The Master Butcher's Singing Club (50 page)

When he was younger, Delphine scolded Markus for losing mittens, and then knit him new pairs. Developed strategies of feeding to combat his thinness, which did not work. As he grew older, she helped him study and celebrated the awards that he won in school. Consoled him when he was forced into eyeglasses and made him wear them, hoping secretly that they would keep him from acceptance into the army. By cheating on the vision tests (she was sure) he schemed his way in anyhow.

The day he told her, she was prepared.

“Markus, sit down with me.”

He sat down eagerly at the kitchen table, confident and excited, indulging her. Delphine knew already that he wasn’t going to listen to her or believe her, but she was determined to make some impression.

“Markus, it’s not like in the movies where they shoot you in the shoulder or even if you die it is neat. Drilled through the heart. Men get ripped limb from limb. Torn up like so many pieces of paper. And half the time it’s out of some mistake and our own side kills its men by accident. Whatever you do, Markus, I am begging you, for Eva’s sake and your father’s sake and even though I’m not your blood mother, my own sake, too. Don’t get yourself put in the thick of it. Nobody says what it’s really like, Markus, to the young men. No one says boys get mangled.”

“Mangled!” Markus looked at her in patronizing surprise. “Where did you learn all this?”

“Reading, and common sense.” She could feel herself becoming desperate with irritation at his superior attitude. “What do you think bombs do? Pick out the Germans and Japanese? Make distinctions when they fall close to our lines? And then neatly and invisibly do away with you? They’re meat grinders.”

“Mom,” said Markus, “calm down.” As if he were dealing with a crazy person.

“Are we all a bunch of stupid suckers?” Delphine burst out passionately. It wasn’t even the war that made her so angry, it was the hypocrisy, the cheerful façade, the lies. She grabbed a magazine and leafed to an ad for toothpaste that exhorted the reader to send a tube to their boys
in the front lines. “As if the worst you’ll suffer is a toothache! And this!” An ad for gum implying that a stick in every letter would counter loneliness and even sharpen the troops’ observational skills.

“That’s how we are in this country,” she cried. “Destruction is a way to sell gum!” She put the magazine down, nearly weeping.

“I know, Mom.” Markus put his hands on her shoulders now and patted gingerly. He spoke quietly, dropping the cocksure tone. “I’ll be careful. I won’t let anybody shoot me or mangle me. I’m not like Franz, you know. He was a trained pilot when he went in. Me . . . they probably won’t even ship me overseas.” He said this kindly, to comfort her, but although she was grateful she could tell he both thought and hoped otherwise.

She put her face in her hands as Markus continued to pat her, awkwardly. She knew he wished that he were somewhere else. She felt her heart splitting right in her chest. “Go, get out of here. It’s your last night home,” she finally said, wiping her face with her apron. “Go tear up the town.”

“There’s nobody here to tear it up with anymore,” he said. “I’m gonna take a walk, buy a newspaper. Then I’m reading myself to sleep.”

HIS BROTHERS’ ARMIES
still ranged across the room, along the top of the dresser, on the windowsill. Markus had long outgrown the set, but he didn’t take down the display. In fact, after he’d taken his walk, unable to sleep, he spent his last evening at home perfecting the battle. Even though it was stupid, sentimental, Markus righted the tiny horses and toppled lieutenants, rearranged a charge and fortified a stand. As he fiddled around, he grew absorbed by the boy’s play. He surrounded a motley reconnaissance group with the wooden rocks and trees the twins had sawed of lumberyard scraps and painted in crude woodland colors years ago. He arranged the armored vehicles, with real rubber treads and tin flags. The soldiers had tiny helmets that could be blown right off their heads. And the horses, and the cavalry, they were obviously no match and easily reared over backward, hit, when, in a moment of fascination, Markus ranged their homemade machine-gun nests
before them and made a sweep, and then sent in the tanks. Anyone could see that it was romantically insane to send mounted horsemen against armored divisions, as the Poles did when Blaskowitz’s Eighth Army drove eastward against Lodz, but Markus meticulously arranged the seated horsemen with the rearing officer at their head.

