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

  “I wasn’t angry.”

  “Then why did you break the glass?” Though he studied her face as if ready to know everything about her, she couldn’t give words to the yearning that had made her step through the glass.

  “My brave darling.” The face of her mother swam next to the doctor’s. “But how about scars, Dr. Miles? Will she have scars on her face?”

  A few of the slivers would leave tiny scars on Emma’s forehead as if proof of her temper, there for anyone to see and be warned: this is what this girl is capable of. However, in the weeks following her injury, she had no toughness left in her as she basked in her mother’s concern. She’d feel content whenever her mother allowed her to try on her rings or watch her apply makeup, when her mother asked what she thought of a certain color dress, or dabbed medicated lotion on Emma’s face and stroked it gently into her skin.

  As she discovered her mother piece by piece, even a flaw, like the varicose veins on her mother’s left leg, looked like an adornment, a perfect winter tree growing upward from her delicate ankle. Below her knee, one large vein branched into thin lines. It was a pattern you could memorize and trace on a blanket, say, or a tabletop when you were alone.

  One morning, when Emma felt irritable because her face itched badly from the many small scabs, her mother took her into the kitchen. “Whenever your skin gets cut,” she said, “parts of yourself are left frayed.” And as Emma imagined countless red ends just beneath her skin, her mother turned on the faucet and saturated a clean dish towel with cold water. “Then it’s up to you to bring those parts back together again. Here.” She folded the towel over once and held it against Emma’s face until the itching receded as though all her ragged ends were connecting beneath her skin—sleek and smooth and new.

  She kept that towel against her face, followed her mother into the big bedroom where children were only allowed when invited, and stood behind her mother as she sat in front of her ornate mirror and her crystal vase with roses. The mirror made it look as if there were two vases. Every Friday her mother had eighteen white roses delivered from the flower shop, and she arranged them in the matching vases Pearl Bloom had given her as a wedding gift, one for the mantle above the fireplace in the living room, the other for her bedroom. “You always place an uneven number of flowers into a vase,” she taught Emma. Beyond the reflection of the roses and of her mother swum Emma’s own reflection, and beyond that shimmered the open closet with all its dresses and suits and gowns. The clothes of Emma’s father used to hang in the far left side of the closet, but gradually they’d been squeezed out of the bedroom entirely and into the guest room. Because it was important to hang up clothes properly. That was something else her mother taught her. “Always with a space between them to keep them from wrinkling.”

  As her mother’s hands drew a brush through her hair, Emma tried not to look at the blue hands, hands so blue and cold that they were almost purple, hands that were clammy and not beautiful like the rest of her mother. Carefully, she took the mother-of-pearl brush from those cold fingers and lifted the dark hair from her mother’s neck while drawing the bristles through its many fine strands. They gave off the scent of limes, and as Emma leaned closer to breathe in that scent, she noticed her mother’s eyes in the mirror, startled, and then distant, as if she’d expected to see someone else.

  The more Emma clutched at her mother, the more Yvonne drew away from this fleeting and mismatched courtship. She’d find excuses to not have Emma follow her around, sent her off to play with her brother, to visit her grandmother. Some evenings Robert took the children to the Royal. They liked King Kong, a film he’d seen more than twenty years ago when he was in college. Both were mesmerized by Fay Wray who didn’t have all that many lines but got to do lots of screams. She could scream better than anyone the children knew, and they would practice Fay Wray screams, dropping to the floor in a swoon, a faint, getting it right—that languid folding together where you’d bend at your knees and waist at the same moment so that you wouldn’t just flop down flat but glide into a decorative heap, or pose rather, the back of one hand, ideally, ending up against your forehead as your last scream faded into a sigh.

  Fay Wray. They were Fay Wray in the elevator. In the lobby. On the dock. Some days, on the roof, Emma would test the embrace of the house by playing Fay Wray, balancing on the low walls along its edge, daring the house to hold her if she were to slip and fall. Fearless when it came to the house, she ultimately believed it would always be there for her. Not like Opa. A house cannot be buried like that.

