Under the Same Blue Sky (26 page)

Work, just work. We had just acquired a set of watercolors by J. M. W. Turner of storms at sea. Here was the appropriate scale of plans for these times: helping the baron create a list of possible buyers.

N
OTHING UNUSUAL HAD
happened the day Tom enlisted. I’d walked back from town with the morning paper as always, and he met me at the gate as always. We walked slowly to the castle as always, arms
entwined, slipping between pines for hidden kisses. At breakfast, our feet met beneath the table. Anna lamented the latest rationing. I watched Tom balance his bread, as always, in a tangent on his plate.

“What’s wrong, Hazel?” Anna asked. “Did you see a ghost?”

“No, I just remembered something for the baron.”

That afternoon, I found Tom straightening his tools. “You enlisted.” He looked up. A hammer wavered in his hand. “Is it true?”

He put down the hammer. “Yes.”

“When are you leaving?”

“Not right away.”

“When?”

“Saturday.”

A band squeezed my chest so strongly that I had to sit. “So soon?”

“Hazel, they need trained pilots.”

“You knew you’d do this.”

“Yes. I didn’t want to spoil our time together.”

“Spoil our time,” I repeated dully.

“I’ll come back.”

“Don’t promise. Just come back.”

“
You
came back to Dogwood. Now it’s my turn.” I stepped toward him. I smelled his shirt, his skin, and the sharp bite of sawdust. Without words, we went to his room, to his bed. Now there was no space between us, no leaving, no gravity, no time. That long afternoon, we flew in blue air.

For months I’d known he’d leave. Even the fact of our meeting here after so many years, our ease and pleasure in each other, the thrill to be close, all this was pure chance, not in my plan, nothing to do with searching after Margit. That chance had yielded a great gift. I should only be grateful. And yet, to not see Tom in the morning, to not walk together in the evening, hear his laughter, or feel his solid
presence in the dark times, how could I endure this pain, even if I knew that I must?

In his last days at the castle, Tom put in a bench by my father’s grave. He took long walks with the baron who had been so much to him for most of his life. He sat with Anna in the kitchen as she plied him with presents of knitted socks, a vest, and a scarf to keep warm “up there.” He walked my mother to the bakery and talked with Tilda as she worked. He met with Kurt in the rose garden. In the lengthening afternoons, he and I took blankets to the meadow and lay together, as close as skin.

“This beautiful place,” he said, “and you here. How can I not return?”

“We could meet in Paris, afterwards.”

“Yes, we could do that. The war won’t last long now. Remember, the German supply lines are stretched thin and they’ve had heavy losses. Americans will come in fresh; the Brits have airpower and the blockade. We can help the French. It won’t be long now.”

“Suppose you have to fly against his cousin Manfred, the one they call the Red Baron? He’s downed fifty Allied planes already.”

“Don’t worry, Hazel. If I say I worked for his cousin, they’ll send someone else.” A pretty lie, but I’d think of it often with comfort. “Remember that the Capodimonte porcelain piece we packed arrived without a single broken petal. And I’m not made of porcelain. I’ll come back safe. Besides, since I know how to fly, they might make me an instructor.”

“I hope so.” An instructor far from the front, that would be best of all.

We ate in the banquet room the night before he left. The baron invited everyone who ever worked in the castle. There were speeches, songs, and gifts. I’d made a sketch of us together. “It will fly with me,” Tom promised. We were all so brave, knowing full well how many such dinners were being held all across the country.

Early the next morning, the baron, Lilli, and I walked to the train station with Tom. “Take care of yourself,” said the baron, kissing him on both cheeks.

“I’ll be back, or I’ll be in Paris,” Tom said to me. “Stay,” he told Lilli, took his bags, and was swallowed in a pool of men leaving Dogwood.

We walked back to the castle. Lilli lagged behind us, looking constantly over her shoulder. The baron rested a hand on my shoulder. “Hazel, I promise to keep you busy until the end of this madness.” The polished shoes took measured steps on the gravel walk. I tried to match his pace, to soldier on like him.

