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 (159 page)

All of that same afternoon, Yvonne had been feeling cold, missing Robert. It didn’t happen every day that she missed her husband, but that morning, soon after waking, she’d found herself humming a few notes of Chopin and had been reminded of Robert because he would have known the exact name of the piece. Suddenly she felt she could not possibly go on without him, even though, in the three years without him, she’d often noticed how it was more satisfying to love him in death. Purer. Because she didn’t have to cope with his body.
Robert the artist. Robert the gentle husband. A wonderful man. How fortunate I’ve been. And how—

The doorbell. Then Emma’s voice: “Mother? Are you there?” Knocking. Fussing with the outer door of the cubicle.
Thank God she’s too big to climb in through there.
“I’ll be in the Clarkes’ apartment, Mother.”
Always in my way. Wanting more than I can give her. Always.
Yvonne held her breath, waited till her daughter
was gone and she was alone with the old lure of knives and red coils, a lure she’d rarely felt during the years her back had troubled her. But lately, it had come back, though not as urgent as it used to be. She could decide—and it was that easy most days, a matter of deciding—to get out of the house instead. And she did. Called a cab and met it by the side of the building so that Emma wouldn’t see her waiting by the front steps and tell her to be careful with what she spent.

In Magill’s, while trying on a white cardigan, Yvonne suddenly remembered another cardigan she’d owned fifteen years ago, turquoise, its hood trimmed with a knitted border of orange and white, and as she recalled its softness against her skin, she was suffused with yearning for that cardigan and the time in her life she had worn it:
She lifts Emma into her arms, smiles at Caleb. They’re on the dock and Robert, not too heavy yet, steadies the rowboat so that his family—his young family—can climb into it.
All at once the cardigan stood for those early years when her husband had adored her, when her children had still been small, and when—to anyone who might have passed by that moment and glimpsed her on the dock—she would have seemed the most tender of mothers, the most loving of wives. And yet, seized by desire for that time gone by—
though still not lost… still mine
—she understood that her marriage had never been as fulfilling as this memory wanted to trick her into believing. And it wasn’t even that she wanted to go back to those early years of raising small children. Just to the youth that had been hers then.
Not that I have changed much.
She was constantly amazed by how smooth her skin had stayed.
Posture. That’s so important. Same size waist I had at seventeen.

“It’s lovely on you, Mrs. Blau.”

“Same size waist I had at seventeen.”

“Do you know how many of our customers would love to be able to say that?”

As she watched the saleswoman fold her new cardigan into tissue paper, she wondered how she would remember buying this white cardigan in years to come, and if her memories would be gentie
on her. If only she could get along better with Emma, talk without tension the way she could with Caleb.
A present. I’ll get her a present.

“A present for my daughter.” She glanced around. “It’s so hard shopping for Emma. She keeps wearing the same clothes. But I’ll surprise her with something lovely.”

“How about this?” The saleswoman held up an ivory silk blouse. “It goes with Emma’s hair.”

Yvonne nodded. She could see Emma wearing it, her light hair done up in a French twist—
I’ll do it for her; so much more becoming than hanging into her face
—but when she got home, she found Emma in the Clarkes’ apartment with white dust and paint in her hair and on her overalls, the floor around her littered with plaster and brown dust and squares of sandpaper. Emma didn’t even offer to wash up to try on the blouse. Instead she asked what it had cost—
vulgar, so vulgar to ask the price of a gift
—and then fretted over the expense.

Instead of marrying some day and spending her honeymoon in Burgdorf as she had imagined, Emma Blau gave birth to a child fathered by Dr. Miles. She was twenty-seven when she lay in a labor room on the second floor of the Winnipesaukee Hospital.

“Stay,” she would say, “please, Justin,” whenever he’d turn to leave her once again, and he—face slick with perspiration—would promise to be back after he had checked on another patient. What Emma did not know, and what the nurses were too kind to tell her, was that this other patient was the doctor’s wife, Laura, who lay in a narrow bed identical to Emma’s across the hall, in labor with her fourth child, while outside her window—black with night— branches slick with frost swayed in the wind and scratched the glass, making Laura wish she were home with her daughters. While the two younger ones were not afraid of storms, Amy, though sixteen, still grew frightened and would hide beneath her bed, palms pressed against her ears.

Earlier that evening, while the doctor had rushed his wife to the hospital, Emma’s water had broken, and the two women had ended
up in rooms on the same floor, separated only by a corridor and by the nurses who moved between them, monitoring both labors and the path of the doctor who traveled between his wife and his lover, a startled expression on his face. Laura’s contractions had started one month early, while Emma was five days overdue. Once, as moaning came at him from both rooms, he felt so torn that he stood immobilized in the corridor, incapable of moving in either direction because he wanted to be there for both women. He felt certain that those sounds of agony were his punishment, and then instantly embarrassed that he would even consider his torment to be as painful as giving birth.

