by Ursula Hegi
“And you start each conversation out by thanking her, already in her debt.” Helene laughed and leaned back.
Above, there was nothing between her and the gray bellies of clouds, paler in their recesses as if hoarding light for tomorrow. The hills were pale green. Lately more cottages had begun to appear in that green as if carved out of the hills; and where the narrow road hugged the shoreline, it separated the boathouses from the cottages that were set high behind retaining walls built of field-stones, steps leading up to their front doors. Two more hotels had opened, providing jobs for some of the wives and daughters in town who cleaned the rooms. Quite a few of their husbands and brothers already were earning their livelihood from tourists: fishermen used their boats to ferry them to the islands, and farmers harnessed their horses to cabs that transported them from the train station to hotels or cottages. Though the townspeople welcomed the income, they didn’t welcome the hordes of strangers who crowded their town come summer to swim or boat. Some even returned in the fall when they could watch the leaves turn to brilliant shades of red and yellow, while others preferred Winnipesaukee in the winter when they could hike in the deep snow with skis or snowshoes.
“Right.” Pearl tapped the end of a cigarette against her wrist, lit it. “Then you sit there, listening to Miss Garland’s confidences. She always starts gossiping by swearing you to secrecy.”
“The things I’ve found out from her about our tenants … I have to admit that I like her gossip.”
“It’s extraordinary what she can tell just by watching what the mailman drops into people’s boxes, by the size of an envelope, an official-looking airmail letter, black-rimmed death notices….”
“She has come up in the elevator to tell me I have a letter from Germany.”
“You know what she told me about Mrs. Evans? That she’s white trash. Lived in a one-room shack in the South.”
“Alabama. She told me too.”
“Made me feel real good knowing that, considering how uppity Mrs. Evans is with me.”
“You’re lucky Mrs. Evans doesn’t like you. Otherwise she would give you those awful sweet pralines and remind you that you liked them the first time she gave them to you years ago.”
“I would have pretended to choke that day.”
“I’ve learned so much from you.”
Pearl glanced at her from the side, raised her eyebrows.
“It’s true. Unfortunately, I hadn’t met you at the time.”
Light freed itself from the clouds, slanted across the lake the way dust will when floating in a room while sun moves through it. Against that sudden brightness, the birds looked black.
“I can’t stand that prissy little dog of theirs,” Pearl said.
Two months earlier, Mr. and Mrs. Evans had bought a poodle. Melody, they called her and fought over her, competing for the dog’s attention. They kept track of her age by days. Took turns holding her as if she were an infant.
“They’re more focused on that dog than on each other,” Helene said. “I heard from Miss Garland that Mr. Evans has been blaming his wife for stealing the dog’s affection.”
“Yes, but then last week it was sick, and she accused him of feeding it poison. Supposedly because he was envious that the dog loved her better.” Pearl lit another cigarette. “Beware of childless people with little dogs … If I ever get a little dog, Helene, will you remind me of this conversation?”
“Absolutely. You know what Stefan said? He wanted to know who’ll get the dog if they divorce.”
When Tobias was in fifth grade, he entered a stage of pranks. Excited by people’s outraged reactions, he’d ring doorbells or throw acorns against windows and then run away. He’d hide around the corner from the elevator and leap out with frightful screams that caused people to drop shopping bags or briefcases. Robert was the ideal target: slow-moving and gullible. It was almost too easy to hide his food, or to make him cry by snatching the toy lamb their cousin had given him in Germany. It wore diapers made of handkerchiefs, and its fleece was matted and smelly because Robert was such a baby and slept with it. He would have even carried the lamb to school if their father hadn’t stopped him.
Whenever his stepmother found out about a prank, she’d punish Tobias by giving him chores that he performed without protest before returning to the high-wire feeling that came from pranks. The risk of getting caught only sharpened that delight. But all that changed one Saturday afternoon when his father left the restaurant just long enough to be home as Mr. Braddock arrived, furious because Tobias had lit a paper bag filled with shit outside his apartment. Fanny, upon answering the bell, had tried to stomp out the fire, of course, and ended up with shit all over her shoes.
