For a moment, when she looked at the screen, she remembered the work she needed to get done, one of her jobs for the day: transcribing the rest of the letters her brother had sent her. Mostly from her parents to each other, when they were separated toward the end of the war. Her mother took the kids to Berlin, to an uncle’s apartment, while her father stayed at the front in Gotenhafen—now Gdynia, waiting for the Russian assault. But she was thinking about her brother for other reasons. His wife had died; he was living alone, and the last time she saw him, in July (every summer Liesel returned to her childhood home in northern Germany), he looked very thin. He looked, in fact, like Paul, and for some reason the resemblance struck Liesel with particular force as Paul came back and said, “They weren’t on the windowsill. I found them in the big bowl with all the other crap.”
“Somebody must have moved them there,” Liesel said, putting them on.
She searched her desktop for the folder containing contact details and other necessary information, peering through bifocals at a certain comfortable distance from the screen. Liesel had never learned to type, and Paul felt, watching her, what he sometimes felt with Cal—that he had to be deliberately patient. She tapped one finger at a time and used the arrows to move the cursor up and down, but she found the number in the end and took up the phone on her desk to dial it. The clinic had an office on Far West Boulevard that was open till eight. It’s pretty quiet today if you just want to show up. Shouldn’t have to wait more than half an hour.
“Do you know where that is?” she asked.
“I can find it. We’ll go now.”
Dana was still rinsing dishes when Paul came into the kitchen, but she was almost done, and Paul went into the TV room to get Cal. “Come on, Buddy,” he said, “we’re gonna get you checked out,” and when he bent down to lift his son from the sofa, Cal didn’t resist. But his neck felt hot against Paul’s neck, as he carried him to the car. Dana took along a sippy cup of water and a few books. Both of them felt a sense of occupying familiar roles, and a kind of shyness or uncertainty about resuming them.
Paul was parked in the road; it wasn’t easy getting the key out of his pocket, with the boy in his arms, but he managed to squeeze a free hand into his jeans. Dana opened the backseat door, and Paul, carefully, bent over to deposit his son in the car seat.
“Where are we going?” Cal asked.
“To the doctor.”
“Can we park there?” he said.
“There’s plenty of parking.”
Dana wanted to climb in back, to sit next to her son and make him drink a little water, but Paul said, “He’s fine, he’s used to it,” and for some reason she gave in. There’s never any traffic on Wheeler Street, just the odd car, and driving along is like driving into a postcard of a residential American neighborhood, under the arch of trees and the winter sky, everything quiet, everything happening behind closed doors. At the same time Paul was aware of Dana’s legs. She was a woman who could still get away with wearing shorts, and in Texas, on her weird Christmas holiday, in the sunshine … she let herself show off a little bit. Partly just for something to say, Paul asked her: “Have you heard from your parents?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, how are they?”
“My mother has discovered Instagram,” Dana said. This was a line she had recently used with friends, on the phone and in person, half a complaint and partly a confession, to describe what her relationship with her mother was like. It surprised her now that she was using it on Paul, but she kept going anyway. “She takes pictures of restaurant food, because that’s pretty much all she eats. If you ask me how she is I can tell you what she had for dinner last night.”
“I thought they were on a cruise.”
“They’re on a cruise that has like seven different restaurants. She thinks … she thinks this is a way of communicating with me, because, you know, I do photography, too.”
Paul, driving, slightly distracted, was turning on to 35th Street and passing the clinic where he used to get allergy shots as a teenager. There was a bridge over the road, a passageway between two Eighties office blocks, clad in that synthetic material that looks like cardboard for grown-ups. Its windows were tinted brown. Whenever he drove underneath it some voice in his head, maybe Bill’s, maybe his own younger voice, making a joke for Bill, said Bridge of Sighs. It was Bill who took him each week to get his shots, sat with him in the waiting room and then in the nurse’s office and watched the needle go in. Just one of those stupid things you endure as a kid, and now his own kid was in the back seat, on his way to the doctor. “How are the photographs?” he asked, to keep the conversation going.