Finally, a nurse took him by the wrist in a grasp that conveyed the opinion of the entire nursing staff, and led him toward the room of the woman who was legally bound to him; and when he obeyed the nurse, she suddenly felt exasperated with him and all those kind and patient men who found it so difficult to say no to their wives, their nurses, their children, their lovers.

While Laura’s experienced hands supported her own belly, guiding it through each heave, Emma tossed from side to side, strands of sweaty hair on her lips. Her tongue felt dry, bloated—even more so than the center of her body—as if she also had to give birth to the secret of who her child’s father was. Once it was born, she was certain Justin would make it known that it was his. Of course the townspeople had been speculating after watching him enter the
Wasserburg
so many times…. But speculating was not the same as knowing.

“Where is Dr. Miles?” she asked the nurse.

“Another child … getting ready to be born,” the nurse said, feeling sorry for the Blau woman because hers would be a life of waiting. Taking Emma’s hand into hers, she sat on the chair by her bed. “I’ll stay with you.”

Strong, thin hands. To hold on to. But they weren’t Justin’s. Emma wanted him here with her and felt bewildered by the same longing that had unfurled between them last August when she’d come to his office, arm swollen from a wasp bite she’d gotten while clearing a nest of wasps from the fan in her mother’s kitchen. He
had cradled her arm in his hands—
so different from the hands of this nurse
—had cradled it long after he could have sent her home as if he believed his touch alone would bring the swelling down; and oddly, there in his office with the sun cutting stripes into the floating layers of dust, Emma had suddenly felt a waning of that grieving for her
Opa
and—for the first time since his death, it seemed—had been able to take a full breath. Stripes of light grazed her arm, grazed the doctor’s hands, as they leaned toward one another.

Ever since then, they’d come together Wednesdays at three after he closed his office, and they’d gone for hikes or for swims on the far side of Lake Winnipesaukee where no one knew them and where tourists had blanketed the earth between the edge of the water and the hilltops with row after row of boxy cottages. Though Emma could see that Justin savored every minute with her, she couldn’t do the same because she’d get snagged by the sadness that, soon, he would no longer be with her. They wouldn’t return to her apartment till it was dark, and there—after they’d make love, after he’d set her alarm for one
A.M
. and turn on his side away from her, after she’d adjust her body to fit against his bare back in one smooth motion—she would not sleep at all but lie with her forehead pressed against his spine, willing the sky to conserve its darkness.

After he’d leave, she’d open her windows and air out his smell of pipe tobacco. It would take her days to recover from his visit, days before she’d feel separate from him once more. She’d immerse herself in the house and all its work, and when Justin would return the following Wednesday, she’d feel a resistance in her body when he’d touch her as if, in reclaiming herself, she’d gone too far.

Yet, by the time they’d go to bed, that resistance would have worn through once again. Lying next to him after he was asleep, she’d feel a loneliness greater than the loneliness that would feed on her throughout the week. Now and again—though she tried not to—she would think of his wife, four blocks away in the yellow house with the wide porch and the brick chimney and at least two waterlogged ceilings. Perhaps that very instant Laura was wondering where her husband was or planning tomorrow’s meals, while
Emma never had the luxury of planning the next day with him. Perhaps Laura was marking their next tennis game on their calendar. The two of them were on the town’s tennis team and played mixed doubles twice a week. “One of the few things we do together,” he had told Emma. Other than that, he didn’t discuss his other life with her, crossing a definite border as he moved between his house and her apartment.

She longed for him almost constantly. It disturbed her work. Her sleep. And yet felt utterly familiar because she had read about that kind of love in Oma’s letters. And
Opa
obviously had been a man worth longing for. Certain that his letters, too, had to be somewhere in the house—
What did you write to her? How did you respond to those letters of hers?
—Emma would periodically search for them in the storage area, the garage, the elevator room, certain that in revealing the flip side of that longing, these letters would make known not only her
Opa’s
feelings, but also Justin’s. And as she continued to invent her own version of her grandparents’ relationship, their letters—written and unwritten—continued to shape all she believed about love.

She enjoyed buying gifts for Justin—shirts and sweaters and ties—generous while she was frugal in every other area of her life. Even when he was not with her, he inhabited her rooms with these gifts that he couldn’t take into his other life; and it came to be so that Emma found comfort in having these gifts around, touching them, telling herself that at least she had that one evening a week when he would hold her lightly in his arms while they’d talk in the darkness of her bedroom. His skin was always warmer than hers in the evening.

“But mine gets warm by morning,” she told him once.

“Just the opposite for me. Mornings I feel cold.”

“If we woke up together in the morning—”

“Don’t make yourself unhappy with that.”

“If we woke up together in the morning,” she persisted, “I’d keep you warm. Between us we have the perfect way to keep each other warm. Such a waste …”

“I’ll warm you now.”