The Search for Joyful (35 page)

Actually I think it had, and I hadn't wanted to listen. I thought the loss of his leg would keep him here. I thought he needed me. It was I myself who had prepared him to leave, taught him day by day to be independent, to do for himself and not rely on me.

Had I known what I was doing? I think so. And yet I persisted. Day after day to care for the wound, to balance, to walk without crutches with only the help of a cane. And in mastering these physical impediments his confidence flowed back until at last he could face his family, his friends, and take up a career, take up his old life. He was the only son, and he was going home. In a way I was proud. It took good nursing skills and good psychological bolstering to accomplish what I had.

And what had it taken to undo a marriage, to break my vows? I stayed late at the hospital and after hours visited the little chapel. With a clicking of his heels he had shown me that he could leave me as easily as I could him. But it wasn't easy. It was one of the hardest things I'd ever done. It had made me sick. If I got up from a chair too quickly the whole room swam, just as in the restaurant.

I had always had perfect health. Mama Kathy used to say I was as strong as a little pony. What was this giddiness, this sudden faintness?

I was a nurse, and yet I didn't suspect. It didn't occur to me that I was pregnant. But a second missed period confirmed it, and thought disappeared down a black tarn.

I went to work. I changed the dressing for cot 4, checked that the acute dysentery case was responding, made a note that 12 was now urinating on his own. Suddenly I stood transfixed. I was going to have a baby.

That night I began my letter.
Dear Erich, . . .
I stopped. Dear Erich, what? Come back, we're going to have a baby? Remembering the final click of his heels, I wasn't at all sure he would come back.

What then? I've changed my mind, I'm joining you in Austria?

Austria was no longer the land of what if. It was as alien to me as the Martian plain or the ammonia atmosphere of Venus. Oh, God, what a mess! I stared at my blank letter with its standard opening—and tried to think. How had I come to make so many mistakes? I went back to the beginning trying to figure it out.

Katherine Mary Flannigan had done her best to ensure that my head was screwed on the right way. “Nothing should be worse because you were there,” she'd told me more than once. And my sergeant Papa of the RCMP, what would he say of my impulse to leave things as they were, to not tell Erich? With a convulsive movement I took hold of the pen. We'd talked about having a baby. Later on, at some unspecified time in the future. He'd said a boy would be Victor after his father. I smiled because I knew it would be a girl and that she would be Kathy.

My hand held its position above the page.
It's his child. He has a right to know.
The child would be part of the fantasy. The question was—which fantasy? Would we go into the woods, trap and fish and live close to nature? That had been his first fiction. He caught at anything not to go home, not to let them know he was a cripple, a man with one leg. Why hadn't I seen as plainly as I did now that phase would pass?

The other fantasy was mine—Austria of the waltzes, the Bodensee, and the little blond boy in the sailor suit. I would no longer be Kathy, and of Oh-Be-Joyful's Daughter there would not be a trace. In their place a Rhine maiden sipping rare vintages from the
cartes des vin
with the servant of the glass assiduously pouring.

But what deterred me mainly was a child of mixed ancestry growing up in Austria, subject to what slurs, what discrimination? And if the Naziism in Hitler's homeland was festering beneath the surface? Did I want my child imbibing that atmosphere?

I put the pen down without writing a word. Someday, someday I would sing little Kathy the Austrian folk songs her father had taught me. I'd tell her of our marriage, a wartime marriage which held a great deal of love, but not enough to make it right for either of us. I would tell her. And she would make the decision. If she wanted to write him, she would. If she wanted to visit him, she could do that.

This was probably a terrible decision, I told myself, but for that night at least I didn't go on with the letter.

 
IN THE FOLLOWING weeks my waistband expanded.

I thought Elizabeth might send me a card. She didn't.

What if she had sent a card? Perhaps—perhaps then . . .

Mental paralysis seemed to have taken over. I needed to talk, confide, tell someone. Egg came immediately to my mind. But how could Egg counsel me? She had never married, never been faced with the prospect of a child. But there was someone else close to me who had.

