by Torey Hayden
On other occasions I contemplated Klaus. Where did he live? What did he look like? Did he resemble Mama? She had a very distinctive mouth, wide and supple, and both Megan and I had inherited it. Had he? And what was he doing that precise moment I was thinking of him? One afternoon I counted out the time zones in the Atlas. Seven hours difference between Kansas and Germany. After that I could never look at the clock without doing quick calculations regarding Klaus. Four-fifteen, I’d think, and it is 11.15 at night there. Is Klaus asleep? Is he taking a bath or finding a book to read or doing any of the other countless little things one does before bed? Does he have children now? Maybe he has a boy or a girl of his own. Is he kissing them goodnight?
Perhaps the most bewitching aspect of reflecting on Klaus and József was the eerie knowledge that Mama had been willing to kill them both. My skin would crawl when I really thought about that. To be the child of a mother capable of murdering her own children was a concept that was almost paralytic when I fully considered it; yet, because I was in no danger, I could regard it with fascinated horror. The odd part was that the woman capable of such an act stayed as distant from my mama, to me, as did Klaus and József.
What eventually grew out of my thoughts was an uncontrollable desire to pursue the past. I was transfixed not only by the power of Mama’s stories and the events that came of them, but also by Mama, herself. The magic of our bond was irrefutable. She made me, I’d think, she carried me inside her own body, just as she had Klaus and József. I was part of her before I was myself. I had a right to her world and her dreams and her memories. With incredible clarity, I would think: they’re mine. They are my memories.
I thought of going to Hungary and visiting Lébény. I thought of tracing Mama and Daddy’s trek from northern Germany, where they had met, down through Austria and Czechoslovakia. I thought of going to see the location of Ravensbrück. I thought of searching for Klaus myself. And perhaps most of all I thought of going to Forest of Flowers, where my mother’s resurrection took place. Wherever, I realized I had to go.
The first few days back at school were a crash course in human behaviour for me. I learned quickly to recognize all the little signs: the looks, the avoidance of looks, the instant exit, the intense discomfort I could provoke simply by being present. I also became acutely aware of the countless, casual phrases regarding murder and insanity that littered everyday speech and that took on a brave new meaning when I was in the room.
During the week following my return, I stopped by the French language lab after school to ask Miss Conway if I could get back to working on the French tapes in my free time. Desperate for something to take my mind off things, I thought maybe this would help. I was also nursing the secret hope that she might still invite me over to her apartment to see her slides of Paris as she had promised. In fact, I dreamed about that shamelessly, thinking perhaps we could be friends. She was only twenty-three. I knew that because Brianna, who worked in the front office at school, had looked it up for me, and I thought now that I was an adult and nearly graduated, if she saw me out of school and we talked French together, maybe she would forget I was just a student.
It was after four in the afternoon when I went in to see her, and the school was dead silent. Miss Conway was methodically putting assignments into folders, one after another, and the room was so quiet I could hear her fingernails against the folders.
‘You do well enough in French,’ she said to me when I asked about the tapes. ‘Why don’t you go see Mr Tennant, Lesley? I think you’d be better off exploring advanced German. With your background …’
She didn’t finish the sentence. She didn’t need to because I knew what came next. It was no secret to anyone now where my expertise in German came from. If you read the newspapers, you knew.
‘I’m really a lot more interested in French,’ I replied. ‘And I need more practice.’
For several moments she did not say anything but continued putting the assignments away. I watched her. She was a tiny person, maybe four feet ten or eleven, and I towered over her. I felt clumsy beside her.
She looked up. ‘I really am sorry, Lesley. But I just don’t have the time any more to do those tapes with you. You understand. With the end of school and everything …’ She smiled. It was a polite smile, impeccably so. You almost couldn’t tell it wasn’t friendliness.
