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 (149 page)

When Greta visited her stepmother, she noticed how her accent that had smoothed out over the years was becoming more pronounced. What she noticed too was how much closer Caleb and Emma had become. Changes like that were more obvious when you didn’t see them every day. The week after her father’s funeral she had moved into a suite at the Blanchard Hotel in Boston but came back to her apartment in the
Wasserburg
at least once a month to see her family.

According to Helene, Emma had taken the St. Joseph statue and was hiding it somewhere in her room. Helene had decided not to say anything, but to watch Emma closely. The girl wasn’t eating
well and was clinging far too much to Caleb. Often he was patient with her; but sometimes he’d disentangle himself, run off and roam the neighborhood in ever widening circles where Emma wouldn’t follow him—not only because she was two years younger and therefore restricted in how far she was allowed to go, but also because she missed the
Wasserburg
when she was more than a few blocks away from it.
Opa
had told her that the house spoke a language of its own, and she imagined that language to be much like his. It was only inside the house that she could hear his voice.

One afternoon, when Caleb was playing hide and seek with her, he found her hiding on the second-floor balcony above the front door. To tease her, he locked the window she’d climbed from.

At first it was funny when Emma banged her palms against the glass. “Let me in,” she screamed.

He waved to her as if about to leave. Took several steps back.

As she rattled the window, she was suddenly filled with the certainty that she was forever shut out from the house. There was a sense of death in that certainty. Pressing her eyes closed, she could see her bedroom with its white built-in desk and shelves, her
Oma’s
tiled kitchen on the floor above, the peacock rug in the staircase, and as she felt the loss of all that, she cried out, “No. No,” and walked through the glass, blindly, head first beyond that initial resistance into the breath of the house, birthing her face—bloody like that of a newborn—into familiar and sacred territory.

“I didn’t think you’d do that,” Caleb whispered when he saw the blood. “I didn’t think you’d do that.” Next to his sister—sturdy and screaming—he felt insubstantial. Too light. Too slender. Too pale. Hers was a screaming of rage without tears, face red beneath the blood, and it was with awe that he raised his hands to her cheeks as if to anoint himself with her blood, her strength.

“Go—” A deep voice right behind him. Danny Wilson. “Get Dr. Miles.”

“I didn’t think you’d do that,” Caleb whispered again.

“Go get Dr. Miles. Now. Where is your mother?”

“Reading. On the dock.”

The doctor’s hands smelled of milk and of medicine as he extricated slivers of glass from Emma’s face. She tried not to blink. Every
thing was red in
Oma’s
kitchen, and she could feel
Oma
holding her on her lap, steadying her with strong arms clasped around her.

“It’s not wise to lead with your face.”
Oma’s
breath, warm against the side of Emma’s neck.

“That’s right.” Emma’s mother, still in her swimsuit, was weeping. “You don’t go through things with your head. You just don’t.”

“Your head is for thinking,” Dr. Miles scolded gently, “not for butting through walls.”

“I didn’t think you’d do that,” Caleb said. “I wouldn’t have locked you out.”

“And it doesn’t matter if those walls are made of glass or stone,”
Oma
said. “I know what I am talking about. Your grandfather was like that… leading with his head … always his head.”

Emma tried to imagine
Opa
with blood on his face. But she couldn’t see him at all. Not even when she tried to put him next to the doctor.

“You have to lead with your heart, Emma,”
Oma
said.

The doctor was swabbing something cool against Emma’s forehead and eyelids, blotting the red, turning it cool, transparent. “Am I hurting you?”

Emma shook her head.
I’m back inside. At least I’m inside.

“I don’t think we need stitches.”

Emma blotted their voices till they too became transparent, a cool, transparent hum, but soon
Oma’s
rose above the hum—“Congratulations on getting married”—pulling other voices right behind her.

“Thank you,” the doctor said.

“She’s not from New Hampshire, I hear.”

“Chicago. Laura and I used to work at the same hospital until my uncle brought me into his practice. Laura is a nurse. We just bought an old Victorian. About four blocks away on Gilman Street. It needs fixing up, but that’s all right. What we both love about it is the porch.”

“I’ve always liked that porch. And that great old maple tree right across the street. A girl who used to work here as a maid when first I came from Germany, Heather, she grew up in that house.”

“First thing we’ll do is paint it. I don’t like yellow on a house.”

“Emma?” Her brother’s hand on her arm. “I’m sorry, really.”

Her cheeks hurt when she tried to smile at Caleb, and all at once she wanted to be sitting with him beneath one of the tables in the lobby, surrounded by the legs of the grown-ups while above them voices and laughter mingled with the scent of food, wanted to return to those celebrations she relived so often that they seemed to have happened constantly—not just twice a year—making up her entire childhood …
people in festive clothes talking, laughing, … everyone there… her grandparents and parents, all the tenants, Uncle Tobias, Aunt Greta and Father Creed, Danny Wilson … eating the delicacies that
Opa
always prepares in his restaurant for his summer solstice and Christmas dinners. Her mother in a gay mood and pretty in her new dress, walking among the courtyard tables that are set up with white linen. Emma in her white dress and Caleb wearing his white suit, sitting together beneath the longest of the tables, playing with each other’s hands: they link their fingers; stroke thumbs; explore each other’s hands as if studying intricate maps. They breathe fog against Pearl Bloom’s patent leather shoes, right next there to Stanley Poggs’ shoes. A couple they are, Mr. Poggs and Mrs. Bloom. Through the white fringes of the tablecloth, Caleb and Emma see candles on the other tables, people strolling past their table without noticing them, some with wine glasses and cigarettes. Old Buddy Hedge and his even older father hobble past them, heads down, bad backs curved, giving Caleb an idea for the people game. There, beneath the table, he and Emma play
Krieg der Greise—
war of the old men—the fight Mr. Hedge has been having with Mr. Evans for years now, not speaking though they come to the same parties and rush to the mailboxes every day as soon as the mailman arrives, seeking out occasions when they can ignore one another in public though no one remembers what their feud is about.

