A House of Tailors (9 page)

twenty-one

Blossoms of ice coated the air shaft window, and the first snow had settled in the streets. My hands were chapped and cracked from hanging wash on the roof and then taking it down, dry but stiff and crackling with frost. I made sure that I was the one to do that chore; Barbara's time was coming soon. Weeks, maybe, or even days.

Excitement was everywhere. Christmas was only days away.

Whenever Maria slept, I worked on her doll. Johann had found a small porcelain head for me, and I had fashioned a soft cloth body for it.

Every spare moment, I cut tiny petticoats and dresses with aprons to match for that doll. I remembered when I was small Mama had given me a doll with clothes in a small wooden trunk.

One morning I reached behind the torn lining in the trunk for a bit of my precious money and took myself down to A. T. Stewart's to buy a few feathers, a yard of crimson ribbon, buckram, and felt.

The money would double itself, triple itself. I had just gotten orders for three hats to be delivered two days before Christmas, the loveliest to Mrs. Koch, of course.

In the evenings Barbara and I baked Christmas cookies that we formed into wreaths and snowmen. I teased Barbara, saying she was like one of those plump little snowmen herself with her round cheeks and her apron tight around her middle, smelling as always of the cinnamon she carried in her pocket. How lovely she looked standing there laughing, her hands covered with flour.

I couldn't think about that, though; I couldn't think about Barbara's needing me. By next Christmas I'd be home. If only I could wrap all this up and take it home with me: the steamy kitchen and its trays of cookies, Barbara handing me one to try, Maria on the floor banging her shoe so loudly and grinning up at me, pleased with herself.

“One day,” Barbara said, reaching out to touch my arm, a dusting of flour on her chin, “we'll fill your trunk with sheets and pillowcases, and petticoats with edgings that we'll crochet, and . . .”

“Foolishness,” the Uncle said, but I could almost see the curve of his mouth as he smiled under his beard.

“In the meantime,” Barbara said, “it will be Maria's second Christmas. Dina and I will bake fruitcakes, and we'll light the rooms with candles everywhere.”

Next Christmas, flickering candles in all the windows in Breisach, the lights reflected in the river.

And then at last the holiday was on us. Mrs. Koch sent an armful of evergreen branches that had been cut for her in Lake Placid to put on our mantel. Barbara and I took deep breaths. “It smells like home,” she told me, taking my hand and doing a little dance down the hall with Maria following us, grabbing us by the skirts until Barbara lifted her and danced with her.

On Christmas morning, we all went to church, walking slowly because Barbara tired easily now. I looked at the women's hats and bent my head, telling myself not to be so vain. But none of the hats was as pretty as the three I had made for Mrs. Koch and her friends. And none was as lovely as the one Barbara wore now, with the leftover feathers and crimson ribbon, the felt brim dipping low over her forehead.

I was conscious of Johann and his family sitting in the pew directly in back of us. I sat up straight, glad I had taken time to sweep my hair back with clips. I noticed that Johann had a strong deep voice when we sang the hymns and had to keep telling myself to pay attention to the priest.

I smiled, thinking about the lovely days when we walked through the park and the cold ones when we sat in the bakery. He often talked about the promise his father had made to set him up in a corner of their men's shop. “One day I'll make a key just for you, Dina,” he said. “The only one like it.”

We laughed over this language we were learning and tried to outdo each other with strange-sounding words.

“Do you know what
Schlamm
is in English?” he asked.

“Ha, of course. It's
muddah
.”

He laughed. “Say
mud
. No
ah
.”

“I like it better with the
ah,
” I said.

We leaned forward, our heads together. “Muffin. Puff pastry,” he whispered.

“Yes, puff!” Wonderful on the lips.

We'd leave each other smiling, marking the time until we saw each other again, calling back: “Sunrise, sofa . . .”

Then it was Christmas night. I opened my trunk and tucked away the blue striped scarf Barbara had knitted for me, and the small sewing wife with its needles and pins and silver thimble from the Uncle. I stopped to look at the candles on the mantel and the windowsill. In the dim light, everything glowed. Shadows patterned the walls and the ceiling. What a beautiful day it had been. Dinner with everyone around the table, and Aunt Ida telling us that Peder had written saying that next year they would surely be together.