“He did it to Buddy Hedge. And to Miss Garland.” Mr. Braddock’s chin trembled. “Our Fanny has a difficult enough life without this. At least she was wearing shoes. What if she hadn’t? Your boy could have burned her feet.”
Stefan felt stunned. Then terrified. “You could have burned the entire house … everyone in it.”
Tobias looked at his father’s face. It was red, a purple kind of red. He wanted to tell him that he liked Fanny Braddock—Fanny with the loopy smile and the skinny legs; Fanny with the scrambled brain but a heart so clear you could see through it—and that he was sorry because he would have never left the bag outside their door if he’d known Fanny would be the one to step on it. “I’m sorry,” he started, but his father was yelling at him.
“You don’t even go to the toilet like normal people? You have to shit in a bag?”
“…dogs.”
“What? Speak up.”
“It’s not mine. It’s from dogs. From the sidewalk.”
Stefan grabbed Tobias’ arm, leaving marks that would turn blue and ocher in the days to come, and marched him into his room. “Do you understand that you could have burned everything?” His eyes settled on the flimsy animals the boy had glued together from matches. Matches of all things. Lighting bags of shit and keeping enough matches in his room to burn a town. “Take those down,” he ordered. “Put them on the floor.”
Tobias stood absolutely still, tall and severe with that deep black hair and defiant stare.
“You do it. And you do it now. Since you don’t respect the danger of matches, you can’t have them at all.”
Silently, the boy obeyed. Took each pair of miniature animals he’d built so patiently over the years—eagles and cows and panthers and snakes and pigs and giraffes—and set them on the polished floor, careful to keep them together the way they belonged. Two of one kind… each of them half of one. Goats and turkeys and foxes and cats and elephants and sparrows. Half of me. Of myself. Agnes. Our own ark. Yours and mine. Tigers and antelopes and kangaroos. Monkeys. Four kinds of monkeys.
“I don’t expect you to understand the justice in what I’m going to make you do,” his father said.
Justice. But what does that have to do with justice? And with my animals—All at once he felt chilled because he remembered another time his father had talked about justice, remembered it though he’d only been four years old. It had to do with the schoolteacher who used to live next door, Miss Perkins, who’d planted her flowers too early and then let them wilt, hadn’t pruned her hedges, and had left the brick walk to her door half finished. “You can’t trust people like that because they’re negligent about other things too,” his father had said. “I have a right to have my property look good, to not let it appear run down because of a lax neighbor.” He offered advice to Miss Perkins, chided her, even sent a carpenter over to fix a torn screen door. But Miss Perkins sent the carpenter right back. That winter, the three-day storm tore the roof from the teacher’s house. “Justice,” his father said. And he said it once again when Miss Perkins couldn’t afford the repairs and moved into an apartment across from the school after selling her house to the Marshall family who knew how to take care of property.
Justice.
“Some day,” his father said, “you will know th
at I’m teaching you about the potential of destruction.”
Tobias’ head jerked up. His nostrils widened.
“Step on those things.”
The taste of copper in his mouth. No—
“On all of them. Now.”
A cold rage in his chest kept Tobias from betraying himself and Agnes with tears—I don’t care I don’t care don’t care—as his intricate animals splintered under his shoes—foxes and snakes and ducks and monkeys and nightingales and panthers and horses and falcons and Agnes—
No, Stefan wanted to say, knowing he was making a mistake with his son—
—and elephants and swallows and tigers together the way they belonged. Two of one kind… each of them half of one. Half of me. Of myself. And Agnes—
No—“You have to learn how dangerous fire is,” Stefan said desperately.
