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 (163 page)

“Thank you, Caleb.” As she felt him watching her, she saw herself the way he might—a woman in a film, no softness left, just angles—and it made her proud and yet uneasy that he might transform her into something that then became his on the screen.
At times she hated how he tried to see into her. Because it was not for her sake, but for his own, and for what he could then do with it. A year ago he’d finally sent her one of his films, and she’d borrowed Pearl Bloom’s VCR, feeling flattered and then gradually invaded—
it wasn’t like that, wasn’t like that at all
—as she’d watched the film alone. It was about an opera singer who was born with glass splinters in her hands and with the ability to fly, but only above her own house, which was a church with three steeples—not set in the harsh winters of New Hampshire but in a tropical climate, surreal and lush. To Emma it was obvious that the film held parts of her and of the
Wasserburg,
and that Caleb had woven legends of the lake and legends of the stars into their family’s story. But it was so different from the way she relived her family’s past, feeling responsible to remember and preserve it the way it had been.
The real past.
And though Caleb’s film was gorgeous to look at, it unsettled her that he would use what he could, interpret it as he chose to, and then rework it into something others would take for true.

“Uncle Caleb? How old do I have to be before I can shave?” Stefan was plucking at his chin.

“Couple of years … Could be soon … Your great-grandfather used to say Blau men are a hairy bunch. Let me look at you.” Caleb took his nephew’s face between his palms, and as he studied it closely for traces of stubble, he wished he’d see him more often than once every few years. At thirty-nine, he doubted he’d ever have children of his own. After those brief marriages in his twenties, he’d promised himself that he wouldn’t even think about marriage until he’d been in a relationship for two years. But the longest any had lasted since was a year and ten months.

“Tell you what,” he said to Stefan. “I’ll teach you. Shaving and whatever else you need me to teach you.”

After Yvonne returned to her own apartment and Stefan was asleep, Caleb made a pot of rosehip tea in Emma’s kitchen, and they sat in her living room, resting their heads against the jungle embroidery of the chairs.

“You’re good with Stefan,” she said. “I like seeing him like that.”

“He’s a sweet boy. A lot like Dad, don’t you think?”

“You think so?”

“That gentleness …”

“I wish I had more time for him. But with keeping the house up by myself— Let’s not talk about the house, Caleb. Not tonight.”

“All right. You want to talk about your doctor friend?”

“I wish Stefan could have the kind of Christmas you and I grew up with … those wonderful dinners in the lobby and—”

“You used to get stomachaches.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Stomachaches so bad you’d cry.”

“It wasn’t like that.”

Caleb didn’t say anything.

“It wasn’t,” she said resolutely. “Oh, and about your question … about Justin … I finally did ask him some of the things you’ve been telling me to ask for years.”

“Good.”

“Not so good. We had a fight.”

“Good.”

“Our first. And I’m not sure he’ll ever want to come back.”

“You can’t mean your first fight ever?”

“We haven’t seen each other enough to disagree.”

“In over a decade?”

She curved her fingers around the carved backs of the lions, rubbed her thumbs across the intricate manes. “If you were to add up those hours we’ve actually been together, we don’t have more than half a year, I bet. If that much …”

As Caleb listened to her tell him about seeing Justin with his wife at the Christmas play, and about their fight a few days afterwards, he was aware of the I-can-use-this voice that was so constant in his life. Pointing out. Collecting. Usually it meant just looking. Looking closely. And then imagining it again. And again. Translating it onto the screen. It could bring him closer to an experience. Give him greater understanding. Or let him distance himself. As he had now and then with Emma. Sometimes, though, a replay wasn’t needed because the transformation would happen within the act of
witnessing, already changing what he saw while—beneath all that—he’d remain aware of the process.

Emma was talking, and as Caleb held his cup between both hands, warming them, he could see her with her doctor friend, hear the words between them.
It’s another Wednesday, of course, and they’ve just opened presents—ahead of Christmas as always since Justin will be with his family that day. When Emma finally asks him about his wife, asks some of those questions she has tortured herself with over the years, he speaks reluctantly, volunteering nothing beyond short answers.

Yes, Laura and I stay together because of the children.

No, we sleep in separate beds.

Well… except for that night when Oliver was conceived.

Other than that, we haven’t been intimate since.

That part of our marriage was never all that important to her.

Because she’s just not very … affectionate.

We both understand the nature of our relationship.

Understand it enough to not jeopardize our family.

We’re both mature people.

No, she never asks me about you or Stefan.

Laura is a very tactful woman.

She doesn’t mention that I’m away once a week.

The children assume it’s related to my work.

She is an understanding woman.

A patient woman.

Though Emma was silent now, Caleb wasn’t finished yet. He was still with Justin’s wife
whose patience endures even when her husband moves his lover and her child into his house. Laura Miles greets Emma and Stefan by the door, takes them inside to introduce her to her four children. “This is Miss Blau and her son. Stefan, you already know Oliver from school.” They sit at the table, eat the excellent meatloaf—no, make that veal cutlets—which the understanding and patient wife has prepared. “We are all mature people,” she tells Emma. “Oliver will be glad to share his room with Stefan. And Justin has been looking forward to taking you to his bed. I knit when I can’t sleep. Sweaters for my husband. It
keeps my nights meaningful. I’ll knit one for you too. If I hurry it’ll be finished Christmas Eve. Won’t that be lovely? What color would you like?”

