Ursula Hegi The Burgdorf Cycle Boxed Set: Floating in My Mother's Palm, Stones from the River, The Vision of Emma Blau. Children and Fire

by Hegi, Ursula

  Tobias hiccuped and leaned against one of the cold, black railings that ran from the lanterns to the front door.

  “I didn’t hear your answer, Mr. Tobias Blau.”

  Tobias liked it when Danny called him that. “Seven. Okay? Seven.”

  “You got to act your age. Go away now. Hop hop.” Danny leapt up and stalked past the fountain, around the corner of the house, and into the open garage.

  But Tobias raced after him, eyes still blurry. Through the wide door. Beneath the boxy black heaters that hung suspended from the ceiling. What if they fall and squash me? Beneath the silver blades of exhaust fans that Mr. Wilson had installed up there for sucking car fumes from the garage. Blades sharp enough to cut your head off. Sniffling loudly, he tried to draw his tears back in.

  “What are you snorting for?” Danny stopped in the last stall that was set up for washing automobiles. Its floor sloped in the shape of a V toward the drain. Hoses hung coiled next to the window, and a truck tire was fastened to the wall to protect the front fenders of cars while they were cleaned.

  “I don’t snort.”

  “I’ll live here for a while. But only if you stop snorting.”

  “I told you I don’t—”

  “Forgive me, your highness. I’ll stay then if my aunt doesn’t try to bless me or pray over me while I’m sleeping.” Danny broke the lump of chalk and passed the smaller part to Tobias. “Here.”

  It still felt warm from his palm. And it had a face, the tip of wings—“It’s not chalk. It’s Mrs. Wilson’s Angel of Mercy!”

  “Half of Mrs. Wilson’s angel.”

  Tobias wiped his thumb across the rosy smudges from Mrs. Wilson’s lipstick kisses. “She’ll be mad.”

  “She wants to be my mommy. So she never gets mad at me. Because then I can say, ‘I don’t want you as my mommy.’ Get it?”

  “Do you hate her?”

  Danny picked up a sponge, tossed it into an enamel basin. “This is how it is: she wants to be my mommy; he wants to go back to Florida. That’s all they talk about… and fight about.”

  “I hate my new mother.” But as soon as Tobias said it, it didn’t feel true. Rather like something he wanted to impress Danny with.

  “She’s not new,” Danny corrected him. “You’ve had her for years.”

  “But she’s not my real mother. And that makes her new. Like my real mother is my old mother, and this mother here is—”

  “Okay. Okay. You don’t have to keep saying it over. You hate her all the time?”

  Tobias thought for an instant. “When she makes me drink milk.”

  “And that must be about twenty-four hours a day.”

  “Danny?”

  “What now?”

  “Will you still be alive when I’m grown up?”

  “Jesus—”

  “Will you?”

  “I guess so.”

  “I just want to make sure.”

  “You’re a very strange child.”

  Danny taught him how to draw, first with the upper half of the Angel of Mercy, and later with oils he would buy from the salary he earned for assisting his uncle and aunt. In the garage, he’d save bugs for Tobias’ flesh-eating plants and store them inside an old canning jar that he kept on the workbench. One Sunday afternoon in March, Danny showed Tobias how to build a miniature car from wooden matches. It quieted Tobias to set those matches together and glue them, to file down the points where they connected and make them smooth.

  Usually words were his comfort, his weapon. If other children in the building excluded him from play, he’d call them bad names. Just as he was called bad names in school. “Hun.” “Spy.” His father had forbidden him to use those names because they were bad names for Germans. Now Tobias called the other kids “Stinkyface.” “Stupid.”

  Often the front page of the newspaper had headlines about Germans, fighting dirty, gassing Americans in France—Americans like men of Winnipesaukee who were overseas to win this war so that there would be no other wars ever again. Though Tobias’ stepmother wouldn’t let him read those articles, he knew from other kids about Germans who set fires, Germans who hid time bombs in railroad stations. Worst of all were German spies because they put germs inside horses. Even inside houseflies. Those had to be real tiny germs, Tobias figured.

