Hausfrau (28 page)

Doktor Messerli softened. “Let’s work on this, Anna. Just this. That will be enough. You move like a refugee in a war ghetto when, truly, you have every Allied power at your command. There is no reason to live like this.” Anna nodded. There wasn’t. “A successful life. Anna. I want you to succeed.”

In Anna’s half-attentive state she heard “secede.”

P
OLLY
J
EAN
’
S FIRST BIRTHDAY FELL ON
N
OVEMBER 29
,
A
Thursday. Anna had no interest in celebrating it. All motions toward merriment seemed obscene. They’d had small fêtes on the occasions of the boys’ first birthdays. Simple dinners, then cake with family. It was the cake that Anna cared about. It was tradition: the birthday child, king of his high chair, his hands elbow deep in a cake he didn’t have to share with anyone, icing in his hair, crumbs up his nose, and Anna taking pictures. That’s what she was ultimately after, the pictures. Bruno found the custom ridiculous.
It’s messy and a waste of cake,
he said. Nevertheless somewhere in the attic was a photo album no one looked at anymore and inside it, snapshots of each of the boys, their entire faces smeared black with chocolate frosting.

It was Ursula who came to Anna a week before Polly’s birthday. She’d be happy to bake the cake, she said, and volunteered to have the party at her house. It was a warmhearted offer. Anna’s face collapsed under the sympathy of Ursula’s suggestion, but she said nothing. Ursula backed quietly out of the room and left Anna alone for the rest of the afternoon.

Ursula, like Bruno, took a sensible approach to grief. She threw herself into knitting and volunteered on a children’s clothing drive with the
Frauenverein
and once a week, she met with the same women in the
Kirchgemeindehaus
to work on other projects, some of them charitable, others creative like the following week’s workshop on Advent crafts that Ursula was planning to attend. And every day, Ursula walked over to Rosenweg to tend to Polly Jean. During this time she set her usual impatience with her daughter-in-law aside and looked for practical ways to help Anna get through the day. Ursula cooked most of the family’s dinners and did the greater part of the marketing and housework. She could offer no other comfort. She’d never been affectionate with Anna. To be familiar and effusive now would seem peculiar and forced.

The subject of Polly Jean’s birthday was approached again that evening, this time by Bruno. He was gentle. He spoke gingerly. He had gone out of his way the last weeks to treat Anna with exceptional compassion. “Don’t you want to take a picture of Polly eating her cake? Come on, Anna. If you don’t take a picture you will wish you had. You have pictures of the boys.” He hadn’t needed to remind her. Anna started crying and Bruno couldn’t find a single word of consolation, though he tried many. He sighed as he stood and said to the wall that he was going upstairs to check on Victor. And then he did.

S
TEPHEN
’
S BIRTHDAY WAS THE
first day of May. He’d turned forty-two the month after he left Switzerland. Anna had, on that day and this year on his birthday as well, gone into the city, to Neumarkt, and stationed herself at a table in the Kantorei where they had gone for drinks on the day that they met.
Both times she had gone with the sole intent to cry, though on neither occasion could she find the tears. In each instance, she started at the beginning and told herself the entire story. It had seemed an obligatory, if self-spiteful, ritual.

Was it really love?
she’d ask herself.
Was it close to love? Did it live in love’s neighborhood?

Of course it was love. A version of love. With Polly Jean to prove it.

A
NNA HAD SEEN
D
OKTOR
Messerli only once since Charles’s death. The Doktor spoke much slower than she usually did, and with softer intonations. Her sentences had intermissions. She asked the requisite questions:
How are you holding up, Anna? What are you doing to honor your son’s memory? How are you interacting with your family? How are you taking care of yourself? Are you taking care of yourself?
She gave Anna another prescription for tranquilizers. Anna had never bothered to fill the first.

“Where do they go, the dead?”

Doktor Messerli answered honestly. “I don’t know.” They’d talked around this subject before.

“What do they do?”

“I don’t know that either, Anna.”

“Will I see him again?” Anna spoke with desperation.

“I hope so,” the Doktor said. She meant it.

I
N THE END
,
THERE
was nothing to do about Polly Jean’s party but have it. Ursula and Bruno insisted. Anna, limp as cotton cloth, didn’t have the strength to fight them. They’d planned
nothing extravagant—a supper with the family at Ursula’s house. That was all.

