The Fortunate Ones
Ellen Umansky
Oma wanted to send a telegram to Papi in Paris, but Mutti said no. “He will be back in three days. He will know soon enough,” Mutti said from the cot in the little room that would have been the nursery. She had moved in once the pains began. (“It’s too early!” Rose had heard Mutti cry out.) The doctor had come and gone, the sheets had been changed, the blood scrubbed away. Without any evidence, it almost seemed to Rose as if it hadn’t happened.
“She will be fine, won’t she?” Rose asked Gerhard.
“Of course,” he said. “She has been those other times.”
“What other times?”
Gerhard shook his head. He had little patience for his younger sister. “She will be fine,” he repeated.
They were seated at one end of the long dining table beneath the brass chandelier, eating apricot dumplings with cinnamon. Cook seemed to have forgotten that they had had strudel after lunch. Rose had already polished off her serving, but her brother had about half left. Between small careful bites, he turned to a composition notebook by his side, studied a list he’d written.
“What’s that?” Rose asked. Normally she tried not to ask Gerhard too many questions. Her brother loved nothing more than to lord his knowledge over her. But right now she would do anything not to think of her mother lying pale down the hall.
Gerhard considered for a moment. “I am working out how to sell tickets to the Dianabad pool,” he surprised Rose by answering. “Near the wave machine.”
“But the Dianabad is public, and the season doesn’t open for two more months,” she felt compelled to say. “No one owns those spots.”
He let out an exaggerated sigh, but it was no match for the glow of satisfaction lighting up his face. “You can sell anything, if you know how.”
Rose heard steps and Bette’s fair head appeared. “Gerhard, I could use your help.” He got up and Rose did too, following them down the long hall, away from where Mutti was lying, and into their parents’ bedroom.
The brocade curtains were drawn, the embroidered coverlet on the bed smoothed back, the pile of silk pillows just so. The room was chilly, and all the exactitude made Rose uneasy. “Why are we here?” she asked.
Bette sighed. “You don’t have to be,” she said, and to Gerhard: “She wants the painting of the boy.”
“The painting?” Rose said, as surprised as if she had been told that her mother had arisen this morning and announced she was joining a nunnery.
Gerhard and Bette were already tugging at the gold frame. “She said she sleeps better with it nearby. And we are not to question her. Do you hear?”
Rose nodded. She couldn’t imagine questioning her mother, today of all days.
Bette, thin-shouldered, only a few years older than Gerhard, strained as she tilted the heavy picture, scraping the plastered wall. “Gentle, gentle,” she cautioned as Gerhard helped her heave it off. Rose joined them as they carried it down the hall, and she considered it a victory that Bette didn’t shoo her away.
Inside the little room, Mutti lay against white pillows on the cot. She wore a white nightgown, but the darkness of her hair, piled up on her head, stood out in contrast to all that white. Rose decided it gave her face definition. She was still reassuringly herself, beautiful. The room was cozy, the porcelain kachelofen chugging away, Mutti’s brass lamp with the pink glass shade casting a warm glow. Bette must have moved it in, Rose realized.
A cane-backed chair sat close to the cot, and Bette and Gerhard angled the painting to rest on it. “Thank you,” Mutti whispered. Her dark eyes fell on the picture, and Rose followed her mother’s gaze. The boy in the painting was not pretty. He was too skinny in his red uniform, his face pasty and elongated. The paint was thick, thrown on; it looked as if the painter couldn’t be bothered to slow down and pay attention. Rose didn’t understand why her mother loved it so.
“Children, you are here.” She said it wonderingly, not at all the sharp Mutti Rose knew, and it made Rose wish she had stayed at the dining table and not followed her brother in. Mutti motioned for her to come close, she laid a hand on Rose’s head. Rose saw that the bedsheets were Mutti’s favorite, edged with crochet. “My little mausi,” she murmured, and Rose felt chastened.
“Beef broth, ma’am?” Bette said. “The doctor said you must eat.”
“I could use a touch of something,” Mutti said, and leaned back against the pillows.
Bette curtsied, and signaled to the children. “Come, let your mother rest.”
Back in the drawing room, Gerhard picked up the volume about the Kaiser that he had been reading, sank into the wingback chair near the windows.
“Why does she like the painting so much?” Rose leaned against the chair behind her brother, playing with the fringed edges of the Persian throw that covered the top of the cushion. Across the room, a glazed porcelain vase crowded with roses occupied a spot on the mantel. Why hadn’t her mother asked for flowers instead?
“I don’t know,” Gerhard said, and he didn’t look up from the book. “She does.”
“Well, I think it’s ugly.”
“Of course you do. You’re too young to understand it.”
“I know you don’t either,” she said, coloring. And from the way Gerhard pushed his nose into the book, peered at the pages more closely, Rose could tell that she was not wrong, and it irked him.
“Who is the boy in the painting?” Rose ventured. “Does she know him?”
“No. She bought it in Paris on a trip with Papi, years ago,” Gerhard said, not looking up. “You were just a baby. You don’t remember.”
Gerhard was right. She didn’t remember. The painting of the boy had always been in their flat, along with so many other things. Rose loved the tapestry of the peacock with its lustrous blues that hung near the swords that had been her grandfather’s, the velvet jewelry case with the silver clasp that had been Oma’s, the small landscape of a waterfall that if you were attentive and looked behind the copse of trees (which Rose always did), you could detect the shadow of a bear.
But her mother doted on the painting of the boy, took considerable comfort from it. It disturbed Rose. “I wish it were gone,” she said with coarse agitation.
1
Los Angeles, December 2005