I unbuttoned my shoes and eased out of them, then suddenly remembered the wash. I had run up to hang it on the roof yesterday. Another night up there and everything, chemises, nightgowns, diapers, would be covered with soot . . . gray forever. “I'm just going to bring in the diapers,” I called in to the kitchen.

“Oh, Dina,” Barbara began. “Never mind. It's late.”

I didn't answer. I let myself out of the apartment, not bothering to put my shoes back on, holding the wash basket against my hip, and ran up the stairs to the roof on tiptoe, pushing open the door and hearing the wind banging it shut behind me.

I glanced at the sky, which was filled with stars and a dusty moon, and took a step forward in the wind. In front of me, one of the diapers blew off the line and sailed off the roof just ahead of my grasping fingers.

Shifting from foot to foot on the icy rooftop, I looked down over the edge to see the white square gently fly across the street like a kite and land on a step.

I hadn't bothered to put on my coat, either, so I was cold standing there on the windy roof, brushing my hair out of my eyes, but the sky was so beautiful I was in no hurry to go back to the apartment.

Below, people still hurried along dressed in festive clothes. A few women wore old-fashioned hoops that sailed up in front as the wind caught them. I leaned against the wall, sheltering myself from the wind, peeking down at them and at the candles that glowed in the windows across the way.

People were pointing at something, perhaps at our building, but I couldn't see what it was. A Christmas tree covered with small candles, or the wreath on the door?

I remembered a blustery afternoon hurrying along the Schwartz Street in Breisach, opposite the blacksmith's shop. It had been so cold I had crossed over and walked through his open doors to gather warmth from his enormous fire. Standing near his forge, watching him pump the fire with his bellows, I had breathed in the smoky odor that surrounded him.

Why was I thinking of that now? The cold, but something else. The smell of the smoke from his fire. I could smell it here, too. Wisps of it came from every chimney.

Taking my time, I began to pull the wash off the line, dropping it and the clothespins into the basket: Maria's small stockings, her slips, her nightgowns, not much bigger than the clothes of the doll she had loved when I gave them to her.

I had a secret. Under my shirtwaist was a key on a chain. It was slim and lovely, with the tiniest red stone in the center. Johann had slipped it to me after church, unwrapped.
“Merry Christmas,”
he had whispered.

“Merry Christmas,”
I had whispered back, proud that I knew the words. I had clutched the key so tightly on the way home that it had left marks in the palm of my hand.

If the Uncle ever found out, he'd tell me to give it back. I rubbed my feet against each other in my woolen stockings, thinking Mama would have a fit that I had accepted anything from a boy.

I finished with the wash at last and took one more look over the edge of the roof. More people had stopped, a knot of them huddled on the corner, the wind blowing through them so they had to hold their hats and skirts down.

Something felt wrong to me, and I remembered the blacksmith again. Strange; I could still smell his great forge and the smoke that swirled around it.

I spun around on the roof. Was that it? Smoke? The licorice smell of fire? And then I saw them, curls of gray coming from under the metal door.

I was instantly seized with fear. Through my mind went the memory of the small mice that sometimes scurried along the riverbank at home, their eyes dark with terror when they saw me. Once I had been so close to one that for a second, the small creature had been unable to move. I had stood still, too, and then he had darted first one way and then another to escape the huge creature in front of him.

I was doing the same thing.

twenty-two

I began to move, first back toward the door, feeling the heat of it against my hand. Too hot to open. How had this happened so quickly?

I went one way and then the other along the edge of the roof. Had the air shaft window been open, I could have let myself down that one story. But someone down below saw me. Face upturned, he cupped his hands against his mouth. “Don't go back into the building,” he called. “Candles in the first-floor apartment caught fire. It's a powder keg now. Use the side stairs.”

Behind me, the door burst open with a great roar and flames shot across the roof, sending fire to lick the tar and ignite the wash in the basket.