T
HE BARON KEPT
his promise. The next months passed in a wash of work as summer mocked us with lush beauty. The gardens bloomed wildly. The orchards dripped with fruit. Songbirds rejoiced in the abundance of food. In the long twilights, my mother and I often walked out to “visit Johannes,” sitting on Tom’s bench as shadows crept over us. Once in Pittsburgh, she’d noted with mild disdain: “Those Italians are always touching each other.” Yet now she put her arm around me or leaned against my shoulder. She brought no handwork to the meadow, which was unusual. She’d always been busy cooking, cleaning, dusting, mending, or keeping books for the store. Even while reading with me, she’d be knitting, winding yarn, or peeling potatoes. Now her very stillness seemed a concentrated activity.

Tom wrote weekly, with two letters in each envelope, one for me and one for “my friends at Mein Königsberg.” The latter I read in the kitchen and then gave to the baron. Even Lilli listened, curled in her bed on one of Tom’s flannel shirts that she’d confiscated. “I’m older than others in my flight class,” he reported, “but I’m keeping up.” Once “over there,” American pilots would join Allied flight squads, until more American planes arrived. Every letter carried less war news. He wrote of a rose
garden he’d seen, an idea for packing large vases, incidents in the barracks, quirks of his comrades, books from the base library, a stray dog he’d adopted. I knew his purpose was to ease our worry with normalcy, but these letters, by turns droll and thoughtful, only made me miss him more.

We all lived by letters in those months. We shared them, wrote them, and carried them in pockets and purses. Letters fanned the war as much as posters, parades, flags, war bond sales, and speeches. Ginny Henderson posted careful copies of Geoffrey’s letters in the drugstore window. “Nobody knew he could write so well,” she boasted.

“Mrs. Scott’s son read Geoffrey’s letters and went straight to the army recruiter,” my mother said at dinner. “Soon there won’t be any more boys left.”

In fact, they were being drained away like water from a sink. Luisa’s two brothers had enlisted together. Her husband was safe from the draft, for he was now the sole support of his newly widowed mother, Luisa, and their twin baby girls, both sickly. “I don’t know what to hope for,” she wrote. “If they get better and I can work, I lose Tony. If they don’t get better, I’ll lose my mind.” More and more boys were enlisting in Galway, Jim Burnett wrote. “You can’t believe how this town has changed.”

Everywhere, brutality was seeping into civilian life. At the machine shop where he’d worked for twenty years, Uncle Willy was suddenly a “hyphenated American,” a Hun, a possible traitor. Because he would not crawl across the shop floor to kiss the American flag, he was shunned. “They can’t fire him,” Tante Elise wrote, “because he’s their best mechanic, but nobody talks to him. They leave ugly notes. He’s an American citizen, Katarina. He’s godfather to some of their children. It’s happening all over town to anyone who has an accent.”

Broken beer bottles littered our driveway. When Lilli sliced her paw on a shard of glass, we kept her inside for days, fearing poison. I wrote nothing of this to Tom. He shouldn’t be worried. He should just think about coming home safely.

Kurt organized paper and scrap metal drives in town. His wife, Ilsa, rolled bandages for the Red Cross. “We have to” was his explanation. I discovered why. Their landlord had threatened eviction. When he walked downtown, boys followed him. “Swine,” they whispered. “Kaiser’s swine.”

In Pittsburgh, boys had played war games in our empty lot. Now adults attacked each other, vandalizing foreign-owned stores, ruining businesses, and firing employees with “un-American” names. In once-peaceable towns, mobs beat their neighbors. Some were tarred and feathered. “My sister in Illinois saw a man lynched,” Anna reported. How naïve to think the Atlantic could so neatly divide war and peace. If young men were learning to plunge bayonets into enemies’ faces and bellies, then shouldn’t their parents, their little brothers and sisters spit, poison dogs, and wrap hateful notes around rocks and throw them through our gate?

On a bright fall morning I unwrapped one that said: “Go home, Kraut!” in childish scrawl. The baron had lived in Dogwood for twenty years, but how many children knew him? A handful. Very few had ever spoken to him. The next morning I launched a proposal: “Baron, we could invite a class here to see some paintings.”

He looked up, startled. “Why?”

“People don’t know what you do here. My mother hears people talking in town. Some think you deal arms or train spies in the woods or create new kinds of poison gas that nobody can detect.”

He put down his pen. “Go on.”

“Well, there are children who have never seen you. Most have never spoken with you. Imagine what they think about you.”

