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 (155 page)

Above him on the granite was the name of his daughter, Agnes, who had died in 1910 after living only one year and one month; and above Agnes were the names of
Opa’s
other wives. Emma felt outraged that they had to lie beneath the ground, outraged that her
Oma
was about to be placed there in the dark with them. But at least she hadn’t killed
Oma
with her weight. “She’ll be the death of you,”
Oma
had told
Opa,
but he’d only laughed and bounced Emma on his knees.

She’ll be the death of you.

From nearby came the sound of the Brook-that-finishes-grieving—a sound like that of a very strong wind—and as Emma raised her head, she noticed how the mountains across the gray lake had a sense of stability about them, of eternity that was in odd contrast to the lives of all who had walked up here for
Oma
’s funeral, all so fragile. And yet, seeing these mountains made it seem almost possible that humans, too, could be forever. And perhaps they were, once they lay buried and became part of this hillside where she stood, became part of the undergrowth that had sprung from the pulpy trunks of fallen trees and gave off scents of decay and recent growth.

When Dr. Miles and his wife came to the
Wasserburg
for the funeral lunch, they stood with her by a window and watched as darkening clouds raced across the hazy sun, watched as a swarm of birds was blown sideways against the sky. Instead of scattering, the birds moved into a tighter formation that looked like a dirty sail. Then, all at once, filaments of water linked the lake to the sky. Emma hoped that, once it cleared, the doctor would climb on the roof with her again and let her show him around as he had a few days earlier on
Oma
’s birthday; but it was still raining when he and his wife got their coats.

“Our daughter Amy gets scared of storms,” Mrs. Miles told Emma’s father. “She’s staying with our neighbor.”

Late that afternoon, when only Helene’s family was left, Pearl Bloom brought out the copy she had made of Helene’s will and read it aloud.

Emma could see that her father was stunned. “I didn’t know,” he kept saying. “I truly didn’t.”

“Your mother cheated Greta and me,” Uncle Tobias said.

“I’m sure she didn’t intend anything like that.”

“I agree with Robert,” Aunt Greta said.

“Helene gave a lot to you,” Pearl Bloom reminded Uncle Tobias.

But he shook his head. “And now she’s taking a lot from us. That house should belong to all of us.”

All of us? Does that mean me?
Emma wanted to ask, but when she glanced at her brother who stood by the window with her, he tapped one finger against her lips to stay quiet so that the grownups wouldn’t tell them to run along and find something to do.

“I’m not ready to even think about a will,” her father said.

“Why should you?” Uncle Tobias said. “Given that she’s left it all to you.”

“That’s not why.”

“Everything I ever got, I got from strangers.”

Emma frowned at Caleb. What had Uncle Tobias gotten from strangers?

“Give me time,” her father was saying.

Aunt Greta nodded. “Maybe what you can do in the meantime is share the income from the rent. Until you sell the house.”

“But that would be against my mother’s wishes.”

“It was built
before
your mother stepped off the boat,” Uncle Tobias reminded him. “Built with money from Greta’s grandparents. With hard work from my mother. I’m going to check this out with a lawyer.”

“Give me time to think,” Emma’s father said. “Please.”

“One solution,” Aunt Greta said, “would be to give equal shares of the building to us. We’d each own one third.”

Equal shares of three.
Emma thought it was the kind of idea
Opa
would have liked—one third to each of his children: Aunt Greta, Uncle Tobias, and her father. That’s how she would divide the house. And then they’d all live here. It was what she and Caleb whispered about by the window, promising each other that they’d never fight about the house the way their father and Uncle Tobias and Aunt Greta were fighting about it.

“But then what if you or Tobias decide to sell?” their father was asking Aunt Greta.

Emma stared at Caleb. “Can they? Are they allowed to sell the house?”

“It’s supposed to stay together,” their father said as if he’d heard them, though he was still talking to Aunt Greta.

“Keeping the house together will destroy it and drive this family apart,” Uncle Tobias warned.

“It sounds like you’re putting a curse on it,” Emma’s father protested.

“It was cursed before I was born. You tell him, Greta. Tell him about your grandparents’ money.”

She looked uneasy. “He borrowed from them. For the house. Without paying any of it back.”

“Tell him what your Grandma Flynn said.”

Greta hesitated. “Not to trust him in matters of money.”

“But I never asked my mother to give it all to me,” Emma’s father said.

“Of course you didn’t,” Pearl Bloom said quickly.

Uncle Tobias turned to her. “But it does not take away the responsibility of what Robert needs to do with it now, and he—”

Emma’s mother interrupted him. “Don’t push him like that, Tobias.”

“All we’re asking,” Aunt Greta said gently, “is that you rectify it.”

“I will.”

“Good.” She stood up, took her handbag from the top of the piano, and wrote out a check. “In the meantime I’ll give you my rent for this month. Here.”

“But it says in the will that your apartment is free.”

“I can’t have an advantage over Tobias.”

“I want to work something out. Something that respects my mother’s wishes.”

“Oh please,” Uncle Tobias said. “Don’t hide behind her the way you did when you were three.”

“I’ll find a way to make things just.”

