River's Edge (3 page)

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Authors: Marie Bostwick

BOOK: River's Edge
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For a moment the adults were silent. I could feel the tension among them, and I drew close to Mother, leaning my head against her hip. She looked down at me and smiled. “Peter! Herman!” she remonstrated cheerily. “Have we forgotten? It's Elise's birthday! This is no time to discuss politics. Not when we have a gifts to open and a lovely evening of music planned!”
At Mother's prompting, we all adjourned to the music room. I was finally allowed to open my presents—a charming Victorian dollhouse complete with five rooms of furniture and a family of tiny dolls from Uncle, and from Cousin Peter, a truly exquisite book,
The Children's Encyclopedia of Animals,
filled with lifelike illustrations and information on animals from all over the world. I was delighted.
“Now, my little mouse,” Uncle said, pinching my cheek playfully, “you must give us something in return. A song. Yes?”
I sat down on the piano bench and began, but I had to strike the keys more firmly than usual to be heard over the singing outside. It threw off my timing. For the first time in my life, my fingers stumbled across the keyboard and I had to begin again.
I didn't realize it at the time, of course, but this day was the beginning of the end of my childhood. In a few short years my town, and my nation would be transformed. The map of my world ended a few hundred meters from our house on Alexander Platz, and my country was Mother's bedroom. However, even that private land was soon to change.
Her cough got worse. There were no more parties, not even small ones. She almost never left her room. She liked to hear me play, said the music eased the pain and the fits of coughing more than all the doctor's pills and powders, so Father had the piano moved to her room. I spent my afternoons playing to her. If she was awake she would applaud weakly after each piece, her hands delicate and so pale they might have been carved from ivory, fluttering like the wings of a dove. When she fell asleep, I continued to play, never lifting my foot from the soft pedal, the notes a quiet accompaniment to her dreams. In those early days, when Mother would go through a particularly bad spell, I would play longer and more intensely. Time and time again, she rallied in response, and I came to believe that the music healed her and that as long as I kept playing, Mother would live. For a long time it was true, but one winter she was worse, and nothing I played seemed to help.
Each morning, when I would pull aside the heavy drapes that covered the bedroom windows, she seemed a fraction smaller, her skin a shade paler. She was quietly disappearing, and as the months passed, I grew more and more afraid that one day I would tiptoe into the thick blackness of her darkened bedroom, pull back the curtains to let in the morning sun, and find that she was simply gone.
I convinced Father to allow me to leave school and study at home. In our hearts we both knew the end was coming, and we both tried to deny it. For Father that meant removing himself from the hurt by working longer and longer hours, staying as far away as possible from Mother's little room, a room that smelled like camphor and secrets. For me it meant staying as close to Mother as possible, knowing that while my music urged her not to leave me, she would fight to live as long as she could.
How well I remember those years, sitting on the floor near Mother's bed, studying quietly when she was asleep, reading to her from my textbooks when she was awake, playing music to distract her when the pain was worse. It was a private play in which Mother and I acted out the only important parts, with occasional cameo appearances by Father, doctors, nurses, and housemaids.
Father spoke to me about Mother's illness only once. He called me into his study to say he'd heard of the Schatzalp sanatorium in Davos, Switzerland. It had a wonderful reputation. Many of its patients came home completely cured after months of exposure to the resin-scented pine forests and healthful climate. Mother was awfully sick. She could not sleep at night because the coughing never stopped. Father explained that after Uncle had pulled some strings with a Swiss cousin who knew one of the doctors at Schatzalp, he had been able to secure a bed for Mother.
“She will be leaving for the sanatorium tomorrow,” Father said. “I will take her there myself.”
“No!” I cried, surprising both him and myself with this outburst of protest. I had never contradicted him before. “You can't send her away! Those places never do any good, anyway.”
In the past, Mother had gone to various sanatoriums for short periods of time and always came home improved, but not cured.
“Elise,” Father began gently, “you must understand—”
“She will get better,” I insisted. “You'll see. She always gets better. I am the only one who knows how to take care of her. Mother says that no one but me knows how to make her tea properly. There won't be any pianos there, and no one to play them if there are! You'll kill her!” I shouted. Father stared at me hard, as if he didn't quite recognize me. I took a deep breath and forced myself to speak more calmly.
“Please, Father. Don't send her away. She needs me,” I said pleadingly. “I can make her better. I know I can! I've been working on a new sonata. Mozart's C Minor. Her favorite. It is very difficult, but I'm practicing as hard as I can. Soon I'll have it, and then ...” Father's eyebrows drew together, and he studied me with a mixture of concern and confusion.
I stopped in midsentence, knowing I wouldn't be able to make him understand. As Mother's illness progressed I had forced myself to learn more and more difficult pieces, believing that somehow only the sacrifice of my time and effort would satisfy the greedy god of tuberculosis. So far it had worked. Each time I stretched myself and mastered a more difficult piece, Mother rallied just as she had the day I'd first played for her. Well, not quite like that. She was never as well as that again, but she was still alive. The Mozart was the hardest composition I'd ever attempted, not because of its technical difficulty, though it certainly was a challenge, but because it required an emotional depth that seemed beyond me. Mother loved it for just that reason. “It is so impulsive! So personal!” she would say. “As if he is finally daring to reveal the complexity of his own nature.”
Maybe that was why I didn't care for the piece despite my love of Mozart. My favorite was the third movement of the Sonata in A Major, the “Alla Turca,” which I loved to play as fast as I could, which is to say much too fast. But I didn't care for this piece. The structure was unlike anything else Mozart had written, with unpredictable pauses, and sections that seemed almost improvisational in nature. Try as I might, the notes sounded pedantic and planned when I played them. This was a piece that required drama and intensity and, most of all, maturity. That was something no amount of practice could give me.