“I don’t know, she eats a lot of fancy salad. Sometimes I get to see what my dad eats, too. Mostly steak, and … manly seafood, the stuff you have to kind of break into. He was always trying to get me to eat that stuff growing up. For some reason, it was like a big deal to him, and because I was Daddy’s little girl, I always … I don’t know. Learned how to use a lobster cracker. You know what my parents are like, they’re conventional people. I don’t mean that in a … because of course they’re actually fairly weird and don’t even know it. Or maybe they know it. Maybe that’s what … conventional probably isn’t the right word, people who belong to the kind of social class where you don’t have to worry if you belong or not.”
“They must think it’s pretty weird your …”
“I don’t know what they think, about any of this. But you cannot underestimate their capacity to accept everything as normal. Especially my mother’s. You know what she said when I dropped out of Amherst.”
“I know what she said.”
“She said, where are you going to live, you’re not living with us. So I told her, Michael’s apartment, you know, 83rd and Central Park West, and she said …”
“That’s a good address.”
“Right, so in this case … I don’t know what she thinks.” But she was losing steam and wanted to keep it going, whatever vein of intimacy she had tapped ran deeper than this. Though she also realized there was something impersonal about it, her tone of voice, she could have used it with any of her girlfriends, and so she said, changing tack, “It’s good to get out of the house. Everybody just kind of sits around.” But maybe this sounded more critical than she meant it to, and she added before he could respond, “I think Henrik has asked Jean to marry him.”
He was merging onto Mopac, rising along the access ramp and turning the corner, joining the flow of cars. There were neighborhoods receding below him on one side, and on the other Camp Mabry rolled along—the old Air Force base, part of which had been turned into a museum. Airplanes parked along an open green, old tanks and rocket launchers, and he said, without thinking, “Cal would probably like that, we could take him if you … I don’t know when it opens after Christmas.”
“What?”
“Camp Mabry. You get to climb on airplanes. That kind of thing. I can’t remember how long you’re around for.”
“I fly back on the twenty-eighth.”
“In that case, I can take him after …” but he let the thought drift away. Mopac runs through west Austin, and the view of the city it offers is spaced-out and suburban, especially as you go farther north. The treescape from the streets below rises to the level of the freeway, it’s like driving through clouds or skimming a forest, but there are also malls and office buildings on the high side, blue-glass-fronted, computer-generated. Shopping plazas, new apartments. The wide grassy verge has a half-constructed feel, piles of dirt and pebble line the roadside, orange cones, dump trucks. Traffic is never too bad, there seems no danger of running out of room, and Paul always kind of liked taking Mopac (the only highway Liesel was still willing to navigate). It gave you a sense of Austin as a place where history is not particularly a burden. He was looking out for the exit sign, Far West Blvd., and said to Dana, “Did she say something to you?”
“Who? What?”
“Jean, about
Henrik.”
“In so many words. We went for a drink last night, and she … gave me the impression that …”
“They’re not getting married,” Paul said, signaling and pulling onto the exit ramp.
“Why not?”
“This is not how we do things. She would tell me … but anyway, this is not how we do things.”
He drove, braking gradually up to the bridge, and signaled again.
“I think you’re making some kind of judgment about her, which I don’t understand.” Dana’s voice had changed, her tone was different, she was annoyed but also dimly aware that a layer of friendliness like skin had broken, and that what lay underneath counted more.
The light turned, and Paul turned with it, crossing over the highway and getting a glimpse of the old train line underneath, which the highway had been built along, tracks rusting in rising grass, and Austin itself spreading into the distance, flat and green, a map of roads like veins across a hand, people with places to go, taking their cars to get there, and he entered the relative quiet on the other side, business developments and parking lots, and wide empty streets circling and cutting through them. When he pulled into the clinic, there were only a few other cars in the lot, and Paul turned around in his seat to say, “Nothing to worry about,” but Cal was asleep. Dana said she’d wait with him until he woke up or the doctor was ready to see him, so Paul got out of the car and closed the door quietly. Dana, surprisingly angry, calmed down by looking at her son.
