Ursula Hegi The Burgdorf Cycle Boxed Set: Floating in My Mother's Palm, Stones from the River, The Vision of Emma Blau. Children and Fire (136 page)

But through all those changes, Greta kept returning to Boston at least once a month. Several times she bought sheet music for Robert who’d felt restless ever since Tobias had left, and who would immerse himself even more in his music until he, too, would go to college, Ohio State, to study veterinary medicine.

Sometimes, sitting in a compartment, Greta would catch a glance into other trains as they passed, and be left with momentary images
of people as smoke billowed between her and those people who were not constant in her life. Despite that fleetingness—or perhaps because of that fleetingness—she’d feel connected to them in an odd way.

As the priest’s hair receded and his limber body grew more solid, he began to worry that Greta might encounter a man who might be available to her every day. To keep her from slipping from him, he would plan their next meeting while she was still with him in Boston and write her thoughtful letters, advising her in her selection of the books she read and the charities she supported: two hospitals, an animal shelter, an education program for deaf children. He liked to make a fuss over her birthdays, taking her out to dinner and then to the opera.

On her twenty-eighth birthday, they saw
La Traviata
, but she found it impossible to enjoy the opera because she was thinking about the troubles in Germany. Recently, the newspapers had been full of Adolf Hitler. His meeting with Mussolini. His execution of several officers who were suspected of trying to overthrow him.

Her parents were worried about everything having to do with Germany. Hitler’s increasing power. Their families. Even about their accents that had worn smooth in their years of living in America, but were still noticeable enough to remind others that they had come from Germany. Only last week, her stepmother had said, “What reassurance can we offer them here that we are not dangerous to them? The way they believe every German in Germany is.”

As Greta and Noah Creed walked down the steps of the opera house, she wondered how she would feel if she’d been born in Germany and had an accent. But since her mother had been American, the townspeople considered her one of their own.

“You seem sad tonight,” Noah said.

All at once she didn’t want to think about Germany. She tried to smile at Noah. “Maybe it’s because of these operas you take me to—they all end with people dying of broken hearts.”

“I never thought of them that way.”

“And they all need something else to help death along … consumption
in
La Traviata
, poison in
Romeo and Juliette
, a pistol in
Werther
… but basically they die of broken hearts.”

He gave a theatrical sigh and covered his heart with one palm. “They die for love.”

“After suffering great agony.”

“Yes, but they have a moment of bliss together just before they die. Romeo … Werther—”

“But it’s only for a moment. So …”

“What is it? Why are you grinning like that?”

“So Catholic.”

“Catholic? Wait till we see
Madam Butterfly.”

“She dies for love too?”

“Commits hari-kari.”

“For love.”

“For love.”

“Foolish people.”

“You think so?”

She felt his eyes as strongly as she would have felt his hands had he brought them to her skin, and as he kept her there in his gaze, his left arm rose toward her as if to touch her chin. Though he dropped his arm quickly, it was the kind of gesture Greta would replay in her mind in the weeks to come and file away with hundreds like it, magnifying its significance, letting it comfort her through the nights.

When Danny looked up, Tobias was standing in the opening of the garage door, wearing a gray suit. Behind him the sky was equally gray as if all the world had suddenly gone black and white, no color at all, and Danny thought that this was good. Very good.

“Ten years,” Tobias said.

In those years since that other day here in the garage, Tobias had been friendly but distant with Danny, and Danny had thought he’d forgotten, although he himself had thought of it often—not in the way of expecting Tobias to come to him like this exactly ten years afterwards, but rather remembering the pale scalp beneath Tobias’ short hair … the knobs on the back of Tobias’ neck … and Tobias’
hand against his chest as if reaching inside for his heart. Remembering. And imagining more. Fifteen years old Tobias had been, and what had stayed with Danny most was the courage it must have taken Tobias to come toward him like that.
Like a sleepwalker almost. And the will it took me to push him away
.

“You’re back,” Danny said, remembering Tobias’ eyelash on his thumb. “Blow it away and make a wish, Mr. Tobias Blau,” he’d told him, and Tobias had made a wish, had extracted a promise: “When you’re as old as I am.” To Yale he’d gone, the brightest of the Blau children, and Danny hadn’t seen much of him except for brief visits during the summer and Christmas vacations—never the entire vacation because Tobias had school friends in New York and Boston who invited him.

“Yes. I’m back.” With sudden and weightless grace, Tobias hoisted himself up to sit on the workbench between the vise and a bucket, no longer all-gray because he was framed by the wooden shelves behind him, by pliers and wrenches that hung from hooks beneath those shelves.

“You’ll get oil on your good suit.” Immediately, Danny wished he hadn’t said that. It sounded fussy. Like the fussy bachelor he’d become.

Tobias’ fingers curved around Danny’s upper arms.

