The Fires Read online

  “Did you go to those Klan rallies with Grandma? Did Hanna?”

  She stood up and went over to the table where the pattern was and looked down at a diagram, placed her finger on it. “Oh, that wasn’t the Klan, ” she said, making a tsking sound. “My father always said you couldn’t make him put on one of those ghost costumes, even if it was Halloween.”

  “Didn’t you see the pictures?”

  She squinted to read and looked away. “Of course I saw them, and I’d seen them before, but it wasn’t the same thing. It was just an old-fashioned ladies’ auxiliary, Mother told me. They had quilting bees and bake sales. Same crowd as the Rebekah Lodge.”

  “You believe that?”

  “Of course.” She came over and knelt in front of me again, put a pin in her mouth, and said through clenched teeth, “Put your arms up.”

  She shied away from saying anything critical of her parents, even if it was obvious (like her mother’s vanity, which must have sometimes wounded her). Their frailties seemed to panic her—

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  she got this look on her face as if she were being chased. “Did you see Mr. Schultz again?” she said finally. “He’s such a nice person. He told me he was worried about you, working all alone at the hotel.” There it was again.

  “I’m not alone. There’s a security guard now.”

  She pinched a few straight pins from the table and laid them in the palm of her hand. “I never liked that place.”

  “It’s a perfectly good hotel.” With something like a razor, I cut away the memory of the men’s hands, though I thought she could see this, or anyway suspected what I was doing. “Didn’t Grandpa and Grandma stay there after they got married?”

  “That was before. Aunt Emily stayed there on one of her window escapades, and they wanted us to pay for it.”

  “Really? For the windows or the room?”

  She sighed. “The room.” She slipped a couple of pins into the red pincushion tied to her wrist. “Oscar paid for it in the end, as always. Hanna was running over there to see her every day, and we didn’t even know about it.”

  One of the pins in the bodice pricked my stomach. This was what really bothered her: Hanna going to Emily without her, Hanna doing what she didn’t have the courage to do herself, Hanna the prettier one.

  “Well, that wasn’t the hotel’s fault,” I said. My great-aunt Emily’s mind was going, Marietta said, and she didn’t like to have visitors, so even though I thought she might have heard from Hanna, I’d dismissed the idea of going to her for help. But that was when I still hoped my mother or Marietta would give in to the pressure of our lie and decide to help me find her.

  “Nonetheless…” My mother’s ruby ring sparked in the window light. Her skin was a bluish color, her wrist thin and knobby.

  “Have you eaten yet?” I asked her. She looked so vulnerable 116 / RENÉ STEINKE

  and thin. It was as if her dead father were pulling her flesh to some other place, wherever he was.

  “Of course.” She stood up and adjusted the collar where it was basted at my neck. “Tuna-fish sandwich. Now, take this off, but be careful not to rip any of the stitches.”

  VIII

  E mily’s house in Plymouth was pink with green shutters. A plastic canary that Marietta would have said looked cheap perched on top of the mailbox. When I explained who I was to the nurse in the blue uniform who answered the door, her voice took on a canned sweetness, and she ushered me into a sunlit and dusty room with an orange velvet couch worn sheeny. Emily sat with her hands on the wheels of her chair near the window in the sun.

  “Emily,” said the nurse, testing the unstable surface of her,

  “Ella, your niece is here.”

  As she turned toward us, the end of a white lace scarf around her neck twisted under her arm. “Ella?”

  “Catherine’s daughter,” I said, taking a few steps closer to her.

  “I haven’t seen you since the Kestler reunion.” She craned her head to look behind me at the track I’d made on the wood floor, and I glanced back, thinking there must have been mud on my shoes, but the floor was clean.

  “Yes,” she said finally. “You were born just before Robert, Earl’s son.”

  I nodded, but didn’t know who she was talking about.

  “You’re the swimmer, aren’t you?”

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  I nodded, though of course I wasn’t. I’d never even owned a bathing suit. “Used to be.”

