The Master Butcher's Singing Club (41 page)

“My mother will care for them once they are settled,” said Fidelis.

They reached the doors to the shop, and almost entered, but Delphine’s mind spun furiously. She didn’t want to divert Fidelis from the problem with the mundane selection of cheap sandwiches. “Let’s keep walking around this block. I’ve got more to say.”

“It is done,” said Fidelis.

“No, it’s not, and you owe me to listen.”

That got him—he never liked to owe anyone. And he knew she was right, knew that she’d cared for his sons to the full extent of her powers and beyond the limits of her job ever since Eva died. So they didn’t go into the deli but kept walking.

“In Germany,” explained Fidelis, “they learn the proper way to do things.”

“Maybe so.” Delphine breathed deep, tried to stay calm so she could argue reasonably. “But then what? Do you think they’ll want to come back here and help you in the shop? Do you think Tante will even let them come back?”

Fidelis looked down at her, his face distinctly tightening. It was clear that he’d thought of this deep down, but stuffed away his apprehensions, or argued himself out of them. He paused, but then he spoke in a light, determined voice.

“Then I go over there and get them myself!”

“I read in the newspaper that new government is keeping any Germans who visit,” said Delphine. It was purely a rumor at the time, though it would indeed prove true, but Delphine decided to use it. “And the boys . . . what if the borders shut? You know what the war was like.”

But that was going too far. Fidelis became serious and spoke with an earnest fervor. “I have seen war—there could never be another war!
Es
ist unmöglich!
I believe this Hitler is strengthening the country for peace. That is why the family does good—and they buy things for the boys. They have money.”

“Money!” said Delphine, fighting a surge of anger. “All well enough, but these are the sons you had with Eva!”

Her name dropped between them like an anvil.

Now Delphine used the fact that she had been saving for a moment like this, when the stakes were huge.

“Tante stole the morphine—you must know that. How can you send your sons with the woman who made Eva suffer? At least leave Markus here! I’ll take care of him!”

They both stopped walking at the same time. There, in that windy street, they looked at each other. Fidelis’s face was grim and ashen. Her face turned up toward his, a challenge, her eyes narrowed and watchful. When she stared at him, her eyes a magnetic ore, Fidelis felt himself moving toward her, nodding, allowing her to take control. As though the wind had pushed him, just a little, off his feet, he took a step to right his balance. He couldn’t think of anything else to say, because of course she was right. Tante wasn’t good with Markus. And yet, he looked away from her. Tante was right about some things. The younger boys would be better off back in Ludwigsruhe, surrounded by family, not digging their way into hills and floating down the river and nearly drowning themselves.

“I can’t watch them enough,” he said to Delphine, and he put his hands in his pockets and looked down at the mottled concrete sidewalk between them. He had something more to say, and he didn’t want to say it. “I don’t have the money to pay you anymore.”

“I know,” said Delphine, impatient. “That doesn’t matter. I want . . .” Then she was staring at the sidewalk, too. They stood there so long, both with the next words on their lips, that it seemed as though they might sink right through the stonework. The words had too much weight. Fidelis put his hand to his chin, looked down at her standing there, the smart taupe hat cocked over one side of her face, the little veil, the green
feather. Without any warning, surprising him, his hand reached out. He touched the tip of the green feather. Her lips were naturally dark, not pink at all, but a deeper brownish crimson. He took a ragged breath.

“Cyprian,” he said.

She looked at him and then her smile flashed, and her comma-shaped dimples, her strong white teeth. He was dazzled by the freshness of her expression even before she spoke, shaking her head.

“Cyprian and I were never married.”

He took that in. That was something, and it was nothing. The two started walking again, side by side. They had nearly circled the block again before Fidelis found the words he wanted to say. It was difficult finding them at all, because he was ashamed of what he’d thought right after Cyprian had rescued Markus. Along with the relief and gratitude, Fidelis had suddenly been struck by an understanding: he could never, ever, in any way, make a claim upon Delphine. He owed the man she was with, the man he’d fought. He owed Cyprian. Even as he wished it were otherwise now, too, the marriage vow or lack of it did not figure into the picture. Delphine and Cyprian’s union was perhaps a shocking thing, but in fact it often happened that two people pretended to be married to thwart small-town gossip. He had noticed for some time she wasn’t wearing her wedding band. They had come full circle, around the block, and returned to their starting point.

“You have slept with him?” he bluntly asked.

“No,” said Delphine. “Yes and no. He couldn’t . . .”

Fidelis stopped and looked at her with a rising sense of comprehension. All of a sudden he thought he understood. When he grasped it, he shook his head to clear it of all thoughts of Delphine. So
that
was the nature of Cyprian’s wound. As well, the reason for his touchy and protective rage regarding Delphine. Fidelis shielded his eyes with his hand, to blot her away from his sight. The only thing left to ask, Fidelis decided, was whether Cyprian was coming back.

“Is he ever—” he began.

Just then, Tante, furious, her jacket gleaming off her chest like a scratched glass mirror, emerged from the great doors of the stone
building and yelled across to them. She charged toward Fidelis, the boys tailing her as she crossed the street. Fidelis saw her, turned back to Delphine, gave her a strangled, almost desperately pleading look, as though he wanted her to finish the sentence for him.

“Is he ever what?” said Delphine. But without waiting for an answer, she lunged toward the boys, afraid of the traffic. Fidelis grabbed his sister’s arm at the curb, propelling her alongside him.

“Come, Tante, we found a good place.” He waved at the delicatessen that stood open and gleaming just down the street. “Let’s go in. Let’s sit down.”

Tante began to berate him for leaving them all and where, she wanted to know, were the sandwiches anyway, and she was missing her lunch, and that always made her light-headed. Fidelis calmly marched her into the delicatessen, which had small tables placed before a slide of great modern plate-glass windows, and he sat her down. Delphine took charge of the boys, settled them at their own table just behind Tante and Fidelis, and told them what they could have, what they could choose from the things that were cheapest on the menu. At one point, after their order was taken, as she sat with them, she looked up at the table where Fidelis was facing into the little storm of complaints his sister was making. He was nodding at all Tante said, but he was watching Delphine with thoughtful gravity.

THEIR HOTEL WAS
what they could afford, one bathroom down the hall and a dreary gray feeling to the whole edifice. At least it was clean, the other people weren’t threatening, and there didn’t seem to be any bugs. The boys slept with Fidelis, and Tante and Delphine were together in a room. Delphine had dreaded this, and she hadn’t even thought about sharing the bed.

The first night, the two had been so exhausted that they merely rolled in side by side, turned their backs to each other, and managed sleep even though Delphine was awakened several times by Tante’s tossing out one hand, the fingers flicking dreamily just under her nose. She nudged the hand away and slept on. This evening, after they had eaten
the remnants of the food they’d brought, they were going to bed early, as the train was scheduled to leave the next morning.

Tante sniffed as she entered the dim room.

“Someone has been here.”

She went immediately to her bags and began methodically to check through them, ticking off her possessions beneath her breath. Delphine sat on the bed, and watched her. Tante knelt before the brown cowhide valise and removed each piece of clothing as though it would explode. Then examined it suspiciously. What is she thinking, Delphine wondered, that someone entered our room, tried on her clothing, and folded it back into her suitcase? There was really nothing, besides the sewing machine, of any value in Tante’s luggage anyway, and she had left the sewing machine with the manager, safely under lock and key. She’d checked to see that it was still there before she’d retired.

“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.