When Delphine and his father first married, Markus had hidden behind the door of the office listening to his father on the telephone. From thinly disguised talk between Fidelis and Delphine, he understood the truth that his brothers weren’t coming home. That was when he decided that he wouldn’t put the toy soldiers away. He would never put them away. He would have to keep their toys prepared. And so, as though the passionate games they’d played for hours, lost in their careful arrangements, would of their own force and incompletion draw his brothers back home, Markus had wiped the dust off the infantry and set them into a new and stricter formation. He’d kept them looking sharp ever since. Now, he took a step backward, frowned, then swept some down with a finger to lie with their rifles pointing at the ceiling. His action suddenly frightened him. Superstitious, he set the soldiers up again.

THE NEXT DAY, MARKUS
left on the bus to Fort Snelling and Delphine baked until midnight. Then she sat at the table, reading mindlessly down a stack of popular novels she’d lugged home from the town library and eating half the cookies she meant to send in his first package. At two a.m. she baked another batch and when she finally fell asleep she dreamed, for the first time in many years, of those dead in her cellar, of Ruthie, who rose toward her spitting clouds of white moths.

When she woke in the streaming light, Delphine knew that she’d have to take unusual measures to ensure her sanity and contain her anxious grief. An assessment was in order. She must be strict with herself. She was thirty-five years old and the one she’d called her son was grown and gone. What had happened to the two younger boys in Germany was quite unknown. Her husband had dragged from her a sort of
love. Not romance, after all. The weight of it once all their feelings had settled was enormous, like a rug to sleep beneath instead of a goose-down quilt. It was a love full of everyday business, full of selling and killing and hemming pants. They slept heavily, deeply, and probably both snored. He still ironed his own shirts. She bought a sharp French perfume and badgered him about his touchy digestion. Theirs was a tolerable and functional love, and precious to her because it did not have the power over her that she had feared.

More and more, Delphine liked the work of grocering and butchering and figuring accounts. Keeping track of the store’s inventory satisfied a streak of mania for detail. And then there were civic duties that befit her position. To her bewilderment, by simply marrying, following a daily schedule, attending to details and minding her own business, she became one of the town’s most stable and respected women. Her advice was asked. Her solutions were quoted. Her sagacity with cheap cuts of meat and her saving ways with money were admired. She knew when to spend a dime on advertising or equipment and when to save it or buy a war bond. And she read—that was something, too. People followed her appraisals or withdrew books from the library that displayed her neat and forthright signature on the cards tucked into cardboard pockets inside the back cover.

Lately, she had less time to read, less time for everything. The war was changing the business in a startling rush. Suddenly, they were behind orders. Customers came out of nowhere. Jewish synagogues from Minneapolis sought out Fidelis for custom kosher work. At the same time as business boomed, shortages plagued them. Although Fidelis possessed a much coveted C sticker for the delivery truck, they were always low on gasoline. Coffee disappeared. The government requisitioned butter from the dairies, so she sold blocks of oleomargarine with little pats of yellow dye. Her distributor could supply only the lowest grade of canned goods, then none. No eggs. They were all being powdered for the soldiers, apparently, as Markus wrote to say that powdered eggs were their breakfast staple. He lived for Clark candy bars and any fresh fruit he could get, and he was desperately bored. Delphine bought a dozen Modern Library
paperbacks and mailed them two by two. Dos Passos. Faulkner. Cather. She seemed busier than ever, and yet the restlessness that had assailed her as soon as Markus left continued.

Delphine wrangled with suppliers, argued about rationing, made up clever advertisements containing jokes, like the picture of the cow and its slogan, “Our Only Dissatisfied Customer.” She worked long hours in the shop, hoping to exhaust herself. But every night she woke at precisely four and could not still her brain. Sometimes she felt Fidelis awake beside her, thinking about the twins. “They’re too young,” she said to him, thousands of times. She waited until he slept again, and as soon as his breathing deepened, she tossed and turned. She tried to write, to keep a diary, but her attempts irritated and then bored her. For a while she took up sewing and then grew impatient with seams and patterns. At last, she began taking night walks before bedtime.