  When Robert Blau was still in his twenties and thirties, the people of Winnipesaukee used to tell him he looked younger than he was, and he had come to think of himself as youthful until—just around his fortieth birthday—his age suddenly overcame him, softening his body with additional layers of flesh, tugging his hairline toward the crest of his skull. That same summer his wife began to leave for weekends, even entire weeks, without offering reasons; and because Robert did not dare ask the first time she disappeared, it made it impossible to ask from then on. She would simply be gone when he’d come home from work, and the children would be upstairs with his mother.

  Occasionally there’d be a forewarning. “I need to be away for a while,” she might say, and if he’d offer to take a trip with her—“Just tell me where you want to go”—she’d say there was no rush to decide. But then she’d be gone again while he’d pretend to his mother and children that she was taking a rest in some seaside hotel along the Maine coast where her family used to vacation when she was a child; and as his words evoked her strolling along a beach or wading through one of the many tide pools, dress hiked up ever so slightly to keep the hem above the surface, he’d smell the briny air and dislodge other pictures that pressed at him, pictures called forth by her confessions: Yvonne dancing with a man slimmer than he, taller too, her face against his shoulder; Yvonne in a train compartment with a man who still has all his hair, her white legs wrapped around him while the train rocks her even further away.

  “Let her go,” Helene would have liked to tell him. “I’ll look after the children.” She didn’t believe his stories that became more convoluted, involving some ailing aunt of Yvonne’s in Maine, who needed to be taken for medical tests, needed help shopping for a refrigerator, needed Yvonne to pack her summer clothes away for the season. From what Pearl told Helene, tenants who asked Robert about Yvonne didn’t believe those reasons either.

  Had Robert been able to speak to his mother—but how can I, about things like that?—she might have told him that her brother Leo used to be uneasy with closeness too and, therefore, needed to change admirers frequently; that people like Yvonne and Leo were skilled at leaving others behind, settling them with longing, even though Leo had never left the way Yvonne had—at least not with his body.

  And Stefan?

  Don’t think about him like that. His leaving was different. Never for the adoration of others. For him it was always the house. But how about the other wives? No. Not for many years. Odd, how she felt more certain of Stefan in death than she had in life. Although that certainty did not lessen her pain when her body sought out his empty half of the bed, it gave her a greater understanding of Stefan. Because his part of their history had already ended, she could conjure it in its entirety or move back and forth between any moments she chose to illuminate or ponder.

  While her son only had uncertainty with his wife. Whenever Yvonne was away, Helene could smell her father’s sweat on Robert, the sweat of failure. It was obvious that he missed Caleb and Emma but couldn’t bear to have them see him in his dreary sadness. He would come to Helene’s apartment to visit his children, eat dinner with them, and stay till he could tuck them in with a good-night story—Caleb in the room that used to be Robert’s when he was a boy, Emma in Greta’s old room. Since the children had always moved freely between both apartments, they felt at home among their grandmother’s carved cabinets and woven tablecloths.

  Each time Y
vonne left, Robert was more certain that she would not come back; and each time she proved him wrong: after a few days or weeks she’d return rested as if indeed she had spent solitary hours by the sea, doing nothing except watch the waves smooth themselves into the sand. She would unpack gifts—toys and clothes and books—and for days or weeks, usually in direct proportion to how long she’d been away, she would be indulgent and playful with the children, charming to Helene, seductive toward Robert. She bought roller skates for Caleb. A pink bicycle with training wheels for Emma.

  Whatever questions Robert asked, Yvonne would answer with such frankness that, soon, he stopped mentioning that she’d been away at all. Certain it was his weight that caused her to seek other men, he found it easier to pretend to himself—and her—that she’d visited this aunt he’d never met.

  At least I’m honest with him, Yvonne told herself. In giving him the truth, she was urging him to fight for her; but what she got instead was his understanding. He infuriated her when he became so accommodating. If he cared about me, he’d keep me from other men.