  When he got German measles, Dr. Miles said they were called Liberty Measles now. Even though they were still the same measles. A week later, some girls smeared a rotten banana into Greta’s hair, making her smell like glue. Tobias’ father went to see the girls’ parents and came home mad, saying they were not planning to do anything about it. His father was mad a lot. Because of money worries. “People don’t like buying from Germans right now,” Tobias’ stepmother had said. “And some of your father’s suppliers are not giving him the service they used to give him.”

  She was trying hard not to speak German at all, and though she sometimes forgot, she’d correct herself quickly. Whenever Tobias’ little brother called her “Mutti,” she’d say to him, “Mother, Robert. Mother.”

  She refused to let Tobias go with Danny to see The Kaiser, The Beast of Berlin at the Royal Theater where the curtain and seats and carpet were all royal blue. The first moving picture Tobias had ever seen was Romeo and Juliet, and it remained his favorite because Francis X. Bushman who played Romeo had friendly eyes and the most beautiful smile Tobias had ever seen. A smile like Danny’s. If you could make him smile.

  One evening, after two of the older kids in the building teased Tobias into kissing a little American flag—“prove you’re not a spy prove it prove it”—Tobias had the dream for the first time. He was surrounded by mist, a mist so hot and thick that everything was white except for the red hanging above him, a calf’s head, severed, an ancient and mysterious image that bled down on him till he woke, hands against his mouth to keep from screaming. It was a dream that was to come back, but he never told anyone—not even Danny—because he was ashamed of it.

  Besides, he knew how to quiet himself. He would spend hours alone in his room with matches, glue, paint, and sandpaper that he got from Danny, and he’d build miniature animals. Always two of one kind. Meaning each of them was half of that one. Dogs. Cows. Swallows. Horses. For his swallows he used only one third of a match for the wingspan, sanded the ends, glued on the red tip of a match for a beak, and painted them with Danny’s smallest brush. To make sure each animal had another, he’d finish the second animal before he’d let himself start another kind. His own ark. Zebras. Goats. Ducks like the ones he watched down by the lake, their thick bodies a cluster of nine half matches.

  Robert was three when he found his own language in the piano. With a persistence that was rare for him, he badgered his parents for lessons, and whenever they’d tell him to wait until he was five, a quick rage would flare in him, a rage that he’d push right back because it was bad. Cookies smoothed it out, that rage. Pudding. Bread warm from the oven.

  His pudgy fingers looked as though they couldn’t possibly span the ivory keys, yet miraculously they did, leaping with a certainty that amazed Stefan and distressed Helene. To spare her son the discouragement that had bowed her father—that sweat of despair— she tried to distract him from the piano; but he returned to it every day, tapping at the white and black ivory keys while sitting atop the piano bench on four volumes of the German encyclopedia she’d brought from Burgdorf, and she usually had to lift him from there and carry him to his room for his nap.

  No longer awkward or afraid of blushing, Helene moved through the rooms of her luxurious apartment, certain of herself in her role as Robert’s mother. She liked to think of him as her summer child—warm and filled with light. The American children had been born in November and December. Robert had his father’s nose and mouth, but he was fair-haired and his eyes were mild where Stefan’s were determined. “A replica with weaker colors,” Tobias would say many years later when Robert would enter veterinary college, but Helene thought Robert looked more and more li
ke the boy who had grown up next door to her in Burgdorf, and she treated him as if he had the young Stefan’s daring and exuberance—traits no one else saw in the patient and affectionate boy.

  One morning when she really let herself listen to the sounds he evoked and found that they were delicate and powerful, she cried because she felt proud of him and sad for her father who’d never known what it was like to have that gift. Would he have treasured it in his grandson? Resented his grandson? From then on the organist from the Lutheran church came to the apartment on Tuesdays and Fridays. A slender man of seventy, Mr. Howard appeared old from the front, but his profile was young and didn’t show his wrinkles.

  Tobias said Mr. Howard looked like an angel because you could see the light coming through his sculpted white hair. He’d wait for him by the door and then sit on the floor next to the piano, watching him as he taught his little brother about music, asking him questions about the moving pictures Mr. Howard loved to go to at the Royal Theater. The latest movie he’d seen there was Tarzan of the Apes.

