The Edge Of The World Part 3

He had a cheerful, open face, neat white teeth, apple cheeks above his pale brown mustache, and gold-rimmed spectacles that fogged the moment he stepped into the warm house.

"You're surprised?" he asked, pulling off his gloves and pushing them into his pocket. He removed his gla.s.ses and handed them to me, and I polished them in a wifely manner while he slipped off his coat.

"Yes . . . I mean, no, of course not. Come in, Ernst. Here, let me take your coat and hat." I had forgotten that my father had invited Ernst to supper, but no matter.

My mother hurried from the kitchen, shedding her ap.r.o.n onto a hall chair as she came. She glanced critically at me. "I'll entertain Ernst while you run upstairs and make yourself presentable."

"Oh, Mother, Ernst doesn't mind a little ink."

"No, I like to see the evidence of Trudy's work. Especially here." He touched the tip of my nose with a blunt index finger. "It's very becoming. Like the nose of a little woodland animal."

"All right, all right. I'll wash my face."

I ran up the stairs on my toes, eschewing the banister, conscious that I was making my mother sigh by not planting my whole foot on each step as she'd taught me.

As always in the winter, my room was icy, the porcelain doork.n.o.b a cold stone in my palm. Unless someone was ill, there was no cause to light the stoves upstairs. Once inside that private s.p.a.ce, I was snagged almost immediately by a sort of inarticulated dream and drifted to the window. The light of the newly risen moon reflected faintly off the whitened yard below. A wooden bench and a patch of red currant bushes in the summertime were amorphous mounds now; the former might be a man reclining under a blanket, the latter a flock of quiet sheep. Even the iron supports for the clothesline were softened by a thick sheath of clinging snow. I clouded the pane with my breath and traced a meandering path with my fingertip.

Ernst's laughter boomed up the stairs, recalling me to my purpose. "Say," he announced when I came back into the parlor, "I noticed that Winn and Hewitt is selling some Sociables. I'd consider buying one if I could be sure of a partner. It's not good for your health, you know, to read so long and neglect physical exercise."

"Sociables?"

"You know, Mama," I explained, "those bicycles that let you ride side by side, two people on the same machine. We saw one at Green Lake last summer."

"Bicycles in the middle of winter?" my mother said. Distracted, she pulled back the edge of a drapery to look out the window. "What I can't understand," she said, "is why anyone should work only eight hours a day when your father works far more than that. Always he is late. If the fish is dry tonight, you will know whom to blame, Ernst."

Just then the heavy outer door closed with a thump.

"Ah!" My mother nearly sprang for the door. "There he is."

Ernst and I followed her into the hall, where she was tutting and brushing snow from my father's collar. "You are a snowman," she fussed affectionately.

"And you"-he kissed her lightly on the forehead-"are a hot cross bun."

My father was a large man, tall and broad, with cheeks leathered from Lake Michigan's winds. He'd worked his way up from mechanic in a shipyard to captain of a tug barge to owner of his own barge, which he continued most days to captain himself. He pulled off his fur-lined gloves and flexed his fingers.

"Your fingers are hurting you again, Papa?"

"It's nothing. Only the cold."

"You must allow Gerhart to do more of the work, Felix," my mother scolded. "For what are you paying him?"

"Ach! You girls! Always fussing!" He winked at Ernst. "You see what you are in for, Ernst, don't you? And double the trouble if you have a daughter. Did you say the supper was ready, my dear?" He put an arm around the waist of each of his "girls" and led the way down the hall to the dining room.

"So, I hear you have a new carpenter," my father said, bending over his plate but raising his eyes to Ernst.

"Yes, my cousin Oskar."

"Little O!"

Oskar had stayed with the Dettweilers years before. I'd gathered at the time, eavesdropping from behind the blue velvet drapes, that because a red flower had died, his mother found herself unable to look at him without weeping. Afraid of being banished myself, I vowed to be more careful around my own mother's tulip beds. Oskar was a year or two older than Ernst, but a shorter and slighter boy with long girlish curls. He boasted a great deal about his father, who, he said, knew all there was to know about trains and kept beside his desk a big knife from Mexico for stabbing "like that!"-he'd thrust his arm suddenly forward like a fencer scoring a touch-"anyone who bothered him." He also bragged about his older brother, who had skipped several grades in school. He refused to be amused by any of our games, declaring them "too childish," but cried to Ernst's mother when we hid the flannel duck with which he slept. I'm ashamed to admit that we'd meant to make him cry, because when he did, he said, "Oh, oh, oh!" which was odd and amusing and therefore to be provoked. During the scolding we endured afterward, I discovered that the flower had been a younger sister who succ.u.mbed to scarlet fever.

"He isn't little any longer, but yes, that's the one. From Cincinnati. You'll like him now, Trudy. He's like you, always with his nose in a book."

"He's working as a carpenter?" My mother was quick to spot the seams where the pattern didn't quite match up.

Ernst understood her meaning. He shrugged. "He left college, you know. He says he wants to follow his own path, although it's a dead end, as far as I can see."

We laughed, and Ernst smiled shyly at his own cleverness.

My mother pushed on. "Peter must be beside himself."

Ernst's uncle Peter did something that required him to wear spats and travel to Washington a great deal.

"I think Uncle Peter resigned himself to Oskar's ways long ago. He has Manfred, you know." Oskar's brother, Manfred, I'd been led to believe, controlled all the shipping on Lake Erie. Admittedly, my understanding of business and finance was vague. "Oskar's the artistic personality, more Aunt Bertha's boy."

