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

When Caleb propped himself on the windowsill, Emma saw herself all at once the way he might show her in a film, cleaning the floor on her knees, and she felt angry as if she were that maid he’d summoned by pressing his foot against the button.

  “If you don’t let up with this,” he said, “I’ll warn Mom, tell her to hold on to what belongs to her.”

  “What belongs to her?” She stopped scrubbing and raised her face. “There wouldn’t be anything left by now if I didn’t work constantly.”

  “Still,” he insisted, “it belongs to her.”

  “Easy for you to give her advice. You have no intention to help with the house, but you want to tell me what to do about it.”

  “What not to do about it,” he had corrected her.

  “And I need shoes,” Emma’s mother was saying as they re-entered her apartment.

  “Shoes?” Emma followed her mother into the living room.

  “To match both dresses.”

  “We can buy them this afternoon. On the way back from the lawyer’s.”

  “We don’t need a lawyer for this.”

  “Just to make it all legal. It won’t take long. I’ll give him a call to make sure he gets it right.”

  “But—”

  “What color were you thinking of for the shoes?”

  “But make sure Caleb gets half,” her mother said. And she said it again in the car that afternoon: “Make sure Caleb gets half.”

  “I will. It’s important to me too.” And it was. Emma wanted Caleb to have half of it. Only not yet. “There’ll be plenty of time later,” she told her mother, “to figure the details. Until the house is restored, it’s best if I’m the only one on the deed.”

  “You can restore it if it’s in both your names.”

  “Think about it. He could force us into selling next week. The way the house is now, we wouldn’t get much for it. You’d lose everything, while he’d take the money to California and invest it in his films. I’d certainly understand it, considering how important his films are to him.”

  “Caleb wouldn’t do that.”

  Emma felt her mother getting slippery. Evasive. As she had so often in the past. But she was not about to let her. Not now. Reaching across, she grasped her mother’s cold hands. “Caleb does not live here,” she said urgently. “Owning a house here would be a burden for him. It is very expensive to make films.”

  Yvonne turned her face from her daughter and toward the car window—white clapboard houses, the brick bank, the rose hedge by the school—yet above everything that passed lay the reflection of her daughter’s face: determined; always present. Always tugging at her. She pulled her hands from Emma’s.

  “Eventually Caleb will be grateful,” Emma said. “But it’s best to wait before telling him. In the meantime, I’ll write you a check every month for things you need.”

  Things I need. Silk slips. Good shampoo and pantyhose. Dresses and lotion—

  “I was thinking about two thousand.”

  Roses once a week. Magazines. A new raincoat. Nail polish. New towels for the bathroom and kitchen. Candles. The shoes we’re getting today. Yvonne was still thinking about those shoes while they sat in the lawyer’s office, and when she laid down the lawyer’s ballpoint pen, she felt glad that, finally, she’d been able to please her daughter by giving her what she wanted. She hadn’t seen her this joyful in years. Now Emma could not press her for anything else.

  Because there isn’t anything else I can give her.

  Most mornings Emma would awaken with the awareness that the house was hers alone, with a sense of security she hadn’t known since before Opa’s death. Again and again she’d look at the deed proving her ownership. She fined tenants two dollars for every day their rent was late. Charged them for burned-out lightbulbs in the hallway of the floor they lived on. Plans for making the house whole again filled her with such energy and purpose that—even when her body felt tired—she could not stop working: she replaced the brick walks in the garden; took down the rotting rails that partitioned Oma’s flower beds; gutted two empty apartments and repainted them; covered worn floors with carpeting.

  In the apartment that used to be the Perellis’, the original green paint had bled through in several places, and when it still showed through two coats of white, Stefan offered to help her paint over it again, and they both had white smudges on their faces and clothes when they finished.

  “Just look at us,” she said as they washed their faces and hands side by side at the bathroom sink.

