The Hidden Letters of Velta B. (23 page)

Could the Zetsches discern our growing resentments? Did they regret the ignoble loss of Old General? It's hard to say. But by the next morning, they had already left in their Mercedes. As they believed in taking continental vacations, they'd be gone a good six weeks, touring the Swedish islands, competing in shooting matches, Mrs. Zetsche explained in a note she'd left for me.

You'll be our chief housesitter. Therefore, with the exception of polishing the horses in the drive or taking meals with your family, we expect that you'll spend most of your time inside the house. Please launder your own sheets. Also, limit your use of the downstairs bathroom. No more than two flushes per day. We are conserving.

So it's true; for a time I lived in the Zetsche manor. And it's true; I have always been curious, perhaps to a fault. I wanted to know who those people were whose likenesses graced the walls in enormous portraits: our family or theirs? To whom did some of these items belong and what else might be hidden in the walls, up the chimneys?

Without Mrs. Zetsche buzzing about the house, time moved like slow viscous water, one drop at a time. One spoon. A fork. A pass of the mop. I thought about David. I tried not to feel sorry for myself, told myself that because he was already gone I could never lose him.

I had time to think about what kind of a person I wanted to be for my baby. I did not want to be the kind of mother who smothered her child and called it love. I wanted to believe that the kind of love I had for you could be limitless and that the more I loved, the more I would learn of love and be able to keep loving. But I wondered, as I rubbed that silver and caught slices of myself in the shiny metal, could this kind of love even exist? Was it possible for two people, a man and a woman, say, or a woman and her child, to love with this more perfect love? I looked at my stomach. Yes, I decided. It had to be possible.

I sang to you in my belly as I cleaned. I cleaned the upstairs, avoiding the mirror in the corridor. I worked clockwise through the rooms, the way Mother had taught me. She'd also taught me to work top to bottom, dusting and polishing first, laundering second, disinfecting basins and showers third, and scrubbing and waxing floors last. This was good for the body, she believed, as it was natural to start the day upright and then, as gravity took its toll, finish on one's hands and knees.

One day, I made a minor discovery in the cellar: wedged between planking, pages and pages of musical scores. Imagine: a house built of song! Song springing out of every gap in the wall, floor, joists. Dark melodies rose and fell, penned in what I recognized as Velta's hand, her script leaning hard to the left.

It was wrong to do this; the house was no longer ours, nothing in it ours. But I rolled up those pages of scores, took them home. How Mother would have liked to see them, I knew. But I kept them to myself. It was a way to hurt her a little. I didn't like that I had this meanness in me, but I did and I hadn't quite forgiven her for that slap, for her words. Each letter of each word was a dark note, another bird flying, skipping, stuttering across the measures, those lines that look like telephone wires. By this time, I had learned to read music well enough to decipher that certain musical notes corresponded to certain letters of the alphabet. I made a chart. The first letter of the alphabet,
a,
corresponded to the middle a note above middle c. The letter
b
corresponded with the b note, and so on. The letter
j
corresponded with the high a note,
k
with the b note and so on until every letter of the alphabet had its partner on the musical scores. I congratulated myself; not every girl is so clever. But my triumph was short-lived when I read what I had decoded.

We had wallpaper. So we boiled it and made a broth of glue and fiber. Our thoughts stuck together. We ate flecks of paint. Colors bloomed brightly in our dreams.

We had pots. So we put our tears in them. We scooped up our sorrow, ladled it out, filled our children's stomachs with our salt. To the hungry, every bitter thing is sweet.

Those words were dark blots of ink against snow, darkness flung against light. What did I know of hunger? A chicken and an onion stretched over a week. Sure. But a gnawing in the gut that drove people to eat binding glue and the tongues of shoes? Never. And sorrow? I had only waded up to my hips in it. I was not the sojourner Velta was. Maybe this is why I couldn't understand what I read. Perhaps certain experiences can only be articulated and known through hyperbole, euphemism. Maybe this was yet another code, a more difficult language of metaphor and emotion that I might never learn to crack.

