Ursula Hegi The Burgdorf Cycle Boxed Set: Floating in My Mother's Palm, Stones from the River, The Vision of Emma Blau. Children and Fire (167 page)

… more alluring than my daughter has ever been.

“Are you listening?”

“I’ll spend less. And I’ll return the other dress for credit. This one now—” Yvonne motioned to the satin hem that had picked up dust along the way. “You know they won’t take it back like that. But I’ll get it dry-cleaned and wear it for several occasions.”
More alluring than my daughter has ever been.
“Because from now on, I promise, Emma, no more extravagances. Now that I see what you mean—”

“But you don’t see.” Emma shook her head. “You’re looking at it and you still don’t see.”

“I’ll trade you.” Yvonne smiled, suddenly feeling very brilliant. Not only would she keep both dresses, but she’d also get Emma to make sure the house wouldn’t get worse. “I’ll do it. I’ll make it yours, the house.”

Cautiously, Emma swallowed. Again.
Don’t say anything wrong. Don’t mess it up now. Listen to her. Listen closely.

“I’ll make it yours.” Her mother’s face was radiant. “Yours and Caleb’s.” She sounded like a child who believed that if she was nice, she’d get what she wanted.

So give her what she wants.
“Good,” Emma said, her heart beating slower. “Yes.”

It would be all right. Yvonne could feel it. “But you’ll have to let me keep both gowns.”

“Both gowns,” Emma repeated, though she hated the waste.

“And you’ll fix up the house, right?”

“You’ll always have a place to stay. Because I’ll bring it back to how it used to be. And then Caleb and I will work it out between us.” And she would. Restore the house for herself and Caleb.

The last time she’d seen her brother she had tried to talk to him about saving the house from their mother. Emma had been kneeling on the floor of a vacant apartment, cleaning around the recessed buzzer, getting the place ready for the Ketchums, a car mechanic married to a beautician.

“I’ve met with a lawyer,” she had told Caleb. “We’ve taken the old deed from the registry, and he has drafted a new one. He’ll notarize it once Mother is ready to convey the house to us. It would also make her eligible for Medicaid.”

When Caleb propped himself on the windowsill, Emma saw herself all at once the way he might show her in a film, cleaning the floor on her knees, and she felt angry as if she were that maid he’d summoned by pressing his foot against the button.

“If you don’t let up with this,” he said, “I’ll warn Mom, tell her to hold on to what belongs to her.”

“What belongs to her?” She stopped scrubbing and raised her
face. “There wouldn’t be anything left by now if I didn’t work constantly.”

“Still,” he insisted, “it belongs to her.”

“Easy for you to give her advice. You have no intention to help with the house, but you want to tell me what to do about it.”

“What not to do about it,” he had corrected her.

“And I need shoes,” Emma’s mother was saying as they re-entered her apartment.

“Shoes?” Emma followed her mother into the living room.

“To match both dresses.”

“We can buy them this afternoon. On the way back from the lawyer’s.”

“We don’t need a lawyer for this.”

“Just to make it all legal. It won’t take long. I’ll give him a call to make sure he gets it right.”

“But—”

“What color were you thinking of for the shoes?”

“But make sure Caleb gets half,” her mother said. And she said it again in the car that afternoon: “Make sure Caleb gets half.”

“I will. It’s important to me too.” And it was. Emma wanted Caleb to have half of it. Only not yet. “There’ll be plenty of time later,” she told her mother, “to figure the details. Until the house is restored, it’s best if I’m the only one on the deed.”

“You can restore it if it’s in both your names.”

“Think about it. He could force us into selling next week. The way the house is now, we wouldn’t get much for it. You’d lose everything, while he’d take the money to California and invest it in his films. I’d certainly understand it, considering how important his films are to him.”

“Caleb wouldn’t do that.”

Emma felt her mother getting slippery. Evasive. As she had so often in the past. But she was not about to let her. Not now. Reaching across, she grasped her mother’s cold hands. “Caleb does not live here,” she said urgently. “Owning a house here would be a burden for him. It is very expensive to make films.”

Yvonne turned her face from her daughter and toward the car
window—white clapboard houses, the brick bank, the rose hedge by the school—yet above everything that passed lay the reflection of her daughter’s face: determined; always present. Always tugging at her. She pulled her hands from Emma’s.

“Eventually Caleb will be grateful,” Emma said. “But it’s best to wait before telling him. In the meantime, I’ll write you a check every month for things you need.”

Things I need. Silk slips. Good shampoo and pantyhose. Dresses and lotion—

“I was thinking about two thousand.”

Roses once a week. Magazines. A new raincoat. Nail polish. New towels for the bathroom and kitchen. Candles. The shoes we’re getting today.
Yvonne was still thinking about those shoes while they sat in the lawyer’s office, and when she laid down the lawyer’s ballpoint pen, she felt glad that, finally, she’d been able to please her daughter by giving her what she wanted. She hadn’t seen her this joyful in years. Now Emma could not press her for anything else.

