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

  Because of his mother’s hand keeping him here. Because of Oliver. Because of an older girl who had the same chin and eyebrows as Oliver. The same chin and eyebrows as his father who stood there with them and with a woman whose hair was piled up on top of her head.

  “Don’t,” his mother said when Stefan raised his hand to wave.

  But his father didn’t even see him.

  Stefan’s belly was sour. He drank another cup of red punch to make it feel better. Except it didn’t. Only made his belly worse. Because there was something about the way his father and Oliver stood with that woman and the girl. Like a—

  Like a family.

  That’s what they looked like. A family. Like he and his father and his mother were on Wednesdays. But only on Wednesdays. And only inside the apartment.

  “Let’s go home.” His mother’s face was blotched.

  But Stefan wanted to stand with his father and that woman. Wanted to be Oliver. His belly was burning, and he would remember that sensation of burning even years later whenever he’d think of the day he’d first understood about his father’s two families, understood clearly what deep within he had felt since before words had become attainable: that he existed at the edge of his father’s life.

  Two days before Christmas, Caleb flew into Boston and rented a car, surprising his mother and sister with his visit. He hadn’t been back in two years, and he was stunned at how drawn Emma looked, how wary his mother seemed around Emma. His nephew was a rather quiet boy, observant, but shy.

  Caleb tried to keep it light between them as they set up the manger in Emma’s apartment. “Most of these decorations are still from Germany,” he told Stefan. “Your great-grandmother brought them with her.”

  The boy nodded, his eyes solemn. “Oma Helene. I know.”

  “Check out this one.” Caleb handed him the wax Madonna with the melted face. “Doesn’t she look like she’s about to rob a bank?”

  Stefan poked one finger at the Madonna’s flattened features.

  “Like she’s wearing a stocking over her face. Like … like a Madonna-goon.”

  “A goonie-Madonna.”

  “What a great name for her.”

  “Let’s just call her goonie from now on.”

  Once the boy got silly, it was easy for Caleb to keep him going, to get his help in mixing up the manger scene, letting the Madonna boogie with a shepherd instead of watching over little Jesus, positioning the dog so it was sniffing the camel’s ass.

  “You two are terrible.” Yvonne smiled and picked up the king with the red coat.

  “We work at it, right Stefan?”

  “Right.” Stefan laid a sheep into an angel’s outstretched arms.

  “There.” Yvonne placed the red king so close to the tallest shepherds that it looked as though the two were kissing. “How’s that?”

  Stefan nodded. “Like Uncle Danny and Great-uncle Tobias.”

  Yvonne coughed and moved the figures apart.

  Caleb winked at Emma. “I want to call them, see if I can drive to Hartford the day before my flight leaves.”

  “They’ll be glad to see you. Maybe you can also meet with Aunt Greta and Uncle Noah, at least for an hour or so at the airport.” Her eyes were more intense than usual and hard to look at for long. “I want you to promise me something,” she said.

  “Tell me?”

  “That you’ll teach Stefan how to shave once he is ready.”

  Caleb swallowed against the tears that tried to make it up. “I’ll hop on a plane the minute he develops his first fuzz.”

  “You will?”

  It occurred to him that it was more than a request, that it might actually be his sister’s way of letting him know she was done with her doctor friend. He certainly hoped so. She didn’t look healthy. Pared down, somehow. Functional clothes. Functional hair pulled back in a ponytail. Chapped lips. “Absolutely,” he said.

