by Ursula Hegi
“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 Over ten thousand dollars had been withdrawn.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 n
ot 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.
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 h
is 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.
