Blackbird House (13 page)

“But it’s different, of course.
 
You’re our guide, not a prisoner.”

The interpreter gazed at him; her eyes were gray, impossible to read.

“What does your father do for work?”
 
she asked.

Surprised, Lion admitted what he usually kept private.
 
Both of his parents had been killed in a car accident when he was only a baby.

“So much the better.”
 
The interpreter seemed pleased.
 
“Now you have no one to lose.
 
You should be thankful.
 
Maybe you have a wife?”

Lion said no.
 
He laughed at the very idea of ever marrying Carol now.
 
The interpreter was wearing a rag of a scarf around her head, rough wool with frayed edges.
 
When she glared at Lion he could feel the intensity inside her.
 
“You think love is funny?”
 
The guide came closer, so close he could feel the heat coming off her body, and it shocked him, like a spark.
 
“I can undo any lock without a key,” she told him.
 
“If I had to, I could kill a man with a scarf.”

Lion had always been the smartest and the best at whatever he’d attempted.
 
He was the one everyone turned to for help, for advice, the favorite of all.
 
He knew the answers to things, or at least he had up until now.
 
Now he wasn’t sure who he was.
 
Was he someone who could stand on ground darkened by blood and not turn and run?
 
Was he someone who fell in love at first sight?

He asked around and discovered that the guide’s name was Dorey Lederer.
 
She was their interpreter again, later in the week, while they interviewed children, trying their best to figure out what to do with those who’d been wrenched from their families and had not a single soul to call their own.
 
When, after the best part of the next week, most of the children had been processed, the weather suddenly grew warmer.
 
It was a joke of nature, perhaps, beauty and warmth in this wretched place.
 
Now that there was no wind, Dorey took off her scarf and Lion West saw her head had been shaved.

“Did you have lice?”
 
Lion asked.

“Everyone here has lice.
 
As a matter of fact, you yourself have lice by now.
 
You can’t walk through the gate here and stay clean.”

“I didn’t know you were a prisoner here.”

“I got out.
 
I lied to everyone and anyone, but you can only get away with a lie for so long.
 
Then you have to switch to another lie if you want to keep living.
 
One minute you’re a prisoner, then you’re a soldier’s whore, then you’re a guide.
 
I could be anything at all next.
 
I know quite a few tricks.
 
Want to see?”

She asked Lion for some money, which she vowed she would make disappear.
 
Lion was already lovesick.
 
What he felt for her hurt, it was brittle and hard and all-consuming.
 
He could not believe that in a place so full of death he had found someone so alive.
 
“Close your eyes,” Dorey said.
 
When he opened them again, she was gone.

But it wasn’t so easy to escape from Lion; he tracked Dorey down.
 
He wanted something from her.
 
He wanted her in bed, but he wanted more: every secret she knew, every trick, every lie, every sorrow.
 
She didn’t say anything when he appeared at her door, and he couldn’t tell whether or not she was pleased.
 
Clearly, she wasn’t surprised.
 
She drew him into her room and let him watch as she took off all her clothes.
 
She had two long scars; still, Lion thought he had never seen anyone so beautiful.
 
“Look at this!”
 
Dorey said.
 
“I mean it!
 
Really look.
 
This is something I can’t make disappear.
 
Just so you know.
 
So you don’t accuse me of putting one over on you.”

Lion pulled her onto his lap and he cried; despite everything he’d seen in the past few weeks, or perhaps because of it, he wanted her more than he had ever thought possible.
 
He had never imagined people could treat each other in such barbarous and hideous ways.
 
He had never imagined he could feel this way.
 
He thought about Dorey as he was falling asleep and at the moment he woke up and during all of his daydreaming time in between.

“Sensitive men are useless,” Dorey said one night.
 
“I

give you the chance to get away this one time.”
 
She had her mouth to his ear and she was whispering; her every word made his head pound.
 
“I slept with a man who was a murderer.
 
What do you think of that?
 
Disappear if you know what’s good for you.
 
Do it right now.”

But it was too late.
 
Lion had already begun to understand that he wouldn’t be able to leave Germany without her; he asked her to marry him and come back to Boston.
 
He would be starting a teaching position at Harvard.
 
He was just an assistant in the mathematics department, and although it wasn’t much, it was all he had to offer.
 
He wished he could get her a big house in the country, and a horse like the one she’d had as a child.

“Give me your handkerchief,” Dorey said.
 
“I’d rather have that than a horse.”

Lion did so, and Dorey quickly tied the silk in a knot around his finger.
 
Lion tried and he tried, but he couldn’t get it off, not until Dorey bent down and untied the handkerchief with her mouth.

“Now you belong to me,” Dorey said, as if that hadn’t been true from the start.
 
“I feel sorry for you, really, because you’ll never get away.”

Lion was stationed for a while in Berlin, and when they went back to the States they moved into an apartment in Cambridge, near the reservoir, where they liked to walk in the mornings, early, before they had their coffee together.

When Lion’s parents died, his grandmother had taken him in and raised him; she was the person who needed to approve of Dorey the one whose opinion had always mattered most.
 
Perhaps that was why it was so long before they went to visit her: Violet West was not one to keep her opinions to herself, especially when it came to her grandson.

Violet lived out at the old farm on the Cape, without heat or electricity; she still used the outhouse, and in the summers she cooked in the old shed so that the kitchen would stay cool.
 
Lion had bought her a refrigerator, but she refused to have the house wired; she preferred to haul ice from the pond with some old hay bag of a gelding she called Bobby and stack the neat blocks of green ice in the storage bin of the summer kitchen.
 
Violet West had raised seven children and her grandson Lion.
 
She had no fear of hurricanes or of loneliness; she hadn’t once complained since she’d buried her husband of over fifty years when he passed on from a series of strokes.
 
She was beloved in town, well known for making the best chocolate cake in the commonwealth; she was the head of the library foundation, and she knew every single plant that grew in the bog, from pitcher plants to wild orchids.

“What if she doesn’t approve of me?”
 
Dorey asked as they prepared for their trip to the Cape.
 
They had already married, quickly to make returning to the States easier.

Dorey had been employed by the German department at the local high school.
 
“Will you divorce me?
 
Will you throw me out on the streets?
 
Even that won’t work.
 
I warned you you’d never get rid of me.
 
Give me your key,” she demanded.

Dorey held the key Lion gave her up to a match, then returned it.
 
“Try it.”

Lion grinned and went to the door.
 
He slid the key in the lock, but it wouldn’t turn.
 
Dorey came over with a glass of iced water.
 
She let the key float in the glass for a moment, then took it out and blew on it; when she tried it in the door, it worked perfectly So perfectly, Lion had to kiss her then and there, even though when he kissed her he felt as though he were swallowing sadness.
 
He knew he’d never be free from whatever this was between them, not that he wanted to be, not that he ever would.

Lion rented a car so that he and Dorey could drive out to visit Violet.
 
It was late fall, November, and the weather was especially bad.
 
They been busy setting up their apartment, starting their jobs, getting on with their lives, and it had taken them far too long to visit Lion’s grandmother.
 
Lion had a feeling of dread as the day of their visit approached: try as he might, he could not imagine the two women he loved in the same room.

Autumn had been colder than usual.
 
The roads on the day of their visit were slick with ice, a light snow was falling, and the sky was swirling with clouds.
 
Dorey’s hair had grown back, but it was short and spiky and she looked younger than she was.
 
Lion didn’t think about her sleeping with another man, that German soldier, or anyone else for that matter, not any more than he thought of her taking food out of the garbage or putting her hands around an infant’s neck so that the baby’s mother would not be found out and killed.
 
He didn’t think about the two scars that crossed her abdomen, and if he happened to touch them, accidentally, she was quick to move his hands away.

“I know how to walk across snow barefoot and not get frostbite,” Dorey said companionably Bad weather and ice didn’t faze her.
 
She liked road trips.
 
She liked Massachusetts.
 
The dark woods, the fields of ice and hay, the way it was possible to get a good cup of coffee almost anywhere.
 
“You have to concentrate and lower your blood pressure, and then the pain isn’t so bad.
 
It’s nothing, in fact.
 
Like a mosquito bite.”
 
Dorey had dressed up for the occasion of visiting Lion’s grandmother; she wore her good black dress and the little diamond ring set in platinum that Lion had bought for her in Berlin.

“They probably took it off a dead woman’s hand,” Dorey had said in the shop.
 
“It’s easy to do, even if the flesh swells up.
 
You just take a rock and smash the bones.”
 
Now she held her hand up and gazed at the ring, as though it were far bigger and more beautiful than it was.
 
She smiled at Lion.
 
“It looks good on me.”

As for Violet West, she was expecting the worst.
 
She assumed that was why Lion had stayed away.
 
She’d see the truth when she met this wife of his, and she’d have to tell him what she thought, simply because she was made that way.
 
She knew how to test people.
 
She’d made halibut stew and baked beans and molasses bread for supper, every dish she hated; she’d added handfuls of salt, too much pepper, just to test Lion’s wife.
 
She had stuffed the pillow on the dining-room chair where her visitor would be sitting with brambles and nettles and straw. She’d put stones in the bottom of the coffee cup at Dorey’s place setting.
 
She’d left the door to the outhouse open, so that ice swept through and anyone going inside would surely freeze her bottom.
 
At the very last, Violet removed the board in the attic that blocked off the nest honeybees had made in the rafters.
 
Lion and his bride would sleep there tonight, if they could.

Violet West did all this because she loved Lion in a way she loved no one else in the world, save for Lion’s dead father, whom she had loved just as fiercely.
 
She wanted everything for him, and no one could convince her that he wasn’t entitled to all that was good in this world.

“I’m glad you don’t love me like that,” her husband, George, used to say to her.
 
“I’m thankful.
 
I really am.”

“What are you talking about?
 
You know I love you,” she’d say right back each and every time.
 
That was true enough, and yet it wasn’t the same; it wasn’t the way she had loved Lion, and then his boy, Jr.”
 
her grandson, the love of her life.

The last of the fruit on the old pear tree in the yard toppled from the branches when the car pulled into the long dirt driveway.
 
Not a good sign, Violet was sure.
 
If this had been another occasion, she would have already picked those few hardy pears and had a brown Betty or a red-pear pie in the oven, but there was nothing to celebrate, and molasses bread was good enough.
 
Violet was standing out in the yard, waving.
 
As they drove up, Lion was shocked at the state of the house: the white paint peeling off the clapboards, the chimney tilting, the old horse in the field snuffling through the ice, the pear tree so crooked its branches reached to the ground.
 
He’d last been back for his grandfather’s funeral, before he shipped out to Germany, before his world changed, and his grandmother certainly hadn’t looked as old.
 
He found himself fearing that she would slip on the icy path as she came to meet them.
 
That she’d crack a rib, or break a leg, or worse.
 
What if such a thing happened when she was here all alone?
 
Who would rescue her?
 
Who would know?
 
The old horse, Bobby?
 
Barney Crosby, who came to chop the fallen trees into logs?