“Well, the immortal beauty! You’ve caught quite the wife, John!”
“What will you do with the rest of your eternal life, Rebecca?”
“If you don’t plan to die, make sure you’ve got a lot of money.”
“Brave of you to call his bluff, Mrs. Hirschfelder.”
John and Rebecca were all laughter and easiness with their neighbors, but it seemed to her that they were afraid to meet each other’s eye. They accepted an invitation from Betsy Hart to come to her house for punch and cake, along with a good number of their old friends from school, where Betsy’s sister pounded away on the piano and a group of the men sang “Das Glühwürmchen” and “In the Good Old Summertime,” and the piano-playing sister was serenaded with “I Can’t Tell You Why I Love You, but I Do.” It was a merry night, and the hour was late when the party broke up.
Rebecca was conscious that she looked to be in higher spirits than she perhaps felt as she and John made their way back through the chilly streets to her father’s house. She was thinking that if she hadn’t stood up in the theater and reminded Betsy and her town friends that she existed, she and John probably would have just driven home in silence.
John, for his part, had retreated back to the dark-lidded place in which he dwelled when he was with her. She’d seen the other John, her old John, at Betsy’s, in conversation with the people they used to know, and she’d had to acknowledge anew what everyone else seemed to understand already: He was handsome; he was good-natured. He was often friendly. He was well-mannered and gentlemanly. He could be funny. But he lived behind a wall.
Out in the cold, her breath creating vapors, Rebecca said to him, “Did you enjoy the party?”
“I enjoyed it more than the show,” John returned, with a charged glance at her. Here it comes, she thought. Well, I gave him the opening after all. Even if I was feeling tenderly toward him just now, it’s clear enough he’s been angry at me all night. “What could you possibly have meant by it, Beck? Why did you stand up? What on earth could you possibly have wanted to know from him?” He caught himself short and shook his head quickly, staring straight ahead at the road.
“Oh, I don’t know. I don’t have an idea. I’m sorry if I embarrassed you.” Rebecca shrugged. “I was curious. I suppose I did want to call his bluff, as Mr. Bieder said.”
“You were charmed. You were snake-charmed.”
Rebecca stared at John, astonished and amused. “You’re jealous.”
John turned on her a brief glare, then looked away.
“Herr Krause is a handsome devil, everyone says so,” she teased. John stared ahead at the horse’s cold-bitten ears. “He fell in love with me upon the instant and couldn’t bear to think of me in peril,” she put the back of her gloved hand on her forehead in pantomime.
John grasped her hand a bit roughly and pulled it away from her face. “Don’t,” he warned.
“You’re a funny one,” Rebecca said, letting her hand rest in his but looking a challenge into his eyes. “As if you had any real reason to fear,” she finally muttered. “You must know you haven’t any rivals. You never have.”
John turned away to frown at the horse’s ears. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Rebecca sighed, watching his profile against the passing darkened houses. “No, I don’t suppose you do,” she said. “I don’t know why I feel such impatience tonight.” She shook her head. “I can’t say. But I’ll show you. I will show you,” she added, with something of the magician’s abruptness, and she lunged across the wagon’s seat with her husband’s hand in hers and took his chin in her other gloved hand. The reins jerked with a metallic chime. Rebecca brought her mouth to John’s and curled her arm around his neck. I’ll feed you, I’ll warm you, she thought crazily. What’s gotten into me?
She felt his arm encircling her waist, and suddenly the layers of woolly clothing that she wore felt as restricting and cold as a tightly wrapped shroud. She was bursting outward from within, the heat of her self—her real self—spreading and reaching out toward the surface, penetrating her own skin from within, hot inside and cold without, warming the surface from below.
They were in the middle of the street, exposed together alone. John released any pretense of driving the wagon and pulled Rebecca’s body into his. She felt her knee lifting, felt his hand pulling her, and then she pushed herself off the wagon seat and straddled his lap, holding his face in her hands and driving her tongue down into the heat of John’s mouth. He made a sound then, a sound that she remembered from their first kiss, and it broke her heart afresh even as she felt a delirious triumph rising from her chest. She answered with a moan against his lips and felt his body stiffen.