That night, Yvonne opened her arms to Robert, but he didn’t want her solace: he wanted to be alone so he could eat. When, finally, she was sleeping, he got up and ate till there was only the shame and, afterwards, the release of it all in the downward swirl of water. In his grieving for his mother, he withdrew from Tobias and Greta. He didn’t understand how they could think of money so soon after his mother’s death, and he felt hurt when Tobias told him the will was invalid because it required three witnesses, not just one. But when Tobias checked with a lawyer about contesting the will on that basis, he was told that when a widow dies without a valid will, her property goes to the widow’s children—not her stepchildren.

Soon, Robert believed, he would figure out how to deal with the will. To appease his siblings, Yvonne suggested he send them expensive presents—a leather briefcase for Tobias, a weekend on Nantucket for Greta and Noah; but his brother returned the package unopened, while his sister never mentioned his gift.

“They’re not trying,” Yvonne said. “They’re not even trying.”

Whenever Robert let himself think about the will, it was with confusion and anger that his mother had saddled him with his father’s request to keep the house together. With one more chance to disappoint his father. The few times he felt content were when he sat down at the piano; but that didn’t happen often enough because his days would fold on each other so quickly that he always felt he was losing something. After a full day at the clinic, it felt selfish to play the piano when there was so much work to do on the house. Some day soon, he told himself, he would find a way to divide the inheritance without having to sell the house. Meanwhile, he didn’t deposit the rent checks Greta insisted on sending him.

Since he couldn’t bear to sort out his mother’s belongings, her apartment stayed vacant for two years, though he could have used the rental income, not just for his family, but also to maintain the building since Danny Wilson was always at him with an ever-lengthening list of repairs. Robert kept her keys in a kitchen drawer with all the other keys for the building, unaware that—quite often
—Emma would let herself into her
Oma
’s apartment, compelled to search, to touch her
Oma
’s belongings until she was right back in her
Opa’s
life.

Some evenings Yvonne would urge Robert to play the piano, and he’d do it for her. Invariably then, as his hands proved to him that the music would always be there for him if he let it, he felt himself yielding to its current—sometimes turbulent; sometimes calming— as it spilled him back into himself.

Once, after he raised his fingers from the keys, it seemed possible that, with the right words, he would be able to reach Tobias and Greta. “We’ll work this out,” he wrote to both. “Just be patient with me. Please.”

“I know your intentions are good,” Greta told him on the phone. “But it’s not enough.”

“Write to me once you have facts,” was Tobias’ answer. “Right now, I give no weight to your words.”

From Danny, Tobias knew that his brother was making foolish deals with tenants, letting them break through walls, enlarging some apartments by robbing another room or two from adjoining apartments, making those difficult to rent.

Ever since Tobias had stopped coming to Winnipesaukee, Danny had made the trip to Hartford. “Your brother cares more about animals,” Danny told him one Sunday morning, “than he cares about the house. If you add his lack of business sense to his generosity, you’ve got a mess.”

“It’s too much for him. Working at his clinic all day and then trying to maintain the house.”

“The ones I feel sorry for are the kids because they don’t get much from either parent. Emma, she likes to sneak into her grandma’s apartment. Stays there for hours.”

The day before each of Danny’s visits, Tobias would shop for fresh fruits and seafood, for beeswax candles and imported wines, for the long, skinny chocolate wafers Danny enjoyed. Sometimes, when he’d look at Danny next to him in bed, he not only saw his graceful neck and sinewy body, but also the reflection of Greta’s hair red on the water, her palm on the chest of the priest, and marveled
that both he and Greta had ended up with the men they had first touched that very same day.

He had tried to say that to her once when he’d visited her and Noah in their brownstone in Boston. But she’d shaken her head. “I had no idea how I felt about Noah until much later.”

“I did.”

“You were a boy.”

“I saw you there with him on the lake, and I knew.”

During one of her raids, Emma found a red cake tin with folded letters behind her
Oma
’s shoes. When she wrapped it into her cardigan, and smuggled it into her room, she felt calmer than she had in a long time. It was as though something had settled inside her. She didn’t tell Caleb about the letters she kept hidden beneath her bed. At first she honored her grandparents’ privacy by not reading them. All she would let herself do was run her fingers along the handwritten lines; but eventually that only made her so restless that she read them all.

Lieber Stefan
… they started. Or
Mein Lieber Stefan …

Emma still knew enough German to figure out many of the words
Oma
had written, words that revealed a passion in her practical
Oma
that amazed Emma. As she imagined
Opa
reading, she was moved by the longing in those letters, something she had believed you could only feel for someone who was not with you, rather than someone who lived with you day after day. Like the way she still missed
Opa.
Had missed him at age six and age eight and age twelve. And would continue to miss him. Obviously, he had kept
Oma
’s letters and read them many times. And obviously,
Oma
had retrieved them for herself after his death. But where then were the letters he had written in return?

Periodically, Emma would search for them in her grandparents’ apartment. After it was rented to a dentist and his family, she searched in the basement storage area next to the Perellis’, where a moth-eaten thing that might have been a large goat at one time, or a zebra, was wedged atop two steamer trunks behind the wooden slats and kept its mournful gaze on her.

Though she didn’t find any letters written by her
Opa,
she felt certain they had to be hidden somewhere in the
Wasserburg,
and as she filled the silences between her
Oma
’s letters with her
Opa’s
words, she imagined the letters he must have written, and she fabricated a story of the love between her grandparents that was based on assumptions and scant evidence, a story that would shape and distort what she was to believe about love.