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

  After weeks of bartering and buying on the black market, Pearl managed to pull together the kind of abundant celebration she used to give before the war.

  When Robert arrived late after examining the Morrells’ lame horse in the north end of town, Miss Garland was the first to greet him by the Blooms’ door. “It’s lovely to see you, Robert dear.” Her delicate fingers grasped the edge of his hand.

  “You too, Miss Garland,” he replied, “you too,” feeling flustered and obligated to say something else that would take the hunger from her eyes. Ever since high school when he’d stopped visiting her, she’d looked at him as though she carried a balance sheet of things she had done for him and things he had failed to do for her. He wished he hadn’t agreed to be here, that he had lingered with the horse. He felt dirty. Tired. And above all heavy. On the way home he’d stopped at the bakery, and he could still taste the uglies, those wonderful clumps of multicolored dough, their glaze milky and half-transparent with a hint of vanilla.

  Miss Garland was nodding at him while thin coils of hair bounced around her face. “You should see all the food she’s serving. Roasts and fish and ham. Four kinds of cake. And the wines …”

  “I’ll take a look.” Awkwardly, he freed himself from her and walked into the music room that was filled with people. The velour hangings that had draped these walls when he was a boy had been replaced several times over the years with different materials, the latest of them a green satin, and against that deep green stood his brother, alone, eyes amused while he observed everyone, face flushed as if he’d been out in the wind.

  Robert pulled him into a big, clumsy hug. “When did you get back?”

  “Just a few hours ago.”

  “How long can you stay?”

  “I don’t know yet. Couple of days … maybe. I’m on my way to Officer Training School”

  “I’m so glad you’re here. Did you get all settled upstairs?”

  “Downstairs, actually. Danny’s putting me up.”

  Robert blushed. “Your old room’s still ready and— Why am I doing this? It’s just that I want to get you away from everyone else, find out what’s been happening to you. But I sound like my mother, trying to convince you to stay with us.”

  “At least you don’t try to pretend that some day I’ll bring home a nice girl and start making grandchildren.”

  “God, no.”

  “Which leaves the burden of procreation to you since Greta’s never going to get her priest away from the church. Carrying on the family name and all that.”

  Another blush. “Don’t even start on that. There’s no one …”

  “You got any time for me tomorrow?”

  “Breakfast?”

  “Sure. How early do I have to get up?”

  “Seven?”

  “Good.” Tobias stroked his chin, still tender from the stubble on Danny’s face. Already he was thinking about getting away from the party and to Danny’s apartment. When he’d come back to the States, he’d taken the first train to Winnipesaukee and had found Danny in the garage as though he’d been there all along, waiting. They hadn’t touched until they were inside Danny’s bedroom, where the windows were set so high into the foundation wall that the light that came through them only skimmed the air above their bodies. When Danny got a cramp in his left leg, Tobias leaned forward and took hold of Danny’s big toe. With his other hand, he massaged Danny’s calf for him until the cramp subsided.

  “Usually I just hop around until it stops by itself,” Danny said, hands linked behind his head as he watched Tobias’ dark, intense face.

  “This is a better way. Try it. Sit up and grab your big toe—just do it, try it, come on—and pull it toward you … like this, right. And then hold on till the cramp goes away.”

  “Where’d you learn that?”

  “My stepmother. I guess her father used to get cramps like that.”

  “One of those old German customs?”

  Abruptly, Tobias let go of Danny’s leg. He looked tired as though all energy had drained from him, leaving him empty.

  “I didn’t mean anything by German. I meant custom. One of those old customs. I could have said French. Or Italian.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’ll get us some food.”

  “Okay.” Tobias propped a pillow behind his back and sat against the solid white headboard. Every piece of furniture in the room was painted white, making the room look larger and brighter than when Danny’s aunt and uncle used to live here. Their religious clutter had been replaced by pictures of greyhounds in white frames, a long mirror without a frame, and several plain white lamps to make up for the lack of daylight.

  From the kitchen, Danny carried a large tray with sliced apples and cheese and bread. He opened two beers. “Grab a beer,” he joked. “Pull it toward you and hold on till it’s empty.”

  Tobias had to laugh. “Very good. Just pretend you’re reaching for a beer the next time you have a cramp.”

  “Unless you’re here. Then you can massage it.”

  “You can always show one of your other … friends how to do it.”

  “Open your mouth.” Danny fed him a slice of cheese. “There’s more.” A slice of apple. A piece of bread.

  “I can’t eat that quickly.”

  “Not if you keep talking.”

  “Don’t you see others? Didn’t you and Stewart Robichaud—”

  “What do you want me to do? Wait around till you show up?”

  “I mean—”

  “Hey.” Danny raised one hand to stop him.

  But Tobias took hold of what courage he could find and said it. Said: “What I mean is that I don’t feel like looking for anyone else.” And saw Danny flinch. Though he closed his eyes, Tobias could still hear him.

  “Don’t push at me to do the same, Mr. Tobias Blau.”