  In the mirror, Stefan noticed that he was as tall as his mother. Prodding her with one elbow, he motioned to their reflection.

  “What are you grinning about?” she asked.

  He raised himself on his toes, tried to look down on her, and noticed with alarm that from this angle her hair was graying. He tried to joke. “Shortie.”

  “Oh yeah?” She felt a sudden and wild joy at having Stefan with her.

  “Yeah, you’re just a shortie.”

  She got on her toes too, stretched herself to her full height. “Shortie yourself.”

  They had other moments of lightness between them. When he helped her with her work. Cooked dinner with her. Thanked her for a present she’d left for him on his desk. A book usually. Or a candy bar.

  How she wished she could tell her brother about all the changes she was making, but she wanted to enjoy her ownership just a while longer. He wouldn’t be able to help with the work anyhow, and she was glad to restore the house for both of them. Though she didn’t like carrying that secret between them, it had to be like that for now, so he wouldn’t come at her with decisions and jeopardize what she was accomplishing.

  Though she believed that every hour of work brought the Wasserburg closer to the way it had been, she also felt its weight in her limbs those mornings when she’d awake disoriented as if, all night, she had labored to crawl from beneath its burden. Ownership did not make it easier to pay the bills. She had to take out another mortgage. Reduce rents to attract new tenants. Move herself and Stefan into a smaller apartment on the fourth floor. Though she turned all she could back into the house, something else would break down as soon as she’d finish one repair.

  Whenever her brother called, she was quick to get off the phone. But the longer the building was hers, the harder it was to think of the day when she’d deed him his half. She was sure she would— only not yet—and knowing she would was a constant struggle with what she really wanted: to have it be hers alone. But that wouldn’t be right. Now if she’d had that kind of struggle with anyone else, she would have called Caleb, asked him what to do. She missed him. One evening, when Stefan was sleeping over at Justin’s house, she felt such an urge to hear her brother’s voice that she dialed his number in Los Angeles, though she knew she would hang up as soon as he answered.

  “Hello,” he said, and then, “who is this?”

  She couldn’t move. Minutes after he had hung up, she still held the receiver hard against her ear, telling herself that, ultimately, he would have to agree with what she was doing. If she hadn’t left school to care for the house, it would have fallen into disrepair, or her mother would have squandered it. The house had been her education. Caleb had his films. Meanwhile she was doing what was right, looking after her mother, paying her two thousand dollars every month as promised, far more than she and Stefan had to live on.

  Caleb phoned her the summer of 1989 when she had owned the house one full year. “I’m thinking of flying out for a visit next month.”

  “It’s not a good time,” she stalled. “A lot of problems with the house.”

  “Once I’m there, I’ll help with whatever you’re doing.”

  “I couldn’t ask that of you.” She felt queasy. “Listen, I have an appointment in a few minutes. But let me call you back. Soon. We’ll figure out what’s best with your visit.”

  Two weeks later he called again.

  “I meant to get back to you,” she apologized. “But we had trouble with
the elevator again and we—”

  “I know, Emma.”

  “We got it working for a few days, and now it’s stuck again in the basement.”

  “I’m not talking about the elevator.”

  She leaned against the wall by the refrigerator. Pulled the phone cord close and bunched it against her throat. “I did it for both of us, Caleb.”

  “The house doesn’t belong to us.”

  “Who told you?”

  “Certainly not you.”

  “Aunt Greta? Mother?”

  “Why did you?”

  “Because otherwise there’d be nothing left. For you or for me.”

  “I expect you to return the house to Mom.”

  “Listen, it’s her overspending that did it. I’ve tried to talk to you. But the house was never important to you.”

  “I’ll tell you what’s important to me—more important than any house. My relationship to my sister. And I can’t stand feeling cheated by—”

  “No one cheated you.”