She pulled her mouth away with a laugh, feeling dizzy and untamed. “We’re out in the middle of the road, John.”
“I don’t care. Kiss me again.”
“We’ll be arrested,” she said, dipping her head to brush her lips against his. “Thrown into separate cells.”
“Frau Nussbaum will post our bail,” John murmured, and she cracked a decidedly snort-like laugh. His body surged up against hers. “Don’t let go of me,” he said. She tightened her legs around him, and he pulled close about their bodies the lap blanket she’d disarrayed in her mad lunge. In the protected embrace of the blanket, in the dark, his cold hand slid under her skirt and up her woolen stockings to where her legs parted, and her cold hand reached down between his legs, rudely forcing his pants open. She heard herself beginning to pant with hunger and eagerness, and felt herself, too, drawing from behind John’s wall some burdened, hungry thing that she’d been allowing to starve.
“You,” she managed, his mouth hot on her throat. “You. You must know. You must know by now.”
Meanwhile, the horse continued slowly down the street without either of their guidance, moving methodically toward home, a warm barn, a little sleep.
* * *
When they arrived at the Doctor’s house sometime later, Rebecca’s mouth swollen and John’s thin face flushed with exertion, they found all the downstairs lamps lit, blazing into the street at nearly one in the morning. It was their first sign that something was terribly wrong.
Neither of them leaped to react, although the sight of the glaring house was a bad omen at this hour. Rebecca looked a question at John, who shook his head, eyes dark, and swiftly steered the horse down the lane toward the shed behind the house. He paused at the post that marked the corner of the Doctor’s yard, though, and without a word between them Rebecca jumped down.
In an instant, despite the sweetness of the cold night, they were separate again. Perhaps they’d grown too accustomed to the old, hard habit of answering challenges alone and in their own distinct ways, she with decisive, swift movements and he with the quiet relentlessness of a stone. If she had known in that moment what would happen in the weeks to come, she might have taken John’s hand and insisted that he come with her, that the horse could wait—that, indeed, it might be better to leave the horse harnessed and ready in case they had to go for help. She might have waited for John instead of dashing off into the house alone. She might have remembered, in that moment of stomach-freezing fear, that they belonged to each other, that they had married each other in part to help each other through just such moments as these, and she might have tried to reinforce the tenuous thread that bound them to each other. If she had known that in the weeks to come that spider-skein thread would seem to snap entirely, leaving the two of them floating aloft and tetherless in a terrifying blank space, she might have done something differently. But she didn’t because they weren’t together in that way, not even yet. They’d never found a way to be.
Rebecca felt herself moving with effort up the walk, pulling herself against the weight of her own fear as if she were dragging heavy, wet horse blankets again.
She opened the door from the front steps and discovered Matthew sit
ting unsteadily on the parlor rug near the stove, eyes red with recent crying and purple shadowed with baby exhaustion. He was holding something in his plump, dear little hands, frowning at it, busy in thought in that way small children can be. It took her some moments to recognize the object he grappled with, its tubes flopping horribly across his lap.
Rebecca closed the door behind her, and the little boy looked up from his study of the sticky, mysterious tubes of her father’s stethoscope. At the sight of his mother, Matthew’s face curled into a smile that was also half a cry. Under the heavy glass-globed lights of the parlor, Rebecca, still in her coat and gloves and hat, scooped up her little boy and held him, looking around her in real fear for the remainder of the disaster, wherever it might be.
Just as Matthew was setting out to protest the situation, the scratchiness of her coat, and the stethoscope abandoned like so much forbidden fruit on the warm rug near the stove, Rebecca heard the back door open and the heavy step of her husband on the kitchen floorboards. “Rebecca?” he called.
He met her in the downstairs hallway, which formed a dim tunnel between the brightly lit kitchen and parlor. John was openly dismayed at seeing Matthew in his mother’s arms at this hour of the night, rather than asleep and safe in his cot.
“Where is everyone?” John asked, and Rebecca felt a cold stone against her breast. “They must be upstairs,” John looked up. “Hello up there. Dr. Mueller? Miss Nussbaum?”
There came a sound from above, a thud like something falling from a shelf. Rebecca and John looked at each other, startled and afraid.