My mother sighed. "Poor Bertha."

My mother had lost children, too. Two infant boys before my parents had come to America, hoping for better luck. I knew that she and Ernst's mother-whom I called Aunt Martha, although we had no blood relation-often clucked over Martha's sister, Bertha, who, after her little daughter's death, had closed the kindergarten she'd founded and in many other ways allowed, as they saw it, despair to steer her life.

"Gustina!" My mother leaned back in her chair to direct her voice down the hallway.

"Coming!"

"I'm sure your papa will see that Oskar does very well as a shipbuilder," my mother said, turning back to Ernst.

"As a matter or fact, he's been talking a lot about steam engines," Ernst said. "Says he might like to learn to run a tug."

"Is that so?" my father said. "You bring him to the dock tomorrow afternoon, and I'll take him out with me."

"Papa!" I set my gla.s.s with such force upon the table that wine sloshed dark red onto the bleached white cloth.

My mother reached quickly for the salt and poured it over what was sure to be a stain. "Trudy! Was ist los?"

"I've asked at least a dozen times to learn to run the Anna P.," I said, ostentatiously addressing my father alone.

"Oh, well . . ." My father looked helplessly at my mother.

My mother closed her eyes and gave her head a little shake, as if to dislodge the whole scene from her consciousness. "You're not going to become a tugboat captain, Trudy. For heaven's sake."

I couldn't honestly argue otherwise, but this seemed to be beside the point. "You don't object that my other studies have no practical consequence," I said triumphantly.

"Perhaps in July it might be pleasant-" my father began.

I interrupted him. "I'm not asking for pleasant. I'm just asking to broaden my experience. My own papa refuses me but is more than willing to teach some boy he's not laid eyes on for a dozen years."

My father looked to my mother again. It was her job to stand firm.

"It's not that I mean to become a sailor," I went on, "only that I want to feel and see something other than my path to school and home again, something other than well-appointed rooms, if only for a little time. I want to see what it's like to freeze in the open air and buck upon the wild water. I want a few hours in which I don't know precisely what will happen next!" Frustratingly, I knew that my words were only dramatic gestures at a feeling I couldn't articulate. "You came across an entire ocean to a new world," I reminded my mother. "All I'm asking is an afternoon on a tugboat."

"Trudy," she said, giving me a look. "You will help me clear, please. Gustina must be having trouble with the dessert."

While she lifted the platter with the fish carca.s.s off the sideboard, I collected four winegla.s.ses from the table, although I knew she preferred that those remain until last and that, to be safe, I carry only two at a time. The fragile material pinged with every step.

In the hallway, she stopped and leaned close to my ear. The platter and the near-empty gla.s.ses and even her breath carried the scent of sweet wine as she whispered, "You might try going to the dock tomorrow afternoon. You never know."

"I know, Trudy." Ernst's voice followed us down the hall. "Let's go and buy our bicycle tomorrow, what do you say?"

"All right," I called, then walked with exquisite care to the kitchen.

The next day I learned to stuff a hen in Domestic Sciences.

"Now, girls," Miss Emerson said, "you must take your twine, thus, and wrap it several times around the feet. Tie it off tightly but neatly. Even the operations that the diner will never see must be executed with care."

The bones were slippery, and I had a harder time than I'd expected, tussling with the headless bird, its insides plumped with onions and tarragon. I was relieved when the midday cla.s.s ended at last and I was free to take a streetcar from the college to the docks.

But the journey was long enough and interrupted with jarring stops and starts frequently enough to encourage doubt, and by the time I stepped off the car onto the icy bricked road, my conviction had begun to ebb along with the day's pale light. My feet were numb in their thin boots and stockings, well suited to the college's heated cla.s.srooms but impractical for much time in the out-of-doors. I flexed my toes as I climbed the stairs to my father's office. For the first time it struck me that I'd likely missed the boat-after all, my father spent most of his time out on the lake-and I felt some relief at the thought.

No, I could hear Papa's voice before I'd reached the top of the stairs. ". . . didn't put all of my sweat and capital into this business to fork it over to men too lazy to make their own way."

"Come now." Ernst was there. "Gerhart Keffer can hardly be called lazy."

"Oh, Gerhart would never ask me for an extra penny. He knows I pay a fair wage."

"Of course you do." Even with the closed door between us, I could see Ernst nodding. He and my father were in perfect agreement.

I was reaching for the doork.n.o.b when another male voice pushed its way forward. "But who decides what's fair? The tug owners. What say do the workers have?"

I knocked, and the room behind the door fell silent. They were wondering. Well, they would be surprised, I thought stoutly.

"Trudy?" My father, one hand on the doork.n.o.b, had to use the other to take his meerschaum pipe from his mouth. He coughed a bit, startled to see me. "Trudy, come in. Come in." He stepped back to let me through. "Are you all right? Is your mother all right?"

"Don't worry. As far as I know, there's nothing the matter with either of us."

"Trudy," Ernst said, coming to stand beside me. "It's good of you to meet me here. Are you ready to pick out our bicycle?"

"Our bicycle . . . ?"

"First here's my cousin Oskar," Ernst went on. "You see that he's changed."

"Yes, Ernst has produced the cousin, as promised." My father gestured with the pipe's stem toward the man in the far corner of the room. "He's become a man of high ideals."

Oskar had changed. He was still not tall, but he was no longer slight, and his girlish curls had become thick, wild waves, the sort that must often break the teeth of a comb. I could discern no family resemblance between him and Ernst; his features were molded of a heavier, darker clay, his forehