Under the Same Blue Sky (27 page)

“Clouds aren’t blue, you dope.”

“Pete,” said Lena sharply. “We don’t use such language.”

I invited Pete to come closer and examine the brushstrokes. He marched up, peered, and conceded: “Yeah, there’s
some
blue.”

After this small victory, I had the children examine brushstrokes on the other canvases, Cézanne’s “crazy angles,” and how the Chinese artist made a few lines suggesting a laboring farmer. Walter noticed
Corot’s “silky water” and Gauguin’s mild perspective. Our hour flew. Lena released the class for recess.

“They’re pretty pictures, Miss Renner,” said Gloria, the last to leave. “Too bad they’re locked up with a Hun.”

“Huns lived a long time ago. People from Germany are Germans.”

“Well, according to my dad, they’re Huns.”

“It’s recess, perhaps you’d like to join the others outside,” Lena suggested. Gloria darted off. “Hazel, I hope you’ll come again. Walter, especially, was so looking forward to this.”

“He has a good eye.”

“He does. Hazel, it’s true what you told Gloria, but you must know that people are suspicious. The baron is all shut up in that castle, like he’s hiding something.”

Searching for a quick and easy answer, I found only: “He’s busy with his work.”

“Well, we appreciate the art. Please thank him for me.” Nobody could blame either Lena or Gloria, I thought, as Kurt drove me home. The baron
was
“shut up in that castle.” He wasn’t a “Hun,” but he also wasn’t part of Dogwood.

“He doesn’t want to be disturbed,” Anna warned when we came back. Late that night, peering out my window, I saw the baron walking Lilli by moonlight, their charcoal shadows making slow circles on the dark velvet lawn. Some days before, he had sent me to the Hendersons for sleeping powders. Evidently they didn’t work, for restless promenades continued, even under a steady autumn drizzle. At work he was distracted, repeating questions, strangely uncertain, checking and rechecking figures. I sometimes saw him in the workroom, studying my father’s map of Europe, gently touching the pinpricked swath of Prussia.

Each week brought shorter, more ragged letters from Tom. He was
“somewhere in Belgium,” behind the lines, but close enough to hear the bombs and see the endless flow of corpses. He was a flight instructor, safe for now, but safety brought him grating guilt: “My men get shot down, sometimes on their first raid. We can’t even get their bodies back. Tell Anna that I’m wearing her scarf. It’s always cold here and hard to sleep. The bombs never stop. Johannes was right. We’re making a hell here.”

CHAPTER 16

A Child Like You

O
n a clear winter night, when moon shadows lay crisp as silhouettes on the ground, I dressed and joined the baron, coming so quietly across the lawn that Lilli merely turned to watch my approach. “Ah, Hazel, you can’t sleep, either?”

“No.”

“You’ve heard from Tom?”

“Not for a week. In the last letter, he said they needed pilots. They’ll be sending him up.”

The baron looked over the trees. Moonlight iced his face. “I just heard that my brother Erich was killed. It was not in battle. He was driving back from town very late, quite drunk. He stopped to relieve himself and was hit by a sniper. There is no military honor for such a death.”

“I’m sorry, sir—”

He held up a hand. “I don’t mourn him, particularly. I never had a moment’s pleasure in my brother’s company. He despised me from the first.”

“Despised? But—”

The baron nodded. “I know it must seem strange to you, Hazel, this lack of familial sentiment.”

It was. He might have been speaking of another species. All I could think to ask was: “You have this news from your father?”

“I’ve had
no
news directly from him in years. I rely on other sources. Apparently Erich’s death, or more particularly the inglorious nature of it, was too much for him. He had a stroke and is bedridden. There is no competent doctor nearby; all are dead or gone to war. It’s left to my mother and the cook to nurse him.”

We walked on. Nighttime made me bold, and mystery drew me on. What deep well of hurt was covered by his calm? “Could you tell me about your parents?”

He looked into the pines. Our boots crunched on needles. “My mother’s family were inconsequential landowners, but she was quite beautiful. In his single moment of weakness, my father married her. He never let her forget how far he’d stooped to do so. Ultimately, this hardly mattered. His tireless service to the Kaiser was rewarded by a noble title and a large estate with a crumbling castle.”

“The first Mein Königsberg.”