It took only two days to arrange a temporary leave, book my seat, and once again be on the long, silver-flashing train. As mile after mile was consumed and I approached my old life, I wondered if I could find my way back into it. I wanted to be Mama Kathy's little girl, and Connie and Georges's little sister. Only there was no Georges. No Georges and no Papa. And my father—he was no longer that dark phantom shape, but I needed a woman. I needed my mother.

The silver and blue train sped on, swallowing the miles, swallowing the years. In Edmonton I left the Canadian Pacific and took a bus into the forests of Alberta. At the familiar crossroads I got out. There was no marker, not even a bench advertising the local mortuary.

Mama Kathy looked very small against the background of spruce and larch, yet somehow sturdy, timeless even, as she waved a bouquet of wayside flowers she had picked, tall lavender larkspur, fiery red paintbrush, and wild gold buttercups. She didn't exactly wave it, she shook it at me in her excitement.

I think I must have flung myself at her, for we rocked backward a moment, our arms tightly locked around each other. What we said was incomprehensible, because we talked at the same time, laughing, almost crying. She didn't notice I was pregnant. It seemed obvious to to me by now, but people didn't notice.

She had borrowed a neighbor's car for the occasion. We bounced along the narrow, overgrown road, Mama Kathy, me, my suitcase, and my flowers, talking all the while. Then there it was, the small house where we had all fit so snugly, the fields I had scampered across searching for arrowheads, the step I preferred to jump over, the porch where I played jacks with Connie—it all burst on me.

The past refused to be relegated to the past. It was here, present, overwhelming. Only because I had made the pilgrimage before, when Mama Kathy was in Vancouver assembling replacement parts for planes, could I bring myself to realize she hadn't always been here in the old familiar setting. She too had been part of the war effort, and her life must have changed as drastically as mine. It was exciting, she told me, but demanding. “I felt the pressure after a while. I'm glad to be back home. My own things, everything familiar. The pace of city life gets to you after a bit.”

Mama Kathy looked older, her red hair somewhat faded, her pretty face lined. “I suspect you're tired, Kathy, after such a trip. Your old room is ready for you. I'll call you for dinner, and afterwards you'll tell me what's on your mind.”

I did as she said, just like the child I had been. And like that child, I put my shoes beside the bed and climbed under the quilt.

Oddly enough, when I began to talk, it was about Crazy Dancer. “He loved to have fun. He called me by my Indian name. And while I was with him I was Oh-Be-Joyful's Daughter. He rebuilt the toolbox of his three-wheel motorcycle into a sidecar, and we cracked up. He fitted out an old jalopy so it ran on kerosine. And he took me to an amusement park. When I was with him a kind of wildness took hold of me, and I was as crazy as he was. We sat on the moon, and afterwards he tied a handkerchief over my eyes, and I fed him ice cream.”

Mama Kathy laughed, but when I joined in she looked at me sharply, and I realized my laughter had an edge of hysteria.

“He was a private. He drove trucks. When they sent him overseas, he asked me to marry him, Mama. And I did.”

“Kathy . . .” The word was full of question.

“It was according to Indian ways, a Handsome Lake ceremony, an under-the-blanket marriage. We went to his mother, and she performed it, and neighbors and friends built a little tepee filled with boughs of leaves and flowers. Outside they left food and drink. It was beautiful. I want you to know that.”

She rocked back and forth a few times. “But it wasn't a legal marriage? No priest, no church? It was not done in the sight of God.”

“I think it was done in the sight of God. We made our vows to Him and to each other.”

She continued to rock.

“We tried,” I said. “We were going to invite you, and Connie and Jeff. But when I telephoned, you told me about Georges.” My God, I was going out of my mind. I had mixed everything up, confused what happened with Erich and my days with Crazy Dancer. I burst into tears.

Mama Kathy reached for my hand and gave it a squeeze. “So what about your young man? They took him?”

“Yes, they took him.”

“Was he killed?”

“I thought so. I didn't hear from him. There was a telegram, I heard the ship he was on was sunk.”