“Stay here,” John murmured. “Until I know it’s safe.” Then John made for the stairs with his long-legged gait. Rebecca stood with Matthew in her arms, both of them watching as John disappeared into the dimness of the upper hallway.
A fearsome quiet followed. Rebecca felt as if a hook in her rib cage were tugging her toward the staircase. She had to know what was up there, but she was suddenly afraid to let her little boy see whatever might be waiting. She forced herself to blink her burning eyes and look away. Matthew leaned his little head against her shoulder. His warm, round cheeks were a soft, kissable plumpness that curved down past his tiny chin, making of his face a darling round pear, creamy white and sweet. Matthew didn’t look like her—he had John’s dark eyes and his lighter hair—and as he lifted his head again to turn his serious, tired baby smile on her, Rebecca’s heart tightened with love so crushing she thought she might die of it. I would do anything for you, but I can’t stay here with you, she thought at him fiercely. Forgive me. She moved into the parlor and set the boy down in his former nest on the rug near the stethoscope.
“Stay here and play quietly, my own sweet love,” she said, kissing his head and his cheeks and his little dry mouth. He looked at her expectantly. So small. Was he too close to the stove? There was no time to lose. She would return to him. She breathed him in and then stood and made for the stairs, backing toward them while smiling insincerely at the little boy on the rug, afraid of the quiet up there, so afraid of it, but still impelled toward it by something she knew but couldn’t name.
Matthew’s small face crumpled at the sight of her retreat. He began to wail in earnest as she reached for the banister and began to climb.
“Sssh, sweet love,” Rebecca whispered. “Sssh, sssh.” But he only sobbed the louder. Rebecca looked over her shoulder at her baby, grown purple faced with the rage of incomprehensible loss. “All right, all right.” She dashed back to the parlor and put the stethoscope back in Matthew’s hands. He flung it away, reaching for her instead. “No, no, little love. You can’t come with me,” she whispered, unhooking his fingers from her skirt, scarcely able to think. What is happening up there? Why is it so quiet? Why hasn’t John come down? She stood hastily, and Matthew fell over with a graceless flop and began to scream into the rug. She righted him as softly as she could and then turned and ran for the staircase.
She didn’t make it far. His screams escalated. “You’re going to hurt yourself,” she cried down to him. “Be still! Be still and wait for Mama!” Rebecca looked up into the darkness awaiting her at the top of the stairs and tried to still her heart. God help me, she prayed forcefully, staring at the black upstairs hallway and searching for the strength of heart to climb up into it. He’s only a baby. I can’t bring him into that.
She heard the baby fall over again, and his screams intensified. Fearing that he really had hurt himself, she hurried back down the stairs and craned from the landing to look into the parlor. Matthew was on his side, perhaps too close to the stove after all, fists clenching and unclenching, eyes shut tight, screaming.
“Matthew, hush! Stop that now! Your mama is going to be right upstairs!”
Matthew’s eyes opened at the sound of her voice, and he reached for her, his tiny fingers spread open like a forced flower, his sobs hoarse and pleading.
It was too much for her. “You poor thing.” As fast as she could move, she went to him, scooped him up, pressed him against her shoulder, none too gently. There was no time to lose. Something was happening up there. She had to get to John. Her shoes made the staircase shudder. “We’ll go together. We’ll go together. Be brave, little one.”
She raced toward the dark at the top of the stairs, where all the light seemed to have been sucked out of the world by some tremendous leave-taking force, like a wind that sweeps a door closed. But three-quarters of the way up, midstep, she felt herself overreach, her body overbalancing, as if the next stair had sunk, suddenly and without warning, three feet into the bottom story. As if the whole staircase belonged to a different house, one built just a bit lower and to the left of her father’s house, the house where she knew herself to be. Clutching her baby boy to her side, she felt herself hanging perilously close to a fall.
Dream, this must be a dream, I must have fallen asleep in the wagon on the way home, afterward, and I’m tucked up against him under the blanket and dreaming this, dreaming this entire disaster.
But as much as she wished it, she knew it wasn’t true. She was falling, with her baby in her arms, on stairs she’d traversed a thousand times.