I fiddled with a button on my blouse. ‘I could do them on my own. If you don’t mind. You know, like I did in March. I could just do them in here on my own.’ There was suddenly an intense urge to cry. I wanted her to know how much I was suffering, how much I needed something to divert my attention, how important French was to me, just because it wasn’t connected to my mother. Perhaps even more, I wanted her to feel sorry for me, to put her arms around me and tell me she understood. The tears rose in my eyes but didn’t fall. However, I did not try to hide them from her.
If she saw my tears, she gave no indication of it. Instead, she turned and went over to the file cabinet. ‘No,’ she said, ‘the lab has to be locked when I’m not in it. There has to be a teacher supervising. You understand. Those are the school rules.’
I studied her face. I had thought she was beautiful. Indeed, I still did. She had very dark hair and large eyes that intimated a Latin American heritage. Her features had the delicate sharpness of a bisque doll’s.
‘You do understand, don’t you?’ she asked again when I hadn’t responded. ‘Why don’t you go and see Mr Tennant? I think he usually stays late on Wednesdays and Fridays. You could do German tapes then.’
‘I’ve been alone in the lab before, Miss Conway. All those other times I worked on my own and you weren’t there.’
‘No,’ she said and it was final.
At home that evening Dad and I sat together in the kitchen. Dad had made a pot of Mama’s strong European coffee after supper, and he even allowed Megan to drink some. Then she wandered off to some other part of the house, leaving us alone with the rest of the pot.
It was a very hot night. All the windows and the back door were open, and Dad had the fan on the kitchen counter. It whirred back and forth, blowing my hair across my face as it passed. The two of us sat, sweat beaded on our foreheads, and drank cup after cup of steaming coffee.
‘You know, I’m thinking,’ I said, ‘that maybe when school’s out, I’ll go away for a while.’
He looked up abruptly. He had been carefully measuring sugar into his mug, stirring it, staring into it, measuring a wee bit more. Mama never took sugar, just cream, but my father had never adjusted to the thick, powerful taste. But now he stopped, holding the spoon, sugar and all, poised over the mug.
‘You mean college?’ he asked with suspicion in his voice. I knew he knew I didn’t mean college.
I shook my head. ‘No. Just away.’
‘Where?’
I shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I just need to get away.’
Brow puckered, he lowered the spoon into the coffee and stirred it. ‘I don’t want to hear this kind of talk right now, Les. There’s been too much happening over the past few weeks. We all need to settle down again. Let’s not think of doing wild things.’
‘It’s not wild. I just want to go away for a while. I need to get out. I need to think. I feel like a boulder is sitting on me.’
He said nothing.
‘I can’t stand it here any more.’
He looked up. ‘What can’t you stand?’
I gazed off across the kitchen. The counter was littered with the aftermath of supper preparation: dirty utensils, half an onion, potato peelings on the drainboard. I wondered what, in ten or twenty years’ time, I would remember of this kitchen. I wondered which of the million moments I had spent here would stay with me.
‘What can’t you stand?’ he repeated.
I turned back. ‘You remember Miss Conway? My French teacher. You know.’ I looked at him. ‘Remember how she used to let me listen to those tapes all the time in the language lab after school? Remember me doing
that in March?’
He nodded.
‘Well, I asked her if I could start back on them. I was thinking if I could get involved in something that, well …well, maybe it’d take my mind off …Anyway, I asked her and you know what she said? No. Just like that. Not maybe. Not wait a little, it’s inconvenient. Just no. She said she couldn’t leave me alone in there any longer. That she didn’t want to stay herself. That she had to keep the lab locked. And cripes, Dad, she let me work in there alone a thousand times before.’ I frowned into my mug. ‘You know how that makes me feel?’
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘I can’t stand it. It’s bad enough having everyone always looking at me, always whispering there goes the daughter of Mara O’Malley. But now not only does Miss Conway not want to be alone with me in the lab, she doesn’t even trust me with her stupid tapes.’
He lifted one shoulder in an expressive little gesture of understanding. ‘It’ll get better. We have to give it time.’
‘It’s humiliating.’