“The black snake,” she wrote, “burrows in the dark bed of the river.” Her first pregnancy she described as an ocean. She swallowed the tides and rocks bumped along the floor of her stomach. The goat at the neighbor's farm had eaten rotten potatoes and had died. The post office had been repainted. A neighbor's laundry line that used to hold all sizes of shirts and socks now hung limp. She seemed compelled to catalogue the world outside her back door, the world down the lane, what could be seen through her leaded bull's-eye windowpanes: a man, a dog, a transport truck. Conjuring her world one small word at a time as if to say
This exists, this, and this.
To keep her words a private matter between husband and wife, she'd written these observations of the ordinary in musical code. But the significance that these quotidian observations held for the two of them eluded me. That was the second code she employed. Cloaking importance in the mundane. Wrapping a layer of ambiguity around the words so that no amount of scrutiny revealed a clear message.

Old Widow Druviete had crossed the veil. We opened all the windows and doors so that her soul could come and go as it wanted. We placed her body in the washing chair, her feet in a tub of water. We washed her with three long cloths. Afterward, we buried her. We burned her clothes; we burned the washcloths. We pounded a nail into the floor where the chair had been and bathed it in brandy.

I suppose she was re-creating a world for her husband, a quiet world he'd recognize, a world of old traditions and customs she did not want him to forget. And stories.

A man who'd been turned by a witch into a wolf ran out onto the road. We could tell because of his eyes. He wept at his fate. He could not remember the blessing that would turn him back into a man. So we gave him a bit of bread, because it is the Christian thing to do. He ate all the bread. He bit our hands; he lunged for our necks. He howled and said ungodly things. But we kept feeding him and feeding him until his stomach burst.

In handwriting belonging to neither Velta nor Ferdinands was something like a
daina.

One girl sings in the river.

One girl sings from the stone.

Both sing the same song.

Could they be daughters of the same mother?

When the swifts dove from the lower limbs of the birch and burst from the eaves, signaling evening's approach, I put away the cleaning things, tucked that music inside my coat, and headed homeward. The house was dark except for a sliver of light from the back room. I heard Mother speaking. “This happens sometimes. A little bleeding is normal.” I pushed open the door and saw Mother leaning over Ligita and dabbing at her brow with a wet cloth. Ligita lay on the bed, her face chalk white and her hair stuck to the sides of her face. A small dark blot of red stained her bedsheets. When Mother saw me, she drew Ligita close. I pulled the sheets off the bed, set pots of water to boil in the kitchen.

Sometime in the night, Ligita shrieked. A solid wall of sound that pushed every other noise out of the house. The house went utterly still, as if it were holding its breath. “Inara!” Mother shouted. “Come quickly!”

I grabbed some clean towels and rolled Ligita toward the wall. More blood and this time something else: a baby smaller than two pats of butter. Mother touched the baby once with the tip of her finger then wrapped it in a towel. I put the bundle under my shirt, holding Ligita's baby to my chest where my heart pounded. I thought maybe my heart would be warm enough and strong enough to beat for this baby, too. Rudy and Father met me on the back steps. I gave the bundle to Rudy and we made the short trek to the cemetery.

Sometimes I forgot how intuitive Father was, how much he understood without saying a word. Already he had dug a hole, small and deep, not far from where our uncle Maris lay. Already he had found a small wooden box, the same shape and size as a cake box. Rudy held the lid and I placed the small bundle inside.

“Shall we sing for this little one?” Father asked.

Rudy's gaze was glued to the box. “No,” he said, and turned for home.

After your auntie's little one passed, darkness set up residence inside your uncle Rudy. He did not speak often, and when he did, it was to complain or make a sarcastic comment. He brought home a TV and watched it for hours on end. Sometimes he'd go out at night and not return for days. Your auntie would have drowned in her own tears if not for your grandmother. While I worked at the Zetsches', your grandmother looked after Ligita. By look after I mean to say she put her to work. It was the best way to manage grief: putting up vegetables, laundering sheets and towels, digging a new root cellar. This is how Ligita learned the
dainas
her own mother hadn't taught her: your grandmother at her elbow reciting the words, keeping time with her fist as she beat dough for bread.