In the half seconds that felt like days during which her body overcorrected and searched for a reality that was no longer there, she saw the house as if through a film of smoke or bright linen gauze, the sort her father used for bandages, but the house was utterly changed. Here it was bright, it was hot. Here the top of the stairs led to a hallway with three doors on one side—not the eight doors, four on either side, that she’d raced in and out of as a girl. As hideous and sickening as the sensation of falling was, and even as the unfamiliarity of the place in which she found herself doubled and redoubled the terror of what was happening, she felt more impelled than ever to get to the top of the stairs. Something she wanted was up there. Something she wanted very badly. She had to get to it. She had to get to it—no matter what it cost, she knew she was willing to pay.
She urged herself forward, hurling her body and angling her shoulder—the opposite shoulder from the one that cradled Matty—toward where she knew the staircase ought to be, ought to be. Although here in this dream house it was as if she were throwing herself over the banister. And for a stomach-dropping moment she thought she’d done just that.
The staircase spun back into place before her. I’m going to hit—
Her shoulder and the side of her head thudded against the edge of the wood. Matty screamed on and on. She cradled his small head, pushed up onto her knees with her sore free arm, gathered her heavy skirt out of the way, and lunged again for the top of the stairs.
Her father’s door was the first on the left. As her fingers closed over the knob, it turned. John was there. She launched herself into him bodily, and he took her in.
“He’s gone, Beck.”
Still holding Matthew, she pushed past John into the room, as peremptorily and instinctively as she’d run into his arms
. There was a light past him on the bedside table, illuminating a room in which nothing seemed possible—surely this was a play, a stage? Not her home. Frau was on the floor. “Oh God!” It burst from her throat in a sob.
John managed to gather the boy away from her. Rebecca, still not seeing, or unwilling to see, what was in her father’s bed, knelt at Frau’s side. She was warm, but breathing shallowly.
“She’s unconscious. She fainted, Beck; she’s still alive.”
“What—” Rebecca, with her hand on Frau’s cheek and her little boy screaming and screaming behind her, and her husband pushed away like so much unwanted food, finally looked at what was in her father’s bed.
* * *
It emerged that on the night of the Doctor’s death, poor Adeline had passed some nightmarish hours. Dr. Mueller had gone up to bed not long after John and Rebecca left for the schoolhouse, and sometime later, at around the hour that popular songs were being sung at Betsy Hart’s house in town, a repeated sound, like a choking cry, had stirred Adeline Nussbaum from her bed and brought her to the bedroom door of her old friend and protector, her one remaining cousin from the old days in Duisdorf, before their small, rudderless family had scattered to pieces all across the cities and America and left each other to make their own ways as best they could. Adeline had lived in America long enough to see that not all the Germans here came from luck and large families. Some came here lonely and died here lonelier still.
The sounds had continued behind her cousin’s door, and so eventually, after calling softly through the wood to him, she’d pushed the door open and found the old man strangling on his own blood, purple in the face, eyes bulging, unable to speak or breathe but not yet dead, horribly not yet dead. As she stood in the doorway, the Doctor, that sturdy and inscrutable man who had always seemed invincible in his way, vomited blood onto his chest.
Her shriek of horror awoke the baby, who tumbled from his cot in Rebecca’s room across the hall with a ragged thump that jolted Frau’s heart, and that was followed by screaming of such an intense pitch that she was convinced the little lad had broken his arm. From that moment she was consumed by the effort and the helplessness of trying to find a way to aid them both at once, by herself. She ran to the Doctor, who didn’t seem to recognize her, his whole body thrown into the effort of fighting something that seemed to have exploded within itself. So then she ran to the boy, who seemed mercifully unharmed, although she could hardly pause long enough to examine him. She hastened downstairs in the dark with the still-screaming boy, where she found herself alone and in a terrible conflict. Could she leave the boy to get help? She couldn’t bring the baby with her into the cold, and she didn’t have time to dress him. Did she even have time to run to the neighbors for help? In a fever of indecision she lit all the lamps she quickly could, hoping somehow that the brightness of the house might alarm the neighbors. She left the boy in the parlor with the only toys that came to hand: the topmost items in the Doctor’s old medicine bag, which customarily sat on a table in the hall by the door.
The Barter Page 23
