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 (142 page)

With a child in her arm at her breast, she felt something unfamiliar that she finally defined as joy, a joy that often lasted for hours and spilled onto others because it was too vast for one child to absorb, a joy that made her feel benevolent toward her family, even the town.

With a child in her arm at her breast, she was no longer intimidated by Helene’s cooking skills.

With a child in her arm at her breast, it was only natural to request household help.

Though Robert couldn’t afford a maid, he was so grateful that Yvonne had survived childbirth, that he didn’t mind cleaning the apartment on Sundays. Yet around Caleb he felt clumsy. Odd, how with newborn dogs and cats—tinier than newborn humans—he was capable, skillful, perhaps because his responsibility for their lives lasted only a brief time. This infant, however, was here to stay.
He admired Yvonne’s ease as she held and bathed Caleb, admired her tenderness with their son.
If only she would touch me with such joy. But that’s jealous. Wrong.

He noticed how some tenants regarded him with respect as if his son were a miracle, and how his parents, too, were treating him differently now that he had moved on from being a son to being a parent, equal with them since his own son had taken up the role of child. Sometimes he sang to Caleb in a melodious voice that—had the older people of Winnipesaukee heard him—would have reminded them of Stefan Blau’s tenor in church before his deal with God had proven worthless.

Gradually, as Robert learned from Yvonne how to bathe and rock his son, he forgave himself for risking her life, and years later during one of her many absences when he’d look back on their marriage, he’d see her holding their son as if she were in a painting—always holding him and always surrounded by light—and he would understand that those early months with their son had been the best part of their marriage.

Caleb brought out the light and kindness in Yvonne that Robert knew she was capable of, but that his parents were unable to see. “My two boys,” she’d say to Robert some evenings while nursing their son, raising her hand from Caleb’s face to his, and he’d feel glutted with bliss.

Cautiously, he’d move through her ivory rooms that were too bright for him, too likely to be stained. Wishing he could shrink his bulk, he’d end up standing in the kitchen with milk and cookies or, if there were no cookies, bread with butter and sugar until the sugar made him queasy and he’d neutralize it by sprinkling salt on the buttered bread instead. And keep eating.

One morning while getting dressed, he saw Yvonne watching him from the bed. Instantly, he felt Fatboy standing right behind him. He knew if he turned around Fatboy would be gone: he never came face to face with him. That wasn’t the way Fatboy waited. But he was there, massively, persistently, studying every movement Robert made, gloating when the scale revealed a gain because it lessened the distance between them. At times he slipped into
Robert’s place, fumbling and blushing, larger and more grotesque every minute. While Robert’s walk, his movements became awkward.

To stop Yvonne from seeing him like that, he said quickly, “I’ve been thinking about cutting out sweets.”

“What a good idea.” She raised herself on her elbows, sounding pleased as he knew she would. “Just think, if you lose one pound each week, you’ll be trim in two years.”

“That doesn’t sound too hard,” he lied. How could he ever tell her about Fatboy? About all those times he’d tried to destroy Fatboy by becoming thin? During his sophomore year at Ohio State he’d lost the weight gained in high school. But even then he’d never felt thin enough. One by one the pounds had come back and he had to start all over again.

“One year if you lose two pounds a week.” She nodded as though she could already see him trim. “I’ll help you. I know how to lose weight. Remember how quickly I lost my pregnancy weight? How I got right back to my size?”

Sometimes she bought suits for him that hid some of his weight, clothes that made people at the clinic ask if he was getting thinner. But thin never felt real. He would have loved to have a twentysixinch waist. So he wouldn’t have to be afraid to eat. So he could keep Fatboy away. When he felt good about himself, he’d forget about Fatboy for a while, but other times he felt him close by. Fatboy had taken him over in stores, in the apartments of tenants, in his father’s restaurant, even in bed with Yvonne. But Fatboy had never claimed him at work, though Robert sometimes felt him waiting outside the clinic. In his work Robert felt safe. There, Fatboy could not get him.

Helene Blau was one of those women who grow beautiful with age, whose features—though never pretty in girlhood—take on a loveliness during the years when many women mourn the passing of their youth. In her sixties, she had finally claimed her body, grown into her shoulders instead of denying their magnificent span. She even moved differently, with a certain harmony and fluidity, comfortable with the space her body took up. At times this
new awareness of herself made her feel almost giddy, extravagant.

Ready for further changes, she went with Pearl one afternoon to get her gray hair cut to chin length. Bought lipstick in a deep shade of red. Purple tulips. Filled three short glass vases with water, and trimmed the stems so the blossoms were close together, petals of flame-tipped purple, a surface of colors you looked down into, so different from the way she usually arranged flowers, leaving their stems long, their blossoms falling away from each other.

