Master Butchers Singing Club Read online

  “I think I’ll wash up,” Delphine said.

  “Well, all appears in order,” said Tante, with a grim look. With infinite care, she began repacking her shabby slips and tissue-thin bloomers, her newly sewn skirts and crisp blouses, all put together on her machine. Delphine walked down the hall to the bathroom. It wasn’t a dreadful place, but the plumbing stank, and the water that came into the little tin sink was only a cold gray trickle. Still, she took her time, soaping herself, combing, rubbing almond-smelling cream into her face and hands. She wanted to give Tante a chance to put everything away and then get into her sleeping gown—the night before had been a big production, but she’d been too tired to care then. She found that her frustrations were brimming. She didn’t want to blow up. She wanted to think of a way to get one more chance to talk to Fidelis. She combed her hair back, smoothed her eyebrows, rubbed sweet oil into her lips, until at last there was no other choice than to walk back to the room.

  Tante was a frightening picture with her hair down. She had released it from the complex of interlocked braids and whorls, and was brushing it. The hair lay in see-through scraggles and bumps, spread across her shoulders, a gray-brown horsy color. She had changed into her sleeping costume—a thick column of scratchy wool nearly as stiff as a blanket. And she was rubbing, into her skin, a concoction of lard and petroleum jelly. The stuff was scented with camphor and orange water, but that did not hide the rancid undertone. The air in the tiny room was penetrating, thick, intense. The first thing Delphine had to do was open the window. When she did open it, asking at the same time if Tante minded, there came from the older woman a horrified shriek muffled by a woolen scarf.

  “If cold air should drop upon my skin,” said Tante, panicked, “I could be sick by morning!”

  The stuff she laid upon her skin was apparently a kind of salve or preventative. She feared, in the city, an infection coming upon her, and she was making preparations to sleep that involved a soldierly defense of her health. There was the muffler, wrapped around her head, a towel covering her throat. Upon her feet, felt slippers laced like baby booties. Her chest bore the weight of most of the stinking grease, and a square of flannel besides, laid upon it, would contain the heat that her body would generate. She tottered to bed with a Frankensteinish stiffness, lay on her back with her hands crossed on her belly. She closed her eyes and uttered a long prayer underneath her breath, in German, and dropped off as Delphine lay down next to her in the dim space of clogged air.

  AN HOUR, perhaps two, after falling asleep, Delphine snapped awake. Her brain was flooded with thoughts. The small room, a rectangle of dark city noises, seemed to rise up and up in the nothingness above the earth. She had the sense of how alone they were, meaningless as individuals, stacked in the hotel like herrings in a crate, one over the other, side to side. All of the confusions of the day swept over her, and she remembered first of all the white-haired woman in the layered blue gown, fold upon fold of material, obviously meant to make her seem mysterious. Yet, she truly was. Men are strange, flawed artifacts, she’d said to Delphine, and whether we struggle to love them, or not to love them, it is all the same. And then Delphine thought of Fidelis walking around and around the windy streets, his face heavy in the stony light with all that he could not speak. She thought she knew what he wanted to say, and what he tried to ask just as Tante emerged hysterical from the office building. She thought she knew, but then again how could she?

  Delphine knew that she was no delver of minds, and the deep look that Fidelis had given her as they ate their food might have been a look of warning: Don’t come any closer. Or perhaps a look informing her that he was still in grief and could not even think of such a thing as she thought, sometimes. Yet, her father’s drinking had made her immune to the love of grown men, she decided, because the reason she gave any consideration to Fidelis was the feelings she had for his sons—she was helpless before those.

  Delphine ached with the one sleeping position she had to hold so that she would not bump against Tante. Carefully, she shifted. Tried to rearrange her limbs slightly. Tante’s hand flopped over and Delphine carefully folded it back onto Tante’s stomach.

  “Nein,” said Tante, “gib’ mir deinen Finger.”