  Nights when she was gone again, Robert fell into light spans of troubled sleep. Occasionally he’d be fully awake by four in the morning, surrounded by the ghosts of men she had told him about, and he’d flee from his bed to seek solace with his beloved Russians: Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev. Hands consuming the ivory keys, he’d fuse in his union with his piano as he could not with his wife, rendering his heartache with sounds that would have moved her, had she been near enough to hear him.

  In the apartment one floor above, Caleb would lie with his eyes far open, soul filled with the passion of his father’s music as it swelled beyond the Wasserburg, the town, the continent, music that would thread its way into Caleb’s dreams and, years later, emerge in his films. What these films would evoke—much more than his mother’s absence—would be the quiver of his father’s music deep beneath Caleb’s skin. People would say Caleb Blau understood the language of longing, that it was there in all his films. He would invoke the Wasserburg and his family—the living and the dead as far back as his grandfather’s first bride—for audiences that had never been to New Hampshire, and they would come to know it as if they’d grown up there, because what they saw in his films would mesh with their own memories, rendering indiscernible what was theirs and what had come from Caleb Blau, and he would feel honored when people who had been raised in capes, say, or ranches would tell him, “As a child I lived in a house much like yours.”

  Robert stood at the kitchen counter in his wet raincoat. Eating. Wurst. Two pieces of Streuselkuchen. Schnitzel. Chocolate with hazelnuts. Cold Reibekuchen, no longer crisp. All week he’d begun each day fasting and had allowed himself only two thin slices of rye bread at work. But once he came home to this empty apartment, he couldn’t stop feeding himself. Tonight his belly felt sore, stretched—enough already enough—and outside it was raining, hard fast drops of April rain, and though he knew he didn’t want to eat the marinated herring his mother had sent home with him the night before—enough already—his movements were getting faster, that sequence of sending the food on its terrible journey from his hands to his mouth, faster—enough—assuaging the hunger he could not slake with music, the hunger that was coming at him like a runaway train, and even though he felt horrified at the thought of his body expanding even further, he could not keep from swallowing. Swallowing.

  Until.

  Until the familiar shame and ache supplanted that hunger. Supplanted all else. He would have gladly killed Fatboy who closed around him. Countless times he had imagined killing Fatboy, turning around swiftly, knife in his hand, and slicing Fatboy open—upward from his prick through the enormous belly, between the nipples of the fleshy girl-breasts, right up through his wide jaw and forehead. Fatboy never bleeds but falls back in two identical halves like a pear that’s been split, giving space for Robert’s true body to rise from its trap. Lithe. Slender.

  On his thumb a smudge of chocolate. As he licked it off, he remembered his mother was expecting him for dinner. No. Eat again? Impossible. He rushed to clean the evidence of his desperate feast. Shook off his raincoat on the way to the bathroom. Turned on the shower. And knelt on the mat in front of the toilet. By the time he stepped into the tub, the water was getting lukewarm. This past year he’d begun taking showers, though he still preferred the full heat of a bath to the abrupt needles of water, but it had become too cumbersome to dislodge himself from the tub once he sat down.

  Hair still wet, he took the elevator one floor up and—as every evening since Yvonne had left—sat at his mother’s lace-covered table with her and his children. He took small helpings, though she reminded him that she’d made the Rouladen especially for him.

  Patting the stomach he detested, he made himself smile at her. “Not with my reserves, Mutti.” When he saw the concern in her face, he thought how the two of them had been left to take care of his children, and he felt an immense gratitude.

  After dinner, he came upon Caleb in the living room, gazing through a rain-streaked window at the dark sky. There was something so private about him that Robert slowed his breath, not daring to speak as Caleb raised one hand and traced the outline of his profile with his forefinger as though reminding himself who he was. From his forehead, he followed the curve of his short nose, across his parted lips, down his chin. The Montag chin. When he touched his collarbone, he stopped as though suddenly aware that he was not alone, and it came to Robert that Caleb reminded him of himself. In a way it amused and hurt him to see a resemblance between the graceful body of his eleven-year-old son and his own body that had grown too large for use and comfort.