Ironically, Caleb’s fantasy of Emma and Stefan moving into the Miles house was not all that absurd. At least not for Stefan. When his father stopped coming to the
Wasserburg
—as if by seeing both families together at the Christmas play he had realized he only needed one—Stefan began to watch Oliver Miles in school, what he brought for lunch, what he said about his father. More than before he could see Oliver’s resemblance to himself.
I could be Oliver.
Only that Oliver spoke faster than Stefan and was thinner with brown hair to his shoulders. Silver-rimmed glasses. Bony wrists. Though Oliver wasn’t a jock, other boys liked him. He had better aim than any of them when it came to tossing pennies into the open light fixture in their classroom when their teacher wasn’t looking, blocking light from seeping through the milky glass until it was like an elevator light with its hundreds of dead bugs, and the janitor had to get the ladder to remove the coins.

Oliver also had a way of spotting and imitating teachers’ weaknesses—the wet cough of the gym teacher, or the way the principal’s nostrils vibrated when he quoted Shakespeare—that made Stefan laugh. He let Oliver read his comic books, and soon the two of them began to exchange comic books. Once the snow melted, they rode their bikes to school. Though Oliver had a ten-speed Raleigh, he’d stay next to Stefan’s balloon-tire bike. Late that summer, when Oliver caught the bottom of his trousers in the chain, Stefan helped him get the fabric out.

Although Oliver was curious about the
Wasserburg,
Stefan never brought him home. They’d wait for each other outside their houses. Still, it was from Oliver that he heard some of the stories that the townspeople still told about the
Wasserburg:
how his grandma had dyed a bath mat and turned Mrs. Perelli’s underpants piss-yellow; how his Great-aunt Greta had stolen a priest from the church; and how old Mrs. Bloom had killed an even older lady by flashing her naked breasts at her. Stefan liked old Mrs. Bloom because
she used curse words as if they were just like any other words. But his mother got impatient with her and the other cardplaying widows, as she called them, who sat in Mrs. Bloom’s solarium, on display from the street like plastic mannequins in a store window, playing cards and smoking and drinking peach brandy. Invariably, Mrs. Bloom would take off her wig to get comfortable, while Fanny Braddock would serve them more brandy.

When fifth grade started in the fall, Stefan was glad that Oliver, too, was in Miss Heflin’s class. Already he was imitating the peculiar bounce in her polio-walk, the way she held chalk in her long fingers, or rang up purchases when she helped the clerks in the store she’d inherited.

One day Oliver brought cigarettes he’d sneaked from one of his married sisters, and during recess he and Stefan hid behind the gym, smoking and talking about how Oliver wanted to be a doctor.

“Like my father. Some of his patients can’t afford to pay, but he takes care of them anyhow.”

“Maybe I can be a doctor too.”

“Yeah, we’ll go to the same university.” Stefan inhaled. Coughed. “Roommates.”

“We’ll celebrate our birthdays together. Like twins almost.”

“Twins …” Stefan was still coughing. “And we’ll take the same classes.”

“Parties, we’ll stay up late and have parties.”

“And when you get sick, I’ll let you borrow my notes.”

“Like you did when I missed school because of the flu.”

Once in a while Stefan would lift out the false floor Great-uncle Tobias had shown him in his dresser, and he’d touch the broken pipe stem he kept hidden there along with a picture he’d cut from the newspaper when his father had given a public lecture about vaccinations. Its creases were smeared from opening and refolding it. And if he set the pipe stem between his lips, trying to fit his teeth into the chafed marks, it would always taste bitter.

There was a word for it—illegitimate. Stefan had heard it before, that word, but he’d never linked it to himself. Not until the end of fifth grade when, during a math test, his right hand and pencil were
caught in a streak of sun slanting through the window. He stared at the line on his wrist that separated light and shadow and saw himself, years ago, on his father’s lap, moving his hand back and forth through a beam of light, making it leap from his father’s arm to his hand.

Illegitimate. But maybe the word was all wrong. Because what if you knew your father? Were you still illegitimate then? Stefan yanked his hand from the light. His mother and his father had done it, the thing that made him the word. And his father had done it with Oliver’s mother. But Oliver was not the word. He stared at Oliver who was bent over his test, stared at him till Oliver glanced up and frowned. His glasses were dirty, and his bangs hung over the top of their frames. He tapped against his watch. Motioned to the test. Gripping his pencil, Stefan tried to make out the numbers on the page, but they were blurred. All around him kids were leaning over the test. Pencils rasped against paper.

“What’s the matter?” Oliver whispered.

“Stefan Blau. Oliver Miles.” Miss Heflin and the hissing of nylon thighs as she limped down the aisle. “You know the rules. No talking during tests.”

Stefan wished he could run from the classroom, hide in some dark place.

She was standing next to him. “You better hurry if you want to finish.”

He erased a set of numbers, wrote in a four, a seven, a three. Erased those.

“You look flushed.” Her palm fit itself against his forehead like white dough.

He flinched.

“Are you feeling sick?”

“No.”

“You only have five more minutes.” Thighs whispered, hissed beneath her skirt as she walked back to her desk. Her chair scraped the floor.