“My poor Kathy.”

“I've talked and talked, and haven't said it.” I stood up, walked up and down the small living room, and came to a stop in front of her. “I'm pregnant.”

In the silence I could hear Mama's intake of breath.

“And not by him,” I said defiantly.

Mama's hand tightened over the arm of the old rocker. “You don't have to tell me anything you don't want to, Kathy.”

“I wrote you. I married again.”

“Yes, of course. That's why I'm so confused. But it's all right. The child is your husband's,” she concluded with obvious relief. “The Austrian who was your patient, the amputee, is the father.”

“You have the picture, but not all the pieces. His mother, Elizabeth Madeleine Hintermeister von Kerll, came after him.”

“You mean, from Austria?”

I nodded. “She came to take him back.”

“But—but—” It was too much for Mama Kathy. She started again, “But he had a wife and child. . . .”

“He doesn't know about the child.”

“What?”

I took a deep breath and explained all the counts on which the marriage didn't work.

“I don't know, Kathy,” she said as she listened.

I finished and she continued to rock. “I wish I were wiser, but I'm not. My best advice to you is—stay here where you grew up and where you are loved. Give your heart a chance to heal. Eventually your heart will answer you.”

“You think so? You think there is an answer for me? Oh, Mama Kathy, I'm terrified. I don't know whether I can go forward, I know I can't go back, and I'm stuck right where I am. I don't know what's best for my baby.”

 
IT'S AN AWESOME thing to be in charge of someone else's life, to make decisions for them. So I didn't. Gradually I absorbed the rhythm of the household. The daily cooking, the cleaning, the gardening, the occasional shopping. Evenings we sang the old songs, the songs we'd sung with Papa accompanying us on his accordion, the one he bought from Old Irish Bill. Then one evening Irish Bill himself appeared, an ancient gentleman who led us in “Kevin Barry” and “Polly Wolly Doodle Wally Day.”

Some evenings we updated our songfest with the radio's hit parade. Once I forgot myself and found I was singing in German, “
Röslein, Röslein, Röslein rot, Röslein auf der Heiden.
” Mama Kathy gave me a surprised and quizzical look.

For the most part I mused. I felt very well. Why not, I was full of life. Life swelled my belly, hard and round. I remembered Crazy Dancer's word for soul,
ahcak.
I wondered if the new little Kathy possessed one yet. When does it fly in? At birth?

Connie came. She and Jeff drove up in their Ford. It was a fire-engine red sports car, with a canvas top they kept folded down. Jeff was the same nice guy I remembered, but somehow I had expected her to be with Georges. We took our sister walk. We went off together, leaving Mama Kathy to explain.

“It should be like old times,” Connie said, “but it isn't.”

“No, it isn't.”

“Jeff's great,” Connie said. “I really love him.”

But he's not Georges, I finished in my mind.

We walked down by the pond, where the ducks migrated each year. They sailed the surface, miniature galleons, their wakes streaming out behind them. Others, who had foraged further, flew in feet first, braking. We watched heads go down and rears come up and shake with the delight of their catch. We watched the males rise from the water, ruffle their feathers, and preen themselves.

“Do you notice,” Connie said, “they go in pairs.”

Like twins, I thought.

Staring at the mallards, not seeing them, she looked as Erich had when he realized he had only one leg. They'd maimed her too, when they'd amputated her twin.

“I knew,” she said, no longer conscious of me, speaking to the wind. “The weight of the world seemed to crash down on me. I was buried under rubble. I died, Kathy. I died when he did, at the exact moment.”

I believed her. It can happen that way.

“I love Jeff,” she went on. “I love being his wife. But I'm a ghost, Kathy, not here at all. I watch them together, Connie and Jeff. And I smile because it's very sweet. But her heart is dead.”

I didn't dare put my arms around her, I didn't dare touch her.

“The War Office sent Mama the standard we-regret-to-inform-you letter, and his things. He had so little. It was a challenge to him to do without, get by on the barest minimum.”