by Ursula Hegi
At times, when she would let herself wish that the Wasserburg were still a community, a family, it felt as though her grandparents’ festive dinners—summer solstice in the courtyard and Christmas in the lobby—had happened every Sunday, linking the years of her childhood; and within those memories, lit and embellished by longing, she would see her entire family: Opa and Oma, her parents, Aunt Greta, Uncle Tobias…. And the tenants, how they’d looked forward to the parties. They brought their families, flowers, tables from their apartments that Emma would help Oma cover with white linen. Those who played instruments—the guitar or flute or violin—performed while everyone sang along. While music and voices crisscrossed the courtyard, Oma moved from table to table with trays of food, wearing the emerald necklace she only wore when Opa reminded her. As Emma recalled how the colors of the food were often enough to satisfy her, she felt once again that certainty of belonging.
And that’s when she thought of giving a party.
A summer solstice dinner in the courtyard of the Wasserburg.
To celebrate her ownership of the house.
To let the tenants see her generous side.
She was lavish in buying what she needed because this dinner would make up for some of her harshness with them, would show them how they all benefited from living in this house that was unlike any other. She bought thick, ivory note cards and a calligraphy pen. After placing her invitations in the tenants’ mailboxes, she wished she’d asked for responses to figure how much shopping she had to do. But the few who couldn’t come surely would let her know. This year it would be best to rent tables and chairs. Already she could see the tenants: in their best clothes they pour through the lobby and out into the courtyard where tables with candles are set up. Some carry instruments or bottles of wine. She brings out platters of potato salad with parsley and radish curls, browned chickens with their feet in white paper lace. The tenants talk among each other instead of barely nodding to each other in the elevator. They drink the punch she made just the way Opa used to: plain for the children, spiked for the grown-ups.
People from other buildings walk by and see the lights, hear the music, wonder what it would be like to live in the Wasserburg. By July the vacancy sign will have disappeared from the front window. For months after the solstice dinner, when tenants encounter her in the hallways, they’ll thank her instead of giving her their complaints or a mumbled hello. They invite her into their apartments, and she enters those rooms that have been closed to her for too many years, sits down—on their best chair, they insist, “For you, Miss Blau”—and looks from their windows at the views that are so different from every angle. By next summer the dinner will be a tradition, and the tenants will bring their own chairs and tables, help with the planning and the preparations.
But this year it would be her gift to them.
Her mother surprised her by wanting to help, and for the two days before the dinner, they cooked together, both almost giddy in the mood of getting ready for the party as they sliced fruits and cubed potatoes, baked strawberry pies and carved radish curls, sautéed onions and stuffed chickens with wild rice and chestnuts. They used both ovens and refrigerators. Face flushed, Emma hummed as she carried trays of food between her mother’s apartment and her own. When she came upon tenants on the stairs— since once again the elevator was broken—she gave them a mysterious smile that startled some and made others speculate that Miss Blau was probably about to raise the rents.
She didn’t think of what to wear until the evening before the dinner when she couldn’t find anything good enough in her closet. What she came across, though, were the star charts her great-grandmother had drawn in Germany, and as she held the roll of linen drawings, Emma thought of how much her son had wanted them ever since he was a small boy. She hesitated. Stefan was old enough. And careful with what belonged to him. As she left them on his desk, she imagined his surprise when he’d return from his camping trip with Justin and Oliver. This past year it had become easier to let him be with Justin, and oddly—now, that he didn’t worry about disappointing her each time he turned to his father—Stefan came back to her with greater ease.
When her mother offered to let her choose a dress from her closet, Emma felt embarrassed, recalling that day she’d found her here with two new gowns. “You pick something,” she said, aware of the smell of old carpets and upholstery.
Without hesitation, her mother pulled out a gray silk gown and held it in front of Emma.
“This is too elegant for me.”
“But it compliments you.”
“You think so?” Emma asked, appreciating—for the first time since childhood when she’d loved watching her mother get ready—her interest in clothes. And when she tried on the gown, she was amazed how graceful she looked, how it made her face softer, pinker.
“Let me try something with your hair,” Yvonne said.
When her daughter sat down in front of the mirror, Yvonne felt a tug low in her spine and with it the panic that her back was about to give out again; but then she reminded herself that she hadn’t had backaches in the twenty years since Robert’s death, and instantly the discomfort ceased. I don’t need this. Don’t need to hold it.
Pulling her brush through her daughter’s hair, she gathered it, and as she twisted it upward into a coil, she noticed a few tiny, white scars high on Emma’s temples. “I thought those scars had healed,” she said.
“Not all of them.” As Emma felt her mother’s eyes, probing, she suddenly knew that her mother was seeing her with greater clarity than she could see herself.
“If you like your hair this way, I’ll do it for you tomorrow.”
“Thank you,” Emma said, oddly consoled. “For the dress too.”
