Under the Same Blue Sky (20 page)

After dinner, over coffee and
faworki,
the baron drew a photograph from his wallet, holding it by the edges as if it were a tiny Rembrandt, and set it gently before my father. I leaned over to see a man reading in the rose garden. Who could it be but Friedrich? “Could you make this in tin, Herr Renner? You’ll be well compensated.” Deep eyes warned me:
Say nothing.

My father studied the photograph. “I’ll try.” We drank schnapps in crystal glasses that had never in my memory left our glass cabinet. The baron briefly recounted his success with the Constable landscape.
Carnegie’s agent was pleased and might buy a series of Dürer etchings and a jeweled medieval chalice just recently available. “Tell us about the Constable,” my father said. The baron described how land rolled into sea, the stark tree, the great sky—and here he stopped. What else did he see? A burning man falling, a plane spinning, an Allied fighter arching up, triumphant at his kill? My parents were silent. They must have known.

“A friend died three weeks ago,” the baron said. “I happened to be at our embassy when the telegram came. He was a pilot. The body was—unrecognizable.”

My father refilled the baron’s glass. “We’re losing our best.”

“How many for you, Herr Renner?”

“Three cousins in Tannenberg, two in Gallipoli. Another lost both legs. Ten nephews are dead or missing. Five women from bombs. Twelve children. Of friends and their sons, nearly thirty. Seven crazed from shell shock.” My father looked away. Did he see a regiment filing past him, all the dead, wounded, and lost? “And you, Baron?”

“Nearly fifty from my academy. Of my relatives, eleven. If we were over there, Herr Renner, we might both be dead.” Now both were helpless bearers of guilt and grief.

Our clock struck eleven. The baron waited out its chimes before pushing back his chair. “Herr Renner, it is said that pain shared is pain halved. We are brothers of a bleeding land.” He grasped my father’s hand for a long moment before turning to my mother. “And Frau Renner, you have given me a taste of Prussia and a welcome in your home. I sincerely thank you for both.” He kissed her hand.

“Miss Renner, a car will be here at nine on Monday morning. We’ll meet at the station.” He shook hands and left. From the baron’s metronome tread, I knew the academy had put this in his bones as well: how to descend a stairway.

After the dishes were washed and dried, as my father sketched drafts for the baron’s tin, my mother took me to the front room, where she kept family photographs from Germany: weddings, birthdays, baptisms, Christmases, and outings in the country. She slowly turned the yellowing pages. Tiny black crosses hovered over many heads. “Killed?” I whispered.

“Yes. And look.” She opened a wooden box of crude tin faces with a name under each: Erich, Franz, Clara, Gretchen, Bernard, Harald, Horst, Max, Peter, Otto, Ludwig, Hilde, Sophie, Ernst. Many showed children. Beneath them lay stacks of blank plates. I put my arm around her. She leaned against me.

“Now he’s hammering someone else’s dead. Come back again soon, Hazel. He needs you.” We went quietly to bed, but my father stayed up, hammering late into the night. Even if I came back, what relief could I bring him in a city that thrived on war? “We’re the arsenal of the world,” many boasted. Two hundred and fifty war plants beat out munitions. Those who didn’t smell factories or hear the laden trains rumbling east saw smoke curling like huge snakes into the air day and night. Even if my touch returned, could it reach and lift a sorrow like my father’s, so deeply sunk into a soul?

We went to church on Sunday, had a quiet family dinner, and walked up to Shadyside. In the evening, at my mother’s insistence, we saw the new Charlie Chaplin film. We laughed and stamped our feet at the Little Tramp’s misadventures. “You two should come more often,” I said on the way home.

“We will,” my mother declared. “Even if I have to drag him. And we’ll visit you in Dogwood. Everyone needs a vacation.”

“Perhaps,” my father said. “We’ll see.”

In the morning, I took leave of my parents in our flat and hurried down to the waiting car. Holding their faces before me all the way to
the station, I wondered if Margit had known their capacity for love. As her own dreams and plans bloomed and burst, did she trust that Johannes and Katarina Renner would keep faith with each other and with me? Yes, I’d done right to search for her in Dogwood. At least I’d discovered this: Margit had taken some care in her plans for me.

On our eastbound train, as the baron read from a leather-bound volume of Goethe, passengers turned to stare at him or found reasons to pass us in the corridor. I imagined their thoughts:
Who is this handsome, foreign-seeming man? An actor? Someone important?
How wearisome to be a constant sideshow attraction, a beautiful freak of nature. As we drew near Dogwood, his shoulders stiffened and he sat erect, facing the next battle.