My heart pounded in my chest and in my ears as I scrambled over the hot tar to the stairs with the black wrought-iron railing that snaked its way down the side of the building. Terrified of the height, but more afraid of the fire, I threw myself over the side of the wall and onto the steps. They moved with me, the metal warm against my stockinged feet. I could hear someone screaming and realized the sounds were coming from my own mouth.

But then I had no breath left. What came into my lungs was searing heat, and I flew down that uneven stairway, jumping the last few feet into the arms of that kind man who had told me the way down.

I ran toward the group of people who were gathered on the corner under the streetlight. Kristel, the girl from the apartment below ours, sat on the ground holding two of her brothers by the hand, her hair snarled and down to her waist, her legs bare, her shoes unbuckled on her feet. Her mother was there, too, her shawl over her head; her hands, pressed against her cheeks, were trembling. Their faces were black with soot. The woman from the first-floor apartment sat in the filthy street, hunched over, rocking back and forth, dazed. “My fault,” she said. “The candles were too close to the curtains. My fault.”

My hand went to my mouth. I turned, twirling in the windy street, looking for Maria and Barbara and the Uncle. Not there. Still in the house, then.

In front of me was the door to the building. I reached down.
“Please,”
I said, and took Kristel's shoes off her feet. “I have to . . .” I pointed. “My family . . .”

My family.
It was the first time I had thought of them that way.

Kristel's head was on her raised knees, her hair covering most of her skirt. “What are you doing?” she asked.

I crushed my feet into the shoes, which were much too small, wondering if I could get through the front door, hearing the sound of bells in the distance—not church bells, perhaps a fire engine coming with water.

I was through the door in an instant, looking up at the stairway, which seemed to be covered in a dense fog, like the bridge over my river on an early spring morning. But this narrow bridge that led upstairs had tongues of fire running along the banister and across the top two steps.

I put my hand in the band of my skirt, not bothering to unbutton it, but pushing out as hard as I could so the buttons popped. . . . Mama's voice was in my head:
Dina, always you make the buttonholes too wide
.

I stepped out of the skirt and the petticoat Barbara had spent hours trimming, two pools of fabric to burn on the bottom step.

I saw Mama's face.
What will people think?

I took the stairs two at a time. My head felt fuzzy now. I was coughing, trying to find breath.

By the time I reached the top step of the first floor, I could feel the heat through Kristel's shoes and on my legs. And as the banister turned onto the second floor, through the smoke, I could see Barbara, almost a shadow, and behind her, guiding her with one hand and holding Maria in his other arm, was the Uncle. The bottom of Maria's blanket was smoldering.

Steps above me, he leaned over the banister and put the baby into my arms.

I turned, went down the steps, down, toward the door. Maria was still sleeping, had slept through all of this; otherwise why would her eyes be closed, and why would she be so still?

I reached the door with a man guiding me, such a large man, and I remembered vaguely that I had seen him sitting on the steps next door during the summer. Then I sank down into the street with the baby in my arms.

A voice that sounded like Mama's said, “Did you see that? Did you see what she did?”

And I realized she was talking about me.

twenty-three

In my dream I swam in the river, diving deep into the water, sounds echoing around me, a school of fish and a ship gliding past above me, and then someone moaning. Was it Barbara? It seemed that Aunt Ida was saying, “Ah, I know, I know.”

I was alone in Aunt Ida's kitchen, I thought. But the blur of water covered me and I floated, eyes closed.

Later I heard another voice. “Gone. Everything gone.”

It seemed as if I were in a tunnel now, with voices bouncing off one wall and onto another.

A baby was crying. Was it Maria? But this sound was the sound of a newborn child, high and weak.

I opened my eyes and felt with my hands under the thin blanket. My own clothes were gone. I was wearing a huge cotton nightgown.

And how hard the bed had become, reminding me of the hot nights I had slept on the roof upstairs. Then something tugged at my mind. The roof. What had the blacksmith been doing on the roof? How did he breathe in that forge of his?

I shook my head. I was dreaming, half asleep, half awake. And then I remembered. The fire.

I tried to sit up, but it was hard to move, hard to breathe.

“You've slept most of the night and most of the day,” Aunt Ida said.

I turned my head. I could see a corner of the parlor, two stippled walls, two chairs.

