The Master Butcher's Singing Club (40 page)

“That sounds good,” said Markus, his voice clogged as if he was about to cry.

“I know it sounds like I’m hard-hearted, talking about marmalade when you’re leaving all the way to Germany,” said Delphine, turning to him. “I’m all broken up inside. I don’t want you to see it.”

She turned away and as she did so Markus put his head against the back of her arm, and leaned there. She did not move. There was a long sigh of quiet in the kitchen. He had chosen her, once again. At that moment, Delphine decided. He was hers. That was that. She would not let him go. It was just a matter of finding the right way to keep him, but she would do it. Tante hadn’t a chance.

Eventually, Markus grew embarrassed and moved off, wishing that he could speak, but unable to choose the right words. He started eating a cheese sandwich she put into his hand. Hypnotized by despair at the familiarity that he was soon going to lose, he chewed too quickly. He wanted to tell her that he could not go. Maybe even to beg her to hide him, or bring him home with her, or do something to persuade his father that this was a mistake. But his tongue was fat in his mouth, numb and stupid. The sandwich was dry and sticky all at once, and very difficult to eat. I’m just luggage getting moved from here to there, he thought. A thing that doesn’t matter. A stuffed pants and jacket. He couldn’t find the words to tell this to Delphine.

* * *

IN THE DEEP BLACKNESS
, they loaded the car and the boys crawled sleepily into the backseat, collapsing immediately back into their slumber. Fidelis would take the first shift, driving, and so he got behind the wheel. Tante made certain she slipped into the middle seat, jostling Delphine aside in her haste to set herself next to her brother. Her sewing machine was latched in the trunk, nestled in its traveling case, crated besides so it would not suffer on the voyage. A small valise of her clothing was also set in the trunk, and her large black leather purse was secure in her lap. Tante was prepared. She had freshly aired and pressed her tough and shiny suit. She’d brought five boiled eggs in a sack—it hadn’t occurred to her to bring one for Delphine. But no one would notice the eggs, anyhow. Delphine had made sugar cookies in the shapes of animals, special for the boys, and she brought fried doughnuts, sausages, bread, hard cheese, apples, and a small insulated box that contained bottles of beer.

Delphine was wearing an ordinary suit and coat, but in a round green case she had brought along two changes of underclothing and her one smart wool suit with a pinched-in waist. The suit matched a hat with a curved green feather stuck in the band, a hat she could tilt rakishly over one eye. There was a short dotted veil inside the hat that she could put down if she wanted to look more coquettish yet. But she didn’t. She just wanted to get through the whole mess. While Tante and Fidelis wrangled papers and got passports cleared, her job would be to take the boys out to see the monumental sights of Chicago. After lunch, she switched places with Fidelis. Driving, she could concentrate silently on the road. The car’s atmosphere was gloomy. There was some cheer from Tante, but Delphine thought it morbid. The boys drowsed and drifted in sleep. The closer they got, the more Delphine felt that her appointed task—walking around with them looking at parks and historical markers and art museums—seemed about the grimmest, most upsetting thing she could think of to do. Once they were settled, she decided, they’d find a circus.

WE SPENT TWO DAYS
feeding peanuts to the goddamn elephants
, she would remember with Markus, later on. Because while Tante and
Fidelis made their complicated arrangements, that’s where they were. At the beginning of the stay, Delphine went into a bookstore, consulted a guidebook, and marked out in her mind which educational sights they should supposedly be seeing. After she made the boys memorize facts about the sights, they went straight to the circus and spent the morning at the sideshow feeding the monkeys and elephants and talking to all of the attractions, who were on duty in their carts and behind their cages or on their little podiums, their placement depending on their oddity. Because it was a raw late winter day and there weren’t many gawkers, and because the boys were so obviously smitten with wonder, but mainly because Delphine liked to talk to people, they made friends.

There was a woman called the needle, so thin that when she turned sideways she was supposed to disappear (she didn’t). There was the usual fat lady—hers spread in pools beside her where she lay on a bearskin rug, as though she’d half melted. Seal-O was a young man with flippers for hands and completely turned-out feet. He had a mean personality and made fun of the boys’ worn and shrunken clothing. Seeing they were stung with shame, Delphine said to Seal-O, “You’re a fine one to talk. You should be balancing a red rubber ball on your damn nose.” He laughed at her in a nasty way, and she grabbed the boys before he said anything worse. They talked to Mr. Tiger, whose skin was really striped. He let them try to rub the stripes off, and they couldn’t. Girl Wonder Calculator made their heads spin. “How come you’re here,” asked Delphine, “not in the university?” There were a very bored strong man and a frightful person of no determinate gender who had another frightful half-a-person growing out of its belly. There was an exotic four-breasted mermaid, whom the boys were not allowed to see, but Delphine did see. She told them later that the top was real but the bottom was definitely made of rubber. And at last there was the Delver of Minds, a little off from things, in a solemnly draped tent.

The boys, as could be expected, had no interest in having their minds delved. Delphine bought them some cotton candy swirled on a paper cone, told them not to get lost, and paid a quarter to enter.

Of course, thought Delphine, the Delver of Minds was a woman.
She looked up rather grumpily from where she sat next to a little charcoal burner that she stirred with a slim iron poker. Without a word, gesturing abruptly for Delphine to sit in the wooden chair across from her, the Delver busied herself with unwrapping and then sprinkling onto the charcoal some powdery substance, maybe a kind of incense, that gave off a penetrating spicy aroma. The smell was extremely pleasant, and Delphine breathed it in and looked curiously at the woman.

She had white hair but her face was young. Perhaps she was not much older than Delphine. Although she was quite delicate, and seemed a bit chilled even swathed in misty blue folds of material, she also had a broad-lipped mouth and powerful hands. Her wrists, as she laid out a pack of cards in some peculiar order, were bony and slender. But those fingers, thought Delphine, could crack walnuts.

“You’re watching me pretty close, miss,” said the Delver.

“I was just noticing your fingers—strong enough to crack walnuts open—that’s what I was thinking.” Delphine laughed.

“Crack walnuts. The man in question does that with his fingers. You can look at me all you want,” the woman said, putting away her cards, “but you paid to get your own mind read.”

“Well,” said Delphine, unnerved by the walnut reference, “go ahead then.”

“You’re in town on some desperate errand,” said the Delver.

“Pretty good,” said Delphine. “I’m here to send off the man’s boys, the man I work for.”

“They’re going to Germany.”

“What?”

“You’re in the meat business,” said the woman. “I looked at your hands, too.”

Nicked and gouged, already missing a tiny corner of a fingertip, scarred with small white nicks, roughed with lye and toughened from mixing hot spices for Italian sausages, Delphine’s hands had changed. She looked at them, lying there on the little copper table, as though they were the hands of an alien being. “I never noticed,” she murmured.

“No,” agreed the woman, “you never even tried to hide them when
you walked in. Women around here wear gloves. That says something, too.”

“What does it say?”

“You’re not going to hide anything,” said the woman. “There are people who pretend to themselves they are honest, and there are people who actually tell the truth. You’re still between the two. But you’re heading toward the latter. I hear music. This man, you love him.”

“No,” said Delphine. Then she added, “He sings.”

“Oh, all right,” said the Delver. She closed her eyes and then pinched her fingers to her temples, as though she was suffering from a sudden headache. “There’s some kind of animal in your way. Oh, I can’t be right.” She began to laugh to herself. “I am seeing in your mind the picture of a large black bug . . . skinny at the middle like an ant.”

“Well, you are right,” said Delphine, too amused to be totally surprised. “It’s the boys’ aunt.”

“You hate her guts with good reason.”

“You could put it that way.”

“But she’s going.”

“She’s . . .” and now Delphine’s breath stuck, painfully. “She is taking the boys.”

“And you love them.”

“Yes,” said Delphine promptly.

“The man is too bright to look at, too dark inside to read. He is a widower. Marry him.”

“I can’t,” said Delphine, now obscurely irritated.

“You’re no coward, either,” said the Delver, “so the reason lies elsewhere.” She turned over the glowing coals and sprinkled a different powder onto them. A bitter and soothing scent rose between them. “You’re tired of holding them all up, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” said Delphine.

“Then let go of the ones you can do without. She won’t let you take them all, anyway. You will not prevail over her, or divide the sister from the brother, not if they’re blood.”

* * *

DELPHINE GATHERED
the boys and walked away from the Delver’s tent—she’d said other things, statements Delphine needed to sort out. And her head now ached mildly from the smoke of the powder she had breathed. That afternoon, the boys were getting their passport pictures taken, anyway, and they were to meet at the hotel just before.

“Let’s get those strings of candy off you,” said Delphine, brushing Emil’s suit jacket, which she’d let out as much as it would go. She plucked away some spiderwebby bits of pink floss. Markus brushed Erich off and unstuck some pieces of straw from the elephants’ bedding from his wool socks. Erich grinned, his two front teeth looked huge and comical. His other teeth were still missing or only half grown in.

“Now you all look good,” said Delphine, but her voice stuck in her chest and came out half strangled.

As they walked back to the hotel, there entered into her mind the unwilling but compelled conviction that she had to talk to Fidelis alone. And she would do it. Never mind what blocks Tante threw, she’d make sure that she and Fidelis had the chance to talk this over before the four of them took off on that train—who knows, it could be forever, the way things were going. She’d kept track of what was happening over there ever since the purge of 1934. Details of that terror were still coming out and she collected them in her mind, would not forget the slaughter as Fidelis and Tante conveniently did when the Saarland was returned and then the Rhineland militarized. All they could talk about was the strength, the prosperity, their family’s increased holdings. The strange, compelling genius of the leader. At the bottom of a Minneapolis newspaper’s foreign section, a tiny blurb on a rampage of hate against Jews and glass breaking made Fidelis shake his head, but then say, after a few moments,
that things had always been so. There was always this poison, a few who would express it.
Johannes, er war Judn,
he said, but didn’t translate or explain. Now, even though Delphine was convinced she could argue him down, even though she believed she’d thought more about the situation that the boys faced than Fidelis, she was afraid to talk to him. Even the thought made her heart beat uncomfortably fast, made her tough hands sweat.

It wasn’t the argument about the politics—it was the other, the unexpressed. All that she feared about the lay of her heart and did not examine. Nothing is by accident, nothing is by chance, she told herself. I went in to see that delver of minds for a very good reason: whether or not she could see the whole thing, I wanted to get my own mind clear. I had to hear myself say those things, had to hear out loud what I don’t even know I am thinking inside. I had to sit there with that white-haired lady and put it all out where I can see the shape of it.

THEY ALL WALKED
together into the great stone building set inside with tiny corridors of offices where papers were processed. The office ran in balconies around a central shaft open to the ground floor. Dusty light poured down from a vaulted skylight ornamented with obscure struggling figures. The boys craned upward, and Delphine held their hands, walking them up the broad stone stairway. Outside the room where passport photographs were taken, people waited in a line along the corridor, some on the floor, some slumped against the wall. It was a very long line. Tante was tired, but she didn’t slump. Her stiff suit seemed to hold her up. She made a face of severe annoyance, and said that the boys needed to eat.

Delphine seized her chance. “Let’s go and get them some sandwiches,” she said to Fidelis.

Tante said immediately, “Don’t bother. No. We’re not that hungry.”

“The boys ate nothing,” Delphine said, with a composed firmness.

“They’ll live,” said Tante, curt and loud. She produced, with an air of triumph, a clutch of lemon drops from her purse. Their sugary coating had gathered the usual purse dust, and they were stuck together in one lump. Tante cracked it lightly against the wall and gave a piece of the candy to each of the twins, a tiny sliver to Markus.

“There,” she concluded, “that will hold them.”

“That stuff’ll rot their teeth,” said Delphine. “Let’s get them some nourishment,” she said to Fidelis. Then she looked straight into his face, opened her eyes, let the dull radiance from the great central skylight cascade down upon her, and she smiled.

“You could use the air, too,” she said. “Come along.” And he followed.

Outside, in the street, walking toward a delicatessen they’d both spotted, Delphine began to speak with a simple urgency. “I’ve got nothing to lose,” she said to Fidelis, “so I’m going to talk. Listen. You can’t let Maria Theresa take them back to Germany, Fidelis, it is all wrong. Impossible. You can see that she doesn’t know crap about taking care of boys.”