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 (158 page)

None of the rents had been raised since
Oma
’s death. When she sent out notices, announcing a ten percent increase, and added up all income and expenses she expected for the following year, she felt encouraged that, gradually, she would be able to restore the
Wasserburg.
She painted the rooms in the basement where the maids used to live, bought secondhand beds and dressers, hung a plastic shower curtain in the shared bathroom, and sent another round of notices, announcing that each room would be available for five dollars a night to the tenants’ visiting relatives.

“Now she’s running a motel in my basement,” Danny complained to Tobias one Saturday evening while they were washing dishes. “Makes them bring their own sheets and towels. And if she thinks that it’ll bring in another buck, she’ll have me serving them coffee and eggs in bed.”

“I’ll serve you coffee and eggs in bed.”

“Bare-assed in a white apron?”

“For you … sure. I’ll start tomorrow morning. I’ll even iron your shirts for you. Cut your toenails.”

“Please. You’ll turn me into a kept man.”

“It’s called retirement, Danny. And you’re five years overdue for that. My house has space for both of us.”

“You don’t have enough stuff on your walls.”

“That way you can hang up your greyhound pictures and anything else you want.”

“What I like about my job is having the entire basement to myself.”

“Emma is changing that, isn’t she? Soon she’ll want your spare bedroom for guests and—”

“Don’t even think that.”

“You have to be realistic. Since you have a kitchen, Emma will figure anytime now that she can charge the guests for using that. You’ll wake up and—”

“Don’t.”

“—and there’ll be four, five people in your kitchen, making pot roasts or pies. …”

Danny grinned, shaking his head. “Even as a kid, you were a pain.” He rinsed out a bowl, set it in the drying rack for Tobias.

“You can have my basement.”

“All of it?”

“Plus half of this bed.”

“We’re so … different, Tobias.”

“Not really.”

“I think so.”

“You mean things like education?”

“That too. Mostly the way we love. You’re more like your father that way.”

Tobias stopped drying the silverware. “My father?”

“Don’t get so upset.”

“I don’t make people destroy what’s important to them.”

“I was talking about wanting more than you already have. Keeping at it the way he used to.”

“I’m not like my father.”

“Okay.”

“You don’t want more than you have?”

“Mostly I’m content with what I already have.”

“And I’d be content to just have you.”

“You’re so smart with words.”

“That’s me. Smart with words.”

“And angry with me.”

“Because I am nothing like my father.”

“I’m sorry.”

“All right. Sometimes …”

“What?”

“Sometimes I still wonder if I should have gone to his funeral. If I would think of him less often then.”

“I went there for you.”

“What are you saying?”

“Well… that I went to his funeral in your place.”

Tobias crossed his arms. “I don’t understand.”

“Not because I thought you should be there—I probably would have stayed away too if anyone had done that to me. But I went just in case you ever doubted … or regretted. I went for both of us, really—and I thought about it a lot before I did—because if you ever said to me that I had no right to go there for you—”

“I wouldn’t say that to you.”

“Maybe not now, but ten or fifteen years ago you would have. And I wanted to be able to tell you in all honesty that I went for myself too.”

“What was it like? For Robert and Greta? For my stepmother?”

As Danny talked, Tobias closed his eyes and let Danny take him to the cemetery—not too fast, though—
up the path that is rutted, muddy. Wet tufts of grass. Ferns and lichen. Small trees taking hold in the washout along the side where the long twisted roots of old pines hang exposed, smearing out like the bottom of clouds. Branches so full they block the lake. Except you know the lake is there because you see the mountains on its far side, bluish gray, and above it the backdrop of shadowy sky. The sound of the fast brook comes toward you like an increase in wind when you reach the plateau. You walk toward the open grave. Stand behind your step-mother
and your brother and sister while your father’s coffin is lowered into the ground.

And you step forward to toss grains of earth onto the burnished lid.

When the next bank statement arrived, Emma was sure there had to be a mistake. Over ten thousand dollars had been withdrawn.