  “I’m sure you’ll like it,” he told Tobias, “because it has lots of apes.”

  Now and then he saved his sweets for Mr. Howard, who accepted those gifts with a formal bow and the promise that he’d enjoy them for dessert that evening.

  The end of 1918, soon after the armistice was signed, letters from Burgdorf began to arrive once again. When Leo wrote that Gertrud was pregnant, Helene felt alarmed that he seemed so pleased: “a brother or sister for our Trudi. Gertrud has become more stable. Those stays in Grafenberg helped. …”

  In a letter that arrived a scant week later, he was dismayed because Gertrud refused to speak to him or anyone else, and he blamed himself for burdening her with another pregnancy. “Because she’s afraid the new child will be a Zwerg too … While I wouldn’t mind raising half a dozen children like our Trudi.”

  But Stefan’s mother wrote that the women of Burgdorf were not eager to raise another child for Gertrud Montag. Granted, with the first child she hadn’t known how wretched she’d be as a mother, but to have another child meant relying on your neighbors too much. Not that they wouldn’t be there for Gertrud’s next child too. They would do their duty, just as they did their duty to God and to their government. But especially now—with their men back from the war or, worse yet, fallen and buried on foreign battlefields—they had no room in their lives for anyone beyond their own families.

  Beneath Leo’s signature on his next letter, Gertrud added five lines. Now she seemed excited about the pregnancy. She had her own logic why this baby would be all right: “It’s God’s way to make up to us for Trudi.” Already she was planning how the new child, a boy of course with a normal-length body—“We’ll name him Horst”—would safeguard the future of her Zwerg girl long after she and Leo would be buried.

  There was a second postscript. Leo’s. “I didn’t contradict her. Still, I assured her our Trudi will safeguard her own future.”

  It would be Horst, born too soon to breathe for himself, who would be buried before any of them. His funeral was the week after Easter, the same week that Irene and Homer Wilson—following the proper interval of mourning for Danny’s mother—gave an adoption party for Danny. After all the years of waiting to be his mother, Mrs. Wilson was not about to let herself be cheated out of a celebration, though most of the tenants thought it was foolish to adopt a man old enough to start a family of his own. Danny, who had grown up with her detailed plans for his adoption party—to be held in the lobby of the Wasserburg like the Blaus’ parties, with so much food that every guest would have some to take home afterwards—didn’t care enough to deny his aunt that ritual.

  “Embarrassing,” Mr. Clarke said to his wife, but they were both too curious to decline the invitation.

  “I’ll sing if you want me to,” Pearl Bloom offered the Wilsons.

  To Helene it felt odd to be celebrating the adoption of a grown man when her brother had just lost his infant son.

  The afternoon of the party, it occurred to her that Mrs. Evans looked healthier than usual, and when she commented on it, Mrs. Evans admitted, “I’ve just come back from an appointment with Dr. Miles. I always wear makeup when I go to the doctor. So he will take one glance at me and tell me there’s nothing wrong with me.”

  “You’re not fooling him.” Her husband turned to Mr. Braddock. “Arthritis. She has arthritis and she pretends she has no troubles.”

  “Stop fussing, Henry.”

  “Someone has to fuss over you.”

  “Henry doesn’t trust doctors who’re younger than he is,” she explained to Mr. Braddock.

  Miss Garland pulled Helene aside. “A tragedy. It’s a tragedy. Now that Mrs. Wilson finally gets Danny, he’s too old to need a mother.”

  Irene Wilson was dashing about, serving and cleaning all at once with her customary urgency to get things done the instant she became aware of them—a curse and a blessing, she’d once confessed to Helene—and though she would eventually get everything finished, she’d feel overwhelmed because she couldn’t do it all at once. It left her forever dissatisfied with what she accomplished, impatient with her husband who couldn’t do anything quickly enough for her.

  “Let me see if she needs help,” Helene said.

  “I just remembered something about Sara Blau,” Miss Garland started, trying to entice Helene to stay with her, but she excused herself and headed toward Mrs. Wilson. Miss Garland shook her head. Ever since Robert had been born, the third Mrs. Blau had not been very curious about her husband’s first two wives.