All at once Danny felt incredibly shy. “No false teeth yet,” he said, trying to joke himself free of a shyness more awkward than the first time with Stewart Robichaud and with other men.

“That’s a relief.”

“And no family.”

“I didn’t think so.”

And then Danny was standing between Tobias’ knees, his hands on Tobias, swifter than their words had taken them, noticing how Tobias’ jaw had widened with the years, changing the shape of his face from heart-shaped to oval. But how he still had that straight line of freckles across the bridge of his nose. And remembering his Aunt Irene trying to wipe off that line with spit and Tobias breaking free from her.
Why am I thinking about my aunt now? Now
. He’d never been able to call her
Mother
, hadn’t been able to be the
son she’d imagined, the son who would prefer her to his first mother, the son who would marry and give her the grandchildren she waited for with the same urgency she’d waited for his adoption.

Five months ago, without any prior word to him, she and his uncle had told him they were getting their marriage annulled. His uncle had retired to Florida, though he wasn’t sixty yet; and his aunt had gone where no man could follow, had joined a group of rebel nuns who were fighting to be recognized by the church, women who’d left marriages and were working at getting them annulled. After praying to find the best possible name for their order, they’d followed his aunt’s suggestion: Sisters of the Angel of Mercy. Two of them were wealthy, and they’d bought a three-story brick house right next to the Catholic church in Concord where, to the mortification of the priest, they’d established their convent and attended daily mass, wearing severe black habits. Danny had visited her twice, meeting with her on a bench in the churchyard, and as she’d told him about the sisters’ feud with the bishop, he’d felt affectionate toward her now that he was no longer the focus of her disappointment.
Stop thinking about her
.

But he was still thinking about her as he and Tobias moved toward each other once more, slower now, seeing her with Mrs. Teichman and hearing the seamstress telling his aunt that she’d no longer sew for the Blaus because they were German.
Why am I thinking of this now? Because Tobias is too. His Germanness
.

“We could go to my apartment.” Danny steadied himself against Tobias. “Someone might come in.”

“But your workbench—it’s part of it. Do you know that every fantasy I’ve had of you always included that workbench?”

“I’m flattered… I think.”

“Sometimes I didn’t even need to think of you.”

“That story of yours—does it allow that I might have a life away from your workbench?”

“Now you sound pissed.”

“That doesn’t fit your story either?”

“Don’t be pissed, okay? It’s just that all I needed was to think of that workbench.” Tobias decided not to tell Danny that in some of
those fantasies his father had entered the garage, had found him loving Danny, and that Tobias had ignored him, had continued with Danny. Like now.

“My workbench, huh?” Danny took Tobias by the shoulders. “No wonder you put your ass right on it.”

“Priorities … I mean, don’t you get a hard-on thinking about pipes and wires and tiles and screws—”

“Don’t forget pliers.”

“—and grease and nails and …” Tobias leaned back his head and inhaled deeply.

“Bliss.”

“Bliss?”

“Being here—” “On the workbench?”

“No, no, with you. So …”

“So what?”

“Am I still invited to your apartment then?”

Although they would never make plans to be together in the years to come, Danny knew enough about the Blaus’ family patterns to predict Tobias’ returns from Hartford where he’d become the manager of a bookstore. Never for his father’s birthdays, but usually for his stepmother’s and Greta’s, always for Robert’s. Sometimes he visited in February if the ice on the bay was thick enough for skating and ice fishing—except of course for those years when Tobias would be stationed in England and Danny could only imagine being with him.

While some of the Jewish tenants began to treat the Blaus differently—with uncomfortable silences or even hostility—Nate and Pearl Bloom continued their friendship with them. Nate and Stefan never discussed Germany, but Helene and Pearl were able to talk about the newspaper accounts that reported the persecution of countless Jews. Pearl knew how conflicted Helene felt about being German, how she worried about the Jews in her hometown, the Abramowitzes and the Rosens and Frau Simon.

Every month she sent packages with food and money concealed in the hollow cores of spools to her brother and his daughter and
Stefan’s family, who wrote fearful letters about what was happening in their town. But in 1941 mail from Germany stopped, and all Helene knew came from American newspapers that wrote about Germany as a monster with many arms, a Germany she no longer understood because it was not at all like the town she knew so well, a town no larger than the town of Winnipesaukee.

The few times she tried to explain to people in Winnipesaukee about the ordinary people back home in Burgdorf, like her brother and Margret, they looked at her as though she were defending the enemy. And it was not that. Only that she could not take the newspapers’ descriptions of Germans as evil and apply them to everyone over there. Because if she had stayed in Germany, the Americans would see her as evil too. Mrs. Teichman already did. And others in town regarded Helene with a different awareness of her Germanness, considered her punctuality and efficiency German traits, where before they would have thought of them as part of her personality. It made her want to miss appointments, slop food on her dress. Made her want to say, “It’s not what Germans are like.”