  “Look, the birthday boy wants us to come over,” Robert said, and they headed toward Nate Bloom, who sat propped in his wheelchair, dressed in a tuxedo, a mohair shawl across his emaciated legs.

  “Congratulations.” Robert bent to shake Nate’s hand.

  Nate asked the usual: “Still healing cows?”

  And Robert replied with his usual: “Cows and alligators.”

  “Promise to keep both away from me.” Nate winked and introduced Robert to his son, Ira, a tall man with beautiful, even teeth, who worked as a lawyer in Boston and had brought his fiancée, a woman as tall as he. Her hair was so black, it looked night-blue.

  “Yvonne is a window decorator,” Pearl said. “For Powell’s store in Boston.”

  Robert nodded and quickly looked down from the woman’s eyes, only to notice her silver sandals that showed off her delicate ankles.

  Nate and his son were talking with Stanley Poggs, Nate’s business manager, about the renovation of a first-floor apartment, where it would be easier to maneuver his wheelchair. But its completion kept getting delayed because of war shortages. Two years ago, when Nate had lost the use of his legs in a car accident, Stanley Poggs had moved into the Blooms’ guest room to care for business matters and accompany Pearl to concerts and other social events. People in the building gossiped because Stanley was handsome and only in his mid-forties, younger than Pearl, who didn’t seem bothered by the rumors that her husband was grooming Stanley as his replacement.

  “In business and in bed,” people would whisper.

  “Play the piano, Robert. Please,” Pearl urged.

  When he sat down at her white piano, he heard her say, “He’s such a brilliant musician,” and he wished he’d never agreed to this.

  As he struck the first notes of Mozart’s piano concerto No. 23, the woman with the night-blue hair took the chair closest to him and sat erect. She had always been enchanted by music because it unfolded something within her that was usually closed to everyone—including herself. Music released her from the constant loneliness that waited beneath her polite smile, the kind of loneliness that tightens your skin until you can no
longer sleep. She knew how to dodge that loneliness for hours, days even, by surrounding herself with people who admired her beauty; but then there were those other times when she felt careless and had to force herself to do things slowly, properly, in order to offset that wish to hurl out, mess up, destroy.

  Some days tearing a single piece of paper would do. Would return her to who she really was. Tearing it quickly would infuse her with lightness; tearing it slowly would make the paper scream. The slower you tore it, the more resistance you felt. It depended on what you needed to bring yourself back. Sometimes she had to tear several pages, some fast, some screamingly slow. But there were days she needed more, needed to bring that devastation closer to her skin. Like holding her hand over the flame of a candle, rapturous with that pain of being there in that instant, only, and breathing in the intensity that she looked for in others but found too seldom, the intensity that she now felt in this man as he leaned across the piano.

  The bulk of Robert’s torso strained the material of his tuxedo, and he rolled his head as if in a trance. He doesn’t look like the kind of man who would wear a tuxedo, the woman thought. Lowslung pants perhaps and a wrinkled shirt—but not a tuxedo. It only emphasized his massive frame as he hunched over the keyboard, almost crawled across it, crawled into it—a spider, a troll, an angel—as close as any human and piano could possibly get, while his right foot pumped furiously, and his immense bottom lifted in staccato intervals as though he were raising himself up by his fingertips. She gazed at his face, which was all wrong for his body—still the face of a boy—and past him at her own reflection in the mirrored front of the cabinet that displayed Pearl’s collection of crystal and, at the same time, Robert’s reflection—superimposed on the glass, on her, as if he were meant to envelop her.

  She didn’t notice Helene who was watching her from across the room, her chest constricted by apprehension at the eager way this woman leaned toward Robert, whose awkwardness had been lifted from him as if in one remarkable act of grace. The woman’s features were pronounced—just on the pretty side of being too bony with that narrow nose and flat cheeks—Helene thought, and she wanted her to see Robert the way he was, a shy man, less comfortable with people than with the animals he treated, not this vibrant stranger at the piano who might inspire her to claim him and discard him once he revealed himself to her. A woman like that would not appreciate Robert’s ease with animals. He would not fit into her world.

  Helene knew only too well what it felt like not to fit in: although she’d spent nearly half her life in her new country—more familiar to her now than Germany—she didn’t belong, just as she didn’t belong any longer into the country where she had grown up, the country that America had been at war with. Arching her neck, she moved two fingers between her skin and the emerald necklace that she rarely wore. Because it was tight. Because the clasp was complicated. Because of the rage she had felt that first time Stefan had laid it around her neck.

  But tonight he had coaxed her into wearing it to Nate’s party. “To honor him for his birthday,” he’d said.

  “I’ll wear it for our sons,” she’d said. “For returning to us. Without lasting injuries.”

  It pleased her, that proud tilt to Stefan’s chin as he listened to their son, who was mesmerizing everyone with his music. What didn’t please her was the attention of the woman from Boston, and she was glad when Nate’s son stepped next to the woman and laid his hands on her bare shoulder.

  “Yvonne—” he started.

  But she raised one finger to silence him.

  Nate’s son studied Robert who attacked the keyboard like a lumberjack even if he wrested flawless tones from it, whose left foot veered off like the gaze of a cross-eyed child from time to time until he retrieved it.