“Meeting me might not improve their opinion. I seem to be an acquired taste, not yet acquired uniformly, even after two decades.” A wistful sadness veiled the beautiful face. Sadly, he was correct. What would children see, even if their parents let them enter what some called “the Hun’s lair”? Here was a man wholly unlike their fathers, unnaturally handsome and impeccably attired in vaguely foreign cut, formal, even pedantic in speech, unmistakably German in accent and cadence. His military stance, crisp and measured stride, and precise turns might all be frightening. The grandeur of his castle would surely intimidate. Fed by fairy tales and local gossip, would they wonder if the paneled walls hid secret passageways to dungeons where stolen children might be kept?

They wouldn’t see the man who opened his home to an abandoned boy, and an “unsatisfactory” servant’s illegitimate baby girl. They wouldn’t feel the kinship he shared with my parents, how he welcomed them, shared our grief, and honored my father’s passing. If they knew of his love for Friedrich, they’d be repulsed. They wouldn’t know the man who earned our loyalty or how his unyielding standards pushed, prodded, and drew us to levels of work we could not have imagined for ourselves. No, classrooms in the castle would not clear the poisoned air of Dogwood. “Could I at least take some paintings to the school and talk about them? It might help make people less suspicious. I’m sure the children would be interested.”

“Really? In fine art?”

“They could be.” I told him of the books I brought to school in Galway, how the children peered at etchings of Notre Dame, marveled at the shading in Da Vinci’s paintings, and were first contemptuous and then intrigued by modern art’s fractured images.

He studied me. “Apparently this is what
you’d
like, to have some contact with the school?”

“Yes.” Yes, I missed this in my life. I also feared it, but what harm could come of such a small project? “There’s a new Cézanne landscape and the Gauguin prints. The children might like to see them.”

“
Children,
” he repeated, as if speaking of an exotic tribe. He’d hosted me as a baby, I reminded him, and raised Tom. “Yes, that’s true, but children in the abstract are so inexplicable.”

“They wouldn’t be abstract children. They’d be like Tom was once, or you yourself.”

“No, not like me, I assure you. But if you’re so convinced, I’ll provide a few pieces. Kurt can bring them to the school, not to be handled by children, abstract or otherwise.”

“Of course not, Baron. Thank you.”

I spoke with Lena Hardy, a young teacher I knew slightly from church, earnest and enthusiastic, precisely as I’d been in my first months at Galway. She was delighted. She’d heard of the castle’s treasures but thought them as inaccessible as any prince’s holdings. We fixed a date in September. I dressed carefully, prepared my notes, and had Kurt pack a small Cézanne still life sketch, a French garden scene by Watteau, reproductions of works by Corot and Gauguin, and a Chinese watercolor of misty mountains sheltering a farming village.

Then I was in a schoolroom again with the familiar smell of books and chalk, rows of jackets, printed alphabets, a flag and globe, and all the sounds of children. I’d be speaking only to fourth graders. How quickly I’d grown accustomed to the jumble of a single room and all that one could do and not do with young and older children learning together.

Lena had elaborately prepared her students to see “real art that’s going to great museums.” I was “an actual artist” who worked with the
Baron von Richthofen, who was “an internationally known collector.” They must appreciate this rare opportunity. Kurt and I set up the pieces as twenty-five children watched, wary, intrigued, suspicious, and unsmiling. Of course. I was a stranger. Why would they welcome me? I shared how I’d started drawing at their age, how all peoples, in all cultures found pleasure and meaning in art.

“Are these Kraut pictures?” a red-haired boy interrupted.

“How much did they cost?” asked the girl beside him.

“Who’d pay money for
that
?” another boy demanded of the Cézanne. The “Chinese thing” would be nicer in color. Was Gauguin a castaway in the South Seas or did he go there on purpose? Why didn’t Corot have more horses and people?

“Gloria, what do you see here first in the garden scene?” Lena asked.

“A girl on a swing.”

“Why?”

“She’s pretty.”

“The man and the dog are looking at her,” said a somber boy with shiny brown hair. “We look where they look. And there’s the arc of the trees framing her.” He also noted that Gauguin’s colors were “simpler” and his shapes “fit together like a puzzle.”

“Maybe he just can’t draw, Waaal-ter,” one boy scoffed.

“Well,
I
think it’s interesting,” Walter maintained. “And look over there.” He pointed to the Corot. “The white clouds have blue in them.”