by Rene Steinke
blouse and realized he’d seen just enough: long, shiny hair, pretty eyes or mouth.
I followed him out to his car, and he opened the passenger door. When he kissed me, that flowery, tannic fume of booze overwhelmed me, and I thought to myself, That’s right. There’s not any reason he should know.
P aul circled the hotel on the hour, careful to give space to the talks Jo and I had. Sometimes he sang songs to himself in Polish, and sometimes I caught him talking to himself, usually going over in his head what he had to do. He wore these heavy, steel-toed boots he’d bought at Orion’s, the farm-equipment store, and his footsteps were so loud you could hear him everywhere he went, except when he was closest to me, in the lobby. I thought he wore the boots to feel stronger—he was tall, but not muscular, not the sort of man a criminal would fear. His uniform was a pressed dark-blue twill. LINDEN in bold black letters marched across the back.
IX
M arietta came to see me at the hotel. She was sitting in the lobby in her suit, her pocketbook on her lap and her hair curled into little springs at her ears and neck. She’d had her house painted purple. It stood out on the street of white porches like a wound, and against the purple paint, the pale-green curtains in the picture window looked sick. The three or four times I’d stopped by to visit she hadn’t been there. When one day I noticed the newspapers piling up in the driveway and the lawn and rosebushes gone ragged, I knocked and even kicked at the front door and, not seeing any light beyond the curtains, imagined that the entire house had been filled in with cement. She was twittery now, batting her thickly mascaraed eyes and demurely tucking in her chin. “I’ve been waiting for you.”
“Well, here I am,” I said, taking my coffee behind the desk. She chatted while I counted the change into the money box and looked over the guest registry.
It was as if she wanted to make up with small talk for her frankness the last time I’d seen her. She told me Erma had chosen the most beautiful wallpaper, a design with little hummingbirds; there was a squabble in the Ladies’ Guild around a woman who claimed that she spoke in tongues (“Lutherans don’t do that,”
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Marietta told her. “No one will know what you’re saying”). She’d bought apple strudel with nuts, for a change, almonds. The woman who did her nails was pregnant. She was considering painting the living room lavender, too, and what did I think of that?
It was flashing behind her chatter and gestures—what she’d come to ask me. I could see the glint of it, the sharp edge. I had to keep my hands busy so I wouldn’t have to look. I paper-clipped two weeks together in the guest registry. I polished the numbered disks attached to the room keys. It was coming, I knew it.
She’d seen a robin, though it was usually too cold for them in February; Harry Wise fell down drunk at his wife’s birthday party; Bertha Raddis had to give up her Sunday-school class; and she was thinking of painting the living-room walls lavender. Her pocketbook strap flipped like the wing of an injured bird, and she looked guiltily around the room. The velvet curtains had ripped clear up one side; the man who owned the new ice-cream store on Lincolnway was from Hammond, and he knew the Muellers; they’d caught a Peeping Tom around the girls’ dormit-ories—you had to be careful about your windows. The living-room walls really needed painting. Was lavender a good color?
Almost blue, but not quite? Her gaze following some phantom trapped butterfly, she said, “Did you find her?”
I was polishing the wood on the desk in hard circles. “I think so. I went to Aunt Emily’s.”
“She’s seen her?” Her face turned very stiff and pasty, her posture a flat board.
I nodded.
“Well, what do you know,” she said, her voice trembling.
“Emily has seen her and not us.”
I pressed my fingers harder into the dustcloth and made a THE FIRES / 139
squeaking noise on the surface of the desk. “She had three addresses for her, but I don’t know if any of them are right. Emily was confused.”
Marietta’s shoes shuffled on the floor. When she didn’t say anything, I looked up from my dusting. She wiped her cheek as if to get something out of the way, sniffed, and then it came out in a blaze: “Henry sent her away.”
“I know, Grandma.” I set down the cloth and went behind the desk again, began to sort the checks into envelopes.
“I didn’t want her to go.”