  She had intense, bright-blue eyes, but her gaze wandered in and out of focus, alternately alert and bored, like sunlight clouds were blowing through. When I took another step closer to her, wavering over whether or not I should hug her, she drew back and patted the windowsill with her palm, precisely, as if she were keeping beat with a record. “Have to make sure it’s still there.”

  She clicked her tongue. “Catherine’s daughter all grown up.” She said it as if imitating a grandmotherly voice she’d heard somewhere. She held out a small hand powdered with freckles, and I took it, squeezed it, and kissed her lightly on the cheek. “It’s so nice of you to visit,” she said in that strange voice.

  I sat down on the limp, fleshy couch cushions. “Marietta says hello.”

  She tilted her head, but her tight gray curls didn’t move at all.

  “Is she well?”

  “Yes, she is,” I said, a little too brightly, “considering…I mean she’s still spending a lot of time alone.” I thought of Marietta circling the birds in the feeder behind her house, trying to get a particular yellow-and-black jay, of her putting on lipstick in the mirror, looking longingly at the reflection, trying to fish up a younger version of herself. “She’s keeping busy, though.” We’re all busy, I thought, busy as ants in a trampled hill.

  She nodded. “I was so sick myself I couldn’t get out of bed that day, or I would have been there. He was never healthy, that man.

  Don’t know what he would have done if she hadn’t taken care of him. Always going to bed, it seemed like, saying he didn’t feel well when it looked like nothing was wrong with him.” Her eyes glinted. I wondered if she suspected the truth. “My mother says hello, too,” I said.

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  “Oh, how is Catherine?”

  Starving, I thought. “She broke her ankle last month,” I said.

  “Nothing serious, but she’s having trouble keeping her mind on things. It was so unexpected.”

  “Terrible thing, losing your father,” she said, twisting the white scarf in her lap. “You know that, sweetie,” she said, and it surprised me that she remembered this. “Your father was a fine man,” she said, sitting up straighter. “Talented. I liked to hear him play at Grace Church. It was magnificent.”

  He used to sit in his black church coat up in the choir loft, and sometimes during the service I saw him fold and unfold his sheet music, as if each time he smoothed it out, it would contain some new secret.

  Emily’s gaze turned suddenly distant, and she methodically touched the wheel of her chair with the ball of her hand. I watched her lips move, counting. In that precise afternoon brightness her palm ticked against the wheel, and a shadow slanted on the floor.

  If only I could get her to rummage around in her memory, I’d find out where to look for Hanna. “We had dinner at the Housemans’ last week. Do you know them?”

  “Erma,” she said, nodding. “Marietta’s friend. Has a whiny voice.”

  “She showed us pictures of them when they were young.”

  Emily smiled and nodded. “You see me, too?”

  “No. At least I don’t think so. They were in their Klan uniforms.”

  Emily straightened her mouth and looked at the wall. I asked her, “Was my grandfather in the Klan, too?”

  Her face came back, and she waved her hand. “Pfshh. Did she tell you that? That wasn’t the Klan. It was the Women’s Klean Up Society for America. We didn’t have a chapter in Plymouth—we 120 / RENÉ ST
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  had something else called the Queens of the Golden Mask, but it was the same thing. They had the hoods and all, but it was a group for ladies. It was just a way to see your friends.”

  “They helped the men?”

  She shook her head and looked out the window, distracted by something she saw there. “Your grandfather didn’t do anything like that. He was too weak, too nervous. Wouldn’t have known what to do with himself.” Marietta hadn’t liked Oscar, Emily’s husband, either; she said he wasn’t good enough for her. Each of them must have seen the vulnerabilities in the other’s husband, no matter how well he’d hidden them. The sun lay over Emily’s shoulder like a pale drape and lit the fuzz on her cheek. She sur-veyed a spot somewhere above my head. Suddenly that strange, familial voice was back. “How old are you now?”

  “Twenty-two.”

  “I had children when I was your age. You shouldn’t wait too long, honey, or you’ll regret it.”