  Easing her shoulder from beneath her fiancé’s light grasp, Yvonne kept herself turned toward the pianist, who made her forget the lawyer, the silk gown she planned to design for herself, even the way she looked now, this moment, an awareness that had been with her ever since she was a small girl and others had stared at her, an awareness that provided her with a constant summary of her impact on those around her. And yet, fearing it too, being on display. But he pulled her back, the pianist, gave her shelter in his music. And as he merged with the keyboard in a mating ceremony that, ultimately, would be impossible, she felt dizzied by a warmth that spread low in her belly. Drawn to this grace that flourished from his ugliness, she smiled at the image of him bending over her with that same intensity.

  And so she pursued him.

  Over the next two months, she battled his shyness and her disgust at watching him eat enormous portions of food and hearing him hum to himself as he chewed. She felt a certain tenderness at his confusion why a woman as beautiful as she would be drawn to him. Three weeks after meeting him, she announced that she loved him, and she was moved by his gratitude but even more so by her own kindness because it proved to her that she was not frivolous—something that Ira Bloom and other men had accused her of. A frivolous woman would never be able to love a man whose body revolted her. No, her love proved to her that she was capable of enormous depth and compassion.

  But Robert could not believe it fully—this proclamation of her love—and suspected that what she loved was only the image of him at the piano. And maybe that was enough, he reasoned with himself. Maybe it was even better. Because that was the part of himself he, too, liked best.

  “You are extraordinarily gifted,” she told him when he visited her in Boston. “You could be a concert pianist if you chose.”

  “I’m a veterinarian,” he reminded her.

  Being with Robert made her want to match the passion he had for his music. He made her feel chosen and interesting in the same way she used to feel about herself when she was twelve and still believed she could know everything in the world, believed it enough to try and stay up all night reading novels and books about philosophers, feeling chosen whenever she managed to keep from sleeping.

  He thought of her all the time: she was like quicksilver where his mother was serious and deliberate; she was playful and charming; she was the most exquisite woman he had ever met, the kind of woman he would have never dared approach. And yet she wanted him. Had ended her long engagement to Nate’s son to be with him.

  “Somehow I never really believed I would marry Ira,” she’d told him. “It was the kind of engagement that goes on forever because … I guess there’s no next step. And so we stayed engaged. Until I met you.”

  And yet it mystified Robert that she would choose him over the tall lawyer. For her he would change, he decided. Become that man at the piano even when he was away from his music. In bed he wanted her to look at him with that desire. But she was disappointed by the consideration he brought to their lovemaking—she yearned for the abandon with which he hurled himself at his music.

  Since she liked dancing, he didn’t object when she tried to teach him some basic steps, and she made sure to praise him if he remembered a sequence. “With all you know about music,” she told him one Sunday evening when they practiced alone in her apartment, “you’ll be a wonderful dancer before you know it.”

  She got him to laugh at mistakes, and they’d try again until he had the steps right. It amazed him how confident she made him feel about his dancing. Sometimes her hands would get cold and turn from pale to blue to purple, outlining her knuckles and the bones of her wrist. Embarrassed, she’d hide them in her pockets or tuck them into her crossed arms. They stirred him, those hands, stirred him in a profound way and made him protective of her one vulnerability.

  Regardless how lightly he danced with her in her living room, he felt clumsy the Saturday they stepped on the dance floor in the Weirs Beach pavilion, which was famous because some of the great bands had played here. But not that night. And he was glad for that since he felt heavy and slow.

  In the morning, though, he felt faster than she, lighter, when he took her swimming in Lake Winnipesaukee after picking her up
from Greta’s apartment where she had stayed the night.

  “Wait for me,” she shouted after him, laughing and splashing as soon as she reached him.

  When they walked into the Wasserburg afterwards, sun followed them through the stained-glass moons above the French doors and turned the lobby golden-red. Yvonne stopped. Touched the intricate inlay on the desk. “How lucky you are to be living here.”

  “Would you?”

  “Would I what?”

  “Live here. You could. I mean—you could marry me and then live here. With me.”

  She laughed. “Of course it would be with you.”

  “I shouldn’t have asked. I’m sorry. You’ve only known me five weeks and—”

  “Yes.”

  He stared at her. “Yes that I shouldn’t have asked? Or yes that you will… I mean, marry me?”

  “Which one would you prefer?”

  “In my bravest moment?”

  “Only in your bravest moment.”

  “That you said yes to marrying me.”

  “Does a man have to be brave to marry me?”

  “Brave only in believing you could say yes.”

  “Yes.”

  “My dear,” he said and instantly felt the ancient fear he’d known as a boy—babies can kill mothers… babies all powerful, all frail—when he’d stood by the grave of the dead mothers. “But you have to promise—”

  “Promise what?”

  “No children. That you won’t have children.”

  “I don’t want stretch marks.”

  “Promise then.”

  “That’s easy enough.” She took his face between her cold hands. “Oh, Robert. Isn’t this the moment when you’re supposed to kiss me?”