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 (109 page)

When it was time, he came to her door and did what he had promised her, though she had not believed him, offer her the choice of any apartment—
any, except his own
—in his
Wasserburg
, though it must have been obvious to him that she could only afford the least expensive one. Still, he led her through every single room in his vast building, adjusting his pace to hers—I
notice that, things like that—
his widower’s face almost pleased when she told him how splendid it all was. Imagine, a button inside each apartment to let people in from the outside. And another button recessed in the parquet floor where her table would stand so that with the touch of one foot, one toe even, she could summon a maid. Imagine. Her own flush toilet
instead of a privy behind the house. Ceiling lamps that could be turned on with one switch.

On the day she moved into her small apartment on the main floor across from the brass mailboxes and the elevator, Stefan Blau told her,
“Willkommen,”
and explained it was a German word to greet esteemed guests. What Miss Garland had always liked was to watch others, and her apartment was ideal for that because her windows opened to the courtyard and street. And to think that the street view was less expensive than the water view, that she was saving money by choosing what she preferred.

Inside her linen closet, she stashed her canning jars with cloudy contents, sacks of flour, and bottles of maple syrup she’d been hoarding for years in anticipation of emergencies. For her living room she ordered the most luxurious furniture you could buy in Winnipesaukee; but in the bedroom she kept her sagging bed and scuffed dresser, concealed behind the door along with her shame at having earned her money by working. All her life, Miss Garland had yearned to be married, supported by a husband who worshiped her, and after moving into Stefan Blau’s
Wasserburg
, she began to invent her past as though she had settled in a different country where no one knew her history. She would hint at an inheritance, at a young fiancé who had died tragically four decades ago. And because she cherished the idea of herself living in a building this magnificent, she rarely left it, except to watch it from outside while she sat on the bench that the German carpenter had bolted to the end of the dock, her back to the lake and the tourist cottages on the islands and the lower slopes of the mountains.

Harsh work had catapulted her from being a girl of fifteen to being a woman of sixty-five—nothing in between for her—but now that she had leisure for the first time in half a century, she could feel herself growing younger as if her life had opted to reverse itself. Without checking in mirrors, she could tell her body was getting nimbler. She read articles in
Ladies’ Home Journal
on how to decorate elegantly on a small budget, scanned the advertisements in
The Saturday Evening Post
, already knowing she wouldn’t buy any of those wares. Some days she took three baths. After a lifetime of
carrying a pitcher of water to her bedroom and washing herself from a basin or, occasionally, crouched in a metal tub, she loved turning on the faucet and watching an entire white bathtub fill up, a bathtub so long that even when she lay stretched in it, her toes could not touch its other end. And when she was clean, she could let it all run down the sink instead of pouring out slop water. Already, her hands were softer, and the yellow cracks beneath her feet had healed. To make sure her feet would stay like that, she sewed three pairs of soft black felt slippers and embroidered them with hummingbirds.

Inventing a fiancé wasn’t all that different from what she had done since childhood—make up what she longed for—and as her history as a woman who had almost married grew into a lavish tapestry, it covered the worn cloth of her past, except for moments when strands of light dropped through the gaps between the stitches and illuminated fragments of her barren years. She’d been raised in a small, remote house where her mother bred and sold cocker spaniels, and her father left every morning on his bicycle to work at the shoe factory. Sometimes he talked about looking for other work, but since the tools he worked with at the factory didn’t belong to him, he didn’t think he could afford to leave there. Besides, he hadn’t been trained for any other work. “Make sure you get skills and tools of your own,” he’d tell his small daughter, who would not play with other children until she’d started school. The few visitors who came to the house were customers who fussed over her mother’s puppies. How she wished they’d buy every single one of those dogs that followed her all day. If she ran from them, they’d chase her, brown-and-white ears flopping, tiny needle teeth nipping at her ankles. “Scram,” she would holler, “scram scram scram,” flailing at them with her pinafore. One day behind the house she kicked one of them away, and when it didn’t move, she nudged it behind the lilac bush by the back steps and ran inside. For several days she didn’t use the back steps, and when she finally looked behind the lilacs, the puppy was still lying there. “Here, puppy, puppy. …” She bent to pick it up. “Wake up, puppy. Wake up.” In her hands it felt light, curiously light, and when she turned
it around, it had a hole in its white-and-brown belly that was filled with white rice.
Rice?
And then the rice moved.

Feet smooth in her felt slippers, Miss Garland would sit by her window, her good suit jacket over a housedress, not ashamed to be noticed by people who passed by the
Wasserburg
, and if she kept her door half open, she could also see everyone who came to the mailboxes. She was intrigued and appalled by Nate Bloom, the most dazzling of the tenants, who had a telephone and was divorced. His mustache was so thin it looked painted on. As president of the local factory that built railroad cars, he had his own railroad car that he could hook to the Boston and Maine Railroad. Though Miss Garland had only seen it from outside, she’d heard it had red velvet seats and mahogany tables bolted down to the floor, mahogany trim around the windows, and a separate compartment with a large bed. The railroad car was stocked with the best liquors, and Mr. Bloom gave extravagant parties while the train traveled from one place to another. Sometimes he’d order as many as fifty dinners from Stefan Blau’s restaurant, and Miss Garland would see waiters in tuxedos leave the
Cadeau du Lac
to deliver their covered trays to the railroad station. From one of the waiters she knew that Nate Bloom particularly liked Stefan’s
rognons
, prepared in a wine-and-mustard sauce, and the
filet de sole
served with wine-soaked prunes.