  “Thank you, Caleb.” As she felt him watching her, she saw herself the way he might—a woman in a film, no softness left, just angles—and it made her proud and yet uneasy that he might transform her into something that then became his on the screen. At times she hated how he tried to see into her. Because it was not for her sake, but for his own, and for what he could then do with it. A year ago he’d finally sent her one of his films, and she’d borrowed Pearl Bloom’s VCR, feeling flattered and then gradually invaded—it wasn’t like that, wasn’t like that at all—as she’d watched the film alone. It was about an opera singer who was born with glass splinters in her hands and with the ability to fly, but only above her own house, which was a church with three steeples—not set in the harsh winters of New Hampshire but in a tropical climate, surreal and lush. To Emma it was obvious that the film held parts of her and of the Wasserburg, and that Caleb had woven legends of the lake and legends of the stars into their family’s story. But it was so different from the way she relived her family’s past, feeling responsible to remember and preserve it the way it had been. The real past. And though Caleb’s film was gorgeous to look at, it unsettled her that he would use what he could, interpret it as he chose to, and then rework it into something others would take for true.

  “Uncle Caleb? How old do I have to be before I can shave?” Stefan was plucking at his chin.

  “Couple of years … Could be soon … Your great-grandfather used to say Blau men are a hairy bunch. Let me look at you.” Caleb took his nephew’s face between his palms, and as he studied it closely for traces of stubble, he wished he’d see him more often than once every few years. At thirty-nine, he doubted he’d ever have children of his own. After those brief marriages in his twenties, he’d promised himself that he wouldn’t even think about marriage until he’d been in a relationship for two years. But the longest any had lasted since was a year and ten months.

  “Tell you what,” he said to Stefan. “I’ll teach you. Shaving and whatever else you need me to teach you.”

  After Yvonne returned to her own apartment and Stefan was asleep, Caleb made a pot of rosehip tea in Emma’s kitchen, and they sat in her living room, resting their heads against the jungle embroidery of the chairs.

  “You’re good with Stefan,” she said. “I like seeing him like that.”

  “He’s a sweet boy. A lot like Dad, don’t you think?”

  “You think so?”

  “That gentleness …”

  “I wish I had more time for him. But with keeping the house up by myself— Let’s not talk about the house, Caleb. Not tonight.”

  “All right. You want to talk about your doctor friend?”

  “I wish Stefan could have the kind of Christmas you and I grew up with … those wonderful dinners in the lobby and—”

  “You used to get stomachaches.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Stomachaches so bad you’d cry.”

  “It wasn’t like that.”

  Caleb didn’t say anything.

  “It wasn’t,” she said resolutely. “Oh, and about your question … about Justin … I finally did ask him some of the things you’ve been telling me to ask for years.”

  “Good.”

  “Not so good. We had a fight.”

  “Good.”

  “Our first. And I’m not sure he’ll ever want to come back.”

  “You can’t mean your first fight ever?”

  “We haven’t seen each other enough to disagree.”

  “In over a decade?”

  She curved her fingers around the carved backs of the lions, rubbed her thumbs across the intricate manes. “If you were to add up those hours we’ve actually been together, we don’t have more than half a year, I bet. If that much …”

  As Caleb listened to her tell him about seeing Justin with his wife at the Christmas play, and about their fight a few days afterwards, he was aware of the I-can-use-this voice that was so constant in his life. Pointing out. Collecting. Usually it meant just looking. Looking closely. And then imagining it again. And again. Tran
slating it onto the screen. It could bring him closer to an experience. Give him greater understanding. Or let him distance himself. As he had now and then with Emma. Sometimes, though, a replay wasn’t needed because the transformation would happen within the act of witnessing, already changing what he saw while—beneath all that—he’d remain aware of the process.

  Emma was talking, and as Caleb held his cup between both hands, warming them, he could see her with her doctor friend, hear the words between them. It’s another Wednesday, of course, and they’ve just opened presents—ahead of Christmas as always since Justin will be with his family that day. When Emma finally asks him about his wife, asks some of those questions she has tortured herself with over the years, he speaks reluctantly, volunteering nothing beyond short answers.

  Yes, Laura and I stay together because of the children.

  No, we sleep in separate beds.

  Well… except for that night when Oliver was conceived.

  Other than that, we haven’t been intimate since.

  That part of our marriage was never all that important to her.

  Because she’s just not very … affectionate.

  We both understand the nature of our relationship.