Daniela would come from Mumpf and Mary would join them as well. Tim had a game and Max and Alexis would stay with the wife of a teammate. Max hadn’t returned to Dietlikon since the accident. It was best. He didn’t understand that dead meant forever.

Ursula made split-pea soup. Anna managed a few bites. This earned approving nods from Bruno and Mary, which Anna pretended not to notice. Ursula had also baked two white cakes, each covered in pale pink frosting: one for the family to enjoy, and a small one intended for Polly Jean alone. Polly Jean threw herself into its deconstruction, squealing with glee. There were crumbs in her hair and clumps of frosting in her eyelashes. Bruno took the photos. Polly Jean’s laugh made everyone else laugh. Even Anna smiled, though it shamed her and she tried to stifle it. Mary put her arm around her and in a whisper told her that there was never any shame in joy. “If Charles were here, Anna, he’d be laughing too.” Until that point every mention made of Charles had sent Anna spinning into sobs. But the tone of Mary’s voice was yielding and her genuine belief that Charles, wherever he was, was fine and without a doubt happy and safe—
yes, Anna, in Heaven!
—pulled Anna away from the company of her despairs. Mary was sure. “Yes, Anna. I’m positive. Your son is well,” she said. Mary had never given Anna any reason to distrust her. So in that moment, with her family around her, Anna tried to imagine Heaven, and Charles in it.
Where are you? What are you doing? Is this possible? Oh Schatz, my love! Can you see me? I miss you! I love you most of all!

The attempt, to Anna’s astonishment, succeeded. There
were no harps or halos. There wasn’t a gate. In this Heaven there wasn’t even God. And it wasn’t so much a place as it was a dimension that existed just beyond the tangible three of the physical world and outside the immaterial chronology of the fourth. It was only a glimpse, and a quick flicker of a glimpse at that—but what she saw was a vicinity near to her own (nearer in fact than she would have expected) where time and physical form no longer mattered, if ever they mattered to begin with, and there, in that realm, was Charles. He was faceless and formless and yet altogether whole. The universal benevolence Doktor Messerli believed in cupped the soul of her son in its palm. The palm was warm. The warmth was real. This, she could accept. She could live with this.

Anna began to feel some of the hard, black fog lift from her shoulders and with Mary’s permission, she embraced the feeling.
It won’t be bad forever,
Anna soothed herself.
I don’t need to feel bad forever.
She was hopeful but wary. A mood is a fickle thing. As quickly as it comes it can depart.

Polly Jean was a glorious mess. There was even cake in her ears. When enough became enough, Anna made a motion to pick her up and take her away, but Ursula intervened. “I’ll bathe her. Stay with your guest.”

Oh,
Anna said, which she hoped translated to
Thank you.

Victor ate two pieces of cake then ran off to watch television in Ursula’s living room. He, too, seemed lighter. Bruno, Mary, and Daniela drank coffee and chatted. All interaction hedged against levity. Anna felt better, this was evident. Still, everyone remained cautious in his or her speech. No one wanted her disposition to slip.

The conversation began in earnest innocence. Mary had mentioned how much like Bruno Victor looked. “It’s his eyes
and nose. And the shape of his face. A Xerox, Bruno!” Mary laughed at this clever-only-to-herself remark. Anna nodded from the other side of her coffee cup as she sipped. Victor did look exactly like Bruno.
He acts just like him too. On his best days and his worst.
“Max and Tim look nothing alike. Well, maybe in the eyes. A little. Everyone says he favors my side of the family. But oh—listen to this. So my great-grandfather Alexander had two children …” Mary, who had already been talking in circles, launched into an even more circuitous story about Alexander’s fraternal twin sister and what Alexis looked like as a baby. Anna wasn’t listening. She was looping the memory of Charles’s first birthday. It was a balmy mid-April day and the whole family and all the neighbors sat under the apple trees and watched as Charles took his first unaided steps. He toddled three feet and then collapsed on the grass in giggles. It was a good day.

Mary continued. Bruno listened closely, or pretended to. He smiled at the right pauses and made appropriate comments when the moments allowed and held an interested expression as Mary rattled on about babies and family resemblances. Mary had made no secret that she longed for a third child. When Anna asked why, Mary responded by admitting that having a baby would give her something to do. Anna laughed until she realized Mary wasn’t kidding. At the time Anna had thought to herself she’d do better with a lover, they were less trouble.

