The Fires Read online

  “It’s too tight on you.”

  We both broke out laughing as I slid aside the curtain. In Herstein’s dressing room, I knew Jo would tell me exactly what she saw, good or bad, and among all the white lit mirrors, and the lingering smells of hair spray and perfume, for once, we wanted the same things.

  I zipped up the next dress, a silk as dark as blue can be before it’s called black, with a slim skirt and a boat neck, sleeves fitted with cuffs at the elbows. The silk felt airy and cool against my skin, and fit me exactly.

  When I went out and stood before the mirror, I couldn’t believe how different I looked: like a woman who had spent her childhood in Hong Kong, her college years at Vassar, a woman who THE FIRES / 21

  wouldn’t flinch at ordering eel because she actually liked it. I turned to look at the back. The zipper was invisible. A woman who kept it a mystery how she got into her clothes.

  Jo pushed aside the curtain, muttering, “Couldn’t even button it.” She tossed her head back. “That’s gorgeous.”

  The color made my eyes darker and cast a warm tone on my face, the snaky sheen of the silk echoing curves of shine in my long hair. When I let myself think of falling in love, the man was always taller than I was, with slender hands, and now I added to the fantasy that dress. Looking at my reflection, I wanted to kiss him in the rain.

  “How much is it?” said Jo, touching the sleeve.

  I pulled the price tag out of the neck and looked down. It was more than three of my paychecks. “Too much.”

  “Why don’t we split the money my dad gave me?” She fumbled in her change purse. She’d told me that he’d called in sick to work three days the week before, and I knew how much they needed whatever he’d given her.

  “That’s all right,” I said, casting one last look at the three-sided mirror. The sad part about going to Herstein’s was that it made you wish so hard you were someone else, some untouchable woman trailed by admirers and luck.

  I went back into the dressing room, undid the zipper, and when the sleeves and bodice fell away in the harsh light, the scars lashed up at me. Closing my eyes, I quickly changed back into my skirt and sweater.

  As I came out, I slid the blue silk onto the hanger and said, “It’s just a dress.”

  Jo slowly nodded. “It’s too bad.” Going back downstairs to the first floor, we tried on charm bracelets and pearls, sprayed perfumes on our wrists and arms, and went out again to the street, to that gray Indiana light.

  22 / RENÉ STEINKE

  W hen I was a girl and Hanna would still visit, her presence was like an X-ray machine, suddenly exposing the skeleton and muscle of my surroundings: the worn keys of my father’s practice organ, our mended furniture, the fat-cheeked Hummels frenetic on the shelf, the sinking corner of flecked linoleum. “You could leave,” she told me, but I didn’t believe her then.

  When I’d first seen the picture of her in the family photograph tucked into their Bible, my grandfather had pointed to her and said in a cottony voice, “That’s your mother’s older sister. She doesn’t live here anymore,” and though the knot of his face frightened me, I wanted to meet her.

  Except for their round noses, he and Hanna hadn’t looked alike.

  She’d inherited Marietta’s Cupid’s-bow lips and wide-set green eyes, and my mother had her father’s blunt mouth and small dark eyes, the skin on her cheeks roughened and pocked from blem-ishes. Except for the round noses, they wouldn’t have looked like sisters.

  Whenever I asked my mother why Hanna hardly ever came back to Porter, she stiffened her shoulders, stared at a spot in the middle of my forehead, and said there were a few things in the world she would never understand, or else, “She’ll visit in a couple of years after she settles some things.” She looked so pained and tense at the very mention of her sister that I learned not to ask her, because I did whatever I could to prevent her mouth from folding at the corners like that.

  “That’s your mother’s business,” my father always said when I asked him about Hanna.

  She appeared changed each of the few times she did come back, like an actress in different films. Now and then I’d see her hurried writing on an envelope tucked behind the penny bowl, and when my mother left the room, I’d read as much of the letter inside as I could, the lines running off the page and crowding into THE FIRES / 23

  shrunken script at the bottom. I’d hear my mother whisper into the phone late at night and know it had to be her, far away, at the other end of a long, long line.