Stefan noticed her lighter step, that different tilt to her neck as if the grace that had manifested itself in those letters she’d sent him from Germany had now shifted to her body. No longer did she have to endure comparison to his previous wives: they had stayed behind, fading more every year, turning into girls younger than Greta until they had become transparent. What Helene had with him was solid—friendship, esteem. She had learned to balance her love for him with that for her son and grandson; and what was left for Stefan was the right portion, a portion that did not make him uncomfortable.

Still, there were times when he missed the all-consuming passion she used to center on him. One night he watched her calm face on the pillow next to his, and it stirred him beyond language when she turned toward him in her sleep and—in that moment of turning—reached for the back of her neck as she had for so many years to gather and move her mass of hair along with her body in that one motion of turning. And though her neck was bare now and her hand stayed empty, her body completed that motion without waking.

After a while, when the pattern of her breath changed, he reached for her wrist and curled his fingers around its width.

“You can’t sleep?” she asked.

“What happened to that early love of yours, Lenchen?” he whispered, half expecting her to say she didn’t know what he meant.

But she knew. Oh, she knew. And was far more familiar with the touch of her own hands. Had preferred it ever since she’d understood that Robert would be her one chance at a child of her own. To mate with any passion seemed frivolous after the knowledge that Stefan would not impregnate her again.

“Lenchen?” He rubbed two fingers across the soft base of her thumb.

“You mean the way I used to love you?” she murmured. “Without holding back …?”

In the dark, he felt the blood racing through every vein in his body as though he were in one of those medical textbook pictures with all his insides exposed, and he felt certain that if he let himself think about the intricacy of that network of veins and nerves and bones for too long, his body would stop working.

Next to him, Helene was so still that he wondered if, perhaps, she had dozed off. But she laced her strong fingers through his. “Stefan—”

“Yes?”

The rustling of sheets and pillows. “Would you really want that again?”

Yes,
he wanted to say,
yes,
but the truth was that he wasn’t certain. To accept a passion that immense carried far too much responsibility. To ask for it was even more risky. He felt her waiting for his answer. Patiently. Insistently. And felt his eyes forced open with sudden tears.
All those years … the waste of all those years I wasn’t with her fully because I grieved for the other two. Even those years with Sara I was grieving for Elizabeth.

“Yes,” he said.

“I am not sure,” he said.

“Forgive me,” he said.

One afternoon that fall, when Yvonne’s heart felt too generous for her family alone, she offered to help with the packages that Helene sent regularly to her old neighborhood in Germany. Together with Rosalie Perelli and Pearl Bloom, she inserted the leaves in Helene’s mahogany table and spread out items that several of the tenants had dropped off: a lace bed jacket and three pairs of hardly worn shoes from Mrs. Evans; two suits with vests from Buddy Hedge who’d retired from the school; four aprons and a flashlight from Mrs. Perelli. Others in the
Wasserburg
had contributed canned food and even money that Helene was rolling up tightly and, as usual, hiding in the cores of wooden spools.

When Yvonne read the thank-you letter that Robert’s cousin Trudi had sent back with lists of what was needed most—flour and rice; dried eggs and dried milk; blankets and clothing; cigarettes to use as currency—she realized how hungry the people in Germany were. Cold and hungry. Although she’d read about that in the papers, it wasn’t the same as finding out from her husband’s German relatives. She began to worry about them, especially Uncle Leo whose knee had gotten worse. Whenever she went to Heflins’, she bought a few special things, not just the basics the German relatives asked for, but smoked sausage, hard lemon candies, powdered chocolate to make that dry milk more appetizing.

One evening, when she was helping Helene and Pearl with another package, she volunteered to shop for clothes, to find specific sizes and colors—something Pearl acknowledged she was good at.

But Helene told her, “It’s better to send used clothing.”

“I think it would be more generous to give them something new.”

“It isn’t generous if they don’t receive it,” Helene said. “Trudi wrote that things get stolen on the way. Worn clothes have a better chance of getting there.”

“Why don’t you wrap the gifts,” Pearl encouraged Yvonne. She turned to Helene. “You’ve seen what Yvonne can do with a piece of leftover wallpaper and some yarn. She makes the most gorgeous gift boxes.”

“I can do that,” Yvonne said, pleased. “I can also—”

“Anything wrapped like that,” Helene interrupted, “will look new.”

Yvonne glared at her mother-in-law.
Always adding her gloom. Her German gloom.

“But you could sew for them,” Helene offered.

Yvonne hesitated.

“I’ll help,” Helene said. “If you show me what to do.”

That week, she and Yvonne sewed a cherry-red blouse for the midwife in Burgdorf from the lining of Nate Bloom’s old coat; a bathrobe for Stefan’s mother cut from the Staneks’ blue towels that had frayed around the edges but otherwise were still good; four striped silk ties from one of Mrs. Klein’s skirts. At first it felt odd to Yvonne to be teaching her mother-in-law anything, but Helene accepted
instruction so willingly that Yvonne enjoyed working with her, patient if a seam needed to be undone, praising her when she completed something.