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 (156 page)

She was still filling in details of that story for herself by the time Caleb left for film school in Los Angeles, and she took the letters with her two years later when she moved into a dorm at the University of New Hampshire. Though it was just an hour’s drive away and close enough to commute, her mother insisted it was important she learn to live away from home.

Her major was German, the comforting sounds that had come to her in childhood along with English sounds as if they were two branches of the same language. Though it frustrated her that she was far ahead of the other students, their struggle at entering German made her appreciate how hard it must have been for her grandparents to approach English from the other direction when they’d first come into the country. Both had told her about the pleasure they’d felt when, finally, they had learned enough to read without a dictionary.

Though she liked her classes, she looked forward to her drive home every weekend, especially to that last stretch along the shoreline once she reached the winding road at the southern point of the lake in Alton. From there, she could always feel the
Wasserburg
pull her back: first she would see it in her mind—built of bricks and higher than any other house in Winnipesaukee—and as she’d turn off toward the lake, she’d first spot the roofline with the ornate tiles, then the courtyard, the fountain, the French doors to the lobby. From that distance, it was impossible to see the peeling paint around the tall windows, the untended garden, the gradual rot that had been taking hold in the years since her grandmother’s death.

It disappointed her that Caleb’s visits were so sporadic: he’d either arrive from Los Angeles without warning or cancel plans he’d made months before. And when he was home, he’d usually want to
get away to Boston or at least Concord because he didn’t like the films playing at the Royal. Song-and-dance movies, he called them. Even those that didn’t have any music in them. One weekend he took Emma along to Boston, where they stayed with Aunt Greta; but they only saw her and Uncle Noah for breakfast because Caleb dragged Emma from one theater to another. They saw
Persona
and
Stolen Kisses,
and
Rosemary’s Baby
and
Viva Maria, Hour of the Wolf
and
Rachel, Rachel.
On the train home, Emma was too exhausted to talk with him about the films. She was thinking about something Aunt Greta had said to her—that her father had a certain blindness when it came to the house. Emma knew he was still trying to convince Uncle Tobias and Aunt Greta that he didn’t think of the house as his alone. And Emma could tell that he really believed it, though no one else did. Uncle Tobias hadn’t spoken to him at all after accusing him of having lied all along about sharing the inheritance.

It all had become so complicated.

Her father often fretted about Uncle Tobias and Aunt Greta on Sunday evenings when Emma had dinner with her parents at
Opa’s
old restaurant before she drove back to school. She usually carried at least half a dozen German novels in her backpack. Occasionally she read German travel books, picturing herself in the open window of a narrow hotel near the Rhein, feeding bread to silver-breasted pigeons or counting the barges go by as her
Opa
had as a boy. Perhaps she would even spend her honeymoon in Burgdorf. Not that she had anyone in mind. By the end of her junior year she’d only had two boyfriends: the first a studious and shy student much like herself who scared himself the first time he touched her breasts; the second a graduate assistant in her language lab with whom she had sex every day for one entire semester.

Since she did not miss them when she was away from them, she didn’t know how to define what she felt for them, except that it seemed insignificant compared to the love in her
Oma
’s letters. She had read them so many times that not a single German word remained unfamiliar. One of her professors, Franz Haufstolz, a Swiss native, praised her for speaking without an accent and encouraged
her to consider teaching German. He told her she had a gift for moving right inside a language, and when he recommended the University of Wisconsin for graduate work, it was the only school Emma applied to. However, when she was accepted, she did not tell Professor Haufstolz because she felt unsettled at the thought of living that far away from the
Wasserburg.

Three weeks before Emma was to graduate from the University of New Hampshire, the secretary of the German department came to the door of her classroom and motioned for her to come out. It was raining when she ran to her car, and what she’d recall afterwards would be fragments of the drive—leaves and wind and rain and the hope that the secretary had misunderstood about her father—but when she reached home, he had already been taken away, and her mother was sitting with Aunt Greta on the sofa, hands on her lap. Blue hands. Still hands.

“He choked,” she said. “After he finished his breakfast, he choked, Emma. Not at the table. Afterwards, you know … in the bathroom.”

Emma looked away. Saw the carpet and her aunt’s shoes and the walls and was drawn back to her mother’s face.
You used him up. That’s why he died so young.

Her aunt took off her thick glasses. Stood up and folded Emma into her arms. “I am so very sorry.” Her eyes were puffy.

“I heard him cough in there,” her mother was saying. “Then— Then he fell, Emma. I heard him fall…”

Over her aunt’s shoulders, Emma could see the roses on the mantle, white blossoms, long stems, encased by crystal.

“… first he was coughing, and then there was nothing for a while, and then he fell, and I—”

They didn’t say what they all knew but never spoke of: that he’d made himself sick on purpose. To keep from getting bigger.
The faucet running. Coughing. Eyes red and moist when he’d come out of the bathroom.
It embarrassed them almost as much as it used to mortify him.

“Caleb—” Emma started.

“On his way.” Aunt Greta sat back down. “He’s flying into Boston. Noah is picking him up.”

“But he was only fifty-three,” Emma said.

“Did you know that he was playing the piano the first time I ever saw him?” her mother asked. “Did you know that, Emma?”

Emma saw herself opening her father’s closet in the guest room, folding his huge suits and giving them away. But to whom?
Such a waste. Don’t think about his clothes. Don’t. But it’s such a waste to just throw them away.
For years now, he’d been the heaviest man in town, his movements restricted as though he lived in a cage.
The cage of his weight. Of his own making. And the shame of dying because of that.