  Understand it enough to not jeopardize our family.

  We’re both mature people.

  No, she never asks me about you or Stefan.

  Laura is a very tactful woman.

  She doesn’t mention that I’m away once a week.

  The children assume it’s related to my work.

  She is an understanding woman.

  A patient woman.

  Though Emma was silent now, Caleb wasn’t finished yet. He was still with Justin’s wife whose patience endures even when her husband moves his lover and her child into his house. Laura Miles greets Emma and Stefan by the door, takes them inside to introduce her to her four children. “This is Miss Blau and her son. Stefan, you already know Oliver from school.” They sit at the table, eat the excellent meatloaf—no, make that veal cutlets—which the understanding and patient wife has prepared. “We are all mature people,” she tells Emma. “Oliver will be glad to share his room with Stefan. And Justin has been looking forward to taking you to his bed. I knit when I can’t sleep. Sweaters for my husband. It keeps my nights meaningful. I’ll knit one for you too. If I hurry it’ll be finished Christmas Eve. Won’t that be lovely? What color would you like?”

  Ironically, Caleb’s fantasy of Emma and Stefan moving into the Miles house was not all that absurd. At least not for Stefan. When his father stopped coming to the Wasserburg—as if by seeing both families together at the Christmas play he had realized he only needed one—Stefan began to watch Oliver Miles in school, what he brought for lunch, what he said about his father. More than before he could see Oliver’s resemblance to himself. I could be Oliver. Only that Oliver spoke faster than Stefan and was thinner with brown hair to his shoulders. Silver-rimmed glasses. Bony wrists. Though Oliver wasn’t a jock, other boys liked him. He had better aim than any of them when it came to tossing pennies into the open light fixture in their classroom when their teacher wasn’t looking, blocking light from seeping through the milky glass until it was like an elevator light with its hundreds of dead bugs, and the janitor had to get the ladder to remove the coins.

  Oliver also had a way of spotting and imitating teachers’ weaknesses—the wet cough of the gym teacher, or the way the principal’s nostrils vibrated when he quoted Shakespeare—that made Stefan laugh. He let Oliver read his comic books, and soon the two of them began to exchange comic books. Once the snow melted, they rode their bikes to school. Though Oliver had a ten-speed Raleigh, he’d stay next to Stefan’s balloon-tire bike. Late that summer, when Oliver caught the bottom of his trousers in the chain, Stefan helped him get the fabric out.

  Although Oliver was curious about the Wasserburg, Stefan never brought him home. They’d wait for each other outside their houses. Still, it was from Oliver that he heard some of the stories that the townspeople still told about the Wasserburg: how his grandma had dyed a bath mat and turned Mrs. Perelli’s underpants piss-yellow; how his Great-aunt Greta had stolen a priest from the church; and how old Mrs. Bloom had killed an even older lady by flashing her naked breasts at her. Stefan liked old Mrs. Bloom because she used curse words as if they were just like any other words. But his mother got impatient with her and the other cardplaying widows, as she called them, who sat in Mrs. Bloom’s solarium, on display from the street like plastic mannequins in a store window, playing cards and smoking and drinking peach brandy. Invariably, Mrs. Bloom would take off her wig to get comfortable, while Fanny Braddock would serve them more brandy.

  When fifth grade started in the fall, Stefan was glad that Oliver, too, was in Miss Heflin’s class. Already he was imitating the peculiar bounce in her polio-walk, the way she held chalk in her long fingers, or rang up purchases when she helped the clerks in the store she’d inherited.

  One day Oliver brought cigarettes he’d sneaked from one of his married sisters, and during recess he and Stefan hid behind the gym, smoking and talking about how Oliver wanted to be a doctor.

  “Like my father. Some of his patients can’t afford to pay, but he takes care of them anyhow.”

  “Maybe I can be a doctor too.”

  “Yeah, we’ll go to the same university.” Stefan inhaled. Coughed. “Roommates.”