Hands, long hands, cupping Emma’s ears. “Look at me. Good.” The doctor’s eyes, moving up her face golden and smooth and slow like honeybees. “Good. Good.” Nodding, he was nodding, saying, “You should never let yourself get that angry, Emma.”

“I wasn’t angry.”

“Then why did you break the glass?” Though he studied her face
as if ready to know everything about her, she couldn’t give words to the yearning that had made her step through the glass.

“My brave darling.” The face of her mother swam next to the doctor’s. “But how about scars, Dr. Miles? Will she have scars on her face?”

A few of the slivers would leave tiny scars on Emma’s forehead as if proof of her temper, there for anyone to see and be warned:
this is what this girl is capable of.
However, in the weeks following her injury, she had no toughness left in her as she basked in her mother’s concern. She’d feel content whenever her mother allowed her to try on her rings or watch her apply makeup, when her mother asked what she thought of a certain color dress, or dabbed medicated lotion on Emma’s face and stroked it gently into her skin.

As she discovered her mother piece by piece, even a flaw, like the varicose veins on her mother’s left leg, looked like an adornment, a perfect winter tree growing upward from her delicate ankle. Below her knee, one large vein branched into thin lines. It was a pattern you could memorize and trace on a blanket, say, or a tabletop when you were alone.

One morning, when Emma felt irritable because her face itched badly from the many small scabs, her mother took her into the kitchen. “Whenever your skin gets cut,” she said, “parts of yourself are left frayed.” And as Emma imagined countless red ends just beneath her skin, her mother turned on the faucet and saturated a clean dish towel with cold water. “Then it’s up to you to bring those parts back together again. Here.” She folded the towel over once and held it against Emma’s face until the itching receded as though all her ragged ends were connecting beneath her skin—sleek and smooth and new.

She kept that towel against her face, followed her mother into the big bedroom where children were only allowed when invited, and stood behind her mother as she sat in front of her ornate mirror and her crystal vase with roses. The mirror made it look as if there were two vases. Every Friday her mother had eighteen white roses delivered from the flower shop, and she arranged them in the matching vases Pearl Bloom had given her as a wedding gift, one
for the mantle above the fireplace in the living room, the other for her bedroom. “You always place an uneven number of flowers into a vase,” she taught Emma. Beyond the reflection of the roses and of her mother swum Emma’s own reflection, and beyond that shimmered the open closet with all its dresses and suits and gowns. The clothes of Emma’s father used to hang in the far left side of the closet, but gradually they’d been squeezed out of the bedroom entirely and into the guest room. Because it was important to hang up clothes properly. That was something else her mother taught her. “Always with a space between them to keep them from wrinkling.”

As her mother’s hands drew a brush through her hair, Emma tried not to look at the blue hands, hands so blue and cold that they were almost purple, hands that were clammy and not beautiful like the rest of her mother. Carefully, she took the mother-of-pearl brush from those cold fingers and lifted the dark hair from her mother’s neck while drawing the bristles through its many fine strands. They gave off the scent of limes, and as Emma leaned closer to breathe in that scent, she noticed her mother’s eyes in the mirror, startled, and then distant, as if she’d expected to see someone else.

The more Emma clutched at her mother, the more Yvonne drew away from this fleeting and mismatched courtship. She’d find excuses to not have Emma follow her around, sent her off to play with her brother, to visit her grandmother. Some evenings Robert took the children to the Royal. They liked
King Kong,
a film he’d seen more than twenty years ago when he was in college. Both were mesmerized by Fay Wray who didn’t have all that many lines but got to do lots of screams. She could scream better than anyone the children knew, and they would practice Fay Wray screams, dropping to the floor in a swoon, a faint, getting it right—that languid folding together where you’d bend at your knees and waist at the same moment so that you wouldn’t just flop down flat but glide into a decorative heap, or pose rather, the back of one hand, ideally, ending up against your forehead as your last scream faded into a sigh.

Fay Wray. They were Fay Wray in the elevator. In the lobby. On the dock. Some days, on the roof, Emma would test the embrace of
the house by playing Fay Wray, balancing on the low walls along its edge, daring the house to hold her if she were to slip and fall. Fearless when it came to the house, she ultimately believed it would always be there for her.
Not like
Opa.
A house cannot be buried like that.

When Robert Blau was still in his twenties and thirties, the people of Winnipesaukee used to tell him he looked younger than he was, and he had come to think of himself as youthful until—just around his fortieth birthday—his age suddenly overcame him, softening his body with additional layers of flesh, tugging his hairline toward the crest of his skull. That same summer his wife began to leave for weekends, even entire weeks, without offering reasons; and because Robert did not dare ask the first time she disappeared, it made it impossible to ask from then on. She would simply be gone when he’d come home from work, and the children would be upstairs with his mother.

Occasionally there’d be a forewarning. “I need to be away for a while,” she might say, and if he’d offer to take a trip with her—“Just tell me where you want to go”—she’d say there was no rush to decide. But then she’d be gone again while he’d pretend to his mother and children that she was taking a rest in some seaside hotel along the Maine coast where her family used to vacation when she was a child; and as his words evoked her
strolling along a beach or wading through one of the many tide pools, dress hiked up ever so slightly to keep the hem above the surface,
he’d smell the briny air and dislodge other pictures that pressed at him, pictures called forth by her confessions:
Yvonne dancing with a man slimmer than he, taller too, her face against his shoulder; Yvonne in a train compartment with a man who still has all his hair, her white legs wrapped around him while the train rocks her even further away.