Under the Same Blue Sky (25 page)

“Hazel, come to the kitchen with us. We’ll all sit with him later.”

“No, I want to be outside.”

“But not alone.” So Tom took me to gather daffodils, hyacinth, and sprays of pussy willow and crab apple blossoms. With his arm around me and Lilli brushing my leg, I could feel the ground again, even if shadows dangled from every tree.

Pastor Birke called on us in the afternoon. Mrs. McClellan brought a tray of almond cookies. The Hendersons came with their lanky son, Geoffrey, who had been away at college. Mr. Finkle the postmaster and his wife brought a gift of black-rimmed handkerchiefs. My mother accepted them graciously, only later muttering: “I don’t need black handkerchiefs to remind me that I’m a widow.” She wouldn’t wear black after the funeral, she’d decided: “Why make a show for others? Your father knew I loved him with all my heart. I’ll miss him forever. It doesn’t matter what I wear.”

Uncle Willy and Tante Elise came on the last train, bringing the gift of their presence. Oblivious to the castle’s grandeur, they took bread and cheese in the kitchen, listening, nodding, never speaking of war.

“Let’s go sit with Johannes,” my mother said after they’d eaten.

Startled, I caught Tante Elise’s eye. She had noticed the change as well. It wasn’t: “Let’s go sit with your father.” From now on it would be “Johannes” or “our Johannes” in my presence. I had joined a sisterhood of loss.

We went into the room where he lay. Tom and Anna had set out chairs and put our flowers around the body. “Johannes was alone too much,” my mother said. “I was always at the bakery.”

“And I made him come to Dogwood. Perhaps he should have stayed in Pittsburgh,” I added.

“No, this place was good for him,” Uncle Willy insisted. “And it was good that you worked, Katarina. I know he was proud of you. And he had some peace here. He wasn’t around war factories all day.”

“But I could have—” Done what?

Uncle Willy took my hand. “Hazel, the pain that was too much for him, that pain was who he was, a man who ached for every loss a world away, whose heart was large enough for that. Did you want to make
him less than such a man?” Did I? Was it arrogance or selfishness that I had thought to “heal” his crippling compassion? The father who gave me caramels felt for
all
the fallen fathers. Mourning him hurt so much. But he had mourned millions. Who could do this and live?

“Johannes, my friend,” said Uncle Willy, “you were the best of us.”

We held hands together and breathed the flowers. Then very slowly, the stories began. We talked about old times in Pittsburgh and the Old Country. At last, we even laughed together, as my father would have wanted.

Tom worked all night on the oak coffin, cutting and fitting, sanding and waxing until it glowed like amber. He nailed a cross on top and below it two of my father’s tins: a woodland scene and the Old Bridge in Heidelberg.

“It’s beautiful, Tom,” I said when he brought me to the workshop.

“It’s my best work,” he said shyly. “But it’ll be buried, so I made these for you and your mother.” He held out two palm-sized boxes with tiny flecks of tin and a miniature cross. “I only knew him a little while, but it feels like I’ve lost my own father.” I have the little coffin still, the crisp edges worn by a thousand touches. In each touch I’ve felt my father’s heart and the caramel sweetness of his time with us.

All the castle staff came to the funeral, Mrs. McClellan, the Hendersons, the Finkles, and some of the bakery customers who were friendly with my mother. The choir wasn’t there but with the doors thrown open to spring air and sunlight pouring through the high windows, we were embraced by peace. Anna and Tante Elise sang “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.” When Pastor Birke spoke in German, I translated for Tom. My mother never moved, only closing her eyes when the deep bell tolled my father’s soul to rest. I thought of poor Ben, who’d had no such bell.

The baron had ordered a black coach with black horses to bring the coffin home. We walked behind it, carrying flowers for the grave. It was a Monday morning, the streets busy and American flags fluttering on many windows. “Crush the Kaiser!” read a banner outside the barbershop. We passed a group of young boys. “Another Kraut gone,” one said. Pebbles hit the carriage. “Should I do something?” Tom whispered. I shook my head. We walked in silence, broken by rustling whispers on the street: “Huns . . . one of
them
.” Pebbles hit the horses, making them lurch. Captain Neal, the town’s portly policeman, came out of Delia’s Café just then and quietly joined our procession. The pebbles ceased.

“Thank you, Captain,” the baron said at the castle gate.

“I can’t stop the war, sir, but I’ll be damned if I can’t keep the peace in Dogwood.”