‘Yes, it is. But there’s not much we can do about it except live through it and prove them all wrong.’
I grimaced. The room was sweltering, and I became abruptly aware of how uncomfortably sweaty I was. Why the hell was I drinking coffee? I pushed the mug away.
‘I liked her,’ I said. ‘And I thought she liked me. I was the best student in the whole class. I killed myself to be best. Just because I knew French mattered to her and I liked her. I could have done that well in German without even bothering to bring home the book. I could have had it a lot easier.’
Dad wiped his forehead with the heel of his palm. He sighed. ‘So, you want to run away.’
‘No. Not run away. That’s not what I said, is it? That’s not what I’m talking about. I said I just wanted to get out of here and pull myself together.’
‘You’ll be leaving in the fall anyway, Lesley. When you go to Kansas City.’
I shook my head. ‘That’s not what I want.’
There followed a poignant moment when neither of us spoke. The intensity of my desperation swelled in the silence, and I think he was as aware of it as I was. He sighed.
‘It’s not running away, Dad. It isn’t the same thing.’
‘When you get out because someone humiliates you at school, Lesley, that’s running away.’
I released a long breath and let my shoulders sag. ‘That’s not what I mean. Not really. It only looks like that, but it’s not the reason.’
‘Then what is?’
I fingered the tablecloth.
‘This is a good family, Lessie. We’ve been through some bad times, but it’s still a good family.’
‘I know it. But I just need to be outside it for a while. Can’t you understand that? Can’t you see what I mean?’
He turned around and lifted the coffeepot from the stove. First the coffee went into his mug, then the sugar, slowly, in measured spoonfuls, then the milk. He stirred it and then finally raised his head to look at me. When he saw that I was still watching him, he looked back down and paused with the teaspoon in his hand. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I’m afraid I can’t.’
Chapter Twenty-eight
Mama had let me sleep with her when I was very young. My father, snoring softly, had formed the mountainous horizon of those nights, but it was with Mama that I slept, nuzzling into the thickness of her hair, protected by the tired bulk of her body. My memories of those nights were mostly of darkness, blissfully satiating after the autonomy of the day. I would drowse against her breasts and be enveloped in her deep, familiar smell. I didn’t have my own bed until I was more than three, until we moved to west Texas.
Megan too had slept with Mama and Daddy. I was old enough by then to remember them together clearly. Megan never had a real crib. Just a laundry basket with a gingham lining that Mama would carry from room to room in the daytime. At night, even as a newborn, Megan was snuggled down between Mama and Daddy in the big bed. I recall once coming in during the night. I had been sick in my stomach and had come for comforting. Megan was maybe two then, her hair already long and straight, like Mama’s, and there they were together. Mama, free of the restless energy that dominated her waking hours, was deeply asleep, her breathing soft and even. And Megan, like a little dormouse, was curled snugly into the small hollow beneath Mama’s arm. Even in the blackness I could see their hair mingled together, light and dark, and I could see the slack peace of their dreams. It was my father who’d awakened, not Mama, and although he’d let me into the big bed with them and had held me in his arms, I remember crying just a little because neither Megan nor Mama had stirred.
During the course of that May following the murders, the memories of those nights returned persistently to me. I couldn’t sleep very well, and while I lay awake in bed, I found it curiously easy to evoke the darkness that had surrounded me in infancy, to recall the unconditional safeness of those nights. Yet, I could bring back only the dim, snuggly emotions and not the actual heavy warmth itself. Thus, the memories always left me longing.
Deep into one night I actually got up, my head full of hazy, unformed thoughts about sleeping with Megan. It was then that I chanced across my father. He was in his nightclothes, tissues clutched in one hand.
‘What are you doing, Dad?’ I asked. The house was dark.
He shook his head.
I was only half awake myself. It was like seeing an apparition. When he didn’t answer, I turned, bewildered, and went back to my bed, having forgotten what I’d gotten up to do.