“We had to pay the bill for your father’s burial,” her mother reminded her.

“No, we paid for that a while ago.”

“We also had the black clothes I got for you and me.”

The following month the balance was nearly five thousand dollars lower than Emma had expected, and when she showed the statement to her mother, Yvonne said, “If the statements cause you such anguish, I’ll do them.”

“No, no,” Emma said quickly. “It’s just that I need to estimate expenses. When they are higher than I planned, it throws everything else off.”

“Your father always totaled things up after the expenses.”

“Too much money goes out that way. I wouldn’t know what we can afford next. Besides, I have to schedule repairmen in advance.”

“In advance…” As her mother waved one slender hand through the air, the sleeve of her silk blouse fell back, exposing the pearl white skin of her arm. Quickly, she pulled it back down. “It doesn’t work that way.”

“Maybe if both of us cut down on expenses …”

“That’s a good idea. A real good idea.”

But the following Friday her mother had her roses delivered as every week, smiling to herself as she arranged them in her crystal vases. All day Emma tried to ignore them but that evening at dinner, she felt the panic of losing the house. These roses stood for her mother’s wastefulness. For drinking bottled water instead of water from the tap. For half a dozen subscriptions to magazines.
Don’t say anything. Don’t.

But Yvonne could feel her daughter pushing at her with eyes of reproach. It made her remember Emma as a newborn, grasping, always
grasping. And the presence of this daughter still was everywhere: first she had inhabited her womb, and now she was suffocating her with her busywork.

“I’ve been thinking,” Yvonne said, “about you living in one of the empty apartments.”

“But I want to stay right here with you. In my old room.”

Yvonne gathered into her voice whatever firmness she could find in herself. “I would like for you to have your own place. You’re old enough to live alone.”

That firmness also made it into her voice when Emma asked her if she’d taken her medication, or when she had breakfast ready for her as soon as she got up. Very quickly it became clear to Emma that her mother preferred to be alone. To console herself, she chose several pieces of her grandparents’ furniture from the storage bin, among them their bed and corner bench, the roll-top desk and piano,
Oma
’s china cabinet, and the massive lion chairs her grandparents had brought from Germany. With the help of Danny Wilson she cleaned them up and hauled them into the smallest of the empty apartments right off the lobby. From her father and Mrs. Bloom she’d heard stories about the old woman who’d lived there for over three decades.

“That Miss Garland made the best soup,” Danny Wilson told her while they set up the bed. “My Aunt Irene didn’t like her much. Too nosy, she said. But Miss Garland was all right. Know what she did a few days after my mother died? Called me inside her apartment and asked what I’d eaten the last couple of days. When I couldn’t remember, she made me sit down and cooked white soup for me. Best soup I ever had.”

“What kind was it?”

“I don’t know. Thick and white and smooth.”

Emma unrolled a six-foot section of peacock runner, left over from when
Opa
had replaced the carpets in the hallways, and placed it next to her bed. “My father told me she made peanut brittle for him. He loved that when he was a boy.”

“Not just as a boy.” Danny adjusted a bolt on the birch headboard. “Miss Garland, she was crazy in love with your grandpa.”

Emma looked up. “Really?”

“I don’t think he ever figured it out. He was too bothered by how much she loved this house. Made him act jealous. Like he was worried his house would love Miss Garland right back.” He straightened himself carefully. “And maybe it did, you know?”

All her life, Emma had lived on the top floor, and her first night alone in Miss Garland’s apartment, she could feel the sum of the
Wasserburg’s
history on the floors above her. As she listened to the trees by the lake braid their leaves into the wind, it occurred to her that she might like living in these rooms. Though Miss Garland had died three years before Emma’s birth and nearly a dozen different tenants had lived in her apartment since then, it was Miss Garland’s essence that Emma still felt here.