Tom, the baron, Kurt, and Uncle Willy carried my father to the meadow, where a grave had been dug. Pastor Birke said a brief prayer. We buried him and laid flowers on the turned ground. I felt weightless as we walked back, as if I’d left my own body behind. Tom held my hand.

“Now we eat,” said Anna.
Now we eat?
Since we’d cut my father down, food had turned to sawdust in my mouth. “Hazel,” she said firmly, “it’s time.”

We gathered in the small dining room, fragrant with apple cake and Mrs. McClellan’s gingerbread. Tom opened a keg of Anna’s beer. There were meatballs in cream sauce with the crispy fried potatoes my father loved and onions sautéed to sweetness in fresh butter. Tante Elise’s tangy sauerkraut banished the scent of grave dirt that hung around us. We ate and ate, filling our emptiness.

“Frau Renner,” the baron said over apple cake, “you are welcome to stay with us as long as you wish.”

“Yes, Baron, I’d like to.” So quickly she’d decided. I was happy, of course, but surprised. She’d said nothing to me. Was this how she’d felt when I announced my plans for Galway or for Dogwood?

“Good,” said Anna. “We’ll try to make you happy here.”

Hazed with beer, I pressed close to Tom, needing the warm weight of his presence. With America at war, how long would he stay in Dogwood? In these few days, my world had changed. My anchors were breaking away.

In the last nights, my mother had shared my bed. Now she’d sleep alone. “I have to start sometime,” she said. Two days later, as we walked to the meadow, she announced: “I’m selling the store to Frank.”

“Are you sure?” She had deliberated for weeks over buying a Victrola.

“Yes, I’m sure.”

“When did you decide?”

“Yesterday. I spoke with the baron. He knows an accountant in Pittsburgh who’ll oversee the inventory and help me draw up papers.”

“You won’t want to go back sometime? You’ve lived there so long.”

“No. You’re here, for now. I have work, clean air, and friends. I’ll miss Elise and Willy, but Johannes is everywhere in Pittsburgh. I couldn’t bear it, and I don’t want to manage a hardware store.”

“I see. But can Frank afford to buy it? And suppose he gets drafted?” I stopped, not to overwhelm her with issues. But she’d thought of everything.

“I’m not in a hurry; he can pay over time. We worked it out yesterday.”

“You spoke to Frank yesterday?”

“Yes, I called him. He said he has asthma and flat feet, so the army won’t take him. He’ll get a bank loan. That shouldn’t be hard. The store is doing well.” This was a new Katarina Renner, changed before my eyes.

“Well then, it’s settled. And when the store’s paid for, what then? You’ll buy a bakery?”

“Perhaps.”

I stopped walking, amazed. “You thought of that?”

She took my hands. “Hazel, the truth is, living in Pittsburgh or Dogwood, selling the store, buying a bakery, are all little things. How to live without Johannes,
that’s
the big thing,
that’s
what I have to figure out.”

We reached the meadow. We knew we’d see his grave. Yet the sight of bare, mounded earth took our breath away. He was underneath, in a wooden box. “
Zu schmerzlich,
” my mother whispered. “Hazel, it’s going to be so hard.”

CHAPTER 15

What You Can’t Say

A
s swiftly as spring came to Dogwood that year, America was changing. Now I was the one who walked to town early for the morning paper, each a louder drumbeat calling us to arms. “Once lead this people into war,” President Wilson had said, “and they’ll forget there was ever such a thing as tolerance.” He was right. Hatred of Germany and the Central Powers was being manufactured and sent through the air like factory smoke, blowing into homes, stores, schools, and churches, fanned by legions of “Four Minute Men” who commandeered theater stages before every show to rouse a fighting spirit.

“There is something fundamentally wrong with the Teutonic soul,” intoned Professor G. Stanley Hall, the psychologist my normal schoolteachers so admired. The great evangelist Billy Sunday preached: “It is Germany against America; Hell against Heaven.”

In taverns, Tom said, many patriots swore off German beer in favor of corn whiskey. Poppy, the town drunk, was arrested for disturbing the peace after careening down Main Street, screaming: “Drink American, everybody! Drink American!”

In New York, the baron was handed a flyer. He showed it to me, holding the paper by its edges as if it might corrode his hands. I read: “The hideous Hun is a fiendish torturer and sadist who thinks no more of raping a 10-year-old girl than of sweeping priceless treasures from the table to make room for his feet in the French chateau commandeered as his headquarters.” The baron raised an anguished face: “
This
is what they think of us?”