  A couple of weeks after the funeral, I drove over the bridge near Gary, heading for Chicago to look for her. Silhouettes of factories stood against the sky, pumping smoke in an urgent rhythm, the clouds a fantastic pink color. I snapped on the radio, glancing at Hanna’s souvenirs on the dashboard, the toy arrows’

  turquoise feathers fluttering, the chalky white spots on the carved wooden deer. I’d brought them along with the letter I’d found—for luck. The green sign said CHICAGO, 20 MILES.

  Even in her late forties, though her skin was wrinkled, Hanna had the round features of a girl and high fickle eyebrows, as if she’d in some sense never grown away from the teenager she had been when she left. The last time she’d come to our house she said to me, “I haven’t seen you since you got bosoms” and embarrassed me, though I quickly forgave her for it. She often said the wrong thing, but it wasn’t malicious, just misplaced.

  Simply standing in the doorway that day in her man’s shirt and worn-out white shoes, she unnerved me because I couldn’t tell what she might say or do next. She said she was on her way to the dunes, but it was cold and the lake would be wild and mossy, the sand still iced. Her legs and head were bare, and she wore huge sunglasses with purple lenses. She didn’t belong to Porter, this place that valued belonging so much.

  At the edge of Chicago, I turned down a busy road and stopped at a gas station with a phone booth next to the pumps. Someone had spray-painted the outside of the glass black. I went inside and pulled the hinged door shut, feeling as if that small, confined space would give me more control over what happened. If I could find Hanna, I would tell her what I hadn’t been able to tell Jo, and then she would help me get away, maybe let me live with her for

  24 / RENÉ STEINKE

  a while until I understood better what was needed. The edges of the pages in the phone book were tattered, and the page I opened to was ripped in half. I flipped through the c’s to Cornell and found (with the middle initial T.) his name, checked the address against the one on the letter I’d found in my mother’s attic next to the souvenirs in the box with Hanna’s name on it. It was the same. I stood there for a few minutes, listening to the traffic outside, the friendly bell that rang each time a car pulled up to the gas pump.

  Chicago wasn’t far from us, exquisite hotels and towering buildings with windy shadows, a lake flecked with ice or night-marishly murky, a city like the Monopoly game, where anything, bad or good, could happen to you.

  Cornell lived on the South Side in one of a long row of old brick apartment buildings with wrought-iron gates and chipped lion statues on pedestals, tracery and stained glass in some of the windows. I opened the heavy front door and went inside the foyer, where another door was propped open with a cinder block.

  I started up the dim, uneasy staircase, past peeling wallpaper with a thick stripe and hand-shaped leaves falling through the bars. I didn’t know how he and Hanna had parted, if at the mention of her name he’d invite me in or spit in my face.

  Knocking on his door, I heard jazz music turned down and padding footsteps. When I saw his puzzled eyes over the chain catch in the door, I knew he didn’t recognize me, and there wasn’t any reason he should have. He’d come to our house eight years before in a torn coat, and I’d imagined Hanna still holding a scrap of its wool in her hand, that she was the reason for his dazed expression when he’d said her name and it exploded and lingered above our heads like a mushroom cloud. Now that I was here, I saw how wrong I might be. />
  THE FIRES / 25

  He opened the door wider. The skin around his eyes had wadded and yellowed. He stooped around his folded arms.

  “Yes?”

  “Cornell?”

  “Do I know you?” I pushed my hands into my skirt pockets, fiddled with their silky lining. His lips were full and kind, posed to burst into laughter, even if he wasn’t joking. “Remember Hanna Kestler?” It took all of my mouth to say her name.

  He leaned his hip against the doorframe, jutted his chin into the air. “But who are you?”

  “Her niece. A long time ago you came to our house?”

  After he’d left, my mother had warned me not to mention it to my grandparents, who didn’t know about him. “But he’s her husband,” I’d said to myself. I’d pictured her with him riding somewhere in his blue car, his papers between them on the white vinyl seat, the windows down, Hanna humming, and the wind ruffling her short red hair. He would look at her, relieved, and tell her how unhelpful my mother had been. Hanna would be sad, but she would laugh lightly anyway. “But Ella,” he would say, “she wanted me to find you.” It was crazy, but that was why I expected him to remember me.