In my frustration I felt like tearing the sheet music into a hundred pieces. But I forced myself to keep going, convinced that if I could learn it, Mother would live. I practiced every spare moment and had taken to getting up in the middle of the night to practice silently, my hands suspended over the keyboard but not actually touching it, my fingers stretching silently over an impossibly complex landscape of sharps and flats, in a race against death. I was making progress, but not quickly enough.
“Father, you don't understand. I've almost got it,” I explained urgently. “I just need more time!”
For the first time in my life, I saw tears in Father's eyes. He swallowed hard. “Come here, Elise.” I walked across the carpet to the wing chair where he was seated. He pulled me onto his lap, a thing he had never done before. “You have done a wonderful job caring for your mother. A wonderful job,” he repeated. “But she is very sick, and she is getting worse. You must be brave. This isn't like the other times, Elise. It is much worse. There is nothing more you can do. Schatzalp is the only chance we have. If she doesn't go, she will certainly die.”
I sat on Father's lap, blinking back my tears just as he had. I knew he was telling me the truth. I couldn't save her. I was not good enough. I had not practiced hard enough, and the race was lost. It was my fault. Everything in me wanted to lean into Father's broad chest and sob, but I couldn't. I didn't want Father to know how I had failed us. I had to be brave so no one would ever know. Like Father. “All right,” I whispered my reluctant assent.
“There's a good girl,” Father said, patting me awkwardly on the back. “Run upstairs now, and help Mother to get ready. You will know exactly what she needs. If you leave it to the maid, who knows what she will pack?”
I slid off Father's lap and walked to the door. Turning back to inquire what time the train was to leave, I saw him sitting with his head buried in his hands, his shoulders jerking silently as he fought to suppress his grief. I wanted to run to him, to climb back into his lap and cry with him, to call him
Vati
—Daddy—the way other little girls addressed their fathers, to share our fears and find solace in bearing the unbearable together, but I couldn't bring myself to do these things. I did not know him well enough. I swallowed my questions and climbed the stairs alone to Mother's room. Our moment of intimacy passed.
The next day I stood on the railway platform and waved good-bye to Mother and Father as the train pulled out of the station. I could see Mother's pale hand waving farewell, but her face was obscured by steam from the locomotive.
Children weren't allowed to go to Schatzalp. Father went to see her occasionally, but his visits were short. He never said much about them except that he was sure she was getting better, or at least no worse. Mother wrote me letters weekly, at first in her own hand, describing the lovely mountain scenery, or the funny doctor whose eyebrows were so thick they grew into one straight line that raised up and down like a curtain when he was confused or irritated; or the way the nurses would wheel all the patients out into the afternoon sun, wrapping them so tightly in layers of blankets that they couldn't move their arms but just lay there like rows of pink and white sausages baking in the sun. Later she began dictating her letters to a nurse. They still came as regularly as before, but they weren't as personal. She always asked how I was, assured me that the alpine air was doing her a world of good and she was growing stronger every day. It wasn't true. She died at the Schatzalp sanatorium in the spring—May 14th, 1938.
Father went to Switzerland alone to “see to the arrangements.” The night he returned, he drank too much at dinner and told me about his trip.
“The director met me at the door with a sad face and a bill. He said he had taken the liberty of contacting a minister who would meet me later that afternoon so we could discuss the funeral arrangements. Sanctimonious little priss,” Papa mumbled before draining his glass and pouring himself another.
“I told him that wouldn't be necessary. No ambassadors of God were wanted—thank you just the same. If there is a God—which I think, given our recent experiences, there is much reason to doubt—” Father said in a voice slurred by wine and sarcasm, “if there is a God, He certainly didn't help me when Lale was alive. I have no intention of praying to Him now that she is dead. There will be no funeral. A simple burial will do. There is no point in doing more.”
He picked up the glass and took another drink, drawing the liquor into himself with greedy gulps like a man desperate to quench an unquenchable thirst. The man sitting in front of me was nothing like my fastidious, tight-buttoned father, and yet there he was, sitting in Father's chair, wearing his clothes, speaking in Father's voice. I asked permission to be excused and go to bed. He looked up at me with a surprised expression, as though he suddenly realized that I was in the room and how this all must look to me. His eyes softened, and for a moment I thought he was about to apologize. Instead he nodded his head once, granting my request. I placed my napkin next to my nearly untouched plate and pushed my chair back from the table.
“She was very beautiful,” Papa said as I was leaving. “She was everything to me, Elise, but I never knew how to tell her so. You are very like her. Very like her.”
I waited for him to say more. To cry. To hold me close, but he didn't. He couldn't, and neither could I.
“Good night, Father.”
“Good night.”
At breakfast the next morning, Father sat in his usual chair, wearing his uniform with the knife-edged crease in the trousers and drinking strong black coffee while he read a report. I ate my breakfast rolls in silence, every now and then tearing a piece off a roll and dipping it into my cup of hot chocolate. Everything was exactly as it had been before. It was easy to imagine that nothing had changed at all—that Mother was upstairs in her room still asleep and Father and I were eating breakfast alone in the silent dining room just as we had for so many months before. But we knew the truth. Mother was gone, and she would never come back. We didn't speak of her, but there was nothing unusual in that. There were so many things we did not speak of. It had been that way for such a long time.
The clock on the hall struck half past seven. Father gathered together the loose papers and stacked them neatly before taking a last sip of his coffee. “The car will be waiting. I must go. Frau Finkel is coming later to help you with your lessons.” He paused and wrinkled his brow. “I suppose we must enroll you in a proper school again next term. There's no reason for you to stay home anymore. Don't wait for me at dinner, Elise. There is so much I must catch up on. So much time lost.”

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