While Miss Garland’s furniture had been too sparse to obstruct the light, Emma crowded her rooms with so much furniture that light had difficulty passing through. Still, it settled something within her to be living in these rooms. From her window she had a view of Mrs. Bloom’s greenhouse jutting into the courtyard, and from her door she could see the elevator and brass mailboxes. Some days she didn’t leave the building at all, and the outside would seem of a different texture, gauzy.

She still insisted on doing her mother’s laundry, and once a week she vacuumed both apartments, scrubbed the kitchen floors and bathrooms. Living alone made her turn more toward Caleb with phone calls, letters, and he too called at least once a week. What linked them was not only the closeness they’d felt as children, but also the fear of losing that closeness. For the next few years neither mentioned the deed. All Emma was able to do over these years was arrest the decay that had settled in the cracked plaster of the walls, a decay that persisted in the underlying smell that sifted through the staircase and rose beneath your step from the tweed carpet runners. But a house could not die the way
Opa
had, the way her father had. She would not let that happen. And that’s what kept her working. That, and seeing the house through the eyes of her
Opa—
splendid and graceful.

Still, each repair would only show off all she hadn’t done yet;
and she’d feel overwhelmed by the responsibility, knowing no one else would restore the house if she didn’t. She’d remind herself that her apartment was clean, that whatever chaos might be in the rest of the house could not come into her own rooms; yet, that ring of order would not always hold, and she’d feel as if her apartment were about to be overrun like the clearing in the cemetery when growth and underbrush pressed in.

Yet, now and again the house made her feel competent. Joyful. Like when she sanded and stained the arched trim around the front door of the building; and when the tiles came loose in two bathrooms, and she learned to affix them with grout and sealer.

The afternoon the Clarkes’ kitchen ceiling got damaged from water that leaked through from the apartment above, Emma thought she’d have to hire someone to plaster it since Danny Wilson already had too many other chores on his list; but then she decided to try fixing the ceiling herself. At Weber’s hardware store she saw Dr. Miles with his three daughters, his oldest the size Emma had been the day of Oma’s last birthday, his youngest still a toddler, though the doctor was old enough to be a grandfather.

He was buying a large screwdriver. “Mine got all rusty,” he told Emma. “I forgot it outside.” Though he didn’t look like
Opa,
he reminded her of him in the way he listened closely to his children’s questions.

When she told him about the water damage, he asked details, nodded, but just when she expected him to tell her how to repair it, he said, “We’ve had two ceilings like that in our house for over a year now. Let’s ask one of the men here. They’re very knowledgeable.” He followed her to the information counter, where one of the Weber sons recommended Emma scrape the ceiling and patch it with spackle.

“Not as messy as plaster. And it has a longer setup time. You paint right over it.”

“See?” Dr. Miles smiled at her. “You’ll have to let me know how that worked. Maybe that will motivate me to take care of ours.”

When Emma came home, she rang her mother’s bell. Waited a moment and then called, “Mother? Are you there?” She knocked.
Opened the cubicle. Empty. Some days, when her mother didn’t want to see her, she’d leave a note or whatever Emma had asked for in the cubicle. Too
convenient for her.
Crouching in front of the open cubicle, Emma called out, “I’ll be in the Clarkes’ apartment, Mother.” But there was no answer.

She was scraping the Clarkes’ ceiling, brown specks drifting down around her, when all at once she felt the same yearning her
Oma
had written about in her letters. Except that it was directed toward Dr. Miles. It puzzled her, and she tried to scrape it away with the debris; but it persisted as though it had been there since that day he’d pulled fragments of glass from her neck, her lips, her forehead. And perhaps it had grown when she’d taken him to the roof of the
Wasserburg,
and with each visit to his office for earaches, coughs, a sprained wrist. As her memory of the doctor’s careful hands on her face fused with her Oma’s letters, she spackled the nicks, sanded the ceiling till it was smooth, and coated it with white paint. It looked quite good—not perfect, but good enough—and knowing she’d done it by herself exhilarated her. Because if she could do this in one room, she could do it for the entire house.