For the next five weeks I kept on at the Zetsches', scrubbing the heads of the small stallions until they gleamed. One day Father came by to visit me. Mr. Zetsche's spare car, another Mercedes—this one soot gray—was parked on the drive. I could read in Father's eyes how badly he wanted to drive this auxiliary Mercedes with the faux-leather bonnet, clean now from the grille to the side vents to the spoiler, the interior fumigated with an ozone box and each tiny slat of the air vents in the dash swabbed with cotton-tipped swabs, every surface loved by a golden chamois. But Father had his dignity. Father touched the chrome molding tentatively. He thought for a moment then opened the driver's-side door. “I just want to sit inside. For a minute. Or two.” He slid into the leather seat, inhaled deeply. He ran a fingertip along the dash and then recoiled as if he'd received a shock. The gold key dangled from the ignition. Powerless against such temptation, Father turned the key. The ignition fired, the engine hummed—a smooth liquid sound of a well-oiled machine.

Father turned a knob at the end of the shifter and the windshield wipers swished up and down. Up and down. Then he turned on the radio and a Wagnerian opera commenced. It was a sledgehammer of sound disguised as orchestral music. Father twisted the knob gently and found Sibelius on another station.

“Sit with me,” Father said. I opened the passenger's door and slid in beside Father. We inhaled the rich leather scent of good breeding. We watched the precise synchronization of the windshield wipers. Father's hand trembled at the shifter then fell to his lap. He shook his head. “I can't—it wouldn't be right.” He opened the door and climbed out, leaving the keys in the ignition, the engine running.

I sat in the car alone and listened to the plaintive strains of violins and the swishing of the wipers. I studied Father's stooped form. I thought about him, about Mother. I thought about the things each one of us had wished we had done in our short lives. And then I thought of our many compromises. We settle too quickly, our gazes falling lower and lower, until we forget our small dreams and then, worse, we forget how to dream at all.

It shouldn't be this way, I decided, as I slid over the shifter into the driver's seat. I ran my hands over the cherrywood steering wheel; I would do what Father told himself he couldn't. It was the least I could do. I switched the radio back to the furious Valkyries. Transmission in gear, I pressed the pedal.

The car shot down the drive into the first miniature stallion.
Clank,
then a loud
lug, lug,
a shrieking whine as cast-iron hind legs tore at the undercarriage. Then
clunk-clunk
as the back tires rolled free of the fallen beast.
Clank, lug, lug, screee, clunk-clunk
as I plowed rank-and-file over every horse. Finally, the drive shaft of the Mercedes high centered on the raised front legs of the last stallion.

Father opened the driver's-side door. “Inara!” he gasped, pulling me from the seat. We stood and surveyed the carnage. Steam hissed from beneath the crumpled hood. Father rocked on his feet. He doubled over. He roared with laughter.

“Oh, Inara.” Father clutched his sides. “If only your uncle Maris could have seen this!” Father rested his hands on his knees and waited for his breath to return.

I handed Father the keys. And then I went to Mrs. Zetsche's linen closet and found her oldest sheets, one for each of Mr. Zetsche's black stallions.

“I'll be fired,” I said.

“Oh.” Father rubbed his chin. “Most certainly.”

“I should look for another job.”

Father put a hand on each of my shoulders.

“Time for that later. I'll help you lock up. Then you can come home. We miss you at the dinner table.”

A few days later, the Zetsches returned from their continental vacation. The battered Mercedes we had pushed into their garage. The fallen horses lay shrouded in Mrs. Zetsche's sheets. When popping gravel announced the Zetsches' arrival, your grandfather and I stood on the drive like soldiers awaiting inspection. Slowly they passed the draped figures until they reached the garage. Mr. Zetsche climbed out of the car and stood for a moment studying the battered and broken Mercedes. Then he walked to the drive where he stood before each toppled sculpture, lifting the sheet quickly then letting it fall. All this time, Mrs. Zetsche, in shock, sat trembling in the car, murmuring, “Oh dear, oh dear.”