CHAPTER 12

Our Mother, Our Bride

M
y father’s finished tin of Friedrich arrived and disappeared into the baron’s suite, which only Tilda entered. She was a gaunt, fierce-eyed woman who pressed herself against walls when I passed and returned any greeting with the briefest syllables. “Tilda’s not a talker,” Anna said when I remarked on these encounters. “That’s why she cleans his rooms.” The potato peeler’s
click-click-click
said the subject of the baron’s rooms was closed. “There’s a letter for you on the table.”

It was my own letter to Susanna, returned unopened in an envelope from the judge. He didn’t trust me not to speak of Ben—that was clear. He didn’t want me, letters from me, or any memory of me in Galway. Anna discreetly made no comment. At least the Burnetts kept our friendship. I’d sent them a postcard of Dogwood and Alice wrote me back. The new schoolteacher was nice but a little boring. Some country children had stopped coming. She was reading
Great Expectations,
by Mr. Dickens. It was good. Her mother was having a baby; she hoped for a baby brother. They were all so excited. She was feeling well and hoped I was the same.

Alice remembered me, but what of the other children? How many had been told to forget about the witch, the fraud? My blue house was gone. My drawings on the schoolhouse walls must be gone and perhaps my collection of feathers, rocks, and dried flowers.
Never mind. You’re here, in Dogwood.
The baron required only diligent, meticulous work. When the war ended, peace would surely heal my father. The children had a teacher, perhaps boring, but causing no trouble.

“Even if you aren’t Friedrich, you’re useful to the baron,” Tom said when we returned from Pittsburgh. “You could stay after the war, you know. There’s nothing wrong with Dogwood.” That was true. It was also true that Tom’s own gentle, steady presence was weaving itself so tightly into my own life that it was hard to think of leaving.

Still, I couldn’t help musing. Suppose a healing touch
did
return? Then, my fantasy followed, shouldn’t I take it where the need was greatest, to the Western Front? Could I ease trench fever, suck out poison gas, calm the shell-shocked, and patch up bodies ripped by guns, grenades, and bayonets? But the need was boundless over there. Each “success” in Galway had brought dizzying weakness. Could I survive one ward of wounded men? And what of the civilians blasted by bombs or starved by blockades? I walked through the mirrored gallery, making infinite regiments of Hazels, left, right, ahead, and behind. Would all of us suffice to heal the wounds of war?

The
New York Tribune, New York Times, Newark Star-Eagle, New Yorker Staats-Zeitung,
and
Philadelphia Demokrat
brought casualty counts. Every two-reeler that Tom and I saw at Dogwood’s Palace Theater began with newsreels of soldiers scrambling out of trenches, poison gas alerts, and Red Cross nurses feeding broth to men with bandaged faces. A Wurlitzer organ played triumphantly over scenes of Allied victories in the forests of Mametz, Orvillers, and Trônes. Troop trains steamed out
of London. How many men in last week’s films were dead or maimed by now? When the Battle of the Somme began, we watched Allied troops furiously digging trenches, and then relaxing with cards and coffee. Only newspapers reported the carnage. There were sixty thousand British casualties on July 1 alone. What of their families?

And German families? The baron was helping the National Relief Fund Committee for the Wounded and Destitute in Germany and Austria-Hungary slip food and medical supplies through the British blockade. “Germany is our mother, America our bride,” committee members fervently declared, swearing that loyalty to the bride could never discount compassion for the mother’s plight. Yet with the committee suspected of arms dealing and some banks refusing its accounts, members began raising funds through private sales of artwork, jewelry, and antiques.

On a hot August day, I helped Tom pack crystal goblets from the baron’s collection for an auction house in New York sympathetic to the fund. “It must be hard for him to be so caught in the middle,” Tom was saying.

“It’s hard for
all of us
. Him, Anna, Tilda, me, my family. You know what we’re called: ‘hyphenated Americans’ Huns.”

He stopped packing. “Oh, Hazel, nobody thinks that about you.”

“No?” I told him about my father’s soaped and broken windows, the streetcar sneers, and the “louts” at Henderson’s Drug Store.

“I’m so sorry. I wish I could help.”