  He heard the resentment in her voice and recalled his grandfather telling him how Emma’s hands had been so strong at birth that he’d known no one would ever be able to take from her what she wasn’t willing to part with. And as that memory fused with what Emma was saying to him now, he didn’t know yet how it all belonged together, only that it did.

  “What I’m doing is preserving it, Caleb, making sure there will be something for you and for me. But I don’t see you helping in any way.”

  “I’ve tried to imagine why you did it.”

  “This isn’t doing any good.”

  “I know for you the house stands for something that was good once. But now you’re selling me for the house and—”

  “Don’t, Caleb.”

  “You’ve stolen from our mother. And you’re lying to yourself.”

  “You would have nothing if I hadn’t stopped her. Nothing.”

  “Isn’t that exactly what I have now? Nothing?”

  “What do you know? Ever since Vati died, you have not been there for me or for the house. You’re never here. And when Stefan was a baby, I had to leave him with Mother or with tenants while I scraped and painted and cleaned and—”

  “You could have hired others to do that.”

  “And who would have paid those so-called others?”

  “You’re reaching back awfully far to prove how you suffered.”

  “It happened. It all happened. And I’m still the one who makes sure Mother has a house to live in, the one who does her laundry, who gets the stains out of—”

  “There’s no need for you to do her laundry. Send it out.”

  “It’s too expensive … and impersonal.”

  “You keep suffering so that you can justify cheating Mom out of the house. And you know what the sad thing about this is, Emma? That I’m not surprised.”

  She felt furious. Furious that everyone was after what should have been hers. The Wasserburg. Justin. Her son. She was not about to let Caleb take the Wasserburg from her. The way he’d taken the pink bicycle with the training wheels that her mother had given her. It had never been fully hers, though she’d believed it was, riding it only on sidewalks, so careful to wipe off each speck of dirt while she’d waited for a dry, sunny day to take it on the path by the lake. But Caleb had ridden it without asking, had brought it home wet with dirt and leaves on its fenders and tires, had made it ugly so that she’d never been able to enjoy it again.

  “I don’t deserve this,” she said.

  “Emma—”

  “No.” She slammed down the phone as rage from that long-ago day pitched through her, tilted her back to yet another day when Caleb had locked her out on the balcony with the copper taste of death on her teeth till she’d gouged her way through blood and glass into all that was sacred and safe.

  The phone started ringing. She stepped away from it, breath heaving. And in that very instant she understood. Understood that she alone deserved the house. Understood that even though she had taken ownership for Caleb and herself, she was no longer willing to give him half. Not now. Not after he’d accused her of cheating him and her mother. Truth was that Opa’s Wasserburg belonged to her. Had always been meant to be hers. She had stripped her life bare working for it. It was all she had. And it was all she wanted. All she needed.

  Periodically, that day, the phone rang, and she finally picked it up late that evening.

  Caleb. Of course. Talking fast as if worried she’d hang up on him again. “I want you to know that I checked with a lawyer about what I can do to make sure the house goes back to Mom.”

  “Listen, I have a lot of things to do.”

  “My lawyer said I would have to prove in court that Mom was incompetent when she deeded the house to you.”

  “You’re bluffing.”

  He didn’t answer.

  “You are,” she said.

  “I am planning to check with a lawyer.”

  “So go and check.”

  “At least put me on the deed too.”

  “Now you want it?”

  “For her. I would use it to take care of her.”

  “I’m already taking care of her. Whatever she gets, Caleb, she spends. Faster than you can count it.”

  “Then let her.”

  “I can’t.”

  “I thought your grand plan was to divide it all the way Oma should have, to Aunt Greta and Uncle Tobias and with Father’s share going to Mother.”

  “I was twelve when Oma died.”

  “But you knew instinctively what would have been right.”

  “Can you imagine what kind of a legal mess that would turn into?”

  “Not really. It’s still the best solution.”

  “Why? You’ve checked that out too with your lawyer?”

  “I’m sure it can be done.”

  “I have to go.”

