Under the Same Blue Sky (34 page)

“So you know,” said Anna quietly. She described how influenza had slipped into Dogwood the day after we left. “We had a touch in the summer, but this time, there’d be one death, another a few days later, and then more and more. They put beds in the school. Then it was over, like a terrible dream.” The shoe salesman had said the same, as if all of America had the same dream.

“Here in the castle?”

“Nobody, thank God, but others you knew. Your friend Lena was the first.”

“Lena?” Not possible. I saw Lena in her classroom, Lena on Main Street in a swirl of autumn leaves, sharing her concerns about Walter, Lena after church in a crisp shirtwaist, smiling. Lena who was exactly my age.

“Then Captain Neal, the policeman who helped at your father’s funeral. Dan Walker the iceman, and then his wife and two children. Five on Tilda’s street and seven on Elm. Charlie Snead’s wife and Harold Woodruff, the mayor’s nephew. Ten children from the school. Some that you knew: Jud and Gloria from Lena’s class.”

Jud. Gloria. I saw their faces, too.
Ask it. Say his name.
“Walter?”

“He got it and survived, but he lost both parents. He’s staying with
the Hendersons now. He needs a family. And after they lost Geoffrey, they need him just as much.”

I looked at my mother, silent through this litany. “Mrs. McClellan?”

“She was Dogwood’s last. Katarina sat with her for two days and nights,” Anna said. “Even Pastor Birke couldn’t relieve her.”

“I wasn’t with Johannes at the end. I wouldn’t let Marjorie die alone.” We were silent around the table, listening to the rattling rain and David’s murmuring patter to Lilli.

“And this came yesterday from Pittsburgh,” my mother said, handing me a telegram from Ernst Schmidt, the butcher. Uncle Willy and Tante Elise were gone. They’d been found by a neighbor, lying together in bed.

“Oh, Mother.” I wrapped my arms around her.

“I’m never going back. Johannes isn’t there, and our friends are dead, our good, good friends. Remember all those Sunday dinners in our old kitchen?” She pressed a handkerchief to her face.

“Yes, Mother, I remember.”

“David?” Anna was saying.

He’d stopped playing and was staring at us, wide-eyed. Tinkertoys clattered from his hand. He hadn’t cried for his mother’s death. For days I’d waited for the tears that must come. Now a stranger’s grief unlocked his own. He curled against Lilli, sobbing, “Mama, Mama.”

I brought him to the rocking chair. Anna wedged Bucephalus in his arms. We rocked and rocked as dusk came and he sobbed himself to sleep. “We put him in your room for now,” Anna whispered.

“I’ll take him,” said Georg. David barely stirred as he was lifted from my arms and carried upstairs. Strains of a lullaby drifted back to us. I didn’t know that Georg could sing. Anna cocked her head. “It’s ‘Saulika Pateka.’ My mother loved that song.” Perhaps Georg heard it from his mother. I hoped so.

The telegram from Pittsburgh lay on the kitchen table like a fallen leaf. As we cleaned the kitchen, my mother shared her plans, marked by the quiet certainty that had grown in the months since my father’s death. Mrs. McClellan’s husband died years ago; her son lived in Philadelphia and had no interest in a bakery. “She wanted me to have it. There’s a flat above the shop where I could live, and the shop next door is for sale. With the money I’m getting from Frank for the hardware store, I could expand the bakery and put in a few tables for a café.”

“You don’t have to live downtown. You could stay here. I’m sure Georg—”

“No. If the store is going to be mine, I have to watch over it. I’m a forty-seven-year-old widow. I have to take care of myself. Hazel, you have to decide some things for yourself as well. Tom might not come back. And now you have a child.”

“I know.”

“Well then? Will you stay here?”

“I don’t know.”

The rain had stopped. I put on my coat and walked outside under the dripping pines. Once, before the war, I’d felt set apart from the sorrows of others. I had my sketchpads and plans that stretched before me; I was extraordinarily blessed. Then the war came, Galway’s delusion and Ben’s death. My father’s passing. Tom’s leaving. Prussia. David. Influenza. Life had tumbled all my plans. Paris seemed vague and indulgent now. Who needed me there? What difference could I make? The castle could provide comfort and ease for me and for David. But Georg needed someone with Friedrich’s range of talents and passion for his work. The best I ever offered was earnest attention. My mother would have her bakery and her own new life. Once I’d asked my father why he had a hardware store. “I enjoy putting tools in people’s hands,” he
said. “It makes me happy.” When had I last been truly happy at work? In Galway, I realized, before my house was blue.