  “But I’m not married,” I said. “I don’t even have a boyfriend.”

  As she nodded at me and looked away, the flesh under her chin wobbled. “That’s too bad, honey. Time’s a-marching on.”

  The nurse brought in a tarnished silver tray with a teapot and clover-shaped cookies and set it on the table. “I thought you might be peckish. Emily bought these from the little Girl Scout across the street.”

  “Thank you,” said Emily.

  The nurse asked if I lived far from there.

  “It’s a few hours away.”

  “Then you should come more often.” She put her hand on Emily’s shoulder. “Right?”

  “She’s a busy girl,” said Emily, pointing as if it were obvious from my looks. The nurse studied me a moment, nodded, and left the room.

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  Emily wheeled herself closer to the table and poured us each a cup of tea. The teacups had delicate flowers and a thread of gold around the rims, just like Erma’s and Marietta’s, such delicate cups, and each of them had managed to keep them unchipped all the years since her wedding. I sipped at my tea and held the bird-bone-fragile handle. “Have you heard from Hanna?”

  “Hanna,” she said sweetly, leaning back and smoothing the pink blanket over her legs. “She was here for my birthday. Where is she now? California?” She tapped her forehead. “Did she go on that tour? I’m trying to remember.”

  I thought of Hanna in a white bulky sweater, her hair gone naturally white, walking out on the porch of her little stone house to look at the sea.

  “When’s the last time she came to see you?” I asked. “Does she come often?”

  “No,” she said, as if it were a question. “She doesn’t come often.

  She was here for my birthday, was it this year or last? Where is she now? I’m trying to remember. Someplace warm. I knitted her a scarf.”

  Hanna and I would drink champagne in the lobby of an extravagant hotel. In the hallway, men in suits would look worriedly at their watches, expensive luggage piled high on wheeled carts.

  “I’d almost given up on you,” she’d say, sipping from a fluted glass.

  “When’s your birthday?” I asked Emily.

  “June. She had a new hairstyle. A flip at the ends like the first lady’s. I always told her what I told you, that she might as well get started having a family, and now it’s too late.” Her eyes were alert again, pressed open.

  “She got married?”

  She looked doubtful, her voice high and stuttering. “Oh, no.

  Oh, no. She’s too busy.” Something fluttered in my throat. “I sent 122 / RENÉ STEINKE

  her a scarf to go with the jacket she was wearing.” Emily’s fist was punching the wheel of her chair in intervals of seven. She seemed impatient to go somewhere.

  “Grandpa left her some money,” I said.

  “Is that so? She’ll be happy to hear that.” She punched the wheel seven more times.

  “She doesn’t know he’s passed away.”

  “Of course not.” She lowered her eyes and looked at the pointed toe of her shoe and then, after a few minutes when I thought she’d nodded off, said, “A shame they never got along. A shame not to get along with your father.”

  I leaned forward, took a sip of lukewarm tea. “Why do you think that was?”

  She sighed. “I don’t know, but it made her wild.” Her words were beginning to slur, maybe from the fatigue of talking, but she also began to say things with more conviction. “I remember I could tell what was going to happen even when she was a little girl and she was twirling around in a circle asking her father questions, you know, like children ask. I remember we all laughed because she asked what color God’s bed was.” She still didn’t look up. “Children made Henry nervous; he always wanted them to be calmer, and children aren’t calm.” He used to threaten that if I didn’t quiet down, he would send me away to China, where they let children run naked in the streets. Emily wiped her forehead with the sleeve of her dress and went on. “He didn’t pay much attention to her questions, and she was twirling in a circle, asking about dying, about why so-and-so had died, and she knocked over a jar of milk, and of course it made a big mess.

  Henry screamed at her to be still, grabbed her and set her down in a chair, and I could see in that little girl’s face right there that she wanted to keep twirling.” Emily looked up, and her eyes twinkled in the sun. “She wanted to knock over every damn bottle in the house.”

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  I was getting close to the truth. “So you could tell what was going to happen, even before it did.”

