Elm Creek Quilts [08] The Christmas Quilt (7 page)

Sylvia fetched three paring knives from the drawer and sat down on the bench across from her mother and sister. Eleanor could peel three apples as swiftly as Sylvia peeled one, the red skin rolling off in a continuous, narrow ribbon as thin as paper. Sylvia tried to imitate her, but her strips usually broke as soon as they became long enough to touch her lap, and thick chunks of juicy white apple flesh sometimes came off with the peel. Eleanor wielded the paring knife so deftly that it was impossible to believe that she had not been preparing apples for strudel since she was Sylvia’s age, or that she had ever spent Christmas anywhere but here.

“Mama?” asked Sylvia, forgetting her promise not to tire her mother with too many questions. “What was Christmas like when you were my age?”

“Very much like it is today,” her mother said after a moment. “It was a day for celebrating the Lord’s birth, for family, for special treats, beautiful carols, and if we had been very good girls, a visit from Santa Claus.”

As piles of apple peelings collected on the table and their fingers grew sticky with juice, their mother told them stories of Christmases in New York—of fancy balls, concerts in the city, the annual trip to her father’s department store on Fifth Avenue where she and her sister were allowed to choose any toy they wanted. She spoke more warmly of quieter celebrations in the nursery with her English nanny, who taught her about Christmas ghost stories and Christmas crackers and their obligation to help those in need, especially during the holidays but throughout the year. Sylvia wondered if the nanny’s lessons accounted for her mother’s determination to continue Gerda Bergstrom’s tradition of giving.

When Eleanor decided they had peeled enough apples, her storytelling ceased. She demonstrated how to slice and cut the fruit into uniform pieces, once again finishing three apples to their every one. She sent Claudia to the linen closet for a freshly laundered sheet while she and Sylvia scooped the apple slices into a bowl and mixed them with two heaping handfuls of bread crumbs, a sprinkling of cinnamon, two handfuls of sugar, finely chopped walnuts, and a large spoonful of softened butter. The sweet smell of apples and cinnamon was too much for Sylvia, and she could not resist dipping her finger into the bowl to taste the sweet juice that had collected at the bottom.

“What do you think, girls?” their mother asked when Claudia returned from upstairs. “Has the dough rested sufficiently?” Sylvia did not know how to judge, but Claudia answered yes so confidently that Sylvia quickly chimed in her agreement rather than appear to know less than her sister. After the girls wiped the table clean, their mother covered the table with the sheet, pulled it smooth, and secured it in place with clothespins. She dusted the sheet with flour, but Sylvia noticed that she used far less than in previous years.

Eleanor instructed her daughters to wash their hands; when they returned from the sink, fingers freshly scrubbed and patted dry, they found her rolling out one of the dough balls into a rectangle in the center of the floured sheet. When she could roll the dough no thinner with the rolling pin, she set it aside. “Watch carefully,” she instructed her daughters. “Someday you will need to know how to do this on your own.”

She slipped her hands beneath the dough rectangle and gently stretched it, pulling carefully with the backs of her hands and her thumbs and allowing the dough to fall back upon the floured cloth. Stepping around to another side of the table, she repeated the motions until she had walked all the way around the table and stretched the dough on all four sides. “This will go faster if you two help me,” she remarked, reaching beneath the pastry dough again. “And I won’t have to walk around the table so many times.”

Sylvia flushed with nervousness and pride as she took her place on the other side of the table from her mother. She had often watched her mother, aunts, and older cousins stretching the dough, but she and Claudia had never been permitted to join in. The fragile dough must be stretched to a uniform tissue paper thinness everywhere, with no tears and no thicker patches to ruin the delicate texture. Sylvia’s touch was at first tentative, but then as she saw how the dough responded as she gently drew it from the center out, she grew bolder.

“Mama,” Claudia exclaimed just as Sylvia saw what she had done. “Sylvia tore a hole.”

Mortified, Sylvia pulled her hands free of the dough and allowed it to fall to the table. A three-inch maw in the dough glared up at her.

“That’s all right,” said Eleanor, hurrying over. “It’s easily mended.” She gently pinched the tear closed and smiled reassuringly at Sylvia, but the seam was too visible and she knew she had ruined the strudel.

“I’m sorry, Mama,” she said. What would the aunts say when they found out?