“The other way, Dina,” Aunt Ida said. “Look here.”

I turned back to see her sitting there and realized I was on the floor with a blanket folded underneath me. “Barbara?” I asked.

“In the bedroom.”

I ran my tongue over my lips.

“She's had a baby, Dina, a boy.”

I struggled to sit up, feeling a knocking in my head and a sudden surge of sickness coming up from my stomach. “Is everything all right?”

“A fine baby,” she said. “Ernest, after your grandfather. And Maria is in the kitchen with Lucas. She's all right, too, not a burn, not a mark.”

Alive, then; all of us alive. I raised my hand to my head, feeling the pain in my fingers, seeing the strips of cloth that covered my arm from wrist to elbow.

“It's not a bad burn,” she said, “but still, I've covered it with lard.”

I nodded, and before I was even sure I was thirsty, she was off the chair and bending over me, holding my head up so that I could sip from a cup of cool water. I swished it around in my mouth. Had I ever tasted anything so good?

I gathered the blanket around me and went to stand at the bedroom door to see baby Ernest. He had a small fuzz of hair on his head, and his face was red from the effort of crying, waving his fists in the air.

I went into the room to lean over him, and put my mouth on his forehead, the skin wrinkled and softer than anything I'd ever felt before. I touched his chin, his shoulders, his fists, and it seemed as if he stared up at me, knowing who I was. And I knew who he was, all of us in our family, my grandparents, my mother, dear Papa. I felt as if I'd never loved anyone so much.

Next to him, Barbara smiled at me, her eyes filling, too. I watched them: tears drying on Barbara's cheeks, the baby's fists relaxing and falling to his chest. And in my mind I heard Barbara's voice again,
Everything gone
.

Not everything.

But I thought then of my suitcase with the pink lining, the money for home, my clothes, even my shoes. Every trace of home, so many things Katharina and Mama had made for me.

And what about the Uncle's fabric? The pile of trousers for the man at the shop? Would we not have to pay for them? I tried to get the words out. “Cloth” was all I could manage. And then I had an even worse thought: what had happened to the sewing machine, the black beetle?

“Sleep,” Aunt Ida said. “We will worry later.”

How strange—sun was streaming in the dusty window. It was daytime. I went back to the parlor dragging my blanket. I was going to sleep as if night had just begun.

Ernest was crying again; the cry wove itself into my dreams, and Maria's coughing, as well. When I woke again, at last, it was afternoon. It had begun to snow. A soft gray light filtered through the window. I sat up to see the three of them sleeping in the bed in the corner. Barbara was in the middle, her arms around Maria and the baby.

On the floor next to me was a neatly folded pile of clothes. Underwear, a waist and skirt, wool stockings, and even a pair of worn shoes.

I put everything on quietly, wondering what had happened to Kristel's shoes.

“Thank you for the clothing,” I said to Aunt Ida when I reached the kitchen, “but where . . .”

“Mine,” she said. “Are you awake? Feeling better?” She waved her hand. “A stitch here and there, a snip of the scissors this morning. You are just half my size.” She smiled. “The size of the shoes is . . .”

“Fine,” I said. I leaned over to give her a kiss. “I want to go back and see the apartment.”

“Don't do that, Dina,” she said with a quick shake of her head. “Let it be.”

My eyes were brimming with the thought of the apartment on Christmas evening, filled with candles, soft in that light. “I have to,” I said, and she patted my shoulder with her warm hand, sighing. “That's what Lucas said.”

I let myself out the door and went down the stairs. Outside, the flakes were large, covering everything: the lights had small caps, and the steps clean new pillows of snow. I turned the corner, hurrying now.

When I reached our street, I could see there were gaping holes where windows had been, and great patches of black covered the building. In front of me were piles of wood and rubble.

Others had had the same idea I did. People picked through the charred remnants on the first floor, people who hadn't even lived there.

I went inside toward the stairs, wondering if they would hold me. Treads were missing, and the banister looped over the steps. I looked up, fingering the sides of my skirt, and behind me someone said, “Don't try it, miss.”

But suppose something was left? Something I could bring Barbara or Maria.