I
N THE MORNING
, I left David with Anna, filled a basket with my mother’s butter cakes, and went to call on the families of Lena, Gloria, and Jud. Sitting in front rooms, I shared my few memories and listened to stories, joining a gently rotating cycle of relatives, friends, and neighbors who took turns making coffee, tending the stove, or washing dishes to relieve the mourners. I walked the dog at Lena’s house and played with Gloria’s chubby baby brother, now her parents’ only child. Each home held a world of grief.

At last I came to the Hendersons. During the worst of the influenza, Jud’s mother told me, the Hendersons kept the store open day and night and worked shifts at the infirmary. “They did everything and more for all of us. And that was after they lost Geoffrey.”

Mr. Henderson was stocking shelves. I offered my condolences. He wouldn’t talk about Geoffrey, only about influenza, announcing with sudden, fierce intensity: “We were all such fools. We thought modern medicine could cure everything. We beat smallpox, diphtheria, and yellow fever. But influenza beat us. Doctors couldn’t help, so people ran after miracle cures: Pepto-Mangan. Pope’s Cold Compound, goose-grease poultices, pawpaw pills, chloride of lime, sulfur powder, even kerosene syrup. I said: ‘Save your money. It’s all trash.’ Minnie Reed drove to Philadelphia for Father Jim’s Weed Tonic when I wouldn’t sell her some concoction cooked up in a quack’s kitchen. The trip wore her out and she died the next day.”

Mrs. Henderson came in. “Hazel, you’re back. You heard about Geoffrey?”

“Yes, I’m so sorry.”

She repeated the story she must have told a hundred times. “He was
in France, about to come home, safe and sound. You can imagine how happy we were. He had to wait a few days for a transport ship. In those few days, he got the ’flu and died. Excuse me, Hazel. I can’t—” She covered her face and darted back to the stockroom. Her husband watched her go.

“It’s like that for us. Sometimes we have to talk about him, and sometimes we just can’t. You know we’re taking care of Walter Baines now?” I nodded. “We’d like him to stay. We can help each other, I think.”

“Is he drawing?”

“Yes. It seems to comfort him. Geoffrey liked drawing, too. He—excuse me.” The anguished face turned away.

“Of course.” As I left the store, I saw Ginny Henderson hurrying to her husband. The picture of their opening day had been replaced by a photograph of Geoffrey in his uniform. Next to it, propped on a little stand, was a pencil drawing of Walter’s parents.

D
AVID HAD SPENT
the morning with Lilli, exploring the castle and gardens, and then settled in the kitchen with his Tinkertoys. “You can leave him here with me. I’m happy for the company,” Anna said. Lilli watched him work, retrieving spools and rods that rolled away.

In the tower office, I related my morning’s calls to Georg. “My father lost so many. I thought I understood what that would be like. But I never did until now. And it was the same for you.”

“Yes, and for so many others.”

“My father remembered them with tins. There must be another way, something we could do here in Dogwood, some kind of—”

“Memorial?”

“Yes.”

“A memorial,” Georg repeated. We sorted our mail as an idea slowly
bloomed between us for a monument to those lost in war and dead of influenza. By late afternoon, we had fixed on the image of a marble eagle rising from a fountain and holding in its talons a tablet of names. We worked at the long table. I sketched as Georg watched, suggested, and sometimes took the pencil from me. Friedrich’s name and my father’s would be there. Marble seats would ring the fountain so all could sit, remember, and feel the healing run of water.

I studied the finished drawing, considering what I’d learned in the past months of materials, labor, and transport. “Georg, this would be very expensive. “Do you think Dogwood can afford it?”

“Perhaps not. In which case it would have to be my gift.”

The next day, we called on Mayor Woodruff, a gruff, red-faced man so stuffed into his office chair that he didn’t rise to greet us. “Heard you went back to Germany, Richthofen. What was
that
about?”

“Family business,” Georg said stiffly.

“How are they taking it over there, getting beat by Yankees?”

“The war is over,” I reminded both of them. “And we
all
lost so many in different ways. Like your nephew, Harold. I’m sorry, sir.”

The mayor deflated, all bluster gone. Pudgy fingers ruffled papers on his desk. “Yes, Harold. That boy was like our own son. Fifteen years old. We were all so relieved he was too young to be drafted. Then the ’flu got him. Where’s the justice?”