It was almost hot, sunshine reflected off the pale asphalt of the parking lot, and Paul felt the sweat in his armpits as he walked into the clinic. A beige and brown Seventies building, single-storied, with automatic glass doors that didn’t seem to work, he had to push them open. The wide empty lobby was paved in marble tiles; there were chairs arranged along one of the walls, and a little Christmas tree, about three feet high, draped in spangles and lights, standing on a side table. Someone had pinned a wreath of plastic mistletoe to the ceiling, which was made up of those dimpled and gritted squares of material you stare at from the dentist’s chair. A few other people sat around, waiting, including a middle-aged couple with their teenage son. He had blond hair and braces; his mother was reading something on her phone, while the dad, in a Members Only jacket, watched the tree lights blinking on and off. So the long day wore on. A few seats away, a mother and her daughter spoke quietly in Spanish; the daughter had a baby on her lap. Paul went up to reception and gave his name and Cal’s name. The woman at the desk handed him a clipboard with some forms to fill out and, turning around, said to a guy sitting down and changing his shoes at the back, “If she does that again, this is what you should do … no wait, I’m serious, this is what you do …” but she was laughing. Paul retreated to one of the empty chairs. There was a clock on the wall that showed a quarter to three. He wrote his name and Cal’s name and took out his wallet to check the insurance details, and wrote them down and felt fine.
Something had loosened in him, after talking to Nathan. Just saying what he said had produced a reaction, a movement away from whatever point he had been trying to get across. Nothing seems very true after you say it, and when Dana came in, a few minutes later, holding Cal’s hand—he seemed okay, he looked pink and unhappy but not floppy or weak—Paul took out a quarter from his wallet and hid it in his palm.
“Hey, Buddy,” he said. “Which hand?”
Dana said, “I haven’t locked the car.”
“That one.”
And Paul opened his palm and showed the silver coin.
“I was right.”
“You were right. It doesn’t matter. Nobody’s here, nobody’s going to take it.”
“I just thought I’d say.”
“Should I do it again?” Paul asked.
“I’ve also brought your books along. Do you want to read one of your books?” and Dana sat down and pulled Cal onto her lap, and that’s what they did. Paul got up to return the forms and when he came back, he said, “So what did she say?”
But Dana was reading. “Whose mouse are you?” she read. Cal looked at the picture and turned the page.
“Nobody’s mouse,” he said.
“Where is your mother?”
“Inside the cat,” and he turned the page again. It was a game they played, but Dana was also showing off. She didn’t know if Paul knew he could do this. While he was in Texas, doing whatever he did, she was watching this—making it happen.
“So what did Jean say?” he asked, when they were finished.
“About what?”
“About Henrik, about getting married.”
“It wasn’t exactly what she said, it was more like … She said she was good-looking enough.”
“What does that mean?”
“She said, it’s done the job, or something like that. Like she didn’t need it anymore, it’s done the job.”
“What has?”
“Her attractiveness or whatever. That’s why I thought, because, if Henrik has asked her … at least, that’s how I interpreted it.”
“I don’t really know what you’re talking about.”