And underneath it all I was thinking of the money tucked behind the lining of my trunk. Suppose that heavy wood had withstood the fire? Suppose I could put my fingers inside and find my money, neatly folded?

Home.

Bent almost double under a beam that seesawed over the banister, I started up. Smoke still swirled on the high ceilings, and everything was warm to the touch. I pulled my skirt higher, and holding on to the side of the wall rather than the banister, I eased my way from one step to another, feeling my own unsteadiness and the unsteadiness of the stairs themselves.

I stopped where the Uncle had handed Maria down to me and saw that a small piece of her blanket had caught in the banister, blackened, almost like paper. No one would have recognized it as the soft pink shawl Barbara had knitted, leaning over in the dim light in the evenings.

The next flights were easier, not that they were in better condition, but I knew now how to use my shoulder against the wall, the hand that wasn't burned against the tread itself. Like a small spider I went up.

When I reached the top, I saw our door half open. The rug with its poor bare spot under the machine had burned away. But the machine was there, a melted ruin, and so was the Uncle. He was leaning over it, crying.

The Uncle. Crying.

I took a step backward, and another, and rounded the top step so he wouldn't know I was there. But in my haste I touched something, the edge of the banister, perhaps, and one of the posts detached, falling through the opening to the next floor, and the next, hitting everything as it went, making a tremendous clatter, raising smoke and dust, and causing someone below to call, “All right up there?”

The Uncle turned as I went toward him, staring at me, surprised, his eyes red, but I might not have known he was crying if I hadn't seen it.

“What are you doing here?” His voice was shaky. “You climbed the stairs? What is the matter with you?” He was like the Prussians: attack, attack. Always I had to defend myself.

I shook my head, running my hands over the machine.

“Foolish,” he said, as if he hadn't done the same thing, maneuvered those stairs to see.

My mouth was dry. “My money, all in the trunk.”

I walked past him, glancing in at the kitchen. Bags had sprung open, and flour and sugar were mixed together, gray and grainy on the floor.

And then my own closet bedroom: the mattress sagging and dark, the trunk closed in front of it, covered with soot and patches of black, and pitted in spots.

I sank down on the floor to run my hands over the metal strips, and opened the trunk to see nothing: clothes gone, lining gone, money gone, all of it just a layer of ash on the bottom.

I knew I'd never go home. Never see the house in Breisach, or my family. Never.

Everything gone.

I rested my head on my knees. This was the worst moment of my life, worse than the soldiers at the river that day, worse than saying goodbye, worse than the terrible trip with the storm and my terrified prayer that I'd never eat again on Good Friday if only we survived.

I don't know how long I crouched there, but then I remembered the Uncle. I went back to stand in the hallway, seeing that the machine belts had burned and snapped, and the piles of trousers and fabric were completely gone, as if they had never existed. Like my clothing. Like the lining and my money.

“Will you have to pay the man for the trousers?” I asked slowly. Even talking seemed an effort.

He didn't answer. He was down on his knees now, his head tilted, trying to see if he could repair it.

Of course he'd have to pay for the trousers.

And the fabric. The fabric that had belonged to him, that would start his business; that terrible scratchy wool, the lengths of cotton. I remembered that I had taken enough for a dress for myself without thanking him. I had never paid him back for it.

I bent down next to him. It was no use. The sewing machine that I had hated was gone along with everything else.

“I was going to go home,” I said, hardly realizing I was saying it aloud.

We left an hour later, with no energy to talk, but the mailman came running after us waving a letter from Katharina. I knew it would be her Christmas greetings. How strange. Christmas seemed such a long time ago.

1 November 1871

My dear Dina,

How busy we are you can imagine, but Friedrich and Franz are helping greatly. Everyone is thinking about winter and the holidays coming. I think that by the time you receive this it will be Christmas, so I send you the happiest of Christmas greetings.

At last that terrible soldier has gone. Krist spoke to him and says he will never come back.

I, too, am thinking I might have a wonderful surprise. It is too early to tell yet, but Krist and I are hoping that we will have an announcement to make very soon.

Much love,
Katharina

Happy Christmas, dear Dina.

Friedrich and Franz send kisses, and I also.

Love,
Mama