“I know,” said Georg. “Where’s the justice?”

Mayor Woodruff turned to a broad window looking out on Main Street, seeming to forget us. “I run a small town. Barking dogs, drunks, broken water mains, bridges, roadwork, house fires, the occasional sticky-fingered clerk. That’s what I do. Not people sick in nearly every house, not young folks dying. Running an infirmary. You know how many towns I called, trying to get doctors here? They had their own sick, and their doctors were dead or sick or collapsed from overwork or
still in Europe. We lost so many to the ’flu: men, women, and children. And then there’s the boys who won’t come back.”

“That’s why we’re here,” Georg said. “To find a way to honor them all.” He set our sketches on the desk.

“It’s a fine idea, Richthofen, but a marble fountain? This is a small town. We don’t have that kind of money.”

“I would fund it.”

The mayor’s eyes narrowed. “For some kind of reparation?”

“No. For recognition that we
all
lost in this war.”

“And some,” I added, “are still lost.”

He looked at me more kindly. “You haven’t heard any more about Tom Jamison?”

“No.”

“I’m sorry, Hazel. My condolences.” He considered Georg. “You must have—”

“I did, yes. Many.”

The mayor heaved himself out of the chair. “Dogwood needs a monument and your offer is generous, Richthofen. Let me take it up with the town council.” We shook hands and left.

On the way home, we stopped for sweet buns at the bakery, filled with a jostling, amiable crowd. Some even greeted Georg. “I rarely come downtown,” he commented. “I send people for what I need.”

“I know.”

“Perhaps that could change.”

“Perhaps.”

T
HAT NIGHT
, I wrote to the Burnetts in Galway, explaining how I came to have a child. I’d written in the fall but got no answer. Perhaps they were merely busy. Perhaps the epidemic had spared Galway. Influenza was capricious, I’d learned, skipping some towns completely, just as
shells fell randomly in trenches. I sealed the letter and took out drawing paper and a pencil. Images came tumbling back. I sketched eager, anxious faces in a spelling bee. An older and a younger boy bent over a slate board. Alice and Susanna sweeping with me after school. A relay race in the schoolyard. How many of my children still lived? How many had brothers or fathers who wouldn’t return?

David couldn’t sleep. He hovered at my elbow, watching me sketch Charlie carrying in a pile of kindling. “Teach me to draw.”

I took him on my lap as my father once took me, pushed a pencil in his fist, and held the small hand in mine. “What should we make?”

“My mama.” At his direction, we made a thin woman “with pretty hair.” Then we made Lotte and “the old lady upstairs.” Nothing else of his past. I’d try again later. Memories were all he had from Prussia; I didn’t want him to mistake them for dreams. Then he wanted scenes from his present life: Anna and my mother cooking, Lilli in the garden. “Now the room with mirrors. That’s my favorite.” How strange to see in another child my own small self exploring this castle. Finally he grew drowsy, and I carried him back to bed.

Christmas was days away. Our wartime holidays had been somber, but now we planned a child’s-scale celebration. We chose a high-ceilinged room for the tree and locked it off from David. The Hendersons gave me Geoffrey’s old tricycle, freshly painted. They’d been saving it for grandchildren. “At least now it’ll be used,” they said.

On Christmas Eve, the castle staff gathered in the great dining hall for a feast of roast goose and potatoes with a sideboard of my mother’s sweets. “We didn’t have Christmas before. Mama said Baby Jesus was scared of bombs,” David announced. Now he ate and ate in spectacular abundance. Even Tilda smiled. “I think the war is over,” she said, “when little boys eat like that.” We cut the
Christstollen,
the finest my
mother ever made, tender and rich with fruits and nuts, the taste of peace.

After the feast, Georg threw open the locked room, revealing our towering tree. Kurt had slipped away to light its candles, but David’s face outshone them. He shivered with joy, demanding how a tree appeared
inside
a house, like Fairyland. Most amazing of all—Santa Claus knew he was in Dogwood. “For me?” he said over and over, unwrapping a toy train set, a stable for Bucephalus, winter boots, another teddy bear, and a set of Lincoln Logs that Georg ordered from New York. We went outside and sang “Silent Night” in the crystal calm.

“Do you remember Tom’s first Christmas here?” Anna whispered to Georg. He nodded, his long arm encircling her rounded shoulder.

It was late when I cajoled David to bed for his lengthening litany of people and animals to be blessed. That night he added “Numa,” explaining, “That’s you, my new mama. Is gud?”