While Fidelis prepared himself for sleep by listening to the radio and soaking his feet in a hot Epsom salt bath that she prepared for him after he drank his first highball, Delphine walked the town streets. Passing the serenely lighted houses in the cool of dark, she wondered whether she had absorbed the insomniacal heron-stride of Step-and-a-Half. Perhaps she would be known as similarly eccentric. Perhaps at night, people in their houses would hear her pass by and say, “There goes that old Delphine.”

As she passed by the graveyard where her father lay, and Eva too, she often turned through the gate to visit. Even at night, the cemetery with its blunt square stones was a welcoming and ordinary place with nothing of death’s majesty or mess. All was neatly laid out, measured inch by inch. Hock’s grave with its severe black spike of granite (he’d already picked it out, way back then) was no more than a sad curiosity. Roy’s grave smelled to her faintly of schnapps. Eva had chosen to be buried in Argus and not shipped back to Germany. But it had pained her sometimes to think of staying forever in such a new country, far from her mother and father’s graves, parentless. Delphine had planted a small pine tree behind Eva’s gravestone, leaving room for it to grow. She
found comfort in imagining that by now the roots had twined down to cradle her friend. One night, although the ground was cold, Delphine wrapped her coat around herself and sat beneath the pine. She listened to the soft wind rushing in its needles, and pretended that the sound traveled down the long roots so that Eva could hear the beauty of it, too.

“If I hadn’t met you,” she told Eva, “maybe I’d have moved on. But now, the strange thing is, you took my ambitions and left me with your life. I have your life now. I kept on running things.”

Fidelis had bought a large cemetery plot, and he would lie next to Eva. Although Delphine had claimed his other side, she thought now that she would rather if Eva lay between the two of them. Beyond her was Roy’s place. At least I’ll have Roy at my shoulder for eternity, Delphine thought, telling rough jokes in my ear. But in that cool, rushing darkness she also felt the bottomless loneliness one can only feel from a childhood loss. That mother loss had made Delphine strong, but also caused her to live as a damaged person, a searcher with a hopeless quest, a practical-minded woman with a streak of dismay. Even now that she could count herself close to middle age, she missed her mother. Stroking the icy blades of grass over Eva’s grave with her hands, she had the sudden urge to lie down and listen to the ground, as if she would hear a great heart beating beneath her ear, as if she would be tranced like a baby by the humming of her mother’s blood.

ENTERING THE WARM KITCHEN
, Delphine found her husband reading the paper, sitting in a chair with his feet in the bath. She’d made the water as hot as he would tolerate, but now the foot bath was cooled. She looked at him—he’d grown a mustache and it came out entirely pale gray, although his hair was the same roan as when she first knew him, shot only here and there with strands of age. She touched her own hair, just a little duller, thinner, in spite of the rich black walnut shampoo she bought from the supplier. Yet she had kept her looks—she knew that from the exasperation of the female customers who declared themselves jealous and then, she imagined, went off uttering words of
condescending pity for the inability to conceive that enabled Delphine to stay so young, and was not worth it, in their opinion, given the joys they experienced with their children.

Delphine sat down on a little stool before Fidelis and took his feet into a towel on her lap. Fidelis’s feet were white and heavy as sink porcelain. The butcher’s defenselessness lay in the tender skin, the surprising arch, the square vulnerability of his toes. Delphine poured eucalyptus liniment into her hands from a big brown bottle, and rubbed her husband’s feet to aid the circulation, then she pared the nails, salted his feet with coarse sea salt and rubbed again to smooth their calluses. At last, she poured more liniment on her hands and rubbed harder. He put the paper down and groaned with relief as her hands worked, and he thanked her in a sheepish voice. This attention always slightly embarrassed him, but he couldn’t resist it. He had never recovered from the old war-time frostbite, and lately cramping pains and a numbness of the toes had begun to plague him.

When his feet were safely stuffed in woolen socks, he poured another highball, made with rum. He was trying to get used to it as whiskey from overseas was scarce. Delphine put away the foot bath, sat next to him. I’ve missed out on God, she thought. Still, I haven’t fooled myself. I still think God’s a drunken lout who hasn’t given the world a second thought since making it. Formerly a genius, yes, I’ll give God that, but a supremely careless artist who casts His most extraordinary paintings and sculptures and exquisite live works to hell and lets the devil shit on them.