“You couldn’t stop him.” I licked an envelope flap and wrote a date in the corner.
“Heavens, no, I couldn’t stop him.” She swung the orange-stockinged leg that crossed her knee. She turned to face the wall and shook her head slightly. “I didn’t think it would last this long.”
“I know,” I said, getting up to pull the broom from the corner.
“I thought she’d be gone for a few months and then he’d forget about it. But then when she didn’t come back, it made everything worse. She wasn’t, I know, but it made her look guilty.” She rocked the pocketbook handle back and forth, and her mouth closed unevenly as if she was about to cry.
I began to sweep the floor behind the desk. “Guilty of what?”
Of letting herself get pregnant? If that was it, why couldn’t she just say it? The bristles whisked against the polished floor. There wasn’t any dirt, just a safety pin, a penny. Of course, she’d have given the baby up for adoption (was that the fear, that the child would one day come back and knock on Marietta’s door?), that was if she hadn’t been unable to conceive, as my mother had said.
Or was the child with Hanna now? Was that why she had stayed away?
Her eyes went blank. “I can’t talk about that,” she said.
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I pushed the broom harder against the floor, so the bristles fanned out, and tried to scratch the gleaming surface. “Didn’t you ever write? Didn’t you visit?”
Her mouth moved mechanically. “After a while it was her fault as much as his, you know. She wasn’t really here when she was here half the time. She pretended to be someone else. She came home when she wanted. I couldn’t help it that she stayed away most of the time. That was Henry’s fault.”
I pushed the broom into the corner, stabbed at a tiny cobweb.
“I told him she’d taken after me, and it was natural for a girl like that to get a lot of attention. She was popular, but he couldn’t see it that way. I convinced him to let her go away with Emily for a while, and I hoped when she came back, it would all be over, but—”
“You lied about it,” I said. I leaned the broom against the wall and looked at her face, which threatened to fall down, but she propped it back up.
“Don’t you know how hard this is?” I remembered her fear in that old Klan photograph and suddenly felt sorry for her.
“All this time you’ve hidden it,” I said. “What did she do?” I wanted to make her say it.
She shook her head, and her face looked haggard. “In the end she wasn’t—Henry couldn’t take it. You know how some days he wouldn’t even be able to get out of bed. He was fragile for a man.”
As I ran the cloth over the edges of the square boxes that held the keys, I thought how my grandfather’s washing his hands could put an end to any conversation, how his fists never seemed empty, how he’d liked to say, “These years aren’t coming back”
when he was talking about working and saving money, but I thought he secretly longed for some pleasure in a particular year that had run away on its long, lithe legs forever. “No he wasn’t,”
I said.
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Her voice was tight. “Anyway, I’m glad you found her,” she said, but she didn’t seem glad. Her eyes looked terrified.
I made some coffee, and we sipped from Styrofoam cups, changed the subject to other things, the color she should paint the living room, the blue dress I was wearing. After she’d finished, she put her cup down and said, “You should go to Chicago, somewhere nice.”
/> I hesitated, wondering how she’d known exactly what I wanted.
“But I’m worried about my mother right now. You see how thin she is. And you want me to find Hanna now, don’t you?”
She waved away my words so casually I thought she’d mis-heard me. “Oh, you’re young. You’ll make new friends.”
She was talking the way she used to goad me about finding a boyfriend, and there was something similarly unsettling about it. “What’s in Porter for you?”
“Well, a job.”
“This?” She opened up her pocketbook and took out her compact. “There are a hundred better ones you could get in a heartbeat in Chicago. And there’s the money from your grandfather, don’t forget.” It was as if she wanted to get rid of me.
I said I’d been thinking about moving there. She smiled slightly.
Peering into her compact mirror, she said, “You’re not an old lady like me. You should be seeing the world.” She put her hand on one loose cheek and lifted it a little. “When I was young, I used to look at old women like me and wonder how they could stand being alive, they were so ugly. I’d look at women ten years older than me and say, ‘I could manage that face, but not that one.’ I let age creep up on me little by little. It’s a horrible thing, getting older. You have to trick yourself.”