Though Nate Bloom invited Stefan Blau on several of his journeys, Stefan declined, just as he declined all invitations, except those from his dead wives’ parents. He was grateful to them for all they did for Greta and Tobias, but even with the help of a nursemaid, he knew that wasn’t enough. Eventually, he would need to find a mother for them. But he postponed thinking about that by working late every evening. Besides, the people of Winnipesaukee—though they praised his devotion to his children—kept their daughters of marriageable age away from him. Often he’d roam the hallways of his apartment house after the restaurant closed, and he’d touch the brass crowns of the fire extinguishers in the alcoves, the wroughtiron sconces—much in the way his granddaughter, Emma, would touch them many years later.

Nate Bloom was persistent—not just with his invitations, but even more so in wanting to rent the largest apartment in the building, the one where Stefan lived with his children. Though Stefan was clear in his refusal, Nate Bloom would approach him about it every time he saw him in the elevator until Stefan offered to rent him two apartments on the fifth floor and combine them by breaking through the connecting wall with an arch.

He hired Homer and Irene Wilson, a married couple who used to manage a building in Florida and came with the best of references. Though Homer Wilson was easygoing and only in his thirties, his tanned skin was already creased across his neck and forehead. His wife had the flat build of a boy, and her mouth was set in an eager but dissatisfied expression as if she worried that whatever she did was not enough. Her first day on the job, she caught Stefan by the front door and confided that she and her husband had moved to Winnipesaukee to live close to the child they were about to inherit.

“You see, my Homer’s sister, she’s been ill with lung problems ever since she left Orlando with some fellow and took Danny along, that’s her son, and we’re first in line to adopt him since he’s got no father, never had, at least not one who’d stay long enough to give him his name on a certificate, so Danny’s last name is already Wilson which means he won’t even have to change his name once he’s ours, once his mother dies, that is just so you know he’ll be living with us.”

Stefan blinked. “Of course.”

She laid one hand on his sleeve. “You of all people know what a tragedy that is for a child, Mr. Blau, losing a mother and—”

“I need to get to my restaurant.”

“He’s eleven, our Danny is, born a month after our girl, but she only lived five hours, that’s all, and it broke my heart all over again when Danny’s mother took off with him like that two years ago, and for what, I ask you, to come north and end up working at a factory that makes hosiery, dragging all of us up north, never mind that Homer has a hard time getting used to the cold, and the time, I tell you the time it took us to look for work that’s right for both of us, that’s why we’re so glad you hired us, well, at least Homer’s
sister did that much for us, wrote to us about your building when it was going up so that we—”

“I’m sorry about your daughter.”

“Homer and me, we can’t have no more.”

As religious as her husband was irreverent, Mrs. Wilson wavered between praying for her sister-in-law’s recovery and her swift death. The boy would visit on weekends, lanky and sullen, and Mrs. Wilson would cry Sunday evenings when she’d surrender him to his rightful mother.

From her apartment in the basement, she supervised four maids who lived in a suite across the hall from her, ready to be summoned by the tenants. All four were young, local girls who moved about the house in crisp, gray dresses and white aprons that never seemed to get soiled, and who rotated their one day off so that there always would be at least three of them. They liked Miss Garland because she never talked down to them and did her own housework, and they looked forward to being called to her apartment because it meant a rest. Unlike some tenants, Miss Garland remembered their names, and after urging Birdie or Heather or Gladys or Stella to sit, she’d brew a pot of strong tea, knowing exactly how much sugar, milk, or lemon each of them liked. Along with her tea she’d offer stories about her dead fiancé and delicious peanut brittle that she made every Saturday. In return, the maids brought her gossip from other apartments: Mr. Bloom, so wasteful with his money, saved slivers of old soap in a canning jar by his bathroom sink; Mr. Blau—God bless him—had not been with a woman since his last wife died; Mrs. Wilson kept a chart in her closet and marked down her sister-in-law’s visits to the hospital; and Mr. Bell, that retired lawyer from New York, cooked on a hot plate that sat on top of his four-burner stove.

If the maids visited for too long, Mrs. Wilson would come looking for them. She worked much harder than Stefan expected her to: not only did she keep the hallways clean, but she even scrubbed the floors of the incinerator rooms; and she demanded that same kind of exertion from the maids and her husband, who’d shrug and let her do most of the talking. Usually she’d find him puttering around
the garage that was separated from the basement by a fire door. His jobs included stoking the furnace and washing the tenants’ cars. He also had a knack for fixing them. Though only a few had automobiles, Stefan figured most would within a few years, and he had planned the garage large enough for twenty stalls. Already, over half a million people in America owned cars—powered by steam, gasoline, or electricity—and that number would likely triple in another decade.

Each time he thought of making a payment to Elizabeth’s parents, he reasoned with himself that the loan could wait till everything was completed. He expanded his restaurant to include the second floor where he used to live. From Boston, he brought in a designer of gardens and, on the flat roof of the
Wasserburg’s
garage, had him lay out a long, symmetrical space with lawns and hedges, flower beds and a stone bench, a swing set and a sandbox where his and the tenants’ children could play.

Once, in the bleak morning hours, after Stefan had paced through the house, he entered the rooms of his children, and when he found them both asleep as of course they would be at that time, it struck him as such incredible faith—sleeping here like that—faith in him, that he was overwhelmed by the sum of their future needs. He felt as though he were the only person awake in the town, perhaps even the world, and he suddenly knew his next wife would be here entirely for his children’s sake—not his; that he would not kill another woman with his seed.

And that’s when he thought of Helene Montag.