Stopping in the public library, I noticed gaps in the shelves. “Those were German books,” the librarian said primly. “They have to go.” I saw a copy of
Heidi
on a stack marked for discard.

“Heidi was Swiss,” I reminded her.

“But she spent time in Frankfurt. Our children have plenty of American and English books to read, don’t they, Miss Renner?”

“Yes, ma’am, I’m sure they do.” In Galway, children sang a verse of “Silent Night” in German for the Christmas pageant. They wouldn’t do this now. In every public place, we had to censor our speech. New laws forbade criticism of the war, the Constitution, the American government, the flag, the Red Cross, the YMCA, the uniforms of the United States or any ally. Obstructing the sale of war bonds or any “disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive” remark about any aspect of the war effort could bring a ten-thousand-dollar fine or twenty-year prison sentence. The post office would not mail periodicals criticizing the war effort. We could not say “sauerkraut” in public: it was “liberty cabbage.” Hamburgers were “liberty steaks.” German measles were “liberty measles.” Lilli was an
Alsatian,
not a German shepherd, and dachshunds were now “liberty pups.”

At the bakery, Mrs. McClellan staged furious battle against houseflies after hearing that German scientists had infected them with deadly germs. “It
could
be true. That’s the kind of thing they’d do.” When some customers took offense at my mother’s accent, Mrs.
McClellan sadly said she’d have to stay in the kitchen and please refrain from singing German songs as she worked.

“Hazel, what’s happening to people?” she demanded. “People still want my cakes and cookies, but they don’t want
me
. A little girl came into the kitchen to watch me making rolls and her mother snatched her back as if I had the plague. But I’m sure it’s no better in Pittsburgh.”

“I know, Mother. I’m sorry.” Even if I looked, dressed, and talked like any true American, I was known to be from the castle and therefore stared at in town, just as I was in Galway, a stranger and suspect. What would they have done to my father, with his strong accent and the Old World cut of his jackets?

America must be saved from people like us: Huns, butchers, Teutonic beasts. Eating must change for the war effort, declared Herbert Hoover, the nation’s food administrator. Through “voluntary rationing” we were to keep wheatless Mondays and Wednesdays, meatless Tuesdays, porkless Thursdays and Saturdays, and heatless Mondays to conserve coal. We began seeing Ford automobiles pulled by horses as “real Americans” saved gasoline for the war effort.

Geoffrey Henderson was the first in town to enlist. I saw Mrs. Henderson red-eyed as I filled a prescription for Anna’s heartburn. “He was in college, so they promised to make him an officer. Maybe he’ll be safer that way.”

“He
will
be safer,” Mr. Henderson called from the back. “Right, Hazel?”

“Of course. Everyone says the war will end quickly now.”
Yes, quickly, before more young men go.
Alice Burnett had written me that a recruiting officer came to Galway and five country boys signed up. “They said the army had to be better than farming. Horace and Charlie tried, but they’re too young.” Of course they were. They were schoolchildren, playing tag at recess. How could they be soldiers?

We must send millions of men “over there,” newspapers cried. “Bang! Bang! Bang!” cried little boys running down Main Street with toy guns. Recruitment posters bloomed everywhere. “Join the Air Service!” said one in the Hendersons’ window. In the bakery: “Be an American Eagle.” By the theater: “Come on, boys! Do your duty!”

I watched Tom training Lilli to go left, go right, sit, stand, wait, fetch, and find. “Stay,” he’d command, and then busy himself with other tasks while secretly timing her stay.
Tom, you stay, too. The trees stay, the rose garden stays.
But walking with him, sitting in the meadow, seeing him follow a bird across the sky, I knew that war would soon suck him away.

“I couldn’t bear it,” I told my mother.

“You’ll have to,” she said quietly. As she bore my father’s passing. That went without saying.

I ceased making plans. To stay in Dogwood, leave Dogwood, go or not go to Paris after the war, what did my plans matter now? This war was a vast whirlpool, churning plans apart. The one million dead at the Somme all had plans, and so did those they left behind. Cities bombed to rubble had plans. The earth, the forests, farms and fields, the growing things where now was wasteland had plans. My mother meant to grow old with her husband. So did the baron and Friedrich, I assumed. Even Ben had yearnings that drew him on. Who was I to think that my plans were inviolate?