POLLY JEAN’S FIRST BIRTHDAY FELL ON NOVEMBER 29, A Thursday. Anna had no interest in celebrating it. All motions toward merriment seemed obscene. They’d had small fêtes on the occasions of the boys’ first birthdays. Simple dinners, then cake with family. It was the cake that Anna cared about. It was tradition: the birthday child, king of his high chair, his hands elbow deep in a cake he didn’t have to share with anyone, icing in his hair, crumbs up his nose, and Anna taking pictures. That’s what she was ultimately after, the pictures. Bruno found the custom ridiculous. It’s messy and a waste of cake, he said. Nevertheless somewhere in the attic was a photo album no one looked at anymore and inside it, snapshots of each of the boys, their entire faces smeared black with chocolate frosting.
It was Ursula who came to Anna a week before Polly’s birthday. She’d be happy to bake the cake, she said, and volunteered to have the party at her house. It was a warmhearted offer. Anna’s face collapsed under the sympathy of Ursula’s suggestion, but she said nothing. Ursula backed quietly out of the room and left Anna alone for the rest of the afternoon.
Ursula, like Bruno, took a sensible approach to grief. She threw herself into knitting and volunteered on a children’s clothing drive with the Frauenverein and once a week, she met with the same women in the Kirchgemeindehaus to work on other projects, some of them charitable, others creative like the following week’s workshop on Advent crafts that Ursula was planning to attend. And every day, Ursula walked over to Rosenweg to tend to Polly Jean. During this time she set her usual impatience with her daughter-in-law aside and looked for practical ways to help Anna get through the day. Ursula cooked most of the family’s dinners and did the greater part of the marketing and housework. She could offer no other comfort. She’d never been affectionate with Anna. To be familiar and effusive now would seem peculiar and forced.
The subject of Polly Jean’s birthday was approached again that evening, this time by Bruno. He was gentle. He spoke gingerly. He had gone out of his way the last weeks to treat Anna with exceptional compassion. “Don’t you want to take a picture of Polly eating her cake? Come on, Anna. If you don’t take a picture you will wish you had. You have pictures of the boys.” He hadn’t needed to remind her. Anna started crying and Bruno couldn’t find a single word of consolation, though he tried many. He sighed as he stood and said to the wall that he was going upstairs to check on Victor. And then he did.
STEPHEN’S BIRTHDAY WAS THE first day of May. He’d turned forty-two the month after he left Switzerland. Anna had, on that day and this year on his birthday as well, gone into the city, to Neumarkt, and stationed herself at a table in the Kantorei where they had gone for drinks on the day that they met. Both times she had gone with the sole intent to cry, though on neither occasion could she find the tears. In each instance, she started at the beginning and told herself the entire story. It had seemed an obligatory, if self-spiteful, ritual.
Was it really love? she’d ask herself. Was it close to love? Did it live in love’s neighborhood?
Of course it was love. A version of love. With Polly Jean to prove it.
ANNA HAD SEEN DOKTOR Messerli only once since Charles’s death. The Doktor spoke much slower than she usually did, and with softer intonations. Her sentences had intermissions. She asked the requisite questions: How are you holding up, Anna? What are you doing to honor your son’s memory? How are you interacting with your family? How are you taking care of yourself? Are you taking care of yourself? She gave Anna another prescription for tranquilizers. Anna had never bothered to fill the first.
“Where do they go, the dead?”
Doktor Messerli answered honestly. “I don’t know.” They’d talked around this subject before.
“What do they do?”
“I don’t know that either, Anna.”
“Will I see him again?” Anna spoke with desperation.
“I hope so,” the Doktor said. She meant it.
IN THE END, THERE was nothing to do about Polly Jean’s party but have it. Ursula and Bruno insisted. Anna, limp as cotton cloth, didn’t have the strength to fight them. They’d planned nothing extravagant—a supper with the family at Ursula’s house. That was all.