“Don’t worry, darling,” said Eleanor. “I imagine even Gerda Bergstrom tore the dough from time to time. When your grandmother first taught me to make it, I tore the dough so many times that it looked like a sweater the moths had found. We patched every hole and the strudel was still delicious, and I’m sure this one will be, too.”

Sylvia felt better, but Claudia shook her head in silent disgust. Leave it to the careless little sister to ruin the Bergstrom reputation, her look seemed to say.

Eleanor urged her daughters back to the task. Sylvia obeyed, but more cautiously this time. Gradually the dough grew longer and wider until it was nearly translucent. Eventually the dough stretched to the edges of the table, impossibly thin. Their mother circled the table one last time, trimming off the thicker edges with a knife. She set the scraps aside—she would make soup noodles with them later—and beckoned for Sylvia to bring her the apple slices. While Sylvia held the bowl, Eleanor scooped out the apples and lined one long edge of the dough from one end of the table to the other, piling up the slices in the shape of a log.

When she had finished, Eleanor set the empty bowl on the counter, her face flushed. Worried, Sylvia watched her while she held on to the back of a chair to rest, but she paused only a moment. Then, starting at one end, she carefully folded the dough over the apples until they could not be seen. “This is where teamwork is essential, girls,” she said, unclipping two of the clothespins. Her daughters had helped with this part before and knew what was to come. They took their places on either side of their mother and grasped the long edge of the sheet with both hands. Eleanor counted to three, and then they lifted the sheet so that the log of apples rolled away from them, wrapping itself up in dough as it went. Eleanor bent the strudel into a horseshoe, put it in a pan, and brushed it with butter left to melt on the stovetop. Claudia helped her slide the pan into the oven, and then, Sylvia thought with relief, they were finished.

“Well done, girls,” their mother praised. “But the proof will be in the tasting.”

Sylvia’s mouth watered in anticipation, but she knew they would have to wait until breakfast Christmas morning to enjoy the fruit of their labors. Eleanor allowed them to savor their moment of pride for only a moment before reminding them of the second ball of dough waiting to be stretched. A few minutes before the second strudel was ready to shape for the pan, the first had finished cooking. The heavenly aroma of cinnamon apples poured into the kitchen as Eleanor opened the oven door and took out the baking pan. To Sylvia’s joy, it looked exactly as it should, exactly like every strudel the Bergstrom women had made in that kitchen for generations.

With the second strudel in the oven, Sylvia was eager to begin another. “Shall we get more apples from the cellar, Mama?”

“Let’s rest a while first,” said Claudia, her eyes on their mother’s face.

“Or you could allow us to help,” remarked Great-Aunt Lucinda from the doorway. Great-Aunt Lydia peeked in over her shoulder, nodding.

“She asked you to help before and you refused,” said Sylvia.

“Hush, darling,” said her mother gently. She smiled at the aunts. “We’d be glad for your help. Many hands make light work.”

As their more experienced aunts joined in, Sylvia and Claudia were reduced to their usual role of kitchen helpers. They fetched utensils and ingredients for their elders, provided an extra hand here or quick clean-up there, but mostly, they watched and they listened. Sylvia drank in their stories of Christmases from long ago, of the hardships and the joys the women of her family experienced within those walls. Her mother listened, too, peeling apples slowly and steadily in her chair, her face no longer flushed, but pale, her smile content but weary.

By late afternoon the flour sack was empty and the sugar bin nearly so, but fourteen flaky, golden brown strudel lay side by side on the wooden table. Lucinda and Lydia promptly turned their attention to their delayed dinner preparations while Sylvia and Claudia cleaned up the mess. Their mother rose to assist, but Lucinda encouraged her to go upstairs and lie down for a while. “I can’t rest with so much yet to do before Christmas,” she protested, but when the aunts insisted, she agreed to sit in the front parlor and work on the Christmas Quilt until they needed her.

Naturally, Lucinda and Lydia had no intention of calling her until the men came in and the meal was served. Even Sylvia knew that. She tried to listen in on the aunts’ hushed conversation as she picked up apple peelings and washed dishes, catching words and phrases that convinced her they were discussing Eleanor’s strange insistence upon baking so many strudel, more than the Bergstroms had made for gifts in years. But the elder women kept their voices deliberately low so that Sylvia learned nothing, not even what they planned to tell the men when they had no flour to bake bread the next day.

