Necessary Lies(23)
“Ya, ya?” she was like that, she would tell Anna. “The Iron Kate.”
That November afternoon Anna rushed back to the lobby of St. Joseph’s Oratory in search of a payphone. William said he would be right there, would have to miss a faculty meeting, but would come. “Watch her,” he snapped. “It’s going too far,” and Anna immediately regretted having called him at all. She should’ve tried to get K?the into a taxi, call William only when she was safely home. But it was too late.
Fifteen minutes later she saw him in the courtyard, below. No hat, no scarf, his grey hair tousled by the wind. His black coat opened. He left the car parked by the curb, lights flashing.
“Where is she?” he had motioned to Anna from below, throwing his arms up, but then he noticed K?the himself, the only pilgrim on the stairs. She had already climbed the first few steps of the second landing and was now motionless, her head bent.
“Mother!”
K?the did not acknowledge William’s presence. She lifted her knees awkwardly to the next step, steadying herself with her hands and then stopping again to clasp her palms and pray. Anna thought that the boards must be hard, and that her knees must hurt her by now, but K?the kept praying, her eyes fixed on the ground. William ran up the side flight of stairs and stood on the second landing, watching her from above, motioning to Anna to come and help him. Only when K?the reached the landing did she open her eyes.
“Mother. How could you!”
There was no surprise in her eyes. But she did not protest when William took her firmly by the shoulders and led her down to the car.
The nursing home room is too small to let K?the keep much from her old apartment. Most of her things are in Anna’s basement. The enamelled wineglasses and beer steins are carefully wrapped in layers of white tissue and placed in cardboard boxes marked, “For Julia.” So are her books and her embroidered linen. Out of all K?the’s furniture William took one piece only, a rosewood curio cabinet with a crystal glass K?the had bought years ago at an auction. He said he liked it when he was a boy, and that it would be just great for his music boxes. The bed and two night stands have been brought here, to the nursing home. The rest of the furniture, William decided, was not worth anyone’s trouble.
On the night stand to the left there are the photographs of William, Julia, and Marilyn at the seaside, their skins young, smooth, without a blemish. In the one Anna is looking at now, Julia is not more than three, and William holds her up, above his grey hair, like a trophy.
“Marilyn called,” K?the says. “She will stay in Boston. The library is expanding, and she is now in charge of rare books.”
“She didn’t come to the funeral,” Anna says. It sounds like a complaint and it is.
Anna wrote to Marilyn after William’s death. A short note was all she could manage. A few details of how she found him that day. Then, in a moment she has regretted ever since, she added a plea for forgiveness. She could never understand why they couldn’t stop hurting each other, after all those years.
“They didn’t let me go to the funeral,” K?the says in a cautious whisper, and looks around as if someone might hear her.
In one of the photographs on the wall, William’s hair is all blond. This is a Breslau picture, a determined look of a five-year-old, dressed in a velvet suit of a little lord. Anna knows this look. Tainted by impatience. With the photographer, the clothes that on this occasion are festive and uncomfortable. With his mother who, he told Anna many times, was there, too, a cold, watchful figure in the corner, her eyes ordering him to stay still.
“You had a fever, again. The doctor said you had to stay in bed. You were in no shape to go anywhere,” Anna says.
What a mess it all is Anna thinks, what a tangled mess. She is covering K?the’s arms with a warm woollen sweater, light blue with white trimmings. It is lamb’s wool, silky to the touch. She feeds K?the small morsels of bread with cream cheese and lean turkey. Baby food, she thinks. K?the eats slowly, chewing each mouthful for a long time.
“Did you sleep well?” she asks and K?the nods. They don’t talk much these days, but the silence is never uncomfortable. Even if there are things Anna finds hard to forget. “Your wife called me,” K?the would say to William, meaning Marilyn. “Anna is my wife, Mother,” William would protest. “Is it really so hard to remember?”
When the meal is over Anna gathers the paper plates and places them in a plastic bag she has brought with her. She will throw it out on her way home; she does not want to leave any garbage in K?the’s room. By the time the room is cleaned it would fill with the smells of stale food. She carefully gathers the crumbs from the table.
“Leave it,” K?the says. “They can clean it up, nein? That’s their job.” She always says the same thing, and Anna always nods and keeps cleaning. This is what she has learned long ago, a thing William found so hard to do. “Just nod and do your own thing,” she kept telling him, “it’s not impossible.”
K?the points to a small lamp by her bed. “Touch it,” she says. Anna touches the brass base with her finger. The lamp lights up.
“Julia gave it to me,” she says. “It’s very convenient. I don’t have to look for a switch when I wake up at night.”
“It’s nice,” Anna says. “Very nice.”
It was William who has made Anna think of his childhood as lacking. “Deprived” is the word he used. A war, he said, can be an excuse to deny a lot to a child.