That was the first time I noticed. But soon I discovered he paced every night after Megan and I were in bed. Like a forsaken, forgotten ghost, he wandered through the house. Things seemed so normal with him during the day. He said virtually nothing to us about his grief. But then he didn’t need to. Hearing his footsteps as he searched from room to room in the darkness was enough.
‘You want to know a secret?’ Megan asked me one afternoon. It was after school, and we were alone in the house. I was lying on my bed because my back hurt, and Megan had come to stand in the doorway and swing back and forth with her hands on the frame. I’d told her to go away because I was sick of her always hanging around me after school, but she stayed, swaying in and out of the doorway.
‘What secret’s that?’ I asked.
‘You want to know it?’
‘OK,’ I said.
‘I know where Mama is.’
I didn’t respond. I didn’t know exactly what to say. She continued her motion in the doorway, and her long hair flowed rhythmically around her.
‘You want to know?’
I nodded.
Letting go of the door frame, she straightened up. ‘Come with me. I’ll show you.’
I rose from the bed and followed her. She walked down the hallway to the linen closet. ‘OK, Les. Now, you got to close your eyes.’
‘What stupid joke is this, Megs?’
‘Just do it, OK? Just close your eyes for a sec.’
Feeling dumb, I closed my eyes, and I could hear Megan opening the door to the linen closet. She took hold of my arm and pulled me inside.
‘OK, now smell, Les. Keep your eyes closed and smell in here.’
I inhaled deeply. It stank of stale cigarette smoke, an ugly ashtray odour that I had always hated. Mama had been inclined to iron everything. She’d iron the sheets and the pillowcases, the towels and even the washcloths. If we didn’t get them off the line in time, she’d iron Meg’s and my underwear. And all the while she was working, she would smoke, and the smell of her cigarettes would permeate the cloth with the steam and the heat of the iron.
I had yelled at her about it. In seventh grade when we were studying the effects of smoking in hygiene class, I had come home every night and screamed at her to stop. I’d cried and pleaded and brought her pictures of cancerous lungs and addicted monkeys. In the end I’d told her never to kiss me because she stank, and that had made her cry.
Now, I stood in the gloom of the line
n closet and breathed in the odour deeply.
‘Sometimes I come in here after school before you get home,’ Megan said. ‘I just stand here with my eyes closed and smell. It makes it like Mama’s just exactly right here, doesn’t it? Like she’s standing near by.’
I turned toward her. Megan had a sheet down and pressed close against her face. Like someone snorting cocaine, she was inhaling in deep, measured breaths. Then slowly, she lowered the sheet, returned it to the shelf and smoothed the ironed surface. We said nothing to one another but remained standing in the small, dark closet.
Megan looked up. She searched my face. ‘How come this happened? How come Mama died, Les?’
I regarded her. What I noticed was what a little kid she still was. She was wearing hot-pink terry-cloth shorts and a T-shirt she was growing too big for. Her stomach was still rounded, giving her that swaybacked, potbellied profile young children have. There were no signs of the softening curves of pre-adolescence in her.
‘Do you think maybe if we hadn’t been so much trouble to her, she might have been happy with us?’ Megan asked. ‘You know. And not needed to go find that little boy.’
I shook my head.
‘Maybe if we’d been better. If I could have done better at school. Mama worried because I didn’t do my schoolwork. She said that to me once. That I had to do my work so I could go to university when I got big. And you know what? I told her I didn’t ever want to go to university.’ There was a pause and Megan reached a hand out to stroke the sheet on the shelf. ‘I shouldn’t have said that. If I’d done better at school, maybe she wouldn’t have had to do what she did.’
‘Megs, Mama was sick. Just as if she’d had cancer or something. You know that. That’s what Daddy was explaining to you the other night.’
‘Then how come I couldn’t tell it? She didn’t act sick to me.’
‘But she was. Inside where you couldn’t see it. And just like cancer makes people die sometimes, this made Mama die. That’s what happened. It wasn’t anything else.’