  He looked into the empty space in the hallway, drew his lips back between his teeth as if he wanted to hide them while he thought for a moment. My heart pounded, and my head felt light.

  Then he opened the door. “Come on in.” He led me into a small room with a radiator, a green couch, a cluttered bookshelf, a large chair, and a pair of brown socks on the dusty floor that embarrassed me.

  “Sit down,” he said. “You’re the one she likes, right?” He sat in the green leather easy chair, browning on the arms and cracked in places as if it had been baking.

  “She wrote to me sometimes,” I said, leaning back on the 26 / RENÉ STEINKE

  couch. I mean—” I folded my arms across my chest. “She didn’t visit much.”

  He gazed at the pocked wood floor momentarily. “She only writes when she’s sad,” he said. “But you’re the one over there in Porter?” He pointed with his thumb as if it were only down the street.

  I nodded.

  “So, Hanna sent you?” He leaned over on the chair arm, smiling expectantly. He had been looking for her, too. She took hold of people that way, even if they wanted to forget her and hadn’t seen her in a long time.

  “No,” I said.

  His smile vanished. I wanted it back; I wanted him to be happy just to see her blood relative. “I thought you could help me find her.”

  He shook his head impatiently. “I haven’t seen our Hanna in years.”

  “Actually,” I said hurriedly, “I’m surprised I found you.” The letter I’d come across with Hanna’s souvenirs in the attic was fifteen years old, and here he was, in the same apartment he’d lived in then.

  He took off his wire-rimmed glasses and began to shine them on his shirt. “Her last letter was from Cincinnati. I don’t know where she went after that. Never heard back from her.”

  He put his glasses on again. “It could be a good sign, though.

  She used to only write when she was miserable. It was because of my songs—she wanted the literary consolation.”

  He picked up from the floor a couple of scraps of paper with scrawled writing and pushed them into his shirt pocket. “Want something to drink? I have some bourbon.”

  I was flattered that he wanted me to stay and thought maybe THE FIRES / 27

  if I talked to him long enough, he might tell me something I didn’t already know. “Sure, a little would be nice.”

  He went out of the room and came back with two emptied jelly jars, still frosted with the fragments of labels, and placed them in front of me on the coffee table before he poured.

  “I don’t usually get a chance to talk about Hanna,” he said, tipping the bottle and filling each glass. He handed me the fuller one. “That’s supposed to be her,” he said, settling back in his chair, as he gestured with his glass at a painting on a blue-pink taffy-swirled background, a woman with large, round eyes, a little rosebud nose, something of Hanna’s smile. “One of those street painters on Michigan Avenue did it. Funny, my girlfriends always think it’s just something I found to put on the wall. Doesn’t look like a real person, does it?”

  I took a sip of whiskey, felt the ridged lip of the jar. “Not really.”

  The face in the picture looked empty and perfect, but Hanna’s face was always moving, hard to catch, eyes lifted here, mouth turned there, and at the next word they would switch, eyes down, mouth twisted, all very quickly, as if she had more nerves and muscles in her face than most people.

  “What did she tell you about me? I’m worried,” he said, lighting a cigarette. He shook the match rhythmically like a tiny drumstick.

  “In a letter once she told me you played the piano.”

  “That’s all she said?”

  I wished I could have thought of a convincing lie then, something to spare his feelings, because I saw how he needed to feel important to her, how he wanted her to feel the loss of him. “And I knew you were married.”

  “We weren’t married,” he said quickly, putting his finger behind his glasses to rub his eye. “That was a lie she told the family, 28 / RENÉ STEINKE

  because—I don’t know—either she wanted to test them or get back at them.” He moved his leg and accidentally kicked over a pile of books, but left them sprawled there on the floor. “I’m Jewish, you know.”

  I didn’t, but nodded. I’d never met a Jew before—there weren’t any I knew of in Porter.