“Yes, precisely. I was eight when we took possession of what Erich termed ‘that old pile.’ Legions of workers were hired to restore and expand the ‘pile’ to appropriate grandeur. Then, of course, it must be filled with fine furnishings and portraits of fictitious ancestors. This became my task.”

“Yours? How old were you?”

“Thirteen. A professor at the military academy had let me explore his library and modest art collection, my only happy hours there. That summer in Vienna, I went with my father to an art dealer to buy, as he put it, ‘old things.’ I picked some true treasures from the dealer’s
jumble and he congratulated my ‘natural eye,’ comparing it to young Mozart’s natural ear.”

“And your father?”

“He would have preferred other skills, but this one was useful, at least. He had the purse and I had the eye. Soon his collection was noted in our circle of petty nobility. Of course, my agency was never mentioned. It wasn’t a matter of family pride.”

“And your mother?”

“She was an adornment herself. She loved me and didn’t want me to leave for America, but she had very little power in that household. However, on my last night, she gave me this.” He took off his familiar ruby bezel ring and opened it to reveal a young woman’s face, a hauntingly delicate version of his own, with the same deep eyes, high cheekbones, and exquisitely sculpted mouth.

“Your mother? She was very beautiful.”

“Yes.” He closed the ring. “She promised to write to me in America and did so briefly. Then either my father discovered the correspondence and disliked it or she simply stopped writing.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Hazel, you have the gift of mourning a father
after
his death. I’ve mourned the one I never had all my life.”

In the slightest shifting of his voice and stiffening of stance I read, as I had learned to read in these months, that the subject of his family was closed again, like a curtain pulled shut. Yet because he kept walking with me, I broached a new subject. “There’s a child like you at the school. He has a natural eye. His name is Walter.” I described the boy’s keen observations of color and form.

“A child like me.” The baron touched a rosebush, all thorns and bare branches. “He’ll have troubles, I’m sure.”

“Perhaps you could help him or encourage him in some way.”

“Perhaps.” The moon had dipped below the castle’s bulk. “For now, I’ll walk awhile, if you don’t mind. It may induce sleep.” So I left him. Later, from my room I watched the erect, solitary precision of his march, like a sentry never relieved of duty.

A
LONG LETTER
came from Tom. He was flying reconnaissance. Every place name had been inked out, but the censors had let stand evidence of a man’s soul shaken like a rag by months of war. “Even back here in the airfields, the blasts rattle your teeth. We have beds and decent food, not like the poor devils in the trenches. You think about them all night. You can’t sleep. I flew today. Up there, it’s quiet. There’s a bit of green in the distance. I could pretend there’s a real world somewhere that war isn’t. I’ve got an English pilot friend named Colin who was a gardener back home. He has a cure for rose mites. We wouldn’t mind some mites. All we have here are lice.”

The next page was written a week later, crumpled, as if it had been started and stopped many times. It began: “Colin was blown up today. He was walking to the barracks. All he ever wanted to do was grow roses. A grenade blew him into pieces.” The writing faltered. “I made the medics find them. The pieces. We’d had tea ten minutes before. If I’d just said, ‘Colin, let’s have another cup,’ he’d be here today. You try not to think like that or you go crazy like the boys they send away with shell shock. Tell Kurt to varnish the bench by your father’s grave and plant more pear trees. We took ten prisoners. One might have killed Colin. But Hazel, they were pitiful. You can’t imagine how hungry & scared those Germans were, like kids with old men’s eyes. One said in English: ‘A whole potato. For me?’ It spins your head around. How are the roses? All that’s here is mud and blown up earth, dust & burned things. War takes color away.
There’s just dust, mud, and rock. Only red when boys are bleeding. I keep thinking about Colin. One more cup of tea and he’d still be here. They’re getting the mail now. Tell Anna I’m wearing her scarf. I’ll see you soon. This can’t go on. Love, Tom.”

I read the letter aloud in the kitchen, letting each sheet fall on the table. Afterward we sat in silence. A breeze lifted the stack, scattering pages on the floor. Lilli whimpered when one flew at her. “Every day he’s alive is good,” my mother said finally.

“He’ll be better once he gets home,” Anna added.