“You do. Just by—” Just by his broad smile in the morning, his whistle that came floating up to our tower office, our walks, his steady loyalty to Anna and the baron, and the warm, rolling, infectious laughter I needed more each day. “Just by being here,” I finished, “and not talking about ‘over there.’”

“Then we won’t. We’ll pack crystal and I’ll talk to you about—flying.” He held a goblet in the sunlight, spraying rainbows across the room. “Did you know that I’m taking lessons?”

“You are?”

“Yes, I haven’t told Anna or the baron. They’d be worried.”

“Of course, after what happened to Friedrich.”

“It’s New Jersey. There’s nobody shooting at you. And it’s magical. You’re free. You’re an angel, a bird, playing in clouds. So far up, everything you see is beautiful, like—a Corot landscape. You have no body, only soul. I know that sounds crazy, but it’s true.” He took my hand. “Hazel, come up with me. You’d be perfectly safe, I promise.”

I looked out into a vast blue sky. How could it hold a mortal body? And who could fly
here
without imagining pilots
over there,
hunted, falling, burning, or shooting, bombing, pouring down death? If America went to war, and if Tom flew like Friedrich, wouldn’t he be as vulnerable as Friedrich, a flimsy soul in a man-made flying box?

He must have read my mind, for he held up a warning hand. “Don’t think about that. We’d just see the castle, farms, woods, orchards, and little towns. You can’t imagine how peaceful it is.”

“No. Please, Tom, I don’t want to go.” He didn’t ask again. We finished packing, speaking of Lilli’s new tricks and how well she could find any of us now, inside or outside the castle.

T
HREE LETTERS CAME
from my mother in one envelope, written a week apart, as if she’d been reluctant to say, “
This
is what’s happening.” In the first letter, my father was leaving their bed before dawn. He’d slip down to the store, where she’d hear him hammering tin. In the second letter, he was spending whole nights there. “He says people might put signs on the windows if he’s not around. Even Uncle Willy’s worried.” The third, hastily written, said: “I found a stack marked ‘Battle of the
Somme’ with names I don’t know. I think he’s inventing them. Please come home and make him forget the war.”

That night my wastebasket overflowed with balled-up versions of “Father, don’t think about sad things.” No, I couldn’t insult his grief with banalities. But perhaps, hard as it would be to leave Dogwood now, a long visit home could give my mother some relief.

“The baron needs you here
,
” Anna said whenever I spoke of leaving. “He hasn’t had a headache for months, even after Friedrich died.”

“Not because of me.”

“You don’t know that. And besides, you like the work, and you like being here.”

“Yes, of course.”

“So? You should stay.” She was blanching cabbage leaves to stuff with her jealously guarded mix of chopped meat, breadcrumbs, spices, and “extras.” Next, she’d tend her beer barrels brewing in the cellar. In midafternoon, she’d knit socks for an orphanage in Newark. Anna never doubted her place in this world. My life would be easier if I could only cultivate her calm “So?”

E
ACH WEEK OF
war brought new complications to our work. When Italy joined the Allies, our agent in Venice refused to work with Germans. The tightening British blockade complicated every shipment from the continent. Even moving work out of neutral Sweden was “a job for Harry Houdini,” the baron said grimly. More and more, we bought and sold for American collectors.

In late September, I was preparing a file when the baron stood so suddenly that I looked up. He dropped a newspaper on his desk and left the office, the polished shoes dragging as if he pulled a great weight.

What had he read? I crossed to his desk. The
New Yorker Staats-Zeitung
was reporting on the Battle of the Somme, now in its third month:
“Somme. The whole history of the world cannot contain a more ghastly word.” The corpses couldn’t be retrieved quickly enough; they piled in trenches and carpeted No Man’s Land, attracting rats. Half a million German soldiers might die in the mud of the Somme, the writer declared, and as many Allies. A million casualties. All for a tiny slice of the Western Front.

The baron’s desk was private; that went without saying. But I saw correspondence regarding clandestine food shipments across the Baltic Sea and into Prussia attached to a list of items I recognized from his private collection. There was an early Rubens, a Roman bust of Alexander the Great, a Paul Gauguin lately acquired, and two Ming vases. Would these be sold for Prussian food? What pain he must feel for the land that expelled him and yet starved as he ate, destitute as he lived in comfort behind an ocean. Was some of this food for his own family? I carefully replaced the newspaper and returned to my desk. When the baron hadn’t returned by noon, I went downstairs for lunch.