When Emma got back to her apartment, Mrs. Ketchum phoned to say her family was driving to Wolfeboro the next evening. In the morning five others called with excuses. Still, there should be enough people to fill the tables in the courtyard. All day Emma cooked, rushed up and down four flights of stairs to carry china and silverware and food to the courtyard. After she bathed and changed into the gray silk, she arranged flowers on the tables. She took a matchbox from her pocket and was just lighting the candles when she glanced up to see her mother descend the front steps in a white gown as if—so the people of Winnipesaukee who passed by the house would tell others later—awaiting applause.
What had seemed possible just the day before—to bring the community of the Wasserburg back to how it used to be—had gone wrong even before Emma served the endive salad. Most of the tenants had either forgotten about the party or had simply not bothered to tell her they wouldn’t be there; and the few who’d come were the ones she didn’t particularly like: Mrs. Ferris with her husband Duke who was a stockbroker and quick with numbers but hard to look at because he picked his ears; Hank and Sybil Weber who at least once a month talked about moving out; Miss Fitzpatrick who’d been engaged four times so far but never married; and the Clarkes with their six children whose apartment needed more repairs than any others in the building.
All the joy Emma had felt while preparing the dinner vanished as she sat in the courtyard, barely able to swallow, sure that the few tenants who sat at these tables readied for nearly a hundred were only here because they didn’t have any place else to go. Like those too old to move away. Some tenants, she was certain, were inside the building. Like the Ketchums who supposedly were in Wolfeboro. Although the light was off in their kitchen, Emma glimpsed someone moving through there. And Mr. Willard, who had told her, “I’ll have to let you know,” had never called back and was probably hiding out in his apartment. Others entered or left the building without even the courtesy of a lie. The expense of it all. She felt ill thinking of it.
But her mother, across from her in white with bare shoulders, obviously enjoyed being all dressed up in the smooth evening air. “They must have made plans to celebrate summer solstice with their own families,” she suggested. “Somewhere,” she added vaguely, rai
sing one hand and pulling it through the air as if she were fanning it through water. “And they’ll stop by on the way home for a glass of punch. Before I married your father, I used to dance at two or three parties every night. …”
They could be seen from the sidewalk, Emma Blau and her mother, both wearing gowns suitable for a coronation, say, or a beauty contest; and to the people of Winnipesaukee who walked by and noticed the empty chairs and countless serving dishes with untouched food, it looked like the end of a party after most guests have left.
After sending her mother to bed, Emma cleaned up alone, face slick with tears. Still in her gown, she carried tray after tray up the stairs to her apartment, washed the few dishes that had been used, packed away what food she could store, all along crying because what she’d wanted to celebrate with her dinner no longer existed. Instead of meeting up with all that had been safe and good in her childhood, she’d met up with the failure of her party, the failure of the house, and was moving into a state of sorrow where tears were the only expression possible for all she felt. And as the shapes of old griefs spread in her soul and pushed outward to claim their hour of tears, she felt terrified. How God awful it was to only want what wasn’t yours. To be forced into lying and stealing to get what should have been yours all along.
Around her, the apartment was too quiet. Without its breathsong, the house felt dead. She stood still. Listened closely. Nothing. Nothing except her crying. As she brought her hands to her eyes, she grazed wet skin and remembered Caleb touching the cuts on her face like that, saying: “I didn’t think you’d do that.” She stared at her hands, surprised they were only wet with tears—not blood as her brother’s hands had been. Wiping her palms against the sides of her mother’s gown, she left her apartment and walked up the stairs to the roof. When she entered the cool housing of the elevator, she shivered. Thick dust sucked up the imprints of her shoes as she climbed the ladder to the rickety wooden platform. She picked up Opa’s toolbox, strained to feel the bliss she had known in this place as a child, and did feel it—for one instant—before it passed through her like the memory of an echo after its origin can no longer be determined.
All at once, and against all reason, she knew she would find Opa’s letters to Oma in his toolbox; but when she opened it, all it contained were the last few things she’d stolen for him as a girl: two silver-plated cufflinks with onyx; half a dozen white handkerchiefs embroidered with the letter S; three woolen scarves; a bottle of men’s cologne that was dried out except for amber residue.
She waited for the familiar hum of the house to resume—the hum of a thousand bees and Opa’s voice beneath that hum—but the wheels and rods and wires were rusty, motionless. As she kept her breath even and tried to breathe for the Wasserburg the way she had for Opa that last year of his life, she could finally see the house for what it was—the ghost of a house, the myth of a house. Yet, so much of her life had been formed by it. All around her, the house tightened as if to hoard the adoration it was accustomed to; and as she felt its massive walls and floors constrict, its fire barriers of cement and brick and sand, she was startled by the urge to undo its construction, to take it back nine decades and open the view it had robbed from the houses behind it, take it back to before that day when Opa—still a young man—had rowed a boat out on the lake and envisioned the shimmering image of the Wasserburg.
