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 (153 page)

Even more so, he wished he could take that for the truth.

When they arrived back home the following afternoon, he urged her to rest while he and the children unloaded the car.

“I am more exhausted than I realized,” she said when he helped her into bed and brought her a glass of grape juice.

By morning he was glad he’d taken that precaution, because she mentioned a tightness in her back, and within a few days she spent most of her hours in bed once again, lovely in one of her peignoir sets.

The closest Yvonne could come to admitting her regret for excluding Helene from the vacation was to ask her if she could teach her some German recipes. Some afternoons Helene would invite her upstairs where she’d position her on the corner bench with pillows that supported her back, and let her watch while she prepared
Kalbsrouladen
and
Apfelmus, Schnitzel
and
Rotkohl.
Though Yvonne took notes and asked questions, she never made those recipes. Still, she knew it pleased Robert that she was trying to learn from his mother.

One morning, as he sliced a Bosc pear into paper-thin rounds and arranged them in a fan on a white plate for her, he felt certain that he had brought on her illness by wanting her home with him. Instantly he felt ashamed. And yet he knew that he would choose illness for her again if it were to stop her from leaving. Between them, now, there was not much room for anyone else: so focused were they both on this illness that Yvonne had given birth to as if it were their third child—coddling it, conferring over it—that they would only half-listen to Caleb and Emma. While Caleb was content to spin dream pictures inside his head, Emma withdrew into the old sorrow:
Opa.
The familiar sorrow that every new loss evoked for her:
Opa.
But at least she’d learned how to calm herself by moving deeper into the house
Opa
had built—
for me he built it, for me alone
—by breathing its many scents, by retreating into the warm boiler room, or looking from a window at the familiar landscape.

They all came together for the celebration of Helene’s eightieth birthday: Greta and Noah Creed on the train as usual, though—according to Mrs. Perelli—they could have afforded a limousine from Boston; Tobias driving up from Hartford in his white convertible; Robert taking the elevator one floor up with his children and Yvonne, whose strapless chiffon gown with its glitter of sequins was too elegant for the occasion.

Dr. Miles brought his wife, Laura, and their little daughter who was just learning to walk; and Pearl Bloom was followed by Fanny Braddock who’d been living with her ever since her mother had died. For years before that, Fanny had kept house for Pearl, and she liked living there now every day because Pearl didn’t get angry at her the way her mother used to when she smiled at men.

While Pearl and Greta helped Helene to finish the elaborate meal she’d been cooking, Yvonne rested with her back against the warm tiles of the
Kachelofen.
She felt shut out by the three women, felt disappointed that Helene had thanked her without enthusiasm for the cashmere shawl she had chosen so carefully for her. Emerald to match Helene’s necklace, the only color she wore to offset her black clothes. Three different catalogs Yvonne had checked, and she’d sent the first two shawls back because the green had not been the right shade.

“Can I try it?” Pearl had asked while Helene was still opening the beautifully wrapped package, and Helene had nodded and said, “Of course,” without trying it on herself. Rude, Yvonne thought. Both of them. Rude. Worse yet that Pearl—who’d started wearing blonde wigs when Stanley Poggs had moved out on her—still had the shawl around her shoulders. She’d probably forget to take it off. Get food stains on it. And, just as with everything else she borrowed, forget that the shawl wasn’t hers.

She heard Robert in the living room, opening the piano, and she closed her eyes, willed herself to move into the solace that he always found in his music, and soon she was with him, closer than if he’d sat by her side.

Tobias lifted the lid from a pot of
Gulasch.
“This smells so good.”

But Helene didn’t acknowledge him. “Pearl?” she said. “Will you taste that gravy for me?”

“Why don’t you let Tobias?” Pearl glanced at Tobias who stood by the stove, shoulders wide and bony beneath his starched shirt, eyes alert, injured. “He’s got excellent taste,” she said, though she knew that Helene wouldn’t want his help. It was like that between them when he visited. Still, what Pearl admired was that he always tried to approach Helene, though she’d been distant with him ever since his father’s funeral six years ago.

“Let me know if the
Gulasch
needs any more
Paprika,”
Helene told her.

“We all trust your tasting skills, Aunt Pearl,” Tobias said. But his eyes stayed on his stepmother, who had never spoken to him about the funeral. At the time it had felt too soon to burden her with his reasons for not coming to his father’s bedside or to the cemetery. Still, he’d felt certain she would understand once he told her how that promise to himself had come about.
I won’t come to your funeral.
Yet some days he still wondered if he should have broken that promise. To stay away had been more of a struggle than he’d expected. For months afterwards he’d felt edgy whenever he’d thought about approaching his stepmother, and he’d stalled, convincing himself it was too soon. While all along the chill between them had grown. Until too much time had passed to bring it up. With her or with Greta and Robert. Even with Danny, though sometimes he wanted to ask him what it had been like at his father’s funeral.