—and lions and turkeys and dogs and kangaroos and cows … splintered without resistance except for a brittle crunch as if someone had stepped on the ribs of newborn mice, and in the sound of that, in its unerring finality, Tobias understood that his father was trying to force him to kill Agnes too. But he could feel his sister digging herself deeper into his soul, and he held her there, hid her there from his father because he was all at once sure that his father had killed her already once as a baby, and that his father would kill him too if he could. He knew it because the calf’s head from his dream had become his father’s and he didn’t even have to sleep to see it—bloody with its fringe of lacerated neck, tongue bulging—
“If I even see you touching a match—” Stefan didn’t know how to finish his threat.
Tobias crouched to clean the fragments of wood from his floor, tiny sharp edges that he yearned to pound into his father’s head. Into your severed head. Your bloody head. And I won’t come to your funeral.
“Do you understand?” As Stefan looked down at the slight neck bent over the splinters, at the curved and knobby back, he felt embarrassed for the boy. I would have fought. I would have never let anyone make me break what belongs to me. But there was no resistance in his son. No anger. Just that meek compliance. And yet, he wanted the boy to look at him, to understand why he’d had to punish him. Wanted to feel like a father, a decent father as he did with Greta. “You only think things out to a certain point,” he lectured the boy as he walked toward the door. “And then your mother and I are left with the consequences.” Another place to live, Agnes says. Tobias heard the door close as he scooped the broken matches into his pockets, dazed at the small pile of debris that had taken up so much more space when it used to be animals. And now all in my pockets. They fit. Into. My pockets. From his windowsill he picked up his two flesh-eating plants, glanced around for a place to hide them from his father if he were to return, and decided to take them with him once everyone was asleep. Another place to live.
Helene was stunned when Stefan told her how he had punished Tobias. “It’s cruel. Extreme.”
“A pansy already, the boy, and you’re spoiling him more.” He stormed out. “I have work to do in the restaurant.”
“Do your work then.”
To calm herself, she spooned vanilla pudding into a glass bowl—“No, not for you Robert. You stay here with Greta”—decorated it with canned cherries and took it into Tobias’ room.
Face to the wall, he was lying on his bed.
“Tobias?” She sat on the edge of his bed, though he refused to answer or turn toward her. One hand on his back, she tried to reach through his silence. “Are you asleep?” she whispered, only too aware that whatever she was to him, was not what he wanted.
He kept his eyelids closed. His breathing steady.
She saw his empty shelves and felt ashamed for not defending him against her husband. How often had she abandoned him to Stefan’s judgment, though she considered it wrong? That old habit of obedience, of loyalty. She railed against it, railed against knowing something was wrong and yet not doing anything about it. It made her angry at herself, angry at her husband. “I’m sorry,” she said.
Tobias turned on his back, his eyes at her, probing. “Why?”
“Because … I didn’t protect you. I’m sorry for that.”
“I won’t come to his funeral.”
“Hush,” she said quickly.
“No one is dying.”
“I won’t.”
“You don’t have to,” she said gently. “But don’t wish him dead, Tobias.”
When Stefan found her waiting for him late that night in the living room, he was startled. “What time is it? What happened?”
“Tobias is not the only one who ever played pranks.”
“I’m very tired.”
Her voice rose. “You did plenty yourself when you were his age.”
“Nothing that dangerous.”
“When the priest caught you, it got dangerous enough for you.”
He had to smile as he recalled the chocolate-brown paint he’d sneaked into church. “That was different.”
But his wife did not smile back. “Of course. What you do is always different.”
“Lenchen, listen, it’s late, I’m tired … and it’s not that I don’t understand wanting to play pranks.”
“He loved those little animals.”
Used to be that he could justify what he did—if not to Helene, then at least to himself—but he was no longer certain that his punishment had been right. Still, he insisted, “I won’t tolerate destruction.”
“And that’s why you make him demolish something he worked on for years?” Her eyes burned into him.