  He emptied his glass, got up and went into the other room, came back with another bottle, and put it on the coffee table between us. Pouring whiskey into his jar, he said, “Not-fond of outsiders, are they?”

  “No,” I said, ignoring an impulse to apologize. “I guess that’s why she stayed away.”

  He nodded. “Yeah, she had to.” He filled his glass to the rim this time. “I think she told me you were smart, that true?”

  I took a drink, shrugged. “I read a lot.”

  “So what, they finally felt guilty, huh?” He was pushing me to make an excuse, to defend them, and I didn’t want to. I’d put my grandfather’s death in a big black box in my head marked DON’T

  and I didn’t even want to admit that I had a mother and grandmother just then, or to have to think how absurd it was that we’d each invented a different death for him—aneurism, virus, stroke—because to correlate our lies would mean flatly looking at his death, and none of us could do that.

  He narrowed his eyes, crossed his legs and arms in a hoarding gesture. “Well,” I said, slumping so my elbows hit my knees.

  “But they’d like to see her. And my grandfather died. She needs to know that.”

  “Yes, she does. I’m sorry,” he said, gulping his drink. A couple of minutes later, he said, “But they don’t want to make peace.

  They want to invade her like a country. If she’d stayed with them any longer, she’d be in the loony bin now. At least she’s not there.

  We can be grateful for that, can’t we?”

  THE FIRES / 29

  I looked at the white plastic radio the shape of a grapefruit perched on the bookshelf and wished I could turn it on to look for my new favorite song. I didn’t want him to know how little I knew. I was afraid he’d be less likely to trust me, or might even ask me to leave, and I began to think, superstitiously, that just talking about Hanna would help, that somehow she’d hear us.

  I asked him about his job at a printer’s, about his neighborhood, his family in New Jersey. Then, abruptly, he asked if I thought Hanna was happy. It was a question that made me think of stiff half-circle smiles and tight patent-leather shoes I once wore.

  “I read somewhere that the secret is to have good health and a short memory,” I said. “She seems to have both.”

  “You think so?” he said, wincing as if the vulnerability in his face were painful or had somehow clouded his vision. “Once I threw a par
ty for her—her birthday—I went out and got her blue cheese, some nice bread, a case of wine, chocolate cake. I invited all these people, and they didn’t have to, but they brought gifts.

  People danced. I remember there were lily petals all over the floor, from people jostling against the flowers. She had on a pretty long dress, she was smiling and laughing, and everyone was having a good time when near the end, she sat down in a corner on the floor and burst into tears. Just sat there crying into her lap.

  I couldn’t get her to say what it was. No one could.”

  A flick of memory brushed past me, just a moth wing: tree bark and branches like a girl’s arms. “You think you know why now?”

  He nodded too certainly. “She was melancholy. Too much of a party knocked her off balance, scared her.” I remembered my father once said that she needed more than she could imagine anyone giving her.

  I told Cornell about the time we were eating dinner at my grandparents’ house when she suddenly appeared in the dim dining room, more like a wish than a person. As if she’d been ex-30 / RENÉ STEINKE

  pecting her but forgot, my grandmother Marietta set a place and filled a plate, my mother talked breezily about Hanna’s skirt, with its gold-coin buttons, and my father squinted at her and kept wiping his eyes. When I hugged her, she whispered, “Don’t believe what they say about me.” My grandfather looked down at his turkey and went on eating. She sat down and said, “I can’t stay long,” smoothing a napkin in her lap and glancing at him nervously.

  Before the pie was cut, she bent over to say to me, “He can’t keep this up forever, can he?” Her dark hair, its natural color, was braided tightly and twisted over her ears, and her nails were dirty with blue paint. She looked tired but smiled with her lips closed, so the dimples curled in her full cheeks, and she patted me on the knee under the table as if to signal she was okay. I was just a girl, but she always acted as if we’d taken a long car trip together and shared a hundred meals, as if we’d seen things others would be envious of and so we had to keep them secret.

  As much as I liked this, I always knew she could just as easily invent another thing that would please her even more.