  “We’ll celebrate our birthdays together. Like twins almost.”

  “Twins …” Stefan was still coughing. “And we’ll take the same classes.”

  “Parties, we’ll stay up late and have parties.”

  “And when you get sick, I’ll let you borrow my notes.”

  “Like you did when I missed school because of the flu.”

  Once in a while Stefan would lift out the false floor Great-uncle Tobias had shown him in his dresser, and he’d touch the broken pipe stem he kept hidden there along with a picture he’d cut from the newspaper when his father had given a public lecture about vaccinations. Its creases were smeared from opening and refolding it. And if he set the pipe stem between his lips, trying to fit his teeth into the chafed marks, it would always taste bitter.

  There was a word for it—illegitimate. Stefan had heard it before, that word, but he’d never linked it to himself. Not until the end of fifth grade when, during a math test, his right hand and pencil were caught in a streak of sun slanting through the window. He stared at the line on his wrist that separated light and shadow and saw himself, years ago, on his father’s lap, moving his hand back and forth through a beam of light, making it leap from his father’s arm to his hand.

  Illegitimate. But maybe the word was all wrong. Because what if you knew your father? Were you still illegitimate then? Stefan yanked his hand from the light. His mother and his father had done it, the thing that made him the word. And his father had done it with Oliver’s mother. But Oliver was not the word. He stared at Oliver who was bent over his test, stared at him till Oliver glanced up and frowned. His glasses were dirty, and his bangs hung over the top of their frames. He tapped against his watch. Motioned to the test. Gripping his pencil, Stefan tried to make out the numbers on the page, but they were blurred. All around him kids were leaning over the test. Pencils rasped against paper.

  “What’s the matter?” Oliver whispered.

  “Stefan Blau. Oliver Miles.” Miss Heflin and the hissing of nylon thighs as she limped down the aisle. “You know the rules. No talking during tests.”

  Stefan wished he could run from the classroom, hide in some dark place.

  She was standing next to him. “You better hurry if you want to finish.”

  He erased a set of numbers, wrote in a four, a seven, a three. Erased those.

  “You look flushed.” Her palm fit itself against his forehead like white dough.

  He flinched.

  “Are you feeling sick?”

  “No.”

  “You only have five more minutes.” Thighs whispere
d, hissed beneath her skirt as she walked back to her desk. Her chair scraped the floor.

  He felt Oliver watching him. Behind him someone hiccuped. Setting his pencil against the paper, Stefan forced himself to look at the numbers, but when the bell rang and Miss Heflin told them to pass the tests to the front, his page was still half empty, and Oliver had to pull it from under his hand. He stood up. Ran off to the school library, where he searched for the dictionary. One thumb against the leather tab with the I and the J, he flipped the pages back, scanned the words … incessant… incendiary … incandescent— There it was: illegitimate. Born out of wedlock … unlawful… incorrect. He could hear his heart beating the rhythm of the word—il-le-gi-ti-mate—and it was as if he were trapped inside a drum while an invisible drummer brought his palms down upon the skin of the drum—il-le-gi-ti-mate-il-le-gi-ti-mate—down, again and again, louder, faster.

  He slammed the dictionary shut, and as he wedged it behind a row of other books to keep it from ever opening again to that word, it came to him that his father had made a choice. It was as easy as math, choosing four children over one child who belonged to the second family.

  Except it didn’t have to be that way.

  Not if Stefan crossed over and undid the word.

  He began to imagine himself inside his father’s house.

  Into his father’s real family.

  Once or twice a day he would walk past the yellow Victorian without looking at it directly, yet taking in every detail of the overgrown garden, the windows without curtains.

  Still, the first time Oliver invited him over, Stefan was terrified. “But when?” he asked.

  “How about tomorrow?”

  When he told his mother at dinner, she said no as he’d known she would. He pushed his green beans to the side of his plate, lined them up like logs, chose the middle one, and pierced it with his fork. Slippery slippery slip—