In the meadow Tom’s soft skin and yielding flesh had pressed into mine. I felt his bones. He folded around me. How could this body withstand shells that shook the earth until it bucked? How could a plane of sticks and metal sheeting block machine-gun fire? Why would he
not
be one of the millions dead before peace ever came? And what of the mind that seemed so firm? His letter lurched from bombs to pear trees. Would it, in lurching, shake loose the Tom I knew? “Hazel, you look pale,” said Anna. “Should I tell the baron you’re not feeling well?”

“No, we need to work.” I climbed to the tower office with Tom’s letter in my pocket. I meant to share it until I saw the baron leaning against a window frame, a telegram in his hand, folding and unfolding the yellow paper. I’d never seen him do this. He disliked creased paper. The marble face was very pale. I stopped at the door. He gestured for me to come in.

“Bad news, sir?”

“My father died three weeks ago. The baroness told nobody. Perhaps she was afraid of creditors. My agent only now learned of his death.”

“I’m so sorry. First your brother and then—”

He went on folding and unfolding the telegram. “You’ve finished the latest offering letter, Hazel?” For the first time, I truly pitied the baron.

“Yes. It’s on your desk.”

I thought he might speak more about his father as we worked. But the beautiful face was marble, the back rigid. Was this how we must all endure the war? Tom must fly, not thinking of Colin or soldiers in the trenches. The baron and I must work, he not thinking of Prussia, and I not thinking of Tom. I pulled my chair forward, my back straight and feet pressed hard into the floor.

“There may be a good market for our Voltaire letters. Could you research it, please?” We worked steadily through the day. By the dimming afternoon, Tom’s letter was so heavy in my pocket that I had to take it out and share it with the baron. He read slowly, holding each page by the edges like a rare manuscript, setting it down carefully, and finally reassembling the letter neatly and handing it back to me. “No good will come of this war. None. And our Tom’s in the midst of it.” He looked out the window. His hand strayed to the telegram of his father’s desk. He was utterly immobile for so long that I asked again if I should leave. He nodded.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
, the baron left for New York to meet a collector. A note on my desk listed a Dutch still life, Greek vase, and J. M. W. Turner watercolor I could show the schoolchildren. “You may be right. We could do some good here and hurt nobody. Have Kurt help you pack them.” I ran for Kurt, relieved and happy for the distraction.

Lena was pleased as well and quickly organized another session. This time she assigned Jud, one of the larger boys, to help us with the easels, a punishment for being “obstripus,” he said.

“Obstreperous?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

Jud’s interest flared briefly for the Greek vase with scenes from the Trojan War, but dimmed when Walter pointed out recurring patterns
of black between the red warrior figures. “Sort of a rhythm,” he suggested, ignoring Jud’s theatrical yawn.

Louise studied a Dutch still life of a laden table and concluded: “They didn’t have food rationing.” Walter, bolder now, pointed out that the artist used perspective “even on apples and eggs.” I looked closely. He was right; the shaping was subtle, but there.

Jud dubbed the Turner “messy.” At least he wasn’t yawning.

Walter, staring at the landscape, commented: “It’s
not
messy. Look how he mixed the blues, different for water and sky.”

“You know what, Waaal-ter?” Stan announced. “You’re really strange.”

Walter shrank, shoulders curling in. A pretty girl named Alma asked loudly, “Miss Renner, did the Trojan War really happen?” Susanna would have done the same, neatly parrying a bully’s thrust. I gave her a grateful smile. My tale of Heinrich Schliemann’s excavation of Troy launched a spirited discussion of Indian villages that might lie under Dogwood. When bells rang for the lunch hour, children sprang from the room as if they’d been launched.

“I hope we can do this again,” Lena said as we folded the easels. Muffled cries brought us racing from the schoolyard, where Walter was being jerked like a doll between Jud and Stan as they repeated: “You wanna be a still life? Do you, Waaal-ter, do you?” Lena and I grabbed both culprits by the collars. Walter crumbled between them, holding his head.

“Jud, why are we fighting in Europe?” Lena demanded.

“To defend the American Way,” he parroted from a dozen posters, pamphlets, and Four Minute Men’s speeches.

“Is the American Way about respecting the other guy and not being a bully?”

“I guess so.”

“Good. Then help Walter up and go eat your lunch.” In answer to pleading looks, Lena conceded: “I won’t tell your parents, but no more fighting in school. There’s too much of it going on over there.”