“I worked on this house for years.”
“Your house still stands. What Tobias built is broken.”
“Matches for matches.”
She shook her head, unwilling to let him justify what he’d done.
“You have punished him before,” he challenged her.
“Never like that.”
“Well, he is my son.”
Suddenly furious, she squared her wide shoulders. “And he became a son to me when I married you. Don’t try to push me from him now by saying he’s only yours. Don’t ever try that.”
“I didn’t mean to. But that boy does not think—”
“That boy has a name.”
“—does not think beyond the immediate pleasure of those pranks. Does not think that the odor of dog shit will stay in the carpet.”
“There are worse offenses than the odor of dog shit, Stefan. Like what you did to our son today.”
In the morning, when they discovered that Tobias was not in his room, Stefan tried to shrug away his fear by saying he’d be back once he was hungry. But Helene could tell he was as worried as she.
He tried not to think of terrible things that could happen to children. The boy’s eleven. Tall and fast. Eleven and a half. Too tall and too fast to be carried off by someone crazy and evil. Old enough to feed himself and keep warm. At least it isn’t winter. But nights in April were still cold. He hoped that Tobias had spent the night in his room. Hoped that he had waited until early morning. Hoped that he’d made himself breakfast—a warm breakfast—before slipping away. But had he taken enough clothes? A blanket?
As Helene witnessed his concern, she felt a softening toward him. Still, she was too angry at him to show it.
“He’ll be back once he’s hungry,” he told her as they searched through Tobias’ room. Two blankets were missing. A pillow and winter coat. Even those creepy plants that ate bugs. “What if—” Stefan swallowed hard before he could say the thing he didn’t want to say aloud. “What if he hurts himself?”
She brought her forehead against his, closed her eyes. “I don’t believe so,” she finally whispered. “He chose to take things that will keep him comfortable.”
But his fear only increased while he and Helene helped the police search the building. He thought of his parents waking up and finding him gone one morning nearly three decades ago, and he knew if he’d understood their terror and loss back then, he could
have never left Germany.
None of the tenants had seen Tobias. Danny Wilson checked the garage and every room in the cellar, even the large storage closet where his uncle kept the still. Though he went into the drying room where the air was thick and fuzzy with steam that rose from damp sheets and towels that lay draped across the heating rods, Danny did not look behind the shelves by the back wall where Tobias crouched. As tenants came in to fold their dry laundry into wicker baskets or hang up other things, Tobias got to listen to the story of his disappearance again and again. For a while, it was exciting to hear them speculate about the mystery of his escape. He found out that his father had not opened the restaurant—the first time ever, as far back as Tobias could remember.
He overheard Mrs. Braddock tell Mrs. Wilson that her husband wished he’d never mentioned the matter of the burning paper bag to Mr. Blau.
“He probably got rough with the boy.”
“He does have a temper.”
“Actually … that’s where he and the boy are alike.”
As long as Tobias heard their voices, he didn’t feel alone; but that night the steam took on the coldness of the floor and walls, wrapping him into a damp, heavy chill that seeped between his socks and ankles, wound itself around his neck. So used was he to being warm in this room where towels and sheets dried quickly, that now the cold felt foreign to him. Even his breath. He was a ghost walker inside his own tomb. He shivered. Crouched low. And finally slept. But just for a few hours. Each time he woke up, it was to the picture of himself crushing his miniatures. And as he felt them beneath his feet, he wished he could will himself to die, lie still and end those thoughts forever. Go to sleep and never wake up. Old Eskimos died like that: when their families moved on to new camps, they stayed behind, and death became theirs by wanting it. When his teacher had read them the story of an old Eskimo, abandoned on the ice without food or a coat while his daughter and her family moved on, Tobias had felt furious at the daughter, ready to go after her and ask how she could leave her father and say he was worn out and useless. But now it came to him that the old man had chosen death and that his choice shouldn’t have anything to do with age.