  “Yes. Goodness, there’s nothing wrong with asking questions.”

  I nodded.

  “And then when she was older and everyone acted like it hadn’t happened. You know, she came to live with us for a while after she started having the trouble. She stayed with Oscar and me six months.” She’d hit an untouched piece of memory and offered it. “Marietta told everyone I was sick with cancer.” This was long before anyone knew anything about my father’s, before we’d all pretend such a disease didn’t exist and it was still a good lie.

  “People thought she’d gone away to nurse me when they sent her off to get her away from those boys.” For a moment I thought she’d said “bowls.”

  “Boys?”

  “Those miserable boys down by Lake Eliza.” She’d said it as if I knew what she was talking about, looking down at her finger, tapping at the arm of her chair. I suspected she really remembered this. “I went along with it for her sake. Oscar was worried I’d lose my wits then, so I had to stay inside most of the time anyway, or he’d have put me in the state home.” She looked out the window.

  I was trying to imagine what had happened with the miserable boys—was it just that she’d started dating older boys who worked in the mills?

  “Why didn’t they just let her stay home?”

  “Oh, she couldn’t go to school after that, with everyone knowing. She had to stay away long enough for us to take care of her.” One of them must have got her pregnant. That was why she’d gone away for six months. But why hadn’t she married the father, or just come back afterward? And it didn’t quite make sense, because my mother had always said that after me, she couldn’t have any more children, and it was a sad thing for my grandpar-124 / RENÉ STEINKE

  ents since Hanna had taken a fall as a girl that somehow made it impossible for her to bear children. Emily had the aura of conspir-acy again, and I knew if I let on that I didn’t know the details, I’d never get her to tell me them.

  “That’s right, I guess.”

  “We got to be real close. She was moody, but we had fun. I remember we baked a lot of cookies and she wanted to hear all about the windows.” She drummed her fingers against her lips as if she was sorry for telling me so much, and we sat there quietly for a while. She tucked her chin into her neck and looked away, shrugging. More fell out in a steady stream. “I made Oscar wait for me, and he never forgave me for it. By the time I was your age I ha
d two children. Most of the girls I knew had four or five.

  For two years I didn’t want him to touch me. And I was afraid of my food. It seemed like if I swallowed too much, it would eat me. And then after the children came, I had my spell. Did you hear about that?”

  “I’ve heard stories,” I said. “I’ve seen the pictures.”

  She smiled and settled her hands in her lap. “I was famous.”

  She nodded to the pictures on one wall, the same newspaper clippings Marietta had saved: A younger Emily with a hoe slung over her shoulder. A barbershop’s window shattered into a web.

  Emily, with her curls piled high on her head, holding up empty hands. Emily in a button-shaped hat being handcuffed by police-men. A jagged hole in the window of a department store, a knocked-over mannequin in a wedding dress, broken glass caught in the veil.

  “Why did you do it?” I asked.

  She smoothed the lace scarf around her neck and fiddled with the ends. “Because glass will shatter. Air won’t.” I knew what she meant, that stillness can choke you. She wheeled herself a little closer to me. Her eyes fixed on me. “I couldn’t take that quiet.” She said it so emphatically I had the feeling that when she’d told

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  this to people before, they hadn’t believed her. “I remember being at the Eau Claire train station, sitting up all night on one of those benches, and in the morning, when I realized I didn’t have any money, I went up to the counter and I demanded that they send me to Bloomington. I knew I had to go there next. He hemmed and hawed, and when I could tell he wasn’t going to give it to me, I took my shovel and went right up to the depot’s window.

  He came running over and said, ‘Whatever you want, whatever you want.’ That was a good feeling, before they arrested me.

  Suddenly everyone was listening.”

  I reached to pat her hand. “No one holds it against you now.”

  She arched one eyebrow. “But they did then. You betcha.” She wiped a cookie crumb from her lower lip. “It got to be expensive.”

  Later, the nurse came in and said it was four o’clock.