  He felt tender toward Caleb when he said good night to him.

  “A story,” Caleb reminded him.

  “Once upon a time—” Robert stopped, ashamed he hadn’t come here right after work, ashamed he wasn’t there more for Caleb and Emma. He wanted to be loving. Attentive. But the eating took him away from his children. The eating and his worries about what he could become if he obeyed his appetite.

  “Once upon a time what?”

  “… there lived a woman.”

  “Where?”

  “Portugal.”

  “Why Portugal?”

  “Well, I guess the story could have happened in any country.” Caleb waited as his father shifted his weight on the chair that was too narrow for him. His belly hung over the belt of his gray pants, and his thighs overlapped the seat.

  “Do you want me to change it to China or Germany?”

  “Portugal is good.”

  “This woman, she loved with—with such an abandon that it made her float in the air. It was a wonderful feeling—light and free and joyful. …” His father squinted upward as if, indeed, he could see the woman high above the ground.

  All at once Caleb saw himself sitting in a darkened movie theater, watching the screen where his father stands on a hard-packed circle of earth among endless meadows, or rather fields of wheat, far below this woman who floats above him—still light and still free and still joyful… and already he saw himself telling Emma about what he saw on the screen.

  His father’s voice dropped as if he were telling the story to himself. “But as she drifted higher, she saw how far it would be to fall. That very moment she stopped rising. Instead she tightened her wings and fought the air current, holding on to her position way up there in the air till she forgot what it felt like … that airy sensation of floating. She felt… she felt heavy. Afraid that any moment she could fall.”

  “And did she?” Caleb raised himself on his elbows. “Did she fall?”

  His father sighed. His breath smelled of toothpaste, and his fingers—so confident at the piano—fidgeted with a torn buttonhole on his shirt. Caleb could see how hard it was for him to tell that story. Now if his father were to take those words and tell them through the piano, they would rise on their own and carry his father along. Because at the piano his father was more himself than any other
times. It made Caleb wonder if all people had one talent that made them totally themselves. And if so, what would be his? Whenever he saw his father hunch his shoulders around the piano as if taking it into himself, Caleb felt certain his father was almighty. Noble.

  “It became painful for the woman to love,” his father said slowly. “Painful and uncomfortable. She felt angry at… at her husband for not flying with her. For not holding her up there. For not sharing her fear.”

  “Where was her husband?”

  “Away.”

  It was then that Caleb knew his father was talking about the kind of love he had for his mother, and that he was really speaking of himself even though the story was about a woman, and that—to tell this story at all—his father had to set it in a place far away. And it came to Caleb how in telling a story through someone else, you could get at it closer. And by letting that changed story pass through you, you arrived at a greater truth.

  “When she was with her husband,” his father continued, “she was afraid to be happy because she didn’t know how long he would stay….”

  Caleb nodded. He’d seen his parents like that.

  “When her husband was away, her days were tinged with sadness and longing. She’d imagine him thinking about her and—”

  “But that wasn’t enough,” Caleb said.

  His father hesitated. “It never is,” he finally said.

  When Robert woke up the next morning, he first felt aware of Yvonne’s absence and then, immediately, of the amounts of food he’d eaten the night before. Disgusted with himself, he vowed not to eat any breakfast. He’d lose the new pounds before his wife returned—those and all the other pounds he’d put on since their wedding. The silvery stretch marks on his stomach and thighs would vanish. He’d take Yvonne dancing. She used to enjoy dancing, but she hadn’t mentioned it in years because he’d always found excuses. But all that would change. He leads her to the dance floor, trim in the gray suit he hasn’t been able to wear since Emma’s first communion. “You look good,” Yvonne says. “Real good.”