I hated it when she talked this way, as if finding yourself pretty was the only thing worth living for. “You’re seventy,” I said.
“You have two daughters. That’s something.”
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She shook her head. “Hanna had beautiful skin,” she said. “Isn’t it funny, we had exactly the same complexion.” She closed her compact nostalgically, as if she’d been looking at an old photograph. “I remember there was this old man, Mr. Hamburg, who was dying. He wanted Hanna to visit him at the hospital. He said just to see her face would make him feel better. She didn’t know him really, just from church, but she was so outgoing she went as a favor to me and brought some of your grandfather’s roses.
His wife said he couldn’t speak at that point, but he smiled when he saw her, and she sat with him awhile. A little later he died.
Isn’t that nice? She didn’t really understand it when it was all happening.”
“Understand what?”
She shook her head and lowered her eyes.
“We’ll see her soon,” I said. “Maybe you can explain it to her.”
Marietta scraped her high heel on the floor and stood up, looked nervously around the dim lobby.
I ’d written letters to all three of Hanna’s addresses, and two had been returned “Address Unknown.” Only the one to Indianapolis still hadn’t come back. I thought I should wait to hear from her before I just appeared unannounced on her doorstep, not just as a matter of being polite and giving her fair warning but also because I wanted some signal, maybe a Polaroid snapshot from her new life, or a friendly phone call at least, so I’d have some idea what to expect. I’d put so much of myself into looking for her, I couldn’t really consider the possibility that she might not want to see us, but she had made a life far away, with or without a child, and Jo was right, she’d kept it that way for her own reasons.
After a month when I didn’t hear from her, I thought maybe THE FIRES / 143
I hadn’t sounded urgent enough in my letter and she’d been too busy to reply. I also thought that the letter might have been lost or accidentally delivered to her next-door neighbor. I decided to go to Indianapolis even though it would be a shock. I’d try to convince her to come back to Porter for a few days, we’d all sit down in Marietta’s lavender-lit living room, and I’d say, “He poisoned himself. Who can say why?”
O n all those rural roads with fields marked out like windowpanes, I imagined how she would look, though it was difficult to age her. I had to remember all the former Hannas with their different hairstyles and makeup and wait for them to assemble. I had changed my mind and felt certain that her gray hair would be dyed—red, probably—and she would have developed that nervous way of hurrying her walk that you see in certain small-boned older women. Her voice would sound from farther down in her throat, more crisp and definite. And her full cheeks would have dropped a little; she’d look tired.
I got to the city in the late afternoon, driving past scribbled neon signs and dusty storefronts to the tarred, mildew-colored street. When I couldn’t find the number, I began to worry that Emily really had lost her mind. There had been three addresses, after all, and she hadn’t even realized it.
I parked on a corner near a playground and got out to look at the numbers more closely. On a building at the end of the block, I saw how the brick shadowed where the numbers had hung before: 172. That was it.
I looked up at the ashy brick, the smudged windows, the laundry line tied from the fire escape. It was unmistakably a city house, just as I’d imagined, and from the sidewalk I heard the cadence of her breath, saw the chair beneath her scraping the floor.
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The door opened quickly when I knocked. She looked even younger than I’d thought, and wore her hair curly and long, black.
She had the same pink Cupid’s bow mouth and long curved neck, the same thin figure. I felt something in me expand when she looked up, a lightness. But the eyes were someone else’s, narrow and brown. It wasn’t Hanna.
The woman became a wall, just drab stone I had to get past. I asked her if Hanna Kestler lived there or if I had the wrong house.
“Oh, did someone send you to get her things?” She smiled.
Her teeth tilted inward. There was a lift and then a heavy sinking in my stomach. Hanna had moved again, but maybe the woman would know where she’d gone. “I wrote to someone over there in Porter,” she said. “You must be family.”