Due to their haste or, just as likely, the contents of the larder, dinner was a simple affair of biscuits left over from breakfast and sausages, apples, and onions fried up together in Grandmother’s enormous cast-iron pan. Great-Aunt Lucinda told Claudia to set the dining room table while Sylvia went to the parlor to summon her mother. She found her asleep in the armchair, holly leaf appliqués scattered on her lap, thimble still on her finger.

If the men of the family were surprised to discover fourteen strudels displayed on the kitchen table, they said nothing of it at dinner. Maybe, Sylvia hoped, they had not gone into the kitchen at all. Maybe they would stay away until the pastries were wrapped in wax paper, tied with ribbon, and safely tucked away out of sight in baskets, ready for delivery. By an unspoken agreement, the women said nothing of how Sylvia’s mother had spent her day. Throughout the meal, Sylvia found herself nervously waiting for her mother to divulge the truth, but Eleanor spoke little. As soon as dinner was finished, she excused herself and went upstairs to bed.

As soon as she was out of earshot, the men revealed that they were well aware of the secret. Uncle William criticized their wastefulness, while Sylvia’s father wondered angrily why they had allowed Eleanor to work herself so hard.

“We couldn’t have stopped her,” said Lucinda. “Not without a good reason, not without divulging the truth about our finances. I don’t even know if that would have convinced her.”

“But you used up the last of the flour,” said Uncle William.

“I have eggs to trade for more.”

“We encouraged her to rest,” added Lydia. “Most of the time she was simply sitting, peeling apples.”

“Obviously that was enough to exhaust her.” Sylvia’s father rose and shoved in his chair, and only then did he seem to remember his three children still seated at the table, hanging on every word. Even two-year-old Richard looked solemn and anxious. “But she’ll be fine after a good night’s rest.”

Sylvia knew her father had added the last for their benefit. She wanted to believe him.

The next morning, Sylvia came downstairs to breakfast to find her mother in the kitchen packing the strudel carefully into baskets. She was shaking her head in mild exasperation as her husband tried to coax her back to bed. “I am not tired, and I am not about to linger in bed on the morning of Christmas Eve,” she told him. “I need to take these around to the neighbors now so that I’ll return before we send William and Nellie out to find a tree. I don’t want to miss that.”

“At least let me drive you,” Sylvia’s father persisted.

Eleanor stopped packing the baskets and looked him squarely in the eye. “Freddy, in all these years you have never treated me like an invalid and I forbid you to start now. You cannot protect me from what is coming, but you can make this time more bearable. Don’t bury me before I’ve passed.”

The anger in her mother’s gentle voice shocked Sylvia. “Mama?”

Her father turned his head toward her with a jerk, but her mother looked up more slowly, as if she was not surprised to discover Sylvia in the doorway. “What is it, darling?”

“What’s coming? You said something is coming. I heard you.”

Her mother said nothing.

“Christmas,” her father said abruptly. “Christmas is coming. Have you forgotten what day it is?”

Sylvia shook her head, both in response to his question and in rejection of his false reply. “Mama?” she said again, pleading. “Why are you angry at Daddy?”

Her mother hesitated. “Because I know he’s right.” She forced a smile, but Sylvia saw tears in her eyes. “I do work myself too hard sometimes, especially at this time of year. Freddy, I accept your offer to drive me. Thank you. Sylvia, would you come along, too, and help me give out the famous Bergstrom strudel to our friends? It’s only fitting, since you helped make them.”

“Of course, Mama,” said Sylvia, forcing cheer into her voice. Silently she chastised herself for not heeding her father’s wishes. How many times had he warned the children not to tire their mother? If Sylvia and Claudia had not agreed to help their mother make strudel, perhaps she would have stayed in her chair in the parlor, sewing on the Christmas Quilt and conserving her strength. Or perhaps she would have made the strudel alone, exhausting her last reserves of energy and rendering herself bedridden. Sylvia could not be sure if they had done right or wrong in helping their mother. It was all so confusing and strange. For years the adults of the family had cautioned the children that their mother was not well and that they should let her rest. Sometimes they forgot, but mostly they did as they were told. What good had it done? Quiet rest, visits from the doctor, concealing the truth about their finances—none of it made any difference as far as Sylvia could see. When was her mother going to be well and strong again?