  She was talking in her sleep and her voice came out of the muffler, but what Tante said was what the witch in the fairy tale said to Hansel, which seemed an alarming omen to Delphine. She made herself breathe deeply, let her limbs go soft, shut down her mind, and waited for sleep.

  THE BOY HIMSELF took care of the whole problem of telling Tante, by becoming extraordinarily ill in the night. It was to Markus himself a great and secret triumph, one he’d not even willed, not that he knew, although in the years that followed he wondered if his hidden self had predicted what would have happened to him if he had boarded that train to New York, then the ship to Germany. On waking that morning they were to leave, his cheeks were brilliant, his eyes glazed. He tossed in a fever so high that Fidelis tapped on the door before sunrise, and asked Delphine to stay in the room with the boy while he went out looking for a pharmacy. She entered, sat down next to Markus on the tiny cot. The twins were sleepily dressing, pulling on socks between yawns, and she could feel their gathering excitement. But Markus was dry with the heat of his fever, and his lips were a vivid bruised plum. His temples were white and his breath was short. She felt for the pulse in his wrist—it raced unsteadily. His face contorted.

  Delphine swiped the wash basin smoothly from the boys and held his head over it. After he felt better, she took the wash basin down the hall. She cleaned it out scrupulously, and put a little cold water in the bottom, wet her handkerchief in the water when she brought it back and began to wipe his forehead, his thin high delicately freckled cheekbones, his throat, his ears, his slender wrists, his forearms. And all the while she looked carefully and pityingly down at him, she inwardly marveled and also feared that his illness would pass as suddenly as it had begun. But it did not.

  When the aspirin only made Markus rave, Delphine said firmly that he could not leave, and no one challenged her. There was no use for it but Tante thought it terrible to waste a ticket and determined to find a way to sell it. She barely concealed her own relief that Markus wouldn’t be joining them. She held her hand before her face and said good-bye to him from the doorway. Delphine leaned into the embrace of the twins, held their scratchy coats for a moment, breathed their dusty boy hair. She held their rough hands as they kissed her, smoothed their foreheads. They tugged away from her, their eyes bright with excitement at their adventure. Then they were gone, the two of them, out of her life.

  EARLY IN THE AFTERNOON, Fidelis drove the car to the hotel entrance and then carried Markus, limp and burning, down to the lobby. Delphine followed with the luggage, such as it was, and they packed the bags into the trunk. Put the boy into the backseat, and laid the car blankets over him. He threw them off restlessly, and anxiously asked, as he had over and over, where they were going.

  “We’re going back to Argus. Going home,” said Delphine, as she tucked the light wool robes around Markus again. He looked up into her face with such a luminous joy that she was startled, then worried about delirium, that perhaps his fever had taken a dangerous turn. While Fidelis paid a tip to the manager for letting them stay longer in the room, she checked Markus carefully and thought that the worst might have passed. Maybe he just felt the way she did, light with hunger and the surprise of reprieve.

  Fidelis drove and Delphine directed him out of the city. Soon they were on the highway north. They said nothing for several hours, except to murmur about the way the fields reminded them of the Dakotas, then farther on how it looked more like Minnesota. How big the barns were, how well-kept. Like they were through with the Depression down this way. Some threatening clouds came up over the horizon and they mentioned those, speculated about a possible storm. When it didn’t come to pass they switched their attention to Markus, stopped several times to check his fever and to make certain
that he drank a little ginger beer from a bottle Fidelis bought. He slept as though drugged. All that day, while the sun was out, they managed to stay on safe and neutral topics of conversation. Or they fell silent, took turns driving, slept in the passenger’s seat. Once the afternoon light waned and the shadows grew long and then smudged into the general darkness, their efforts failed. Silence collected, became uncomfortable. Their quiet became waiting, then suspense.

  During the day, an interior restlessness had plagued Delphine, an itch to say what must be said. It wasn’t like her not to blurt out the truth as she saw it, and she had realized that the avoidance and the careful maneuvering was wearing on her. She didn’t like the thin invisible path she had to tread around Fidelis. She drew a deep, stubborn breath and then held it so long she almost burst. When she let it out, her heart beat slower and she was calm. She had decided to provide an explanation whether or not Fidelis wanted one.

  “Listen here,” she burst out. “Cyprian is like a brother to me. We’re not married and we don’t do anything together. He doesn’t want to.”

  “Want to?” Fidelis swerved a bit. His brain had fixed on a war wound that robbed Cyprian of manhood. It was hard to turn his thinking from that. He didn’t want to? Cyprian didn’t want to? She could think what she liked, but he was sure that Cyprian did want to. What else could Cyprian say, and keep his dignity? Fidelis shook his head, but to enter into an argument or obtain more details was beyond both his English and his emotional reach. He stared straight forward. There was no other car on the road. They were going fifty. He tried to think of some way to advance the conversation, but nothing occurred.

  Delphine crossed her legs, then folded her arms, sank her head down so that she lounged in her seat like a sulky boy. She was embarrassed at having volunteered so much, and maintained a stubborn silence. After a time, Fidelis spoke.

  “What does it matter?” he said, low. “Cyprian saved Markus. He risked his life, dragged him out of the earth.”

  Delphine considered that for a while, and tried to see the structure of Fidelis’s thoughts. For if he’d held himself back because of Cyprian, it must mean that he had feelings for her by the very definition of his resolve. And yet, too, the possibility of Cyprian could be the excuse Fidelis had for not acting toward her as in fact he did not want to. He may have sensed that she was possibly open—even she did not know if she truly was—and neatly banished the issue by conceiving of this species of honor that would divide them from each other and keep them excused from facing what shivered between them.

  “I doubt he’s coming back,” she said. “If he does, it won’t be to live with me.”

  He took that in for several miles, the headlamps cutting through falling darkness now. Her answer left him without assurance, left the whole weight of the situation upon him. Did that mean she was open to him, or that she was simply through with Cyprian? Would loving her, if Cyprian chose not to, betray the man who had saved his son? His thoughts turned this way and that. When he’d come to Eva just after the war, things had been so clear. Carnage and sorrow had made all questions of the heart too simple, maybe, but the way was strictly laid out. No ambiguities, no doubts. He had delivered his death message, she had fallen into his arms. He had visited her to help her get over her shock, comforted her, and in that storm of open emotion, it had been easy to move forward, straight into each other. Here, however, the situation was a maze. It seemed to Fidelis that there were too many people involved, but then it struck him, suddenly, that it was only repetition. Here was Delphine—the best friend of Eva as he’d been the best friend of Johannes, both dead—and now the whole entire set of events was repeating itself because Delphine could rescue him, his boys, the same way he had rescued Eva and Franz.

  This, at any rate, he could tell Delphine by way of a story. He could say it to her now. Maybe if he told it all, there would be a way out, an answer in the telling.

  A light fog had risen and the smoke of it swirled in the high beams. As the car cut through the evening, Fidelis told all that had happened beginning, as he thought he must, with Johannes.

  THE FIRST TIME Johannes saved his life, he had dragged Fidelis out of a pile of dead when the bullet that had slammed through his jaw knocked him senseless. The next time, he had shot an onrushing French soldier when his friend’s rifle jammed. Johannes had saved Fidelis twice only to die himself in the trembling of continual music. This happened in the war’s final days. Through two days and nights in the elegant ruin of an aristocratic house, Fidelis had stayed with Johannes. The place was a stop on the mad retreat, the place where all the wounded and the dying were dumped. All day and all night the walls trembled with the continual shelling, not far off. In the small eternities between each impact, the glass in the windows, smashed all over the sills, shook with a gentle brilliance like chimes in the wind.

