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 (133 page)

“You have a nice, nice body,” she’d say and get on her toes to kiss him on the cheek.

Usually he’d dodge her, though, with her, he didn’t mind touch because he’d known her all his life, her oddness, her weakness, her sweetness. Warm days she’d sit on the front steps of the building, sucking at her knuckles while watching the weather and waiting for him to come home from school. For a while, her parents had tried to keep her in school, but since she’d distracted other students or simply wandered off, the principal had suggested keeping her home.

“She isn’t capable of learning,” he’d said, infuriating Pearl Bloom who started to read to Fanny every morning for an hour. Though Fanny got fidgety when Pearl tried to get her to look at a book, she liked to touch newspapers, those large soft sheets of paper that smudged when she rubbed her palms across the letters. And she’d listen with fascination to any article or report that had to do with weather. Because weather she knew. Weather she could see and smell and taste every minute of every day. Weather she felt behind her eyes before it happened. That’s why she liked it whenever the weather report in the paper was wrong.

Elated when she’d see Tobias turn the corner, Fanny would leap up from the steps, run toward him, and then skip alongside him all the way into the elevator, telling him about rain or sun or a storm that was coming. It was easy for him to be kind to Fanny because she couldn’t do anything to him. The same with Robert who was hesitant, gentle. Who was not at all like their father. Who brought their father as much disappointment as Tobias did.

Although Robert was at first suspicious of his brother’s sudden attention, he came to count on Tobias over the next years when he was teased about being fat. Other boys would leave him alone when Tobias appeared, sullen and intense as if searching for a reason to fight. Helene was glad that Robert and Tobias were getting along, even if it meant an increase in pranks because Robert was turning into his brother’s willing and accomplished apprentice. Those pranks were harmless, she told herself, maybe even good for Robert, because they took him out of his shyness. Pranks like tearing down Miss Garland’s signs about shaking out umbrellas or not dragging sand into the lobby. Nuisance signs that no one missed.

What she didn’t know was that Tobias was teaching Robert the sharp-sweet taste of danger by standing on the edge of the railroad platform and leaning into the breath of fast approaching trains. She did get complaints however from school where, to the teachers’ dismay, Robert tried to be as noisy as Tobias. Even at the Royal where the two liked to see Sunday matinees and whistle whenever people kissed on the screen. They wanted to be as wicked as John Barrymore in
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
, and although they made fun of Gloria Swanson in
Male and Female
, they both cried over the death of Lillian Gish in
Broken Blossoms
. They pretended to be John Barrymore when they dropped soap into the fountain that bubbled in the lobby of the theater or when they ran up and down the royal-blue carpeted stairs while the ticket matron chased behind them.

The evening of Tobias’ fourteenth birthday, they figured out a way to mess with the floating fire escape. If they climbed down the metal stairs to the second floor where it hung suspended on a pulley, their combined weight caused it to drop. Although their father knew that heavy snowfalls brought the metal structure down, he couldn’t figure out why this was suddenly happening without snow and only on the side of the house that he couldn’t see from the restaurant. But Homer Wilson noticed that Robert became unusually furtive on days when the fire escape came down—
no talent for deception, that one
—and he began to watch the boy and caught
him and his brother early one morning bouncing on the metal landing while the steps descended to the sidewalk.

They accepted his offer of silence eagerly in return for stopping this nonsense, as he called it, and he reported to Stefan that the problem was solved.

“Just needed some tightening,” he muttered.

It was nearly impossible to get an apartment in the
Wasserburg
. People would place their names on the Blaus’ waiting list and take whatever apartment became available, even if it was smaller or larger than what they needed. To live in the
Wasserburg
meant an increase not only in comfort but also in status—and for that it was worth it to make sacrifices. Whenever someone moved out, Stefan gave his current tenants first claim to the vacant apartment before he offered it to the next person on his waiting list. Moves within the building were handled by Homer and Danny Wilson, who padded the walls of the elevator to protect furniture against scratches. Some tenants had lived in as many as five different apartments since the house’s completion fourteen years earlier.

Stefan preferred keeping old tenants because new tenants usually needed educating to the way things were done in his building—like the Perellis who promptly installed a wash line between their fourth-floor kitchen and bathroom windows and hung their personal laundry out there for everyone to see. Over the past years, while Louis Perelli and Rosalie Nussbaum had both been married to other people, they had watched how the Blaus had improved the town just by the example of their
Wasserburg;
and now that Louis was divorced and Rosalie widowed, they’d married, though they were over forty. For the walls of their apartment they’d chosen fern-green paint. While Rosalie had brought her French rococo furniture and a trunk full of expensive men’s boots into the marriage,
her new husband had arrived with the stuffed animals he’d shot on safaris.

The first time Robert saw those animals, he was playing in the courtyard of the
Wasserburg
, floating paper hats in the fountain. When the movers carried those huge, lifeless beasts past him and up the front steps of the building, they were the saddest creatures he’d ever seen, and he longed to restore their lives to them, longed for it so strongly that he knew all at once he would become a veterinarian, keeping animals alive. In the past, grownups had asked him occasionally what he wanted to be once he was grown up, and he’d felt dumb not knowing. But now he knew. Already he could see himself telling Miss Garland and Mr. Evans.
“I want to become a veterinarian.”