“We’re all glad he had his music,” Greta said. She leaned her head against the backrest of the sofa, feeling very tired. Early this morning, before she had known about Robert, she’d made love to Noah, and they’d both slept afterwards for a brief while. When they’d woken up, they’d turned toward one another and when they’d found the bliss once more, she’d wanted to cry at the waste of all those years they had not been together, although she knew instinctively that in their chaste love those early years had been as significant as the years of closeness between them.

“His music was always there for your father,” Yvonne was telling Emma. “For me too. That’s what I keep thinking about… your father playing the piano. I could always breathe deeper when he played. He lived his best hours inside his music. Did you know that?”

But all Emma could think of was the piano bench at the
Cadeau du Lac.
During their last visit to the restaurant, the chair at the table had been too narrow for her father. Still, he had tried to squeeze in, and then, face flushed with humiliation, he’d waddled
to the piano bench below the shelf in the lobby where the St. Joseph statue used to stand. Though Emma had wanted to follow her father and help him carry that bench across the dining room to their table, she’d sat without moving, angry at him for being such an embarrassment to her. They had not gone back since.

In the days between her father’s death and his funeral, they found food hidden away: at the bottom of his hamper eight chocolate bars; beneath his summer hat a block of cheddar cheese; in his car four huge, stone-hard pastries in a mess of nuts and glaze and black-and-white dough. Among his papers was the deed to the
Wasserburg,
owned by him and Yvonne with right of survivorship.

Emma tried to talk about the deed with Caleb when they were at Heflins’ buying groceries for the reception that was to follow the burial. “It doesn’t make sense. After going through all that grief with Uncle Tobias and Aunt Greta, he wouldn’t have made the same mistake
Opa
made.”

“I always hoped he’d find some way of settling with them.”

“Maybe he was angry at those two the day he wrote it over to Mother. He never said anything about it.”

“Who knows what his reasons were.”

“You think he did it to avoid probate?”

“Let’s not. Okay?”

“If he’d known he’d die so young, he would have never put just Mother’s name on the deed.”

Caleb pushed the grocery cart faster to get away from her.

“For her to get it all is not fair.” Emma knew it was too soon to talk about any of this, and she tried to stop herself, but she couldn’t. “You know she isn’t capable of looking after the house.”

“Then she’ll get help.”

“From whom? And how is she going to pay for it?” When he didn’t answer, she said, “I’m sorry. I know I’m not doing this right.” As they added cucumbers and pears to their cart, she asked him about grad school. About his films.

Still, beneath those questions, he felt her tunneling back to the deed. “A big chunk of cheese,” he told old man Heflin’s widow.
“How about a quarter of that wheel over there? And a large salami.”

“I wish you would let me see some of your films, Caleb.”

“I’ve only made two so far. Short films … study projects, really.”

“Do you show them to other students?”

“Well, yes, but that’s different. It’s seen as something in progress. To learn from. But nothing really finished.”

“What are they about?”

“My films?” He stalled, reluctant to summarize for her what he’d spun from memories and imagination, those films that he infused with the intensity of vision his grandfather had experienced from the boat, with details from the stories his grandfather had told him. Like about the fire in the restaurant and the dreams he used to have of America. For Caleb, those two belonged together because the dreams had caused his grandfather to come to America, while the fire had caused him to leave New York and build the
Wasserburg.
Caleb always felt closer to the people he used for material, a merging of sorts, a loving that was coupled with guilt at having taken from them. Ever since he’d heard about his father’s death, he’d thought that his next film might be about the woman his father had told him about, the woman who fell from love to earth. Though Caleb didn’t know enough about her yet, he had found that, usually, when he envisioned one element, other images that had been evolving separately would suck onto it, become one with it; and what he could already feel coming together with the woman falling were images of a boy born inside a piano with his eyes far open, images of two children playing the people game, of monkeys and songbirds free inside those children’s house. Whenever Caleb took fragments from his own life and made them magical, he felt magical himself. He’d always loved that story of coming into the world eyes open, and he would give that detail to the boy who would live inside the piano even as a man, playing his music from within.

“Yes, your films.” Emma reached for six loaves of bread. “Can you at least tell me what they are about?”

“It’s hard to explain. I guess … if I tried to sum them up, they’d fall apart. Look at it this way: if I could say something in a few words, I wouldn’t have to make an entire film.”

She was listening closely, nodding.

“I need to figure out what they are about before I feel comfortable letting you see them.”

“I’ll wait till you’re ready then.”

“Thank you. When I have a film worthy of an audience, I’ll bring it home.”

“Caleb—” Already she was right back where she knew she shouldn’t go. But if she didn’t, what would happen to the house? “If Mother dies too … and I hate to even think about it—”

“Then don’t. We already have one parent to bury.”

For a while they added groceries to their cart without speaking.

“But if,” she finally said, feeling ashamed and yet continuing, choosing her words with caution. “What would you want to do with the house?”

“It’s too soon to talk about that, Emma.”

“I know. But I think we should.”

“Why?”

“Just so we don’t have to worry about it.”

“I’m not worried about it.”

“Because you don’t live here.”

“Listen,” he said, fed up with her urgency to know, to solve it all this moment. “Dad just died. That really is the one thing on my mind. We haven’t even buried him yet.”
A huge coffin sinking toward the center of the earth.
He tried to shut off the I-can-use-this voice. Usually he was grateful for the way it collected material, was accustomed to its process of recording just about everything he experienced. And even though he could never use all of it, everything he had ever brought to film had started with that impulse, had played and replayed itself for him as if it were already on screen.
But not my father’s death. I don’t want to use my father’s death.