“Let’s use the larger bowls, Pearl,” his stepmother was saying. She never refused his visits when he came to her on his trips to see Danny, and she’d even told him she’d let him know if she found the old notebook with the legends his mother had written down.

“Can you pour the water off those
Knödel,
Greta?”

He wished he were in the garage with Danny. Soon, he thought.
Soon.

Steam rose into Greta’s face as she drained the
Knödel.
But despite the steam, she felt cold.
Breathe,
she told herself.
Breathe slowly.
The air felt flimsy as though she were standing at a high al
titude. For the past week she hadn’t slept well, dreams darkened by images of a quarter moon too dim to sustain its reflection, and she’d awakened each morning with the dread that something was about to happen to Helene. When she’d told Noah, he’d said to expect death at her stepmother’s age was natural; but what Greta sensed was more complicated than death, something that was to affect the entire family, and she observed Helene closely for any sign of illness, although she moved through the preparations for her birthday dinner with her usual ease.

After Noah and Robert inserted both leaves in the mahogany table and they all sat down to eat, Helene felt a sense of strangeness and belonging all at once.
Stefan should be here. They’re his. Especially Emma.
She looked across the table at her granddaughter. There was something about her that Helene felt in herself too, the kind of solidity that held things together—families; houses; one’s soul. Emma would not turn into a thin wire like her mother.

As Emma felt her
Oma
watching her so gravely, she smiled, and when
Oma
smiled back, Emma felt all grown up. And she was. Twelve, she was twelve, and she liked sitting at the table between Aunt Greta and Uncle Noah. Even after they’d married, Uncle Noah had refused to stop being a priest. Some said he wasn’t a real priest—because how could he, a married man?—but he liked to talk about how being married only made him a better priest. “It gives me more compassion,” he’d say. But the bishop didn’t agree. He’d taken away Uncle Noah’s parish and vestments. And he didn’t like it one bit that Uncle Noah held mass at his own house. Emma liked visiting there because sleeping at Uncle Noah’s house was like sleeping in church without getting into trouble. He and Aunt Greta had turned the largest of their five bedrooms—right next to the little room where Emma usually got to sleep—into a chapel with a plain wooden altar, lots of candles, and chairs much softer than church benches.

They ate the German delicacies Helene had enjoyed cooking and baking for weeks, and they toasted to her health and many more years, not knowing that in the early morning hours she would let
go of all breath. Gently, they teased her with stories that were older than some of the people around her table but had been told and retold so many times that they had shifted, losing some details while gathering others: how Helene had mistaken those little boys playing football for hunchbacks and had called the hospital; how she’d thanked the Evanses for their awful, sweet chocolates, and they’d brought her a box every year from that day on; how she’d lit real wax candles on her first American Christmas tree and had set the curtains ablaze; and how she’d married her husband within two hours of his proposal….

“It was not quite like that,” she’d protest now and again, but she’d be laughing.

Robert was humming, forgetting himself within the pleasures of taste, but Yvonne frowned as he pressed one thumb against the crumbs on the tablecloth, licked it off while his eyes followed a slice of
Sauerbraten
on the way to his brother’s plate. When he leaned forward to help himself to another serving of the sour-sweet beef, he glanced at Tobias’ plate, measuring the size of their servings against each other.

“Are you going to finish your
Knödel,
Yvonne?”

Embarrassed by his appetite, she snapped, “Take it.”

“Thank you.” He ate her
Knödel,
raised his napkin to his lips, and then reached for both her hands—blue and cold as they often were—to warm them between his own.

It moved and saddened her, his tender acceptance of those hands she hated. Moved and saddened her because she could not do the same for him, could not shed her disgust at his size. Though he wasn’t quite as huge as he used to be, she had her suspicions though she’d rather not think about him in the bathroom with the water running, about the red in his eyes when he came back out, the sour breath beneath the smell of toothpaste. She felt certain he lied to her about food, that he ate far more than he let her see, that he kept snacks hidden at the office. Why couldn’t he just stop after one sandwich? One piece of cake? How often had she seen him fluctuate between fasting and eating? Once he had one bite, it was as though a dam had split open.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Nothing.”

“You’re looking at me.”

“That’s why I married you.” She nestled her fingers in his,
warm now, warm.
“So I can look at you. So I won’t have to go to your mother and ask her permission to look at her son.”

He laughed. “I see.”

“Part of New Hampshire marriage law. That you can look at your spouse for six hours every day.”

“Six hours?”

“Seven if you apply for an extension. The same goes for dancing, as you well know.”

“And where do we go to apply?”

As Helene followed the light banter between them, she felt glad for Robert.
At least they have that between them. That and Robert’s music.
She also felt tired.
Probably from all the cooking. The talking. Getting a room ready for Tobias.