“… anyway, it was so strong a resemblance that people just assumed it was her baby! So”—Mary punctuated the end of her convolution by reaching for her coffee cup—“where’d that pitch-black hair and sweet little nose come from? She
really doesn’t look like either of you.” Mary glanced at both Anna and Bruno. Neither spoke for a moment.

Anna froze. She’d never had to answer this question, though for a year now she’d rehearsed several responses.
That’s what I looked like as a baby, my hair only lightened when I went to school. My mother’s mother was Italian (or Spanish). Well, when both mother and father carry recessive genetic traits, there’s a high probability that what’s dormant in the parents will become dominant in the offspring. You see, the nineteenth-century Augustinian friar Gregor Mendel hybridized some pea plants
 … These and more, Anna had practiced. But she hadn’t practiced them enough because when she most needed them, none came to mind.
Jesus. I can’t remember anything.
Anna bought time by shoveling a very large forkful of cake into her mouth. She avoided speaking aloud by pretending she couldn’t.

As far as Anna knew Bruno had never had to answer the question either. But he answered it. Without hesitation, without hedging. “My father’s uncle. Polly Jean looks like him. Her hair. Not her nose. His nose was much bigger.” Bruno declared the size of his uncle’s nose with the timing of a comic straight man.

“Which uncle?” Anna asked. She’d never heard this.

“Rolf.” Bruno didn’t have anything else to add. Anna tried to recall if she’d ever seen a picture.

Daniela piped in, “That’s right, Rolf had the thick black hair when he was younger,
jo
?”

Anna couldn’t tell whether Daniela was genuinely remembering a long-dead relative or if she was trying to somehow help—and if she was trying to help, was she coming to the aid
of Anna or Bruno? “He had a big bristly black mustache, too. And,” she started to laugh, “I remember that he used to curl it like a Bavarian!”

“And give you fifty rappen if you shined his boots when he came to visit,” Ursula added from the kitchen. She’d changed Polly’s clothes and set her to rest in the bedroom and was now starting on the dishes.
She’s in on this too?
Anna took another bite of cake, an even bigger one, that she might have a moment of composure and talk herself down from that irrational ledge.
No one’s in on anything. They’re just talking. Eat your cake, Anna. You don’t have to say a word. Eat your cake. You have your cake, now eat it, too.

Bruno stood and took his empty coffee cup into the kitchen. “Yes. That’s where she gets it. Rolf. Of course.” The answer satisfied Mary, who changed the subject. Anna relaxed. But only a little.

T
WO YEARS BEFORE MEETING
Stephen, Anna was in the Dietlikon Coop. She’d made a list but left it at home and had spent the previous half hour struggling to recall what she’d written down.
What do we have? What do we lack?
She’d put salami in her basket, some rolls, a leek, a jar of stuffed pepperoncini, and five cans of tuna. She’d been inefficient, chasing the items as she recalled them, out of order and erratically. She felt like a pinball, being kicked and slung from one aisle to its counterpoint target.
Tilt
was only a matter of time.
I live in the grocery store,
Anna remembered thinking.
I’m the hired help, the domestic.
This was years before Anna’s analysis, so Doktor Messerli wasn’t around to challenge the authenticity of those statements and to suggest that if Anna felt repressed it was a
sentiment of her own construction.
This is, after all, the life you have chosen for yourself,
she surely would have scolded. But Anna didn’t have Doktor Messerli then. What she had were two young sons, a cranky husband, an aloof mother-in-law, and, on that particular day, a headache. Anna remembered they were out of sugar and turned the cart around and crossed into the baking aisle to fetch the sugar that both she and Bruno took in their coffee. Anna always bought it in cubes. She liked cubes. Their uniform architecture pleased her.
It’s the shape. You always know where you stand with it.
She reached for the usual box but paused when her eyes fell on the one next to it.
Glückszucker,
the package read and instead of geometrically true squares, the portions were formed in the shapes of each of a deck of playing cards’ four suits. Lucky sugar, it meant. Happy sugar. This brightened Anna.
How have I not noticed this before?
She imagined they were charms or talismans. Sweet, magic beans that had the power to conjure good fortune. It was a silly promise made by a substance only good for rotting your teeth. But that was the sugar Anna wanted. She took a box and set it with ceremony befitting the supernatural in her basket.
Now what?
she thought and then remembered that Bruno had asked for some cheese. She pushed toward the dairy case.
It has come to this? Such asinine indulgences?
She supposed it had.