  When she bought an answering machine to screen his calls, he sent her letters she didn’t answer.

  “You will always be my sister,” he wrote.

  “I want to believe that someday you’ll do what is just,” he wrote.

  “If there’s ever anything I can do for you, I’ll be there,” he wrote.

  It made her miss him, those letters—not the way he was now with his demands, but the joyfulness they used to carry be tween them. And that was a great loss, especially if she added it to all she had already lost. Some evenings, late, she would dial his number and wait for him to answer, wait till he had hung up before she would set down her phone. Once, right afterwards when she still held the receiver, it rang in her hand, and she dropped it, afraid it would be Caleb. It kept ringing, and when she picked it up—suddenly sure it was her son calling from Justin’s house, though he hadn’t called her from there before—it indeed was Caleb.

  “What is it?” she asked, sure he’d found out she was the one calling him nights and hanging up.

  But what he said was, “I miss you.”

  “Me too,” she said without thinking.

  “We may never agree about the house, but I… All I want tonight is to talk with you, Emma. Nothing about the house.”

  She leaned forward. “Yes.”

  “I’m still ready to teach Stefan to shave.”

  “Yes,” she said again. “I’m glad,” she said. “I think he’s started,” she said, suddenly worried that Caleb wouldn’t be on the phone long enough to hear all of it. “With shaving, I mean. Not here. But at his father’s house. He’s there a lot. With the boy who was born the same day. Oliver. Stefan has sort of a shadow on his upper lip. The way you used to. And along his jaw. Some days I don’t see that shadow and know he must have shaved. But he doesn’t talk about his father to me. Or about what he is doing there. And I don’t ask. At times I wonder if it’s better that way. For him.”

  “And for you?”

  “There’s so much I have to do here. …”

  “And what does that give you?”

  She was silent.

>   “Are you still there?”

  “I think … he’s used to not needing me a whole lot. And that he wants a full family.”

  “And what’s a full family?”

  “A family that is together more than once a week.”

  “Some of his distance from you may have to do with being almost fifteen.”

  “And with me never being there for him … as much as I wanted to.”

  They talked for over half an hour, mostly about Stefan, but also about Caleb’s work, about Uncle Tobias who was on a Mediterranean cruise with Danny Wilson, about Aunt Greta who was volunteering at a hospital in Boston. Neither of them mentioned the Wasserburg.

  Caleb thought that Emma sounded glad to be talking with him, and he felt good hearing that gladness in her voice; but gradually it began to bother him how she was leaning on him, counting on him as though she hadn’t cheated him and their mother. As his familiar anger seeped back—you can’t have it both ways, Emma—he could no longer trust himself to keep it from her. “I need to be somewhere soon,” he said abruptly. “I’m sorry, but I need to get ready.”

  “Can’t we—”

  “I really do, Emma.”

  “Of course,” she said, confused by the sudden change in his voice. “Maybe we can … you know … talk again? Soon?”

  But he was already gone.

  All she had ever wanted was to have the house back the way it used to be. But now so much of it felt closed to her. As a child she had been a welcome visitor in all the apartments, following her Opa who’d been well-liked by his tenants; but now the turnover was swift, and new renters kept to themselves. Some didn’t greet her when they saw her, and a few left their trash bags on the floor of the utility room instead of opening the trap door and throwing them down the chute. Carelessness like that made her impatient because it always created extra work for those who had to pick up afterwards.

  It seemed that the only way she could get into their lives was through their complaints, through clauses in their leases allowing her the inspection of any apartment, and through the mail she began to take from their boxes. It was easier than taking things from stores used to be, something she’d stopped when she was pregnant. A few of their personal letters she kept in her closet with Oma’s letters; but most she sealed and replaced because they were so shallow in comparison. The last week of each month she would raid all mailboxes for bills. Those she didn’t need to open, just store until the tenants had paid their rent. It was only right that they should pay for shelter before considering other bills.