With the same conviction that he had wanted to build this house, Emma now wanted to burn it, stop its decay and corruption, erase from the land all evidence of it, all memory of it. But how could she burn it, knowing how well Opa had protected it against fire? How could she think of burning it, knowing there were others in the building? But they’ll get out long before the fire spreads to the floors below me. She sank to the floor. Sat back on her heels. Pulled the matchbox from her dress pocket and quickly closed her fist around it to prevent herself from striking a match as if she were a woman with matches in one of her brother’s films. And as she funneled her vision through Caleb’s, the woman holds a match against Opa’s scarves, his monogrammed handkerchiefs. Flames, small and yellow-blue, spin a fast circle, tinge the air with their biting smell. From the town, people watch the house burn, at first lit like a candle, only on top, then filling out and down while tenants pour from the wide doors of the lobby as if late for the solstice dinner; while firemen run up the stairs with their hoses because their ladder truck does not extend that far; while a helicopter dips its huge bucket into the lake and empties it upon the roof and the flames that reach high into the night sky.
All these years Opa had prepared for fire. He had taught her how to want. How to seize what she wanted. And yet it was Caleb who had gotten what he wanted, pulling it from within himself. Opa had not prepared her for that. Had not prepared her for her own greed and deception. In fearing that someone would be a danger to his house, he had suspected Tobias, had caused him harm that had become impossible to amend.
You never suspected me.
She tightened her fist around the matchbox. Hears the Hungarian’s laugh, sees Opa coming at her with his fury, threatening to punish her as he punished Tobias. Coming at her with his fears that burn hotter than any fire because they’re fueled by loss and the knowledge of how impossible it is to keep anything safe, knowledge that it can take generations for a curse to come to fruition. And as she leans into the crescendo of flames and rage, she hears the wind sound of a fast fire. How proud Opa had been that the fire inspector considered his house ten times as safe as other buildings. Suddenly she was furious at him for infecting her with his passion for the house. For preventing her from burning his house. But I don’t have to burn it. She felt herself going limp. I don’t have to burn the house. It came to her that she could step away from the Wasserburg—even though fire would be an easier way to get free of it—step away and yet retain some of what the house had given her.
The edge of Opa’s toolbox pressed into her hand as she pulled herself up. When she stepped out on the roof, the air smelled of rain, and a mild wind rose from the lake. Far below her spread the town and the lake. When the lightning started—a brief flicker at first—she searched the bay to make sure no boats were out there. But the water looked empty and instantly black again until a wild and sudden flicker lit up the entire rooftop, the town, so bright that Emma felt transparent. This was where she lived. This was the place she had always returned to.
All at once she had trouble breathing. Her throat felt hot, and she sat down on the low border of stones, her back to the drop beyond and the lake. Eyes blurry, she tilted her face to the sky, but the constellations were hidden by thick clouds. Beneath her fear, she felt something fragile yet vital as if—by envisioning the Wasserburg on fire—she had burned layers of herself down to the marrow. She bent her neck back further, bent it against the ache that blossomed into her shoulders till her face was parallel to the sky, and waited for the familiar stars to emerge and come closer, gather her up. But the sky remained dark, and for the first time ever she felt a longing to live in a place she’d never been to. A town far from here. Maybe closer to Caleb. “You will always be my sister,” he had written, but she hadn’t answered, had shrunk from his belief that she’d do what was just.
Just. It was not that simple. And she didn’t know how to go about it. Only that she would. She thought of calling her brother, asking him how, yet—in that instant of considering the question for herself—knew it would take going back much further than the years she had owned the house, knew what she’d known instinctively as a girl: that it would mean dividing the house the way Opa surely must have wanted it: equally to his children. Though she felt frightened—Where will I go? What will happen to Stefan and me?—she could already feel herself shedding the weight of the house. And with that came the yearning for her brother.
She stood up. In her apartment she unfolded a towel, held it beneath cold water, and as she pressed it against her hot face the way her mother had taught her, every sensation in her body was pulled into her s
kin—now; here—as though countless parts of herself were rushing back into one.
She reached for the phone.
And when her brother answered, she told him who she was.
ALSO BY URSULA HEGI
The Worst Thing I’ve Done
Sacred Time
Hotel of the Saints
The Vision of Emma Blau
Tearing the Silence
Salt Dancers
Stones from the River
Floating in My Mother’s Palm
Unearned Pleasures and Other Stories
Intrusions
Trudi & Pia
Children and Fire
Ursula Hegi
For Adam, Cheri, and Aaron
Acknowledgments
I THANK MY EDITOR Mark Gompertz and my agents Gail Hochman and Marianne Merola for—once again—taking this journey with me. Many thanks to Gordon Gagliano, Rod Stackelberg, Lou Ann Walker, and Barbara Wright, who read drafts of this novel and offered their valuable insights. In my research, I learned much from the works of Erika Mann, Alexander Bahar, Wilfried Kugel, and William H. Allen.
Contents
Tuesday, February 27, 1934
1899
Tuesday, February 27, 1934
1900
Tuesday, February 27, 1934
1903: September
Tuesday, February 27, 1934
1904–1907
Tuesday, February 27, 1934
1908
Tuesday, February 27, 1934
1914
Tuesday, February 27, 1934
1933: May 10–12
Tuesday, February 27, 1934
Tuesday, February 27, 1934