“There was this guy there, giving us a hard time. He was just stupid and drunk, and Jean, anyway, she really turned on him. She really got mad. Which kind of put an end to the conversation.” But she was also aware of keeping something back, something else they were talking about, and for the first time making the connection in her thoughts (why Jean got mad, what she was upset about, what Dana had told her), she felt a sudden softening, too, toward Paul—almost for Jean’s sake. The way the whole family expected … or wanted … for each other … To be included in that network of anxieties and affections had always been something she kicked against and felt comforted by at the same time. So that when Paul said, “Maybe it’s better if she marries him, maybe it makes the whole thing more justifiable,” she realized he was giving in to her, a little, acknowledging Dana’s right to have an opinion, maybe even asking her for it. Though at the same time, the terms he used, the way he phrased the thought, got on her nerves … Essinger legal language, applied to actual personal life, the life that people are actually living … so she didn’t know what to say. And Paul himself, aware that talking about Jean and Henrik had some connection to their own situation, a man walking out on a marriage, even if the circumstances were totally different, even if he hadn’t really walked out, it’s just that she didn’t follow, or whatever …
“I don’t think she needs to justify herself,” Dana said. And Paul looked at her suddenly and couldn’t tell if she was offering something, forgiveness or something, when the receptionist called out Cal’s name.
* * *
Liesel sat at her desk, reading her father’s letters from the front. Sometimes her own name came up. “I’m thinking of Liesel today. We had a strawberry tort, in mess, and I remember the first time she ate strawberries. Ennie let her pick them, her dress was covered in juice, and afterward you scolded her …” Ennie was her first nanny. With the laptop in front of her, and a copy of her last book serving as a coaster for cold tea, in the study of her big old Southern Colonial, Liesel worked out that she was seven years old when he wrote this. How deeply involved they had been in each other’s lives … and where had all that involvement gone? What had it come to? Most of them were dead and she herself was living so far away from these scenes that they seemed as scaled-down and unreachable as a photograph in a snow globe.
Klaus told her when he sent the letters, “Perhaps I should have edited them a little, the odd word or phrase confounds us when we come upon it. But it is better to be honest—such were the times.” Her parents spent fifteen months apart; the first winter was particularly bad. Her father wrote: “I do not believe we will win, but I do what I can toward victory. If we don’t drive the Russians out of Oberschlesien by March, all kinds of materials will run out. We can hold out that long. When will I see you again? The dinner table is very jolly—last night we ate Königsberger Klopse! Things are looki
ng up … they shot two deserters, and since then, discipline has improved. But I believe, as before, the decisive stroke won’t fall here. Has it fallen elsewhere? God grant the end is sufferable.”
While Liesel sat reading, various things ran through her mind. The sunshine moving across her desk, between the slats of the blinds, which she had lowered because, as the sun descended—the strong level light filled her eyes … winter warmth, a feeling of … having somehow landed on a benign shore, away from—all that. She could hear someone moving next door, probably Nathan, to get a bottle of wine from the armoire. Jean called after him. More and more she found that little things distracted her—the present moment or … Sometimes her father’s letters were hard to follow. They required a knowledge of recent conversations and events, which, even if you could work out the context, seemed to have lost some of their meaning or narrative drive … even though, at the time, these are exactly the kinds of thing … poor Klaus. The last time she spoke to him on the phone they had a fight. Even at this distance (five thousand miles!) they could still get on each other’s nerves. His wife had died three years ago, one of those women who serves as a kind of corrective or promissory note of her husband’s qualities, because if she, whom everyone loved, loved him …
Since her death he had begun to retreat … or maybe it’s truer to say that there was nothing or no one to shake him out of bad habits, which he had always had, impatience, distrust, shortness of temper, all of them consistent with other qualities, generosity, selflessness, honesty. Also, a capacity for taking small pleasures. Music, for example, cake … at certain hours of the day, looking out of windows, sitting in the sun … In one of her father’s letters, he mentioned hearing a news item on the radio about a market in Flensburg where they used to go shopping together. “I almost danced,” he wrote, “with surprise.” Klaus had a little apartment in Hamburg, overlooking a courtyard. His daughter lived in Paris, which is where his wife came from. Why don’t you move to Paris? she asked him. What would I do in Paris? he said, getting angry. Who would look after the house? He meant the house in Flensburg, which was still in the family. Several times a year he drove a few hours north to spend a week or two by the sea, and often complained about the state in which he found it. All the work he put in, while you … while I am here in Texas.
Christmas in Austin Page 23