  They stayed upstairs because below in the cellars the wounded were being smothered when the fit sought shelter, and the reek was even worse, and the screaming and the cursing, the groans, the insane shouts. Fidelis thought it better for his friend to die in the rain and wind, in the random music. His guts blown, his throat filling, it was hard to say what killed him. Dysentery or the shallow, filthy wound or the murderous exhaustion of all of the retreating and despairing men. Johannes whispered, “Sing to me, old friend.” In a freezing room, in one corner of his shattered country, accompanied by the fractured ringing of glass, Fidelis sang. Afterward he’d laid Johannes out and wrapped a silk scarf his mother had given him for luck around Johannes’s face, but he hadn’t had the courage to stay behind and bury him. Fidelis walked on. And where he walked there was more chaos and dying, and he’d walked past that in hobnailed boots and past all he possibly could until he got back to his childhood bed, his mother, his eiderdown cover, his books, his father and sister and Eva. He told her about the death of her baby’s father, and then . . . He said to Delphine, “Es war einfach. Wir haben verheiraten.”

  “You married,” said Delphine, her voice hushed, “so that the baby, Franz, would have a father.”

  “Yes,” said Fidelis, because that was the simple answer. And because he thought it was the answer that Delphine had to hear, but it was not the only answer. His body and Eva’s had told them the answer before they’d known it, in that first meeting, when he saw her more naked than he ever would again. In the darkness now, his face became very hard. When he remembered these things, the sad weight of them closed upon him and he had to breathe in and out deliberately to loosen it, like tight bands around his chest. He certainly couldn’t explain this to the woman sitting next to him. Delphine did not seem to notice, anyway. She had removed her pumps and drawn her feet up on the seat, curved there in thought. She sat there neatly, the way an animal might crouch. He could feel Delphine’s awareness drift deep along some current he couldn’t fathom, and it was a long time before she came to her conclusion and spoke.

  “So if we married it would be the same thing all over again.”

  “Yes!” He was surprised she put it all together. But she hadn’t, not the way he thought, not the way it was a box of four people that strangely dovetailed. Delphine had reasoned that, since he’d married Eva not out of love but rather out of duty to the unborn child, this was not a thing that Fidelis wanted to repeat. And that was understandable, she thought, in a calm relief. Because who knew, after the child was grown, if the two would ever get along? And she herself did not know. Couldn’t read her own heart. Whether it was the sons or the combination of the father and the sons she loved. But at least, in that hour as they cut through the blackness, she admitted the possibility that he was included. And then, from behind them, Markus woke and the blankets rustled down around him as he leaned toward the front seat.

  “Papa,” he asked, his voice thick with sleep, still miserable, “sing to me?”

  Delphine didn’t know that there were times when Fidelis showed a certain tenderness to his sons, times he sang to them. When they had trouble sleeping, whe
n they were very small, when Eva asked him to, and when they were ill, he sang the old German lieder to them in a restrained voice that filled the room with a comforting resonance in which they felt protected. He sang the one he knew was a favorite of Markus’s, and he sang it over and over just as Markus always asked. “Ich weiss nicht was soll es bedeuten, dass ich so traurig bin. Ein Märchen aus alten Zeiten, das kommt mir nicht aus dem Sinn.”

  It was the song about the Lorelei, full of pictures. The women sat on the great rocks, combing their golden hair with combs of gold. Hearing their song, men sailed closer, their hearts were pierced and fascinated by the beauty of the Lorelei, and then they were drawn onto the killing reefs. It wasn’t a song that Delphine knew and only gradually did she piece the meaning together, and when she did she wondered at him, this Fidelis, who casually stuck chickens and stunned sheep, who brought down a dozen mutts in one noise and burned them up like trash, who mourned his wife with a gravity that added to the stillness he possessed already, but said nothing, who made of the complications already between them an indecipherable maze, and who sang to calm his sons. Gradually, she fell under the spell of his singing, too, with Markus, and at last she was lulled into the blackness.

  Fidelis let the song drift, heard their honest drawn breaths, nodded slowly at the road, and hummed a new and simpler song, to keep himself awake. It was a song he’d sung with Johannes, drunk, in forgetfulness which he could not now forget, as the wheels turned them forward and forward, far from Germany, onto the wideness of the plains of America where the wars were not between the same old enemies he was used to, but were over before he’d got there, the great dying finished, and the blood already soaked into the ground.