Because there isn’t anything else I can give her.

Most mornings Emma would awaken with the awareness that the house was hers alone, with a sense of security she hadn’t known since before
Opa’s
death. Again and again she’d look at the deed proving her ownership. She fined tenants two dollars for every day their rent was late. Charged them for burned-out lightbulbs in the hallway of the floor they lived on. Plans for making the house whole again filled her with such energy and purpose that—even when her body felt tired—she could not stop working: she replaced the brick walks in the garden; took down the rotting rails that partitioned Oma’s flower beds; gutted two empty apartments and repainted them; covered worn floors with carpeting.

In the apartment that used to be the Perellis’, the original green paint had bled through in several places, and when it still showed through two coats of white, Stefan offered to help her paint over it again, and they both had white smudges on their faces and clothes when they finished.

“Just look at us,” she said as they washed their faces and hands side by side at the bathroom sink.

In the mirror, Stefan noticed that he was as tall as his mother. Prodding her with one elbow, he motioned to their reflection.

“What are you grinning about?” she asked.

He raised himself on his toes, tried to look down on her, and noticed with alarm that from this angle her hair was graying. He tried to joke. “Shortie.”

“Oh yeah?” She felt a sudden and wild joy at having Stefan with her.

“Yeah, you’re just a shortie.”

She got on her toes too, stretched herself to her full height. “Shortie yourself.”

They had other moments of lightness between them. When he helped her with her work. Cooked dinner with her. Thanked her for a present she’d left for him on his desk. A book usually. Or a candy bar.

How she wished she could tell her brother about all the changes she was making, but she wanted to enjoy her ownership just a while longer. He wouldn’t be able to help with the work anyhow, and she was glad to restore the house for both of them. Though she didn’t like carrying that secret between them, it had to be like that for now, so he wouldn’t come at her with decisions and jeopardize what she was accomplishing.

Though she believed that every hour of work brought the
Wasserburg
closer to the way it had been, she also felt its weight in her limbs those mornings when she’d awake disoriented as if, all night, she had labored to crawl from beneath its burden. Ownership did not make it easier to pay the bills. She had to take out another mortgage. Reduce rents to attract new tenants. Move herself and Stefan into a smaller apartment on the fourth floor. Though she turned all she could back into the house, something else would break down as soon as she’d finish one repair.

Whenever her brother called, she was quick to get off the phone. But the longer the building was hers, the harder it was to think of the day when she’d deed him his half. She was sure she would— only not yet—and knowing she would was a constant struggle with what she really wanted: to have it be hers alone. But that wouldn’t
be right. Now if she’d had that kind of struggle with anyone else, she would have called Caleb, asked him what to do. She missed him. One evening, when Stefan was sleeping over at Justin’s house, she felt such an urge to hear her brother’s voice that she dialed his number in Los Angeles, though she knew she would hang up as soon as he answered.

“Hello,” he said, and then, “who is this?”

She couldn’t move. Minutes after he had hung up, she still held the receiver hard against her ear, telling herself that, ultimately, he would have to agree with what she was doing. If she hadn’t left school to care for the house, it would have fallen into disrepair, or her mother would have squandered it. The house had been her education. Caleb had his films. Meanwhile she was doing what was right, looking after her mother, paying her two thousand dollars every month as promised, far more than she and Stefan had to live on.

Caleb phoned her the summer of 1989 when she had owned the house one full year. “I’m thinking of flying out for a visit next month.”

“It’s not a good time,” she stalled. “A lot of problems with the house.”

“Once I’m there, I’ll help with whatever you’re doing.”

“I couldn’t ask that of you.” She felt queasy. “Listen, I have an appointment in a few minutes. But let me call you back. Soon. We’ll figure out what’s best with your visit.”

Two weeks later he called again.

“I meant to get back to you,” she apologized. “But we had trouble with the elevator again and we—”

“I know, Emma.”

“We got it working for a few days, and now it’s stuck again in the basement.”

“I’m not talking about the elevator.”

She leaned against the wall by the refrigerator. Pulled the phone cord close and bunched it against her throat. “I did it for both of us, Caleb.”

“The house doesn’t belong to us.”

“Who told you?”

“Certainly not you.”

“Aunt Greta? Mother?”

“Why did you?”

“Because otherwise there’d be nothing left. For you or for me.”

“I expect you to return the house to Mom.”

“Listen, it’s her overspending that did it. I’ve tried to talk to you. But the house was never important to you.”

“I’ll tell you what’s important to me—more important than any house. My relationship to my sister. And I can’t stand feeling cheated by—”

“No one cheated you.”

He heard the resentment in her voice and recalled his grandfather telling him how Emma’s hands had been so strong at birth that he’d known no one would ever be able to take from her what she wasn’t willing to part with. And as that memory fused with what Emma was saying to him now, he didn’t know yet how it all belonged together, only that it did.