“I am,” I said. “Where did she go?”
Her eyes were very clear, but strangely twinkling and un-focused. “Go? Oh, no, she died.” Her voice skittered into the breeze. The dry grass in the yard buckled and waved into a lake of needles. The clouds in the sky collided. There was that time she came home and collapsed on my grandparents’ couch, and I watched her sleep for hours. “You didn’t know? I’m so sorry. I just assumed because I wrote her mother in Porter. It happened a few months ago, in August.”
I couldn’t look at her. A cat suddenly appeared at my ankle, its fur spotted black and white like dice. A pink moon shape curved on its nose. I could have counted each whisker, separated each sharp, fine strand of fur.
This woman who should have been Hanna but wasn’t put her small hand on my arm. There was a tight, salty ring around my throat.
“She was a nice lady. I only knew her a little, but she was nice.”
The cat arched its back, and I counted the ribs, the vertabrae in its spine, watched one paw lift and spread out like fingers. “They THE FIRES / 145
found some medication in her room, something wrong with her heart, they said. She was too young for that, a stroke. Her friends from the stationer’s found her, you know, where she worked.
You’re family?”
The cat’s ears tilted back and sharpened. It seemed I’d forgotten something important Hanna had told me, something I needed to ask her.
“Come on,” she said, opening the door wider. “I’ll take you up to the room. You’ll want to arrange for someone to get her things, won’t you?” She led me up a staircase with a pink-and-green banister. I hadn’t been far away all that time, going up and down another set of stairs, in the Linden Hotel.
“It’s an old-fashioned rooming house,” the woman said, “for girls only.” She unlocked a door at the end of the hall and let me in.
It looked like a room someone had left in a hurry. Scattered bottles and cosmetics tripped across the bureau, and the curtain sheers had been splashed with what looked like coffee or dark red wine. I could see the gauzy print of Hanna’s fingers all over.
I didn’t touch anything,” the woman whispered. “Take your time,” she said, slowly closi
ng the door. I wanted to cry, but couldn’t with that salty thing choking me.
I thought of what Cornell had said about the hole in Hanna’s heart—it must have been a real defect, not just something he’d dreamed up to make himself feel better.
I went over to the window and opened it. I had to get some air.
I pressed my stomach over the sill and hung my head out in the cold. “She’s dead,” I said. A silver candy wrapper cartwheeled over cracks in the sidewalk, the green gate perkily blinked in the windows of a parked car. Everything was maddeningly unmoved, even glossed with a faint cheer, shapes curved into smiles. I pulled back in, scraped my spine on the bottom of the window.
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I had trouble believing in it. When I turned around, the room enlarged, traces of her everywhere: her fingers spread in the Japanese fans on the wall; the dent in the silk pillow from her head; the soles of her feet leaving their marbled prints in the dusty floor; her green eyes peeking between the stalks of dead daisies in a vase; her shadow on the walls.
On a table in the corner there was a portable record player and a stack of jazz albums. Had they been Cornell’s choices, or hers?
The record on the turntable was “Ladybird,” and the needle still rested on the disc, so I turned it on, listened to a couple of seconds of a frail horn. I pushed down the lever, scratched the needle across the disc over the hair-thin ridges, then the horn blared back again. Damn her. I hated her for not coming back. How could Marietta and my mother have lied about her dying? I scratched the needle back the other way to the papered red circle in the center. The needle whined, then stopped in a stupid
“whoops.”
I lay down on the bed, picked up the piece of newspaper folded on the pillow. There was a picture of a beautiful woman holding a bottle of perfume. “Life’s pleasures,” the ad said. The mattress was firm and smelled of lilacs, the pillowcases embroidered with spoked flowers. I closed my eyes, combed my fingers into my hair, and saw her face, wide green alert eyes, a small uncertain mouth. That was her. You had to make up what you didn’t know or remember and believe in it. There wasn’t any choice.
