“Are you all right?” he asked, tossing his hair from his eyes.
“Yes,” Marianne said, adjusting herself. “Yes.” And as she repeated it, her look of discomfort disappeared. “This is lovely.”
“It is,” Martin echoed, realizing it was true. His body tingled pleasantly in the cold. The water rising and falling around his neck was featherlight.
“See?” Marianne said, smiling through the spray. “Now promise that you’ll come back to Burg Lingenfels with me.”
And looking at her small, frail form, Martin felt all the resentment and resistance of the afternoon fall away. How could he refuse? She was Marianne von Lingenfels.
“All right,” he said, taking hold of the string to her inner tube like some marine beast of burden and swimming out to sea.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Cambridge, Massachusetts, July 1991
Ania Kellerman had flown 5,000 kilometers, taken the train another 120, filled extra heart and blood pressure prescriptions, suspended bread and milk delivery for three weeks, found, washed, and packed her old but still good trench coat, and filled half her suitcase with good German chocolate, in part so her daughter could show her the house that now stood before them. It was large and gray and beautiful, built in that graceful American style with wooden clapboards and columned porches Americans referred to as “Victorian” in a confusing homage to an empire they had overthrown. It was certainly unlike most of the houses in England. Or in Germany, for that matter, where homes were built of stone or stucco or brick—never something as precious and impermanent as wood.
“Well?” Marianne—or “Mary,” as she was called here in America—asked.
“Can we get out of the car?” Ania said, gazing up at the peaked roof.
Mary frowned. It was a demonstrative look, meant to note this example of motherly hardness or wrongness or, at best, ineptitude. The people of today wanted delicate handling, Mary among them. Ania knew this, but she was too stubborn to comply—and anyway, she did not know how.
Ania waited as Mary went around the car to open her door, an unnecessary rule her daughter had established following an incident in the airport parking lot in which, in Mary’s estimation, Ania had nearly been killed. This was not founded in reality: Ania had looked before opening her door and the minivan pulling into the next space had been at least half a meter away, but Mary had an overactive imagination, especially when it came to catastrophe. And Ania appreciated being cared for this way. When her daughter opened her door, she swung her feet out onto the curb and stood with relative ease. She was lucky to be so fit for an eighty-year-old woman.
Ania used Carsten’s cane for support as she stood before the house. This was the place Mary intended to raise her children postdivorce. She had bought it herself. There were three floors, the uppermost under a steeply gabled roof. Tall, elegant black shutters framed the windows, and on the second floor, a cream-colored panel was carved with an overflowing bowl of fruit and above this, less successfully rendered, a flag inscribed with the date 1864.
Ania regarded the clapboards, which were caked with layers of poorly scraped paint. The sill on the third-floor window was brown and rotten where it met the glass.
“So?” Mary prodded. “You haven’t said a word!”
“It is a beautiful house,” Ania said sadly.
“So why the tragedy?”
Ania shook her head. “It is too old.”
Mary laughed. “That’s the best part! They don’t make houses like this anymore. I love its oldness.”
Ania regarded her daughter, the young American she had become in the twenty years she had lived here. Mary honestly believed that you could update the electrical system, rebrick the chimney, brace the foundation, and cover over the past with a fine, clean coat of paint, and instead of a fragile, seam-filled heap of expired goods, you would have a fresh new house. She had become American enough to assign a moral value to the house’s age.
At forty-one, Mary was a beautiful woman, with thick, honey-colored hair and a long, intelligent face. She was aging like an American, though: deep lines between her brows and along the sides of her mouth. Too much smiling. Too much emotion on parade. It was a young country. It mistook the theater of expression for honesty. If Mary had lived like a German, she would look ten years younger.
“You really don’t like it?” Mary asked, growing more wrinkles by the minute, her face contorted into a tableau of surprise.
“I like it,” Ania said.
“Then what is it?”
Ania shrugged. It was a useful gesture with her grown children—a sort of what-do-I-know disclaimer about her general lack of knowledge or understanding of the modern world.
“It’s dead,” Ania said finally. “The things it is made of—they are past their time.”
“Aha,” Mary said, bristling in earnest now. “So now things that aren’t alive can die, too. I see. How wonderful.”
Ania could see her daughter’s vexation, all the layers of it: the history of disappointments her mother had doled out to her, all the ways Ania had rebuked and judged and misunderstood her, all the times her blunt and unromantic nature had quashed the joys of Mary’s young life. And then there were the surface layers of anxiety about the purchase, which was, in Mary’s own words, the biggest financial decision of her life. The sum she had paid struck Ania as exotically expensive, a sign of how discordant her own sense of value was—a language founded on different root words.
Ania took a breath and thought about Jesus, whom she did not believe in but whose teachings, as she understood them from the Bible, seemed in her old age to provide a sound road map for life. She reached out and placed her hand on Mary’s cheek, which was soft and slightly creamy with moisturizer. “Child, it is a beautiful place. I am an old woman—don’t listen to me.”
“Sure, sure, sure,” Mary said crossly, sounding more German now. “You’re only an old woman who happens to be my mother, why would I want your approval?”
Ania looked back at her daughter. Lightness, lightness, she told herself. This was what such moments required. She bucked the urge to sigh, to shake her head, to honestly reflect the vast gulf between them, and laughed instead.
“You have this,” she said. “You will always have my approval.”
Later, when they were back in the car and Mary had found it in herself to speak to her mother again (a product of her talkative nature as well as her obsessive deliberating on the purchase), she began to lay out her plans.
“I don’t have to fix everything at once. I’ll chip away at it, piece by piece. You know that from living on the farm. You and Father did it your whole life.”