  A few steps from her a group of tenants was asking the old lawyer about the adoption, and Miss Garland joined them.

  “Yes, but do you think it’s legal?” Nate Bloom was asking.

  “That’s what I want to know,” Mrs. Clarke said.

  “I checked it out before I drew up their adoption papers,” Mr. Bell told them.

  “I bet that makes him the oldest person ever to be adopted,” Miss Garland speculated.

  “I found a case of a thirty-four-year-old woman in Oregon.”

  “Let me guess,” Pearl Bloom said. “Adopted by a thirty-five-year-old man.”

  Her husband raised his eyebrows at her. Usually a comment like that would make him laugh, but he was angry at her for dropping his old soap slivers down the incinerator chute. She shrugged. Walked toward the tables.

  “No, a lady adopted her,” she could hear Mr. Bell explain. “Not even a relative. A neighbor lady.”

  Pearl sat down next to Mrs. Braddock and Fanny. “How are you, Sweetie?” she asked the girl.

  “Sweetie …,” Fanny laughed, milk dribbling from her mouth. “Sweetie sweetie sweetie—”

  “That’s enough now.” Her mother wiped Fanny’s chin.

  “Sweetie swee—”

  “Sshhh …,” Pearl whispered softly. “Sshhh … my pretty girl.”

  “You’re her favorite,” Mrs. Braddock said.

  “I need to be someone’s favorite today.” Pearl glanced toward Nate who was standing with his back to her. Ever since she’d married him, she’d been after him to stop saving those worn bits of soap that he kept in a jar by the bathroom sink.

  As soon as the Wilsons’ adoption party was over, Nate followed her to the elevator and started back at her again. “You had no right, no right at all to throw something of mine out.”

  “That old soap looked like bones, and it smelled like—”

  “If it bothers your nose that much, you should keep your nose out of it.”

  “Can we wait till we get inside our apartment?”

  He rode with her in silence, unlocked their door.

  “Look around you.” She motioned to their furniture. “Everything we have is of good quality … but those pieces of soap were disgusting.”

  “They were mine.”

  “I’ll go and buy you a hundred pieces of new soap.”

  “I don’t want new soap. I want my old soap back.”

  “Well,
it’s too late. And I can’t believe that with all your generosity and your money you—”

  “That’s why I have money.”

  “Because of that dirty old soap?”

  “Because I save little things.”

  “Please.” She took off one shoe, gave three quick raps to the pipes that led up to the Blaus’ apartment, and half an hour later met Helene at the locked door that blocked off the stairs to the roof.

  “I got Birdie to stay with the children for a while,” she said.

  Both in warm jackets and hats, they unfolded their canvas chairs and settled in them as they had many other evenings. Only a thin border of sun was left on the upper parts of the mountains, while the lower slopes already looked dark.

  “That man. He spends tons on entertaining but thinks I’m wasteful for throwing out his soap.”

  Helene opened a thermos of hot, sweet tea and poured it into two cups. “Here.” She passed one to Pearl.

  “Thanks. You know what he called me? Irresponsible. You want to know what I call irresponsible? Having a son and not telling anyone.”

  “Nate with a son?”

  “I’ve only known a few weeks, and he asked me not to mention it to anyone, but hell… keeping secrets takes effort, and I’m in no mood to make one single effort for that man. The kid’s name is Ira.”

  “How old—”

  “Well, he isn’t really a kid anymore. He’s in high school already, lives with his mother in Boston. When I asked Nate why he hadn’t told me about his son before, he said he just doesn’t think about him very often. It makes me furious that he would be so indifferent toward his son. Doesn’t visit him more than once or twice a year.” She looked up at the clouds, gray and streaked, thinning out where they touched the tips of the mountains in wispy smears.

  As dusk enveloped them, they talked about Nate and his son. About how different Helene’s brother was with his child.

  “Yes, but he’s doing too much,” Helene said, “feeding and cleaning Trudi as well as his wife … running the pay-library. Always the one to be giving.”