But when he tried to tell Tobias about becoming a veterinarian, his brother only asked, “Are the Perellis’ animals bigger than our father?”

“Much bigger.”

Tobias nodded to himself as if he already knew. “So they’re coming back into the house. Did you see any that are two of one kind?”

“No.”

“Still… They’re coming back into the house.”

Even after a full month of marriage, the second Mrs. Perelli would still get startled when coming around a corner and seeing a leopard or a wild boar poised forever to charge at her. But she was pleased that her new husband wore the boots of her dead husband whose clothes she’d given to the Temple a week after his heart failure. His boots, though, she’d kept because they were of excellent quality, and then—as if by miracle—Louis Perelli had turned out to have the same shoe size, certainly a sign that she was meant to marry him.

She did not like it at all when Stefan Blau came to her door to complain about her laundry hanging in the fresh air. “We have a drying room in the cellar. Mrs. Wilson will be glad to show you how it works.”

“But I like the smell of wind on my laundry,” Rosalie Perelli insisted, small eyes glinting.

He took in the rouge on her cheeks, the carefree hair piled atop
her head. “It cheapens the appearance of my building to have laundry hanging from the windows.”

Twice more he came to her door to remind her. After that, he kept checking automatically for a wash line fastened between her windows, and he felt satisfied when he didn’t see one, unaware that Rosalie Perelli still dried her laundry outside every Thursday night, and that she was stubborn enough to stay up late until he’d closed his restaurant, and that she got up early to reel her line in before dawn.

Another tenant who made him uncomfortable was the Braddock girl whose parents let her roam the building and who had a way of smiling at people that just wasn’t right—the kind of smile little girls will give you before their mothers teach them that it’s not proper or safe to smile at men like that. Sometimes Fanny Braddock would saunter into his restaurant, grab a sponge in the kitchen, and start cleaning his counters, going after every speck and glancing up from the side, wanting him to notice how well she was doing. If he wasn’t busy, he would let her. But usually he’d have to send her home. Other times she’d be in the lobby of the
Wasserburg
and slip with him into the elevator, smiling that smile of hers. Ever since he’d heard that she’d kissed old Mr. Evans in the elevator, he’d stayed far away from her. If you didn’t stop her, she’d ride the elevator all day. Up and down. Some days when he had to wait for the elevator, sure enough there’d be Fanny Braddock, greeting him when the door finally folded open on his floor. It was wasteful.

He already had enough other worries about expenses. Despite high rents, the building swallowed most of its revenues in maintenance and improvements. Profits from his restaurant took care of his family’s living expenses. By now he’d set aside enough money to pay Lelia Flynn once she demanded the return of her loan, but she never reminded him, and he wondered if it was out of generosity or because her memory was failing. There certainly were signs of decline: she was forgetting names, appointments. Fortunately Father Albin and Dr. Miles would call him whenever Lelia didn’t arrive for a scheduled visit. He’d drive to her house, and if she didn’t open her door—her hearing was weak—he’d wait outside for a few minutes
before he let himself in with the key she kept under a flowerpot on her porch. He made sure she had enough food in the house, and if he was too busy, he sent Greta or one of his waiters with a covered tray.

One Thursday afternoon Lelia didn’t hear him until he walked into her dining room where she sat at her bare table—no dishes, no food, no tablecloth—stroking her fingers as if struggling to pull off tight gloves.

“I have an idea,” he said. “How would you like to move into the
Wasserburg?”

“I wouldn’t know how to live with so many other people. …” She shook her head. “No. Oh no.”

“You’ll have your own apartment,” he encouraged her.

“It’s not for me, Stefan.” Her gray eyelashes flickered. “No. Thank you.”

“You would only need to talk when you’d feel like it. And you’d be right there with your granddaughter.”

Again, she said, “It’s not for me.” But then she peered at him in a strange, probing way as though waiting for him to say something else.

“What is it?” he asked, though he knew that it had to be about the loan, that she wanted him to bring it up. Instantly, he felt offended. She should trust by now that—regardless how much longer she lived—the money he owed her would ultimately belong to Greta. He was simply preserving it for his daughter. Far better than Lelia could. And if occasionally he had to withdraw from that fund to repair the furnace, say, or modernize the loading platform in back of the garage, that too was ultimately for Greta’s benefit since, one day, after both he and Helene were gone, his children would inherit everything he owned. Things like that were understood without words.

The first Sunday of May 1925, Father Albin climbed the stairs to his pulpit, but instead of preaching, he announced that his urine was bloody and asked his congregation to pray for his kidney stones to dissolve. Embarrassed by a public prayer of such personal detail, the people of Winnipesaukee averted their eyes; yet, the
priest raised his voice as if forcing them and God to look upon him.

“Lord, I stand here before you with these good people who ask your mercy for me. Lord, my urine is red as the sea you parted for Moses.”

Several women rushed their children from the pews and toward the door.

But the priest’s voice followed them. “Lord, I don’t sleep well, and last night, when I lay on the floor and passed those wretched stones you have cursed me with, I cursed you as they traveled down my malehood.”