The Master Butcher's Singing Club (45 page)

“No!” said Delphine, her voice caught in reluctance to be thrown, so suddenly, into the personal.

Fidelis leaned back now and looked directly at her. The rose light polished his features, lent to the whole of him an incongruous sweetness. He’d hung his jacket on the chair behind him and was now in his shirt sleeves. The light picked up the bronze of the hair on his forearms and she gazed down a bit dizzily at his heavy-boned wrists. He glanced at the darkened door of the kitchen, hitched his chair a little closer to hers.

“I gave Cyprian enough time,” he said. His voice thudded. The statement seemed ridiculous. But when he leaned forward, Delphine smelled the spice of him—white pepper and red, a little ginger and caraway. And the male scent of him, the wool and the linen of his shirt. The tart shaving tonic. She knew he rubbed cigar ashes on his teeth to whiten them and then brushed with baking soda. Knew he lathered his whiskers with Eva’s old bars of hand-milled French lilac soap. All of these little things about him were hers to know because she’d kept his house while his wife died. Then she’d cared for his sons. She’d told herself all along that these things had nothing to do with him, Fidelis himself, but now here he was, removed from the intimacy of his family. And yet she knew his habits while he’d hardly seen the inside of her house. He knew little of her. Nothing so personal as the type of soap she used. And what was she to make of this giving Cyprian time?

“Gave him? What do you mean, ‘gave’ him?

“Time,” said Fidelis, “to come back.”

“Well, yes,” said Delphine. His meaning dawned on her. A contrary ticklish energy seized her. She wanted to make things difficult for Fidelis. Why not? Why should he come here so easily and overfill the small pale gold room, her private nest? So she began to laugh, as though he’d said something very funny, and then she calmed herself and took a drink of her tea.

“Did you think he had deserted me?” She would never give away the reason they had parted. She would never tell that he’d left much earlier than people thought. “So like a man, to think that.” Perhaps she was a little under the influence of one of her drawing-room novels, in which people sparred over such topics as love, for it delighted her suddenly to be in the position she was in, to have Fidelis here trying to explain himself and her believing that she finally read his heart. So he had waited for her!

“Fidelis.” She shook her head, the curls of her brown hair lashed her shoulders, and she raised her eyes to his with a lazy knowledge. But when she looked into his face his expression was of such helpless ardor that she forgot her small artifice.

IT WOULD SEEM
for months afterward that there had been a great collision, that two glaciers had through slow force smashed together, at last, and buckled. The two were dazed, a bit slow with other people, forgetful. Delphine kept her job at the courthouse, but cut the hours back and came into the shop to wait on customers each afternoon. She came to be near Fidelis. As before, she tended the kitchen and, if she had time, did laundry for the boys—not Fidelis. Since she’d left, he’d begun to iron his own shirts with a soldierly precision.

One afternoon, she found him at it when she arrived. That day, for some reason the whole place was quiet. She walked into the cold concrete-floored utility room, where the water was piped out of the wall into a double soapstone tub. There he stood, chilled in the loop of his undershirt, arms moving above the wooden board covered with a padded cloth. He had bought a modern plug-in iron, and was putting a crease in the starched, sizzling shoulder of a sleeve.

To watch him in his power doing work women did so often filled
Delphine with a low electricity, and she brushed the side of his arm, above his elbow. Her hand was still in its glove. He put the iron down. Took her hand in his hand and then pulled off each finger of her glove while looking into her eyes with a steady gravity. When the glove was off, he lifted her hand in both of his and regarded it intently. He stroked her knuckles, scored with white scars, and at last, tentatively, brought her hand to his lips. He fit his mouth over the crease where her fingers came together at the palm.

Then he moved too quickly, in a way she didn’t like, with an arrogant sweep, and tried to pull her to him. She sidestepped his rough gesture and walked out of the room, still breathing the heady scorched scent of clean ironing. That was the first time they’d ever touched, or kissed, though it was more than a kiss and not yet a kiss. Walking home later on, she thought of his eyes as he pulled her glove off, and then she was suddenly home. She realized that she’d walked, tranced, down the long road, without seeing a thing around her. She had no memory of how she got to her door. And yet, though she couldn’t stop thinking of him in this new way, she avoided him. For when they were around each other now the stage was bare, all the scenery pulled away, and there was only the full burden of their attraction. It was too much, to let it happen all at once. They came together by the smallest incremental movements.

Weeks later, they still hadn’t kissed, hadn’t let their mouths touch. And yet one day in the dusty office filled with paperwork, Fidelis knelt before Delphine and with his hands smoothed the insides of her legs up to the tops of her heavy silk stockings, felt where they were hooked with metal garters, traced the slices of material up underneath her skirt. He spread her legs apart so wide she was embarrassed, there in the leather chair, and then he kissed the insides of her knees. She caught his hair back in both fists, pulled so hard it must have stung, but only stared down at him, his face immobile between her legs. She shoved him away with all of her strength, and pressed down her skirt.

“Jesus Christ,” she said. “What are you thinking?”

“I don’t know.” He rose in one subdued, brutal motion and dusted himself off with broad unnecessary whacks at the legs of his pants.
“Around you, I get these ideas.” He tried to recover his dignity, folded his arms, then unfolded them, sat down, and rifled the desk for a cigarette. When he couldn’t find one his threw up his hands as though to say, See? I can’t get anything I want? And Delphine finally laughed.

MANY DAYS
, they couldn’t bear the tension and ignored each other entirely. They set a date four months away on which they would be married. At first it seemed a very long time to wait, and then it seemed to Delphine far too short a time and she thought maybe she would put it off. Fidelis bought their wedding license in the courthouse, showed her the paper casually, and they both signed their names with a dispassionate alacrity, as though they were signing banking documents. They were good at working together—quick and respectful and efficient. Delphine took over the bookkeeping and the ordering again, and she began to bring religion to the dusty office careening with papers.

One afternoon when Franz and Markus were eating in the kitchen, Delphine brought Fidelis in and pushed his shoulder. “Tell them,” she commanded.

Franz paused, frozen, his hand to his mouth, waiting for his father’s announcement. Markus continued eating, chewing serenely. Nodding, he said, “I already know what you’re going to say.” He took another bite, and asked the next important question.

“So does that mean Emil and Erich are coming home?”

“I wrote and sent money,” said Fidelis, with assurance. “Tante will make the arrangements.”

“Tell them,” said Delphine, again, shaking his arm.

Fidelis gathered himself, but before he could open his mouth, Franz beat him.

“Oh, I get it,” said Franz. “You two are getting married.” He forked half of a baked apple into his mouth, chewed it all up. “And as long as we’re making announcements, I’m going into the air corps. I’m enlisting.”

“There is no war!” Fidelis’s low voice nearly cracked with intensity—he still had his hopes. But Franz didn’t seem to notice.

“Oh, there will be,” said Franz. “Just you wait. I see it coming, and
when it does I’m . . .” He made a skimming motion with his hand, like an airplane taking off. He buzzed his hand into the wild blue yonder and then he grinned at them all, nodding to encourage their approval. Fidelis hunched his shoulders in distress and left the room.

“Do you have to be so happy about it?” said Delphine, annoyed with Franz for spoiling the announcement, but also suddenly aghast at his thirst for war.

“I’m happy about it,” said Markus. “It’s like you already live here.”

“Oh, that,” Franz said. “He can do what he wants.”

“You know what I’m talking about!” said Delphine. “Can you go and sit with him at least?”

“Dad wouldn’t want that.” Franz took a walnut from the bowl on the table, cracked it with his fingers, just like Fidelis. He tossed the meats up in the air and caught them on his tongue. “I’ll fly a Spitfire! We won’t get anywhere near German territory. I’ll be fighting other pilots—not Dad’s people. He knows that.”

“You have no idea what a war means!” Delphine tried not to raise her voice or drive him off. But his willful ignorance was making her passionate. “Forget that I’m marrying your father. Be realistic, Franz. They could put you in the infantry.”

“Me?” He looked incredulous, pityingly, at Delphine. “A bomber, maybe. But no. I’ll be a fighter pilot.” He made noises with his mouth and pretended to machine-gun Markus, who popped his lips back at him.

“God, you’re a hard soul!” Delphine cried, overcome.

“What do you want? The marriage is your business,” said Franz. He sulked. “It doesn’t matter what I think.”

“Of course it matters,” said Delphine coaxingly.

“Well then, I think I’m leaving,” said Franz. “Don’t take this personal, but I don’t want to think about it.” He got up and sauntered away, shoved his fists in the pockets of his poor, tattered, imitation flight jacket. As he passed out of Delphine’s sight, he swore hard, kicked the dust. His eyes watered. Then he laughed sarcastically at himself. He had never been so miserable in his life.

* * *

WHENEVER FRANZ
passed the place where he and Mazarine had swung from the road to enter their special place underneath the pine, his throat burned. A tension collected around his heart. For hours after, he would think about the pine tree, his ribs tightening and his chest shutting out the air. It was hard to take a breath. And yet suddenly his breath came out in huge, deep, surprising sighs. Food went dry in his throat and the weight dropped off him. The bones of his wrists jutted out, his cheekbones sharpened. Nor could he sleep right. His dreams were of reckless bargains. Torrents of water swept him from Mazarine or tumbled her over cliffs and through culverts, just out of reach. Things had only gotten worse as it became apparent that Mazarine Shimek truly meant her
no
and would not have him back. Mazarine, in the new clothing he had never touched.

She wore a soft plaid kilt of rust brown to school now—even Franz could tell that it was perfectly sewn. The hem swished just the right way around her legs when she walked, whirled softly when she turned. The colors of her pleated skirt were the browns and golds of the light that used to fall upon the two of them underneath the great pine tree. She wore crisp blouses that managed somehow to drape, as well, across her bird’s collarbone. The fabric joined across her chest with rich, glazed, mother-of-pearl buttons. She wore her hair in a braid now, twined through with a ribbon of heavy satin—sometimes blue, sometimes yellow. He could not help recording a list of these details—they were all he had of her right now. But Mazarine didn’t in any way return his regard. She didn’t speak to him, much less let him take her books from her arms and strap them onto her bicycle and give her rides, as though she were a much younger girl. He missed that the most, he thought. Even more than touching her he longed for the weight of her wobbling between his arms on the bicycle. Him steering and her laughing as she tried to balance. The farther away she kept herself, the more he knew this: he loved Mazarine—to the death, he thought wildly, beyond death.

How stupid! He crashed his fists on his temples. At night, he thought of and rejected ways to make it up to her, ways to draw her to him. He would throw himself upon her mercy. Waylay her. Beg her. Buy her a
hothouse rose and lay it on her bed at night. She needed him, didn’t she? Anyone could tell she was unhappy. Look how quiet she was, walking the school hallways, how serious. Look how her slender grace had become an alarming thinness. How she kept her hair, which had always swirled with her movements, stiffly locked into that one thick braid.

The only thing that really diverted him was the airfield. Sometimes, Franz looked at the other men who worked around him, and wondered if they’d ever had such feelings. He doubted it—none of them looked as if they could ever have been in love with anything but their machines. At first he scorned such limitations. Then they made sense to him. To actually fix a touchy engine was a relief. So whenever Fidelis let him out of the shop, Franz worked on airplanes. In payment, Pouty Mannheim began to teach him how to fly.

Each time they went up, Franz felt the same roaring physical release from the earth that had charmed him when he first watched, from the field behind the house, the plane take off and lift over the windbreak. Only it was better to be in the plane itself. Better now as he understood exactly how to control the flight, read the wind, the signs in the clouds small and large. On their eighth flight, Pouty let him have a chance at the controls. For weeks, they practiced taking off, touching down, and then gradually added a beginning barnstormer’s repertoire of stalls, spins, easy wingovers and gentle loops. When Pouty finally let him take the plane up solo, Franz experienced a startling lightness. The plane flew at a touchy and thrilling balance with just him in it. He focused on the town grain elevator, a thin mark on the horizon, kept his nose directed at it and did a slow point roll. Then a more complicated hesitation roll, a loop, a difficult spin. The earth tipped over him. Concentrate, or die. Things were simple upside down. By the time he landed, he was absolutely at peace. After that, he thought that maybe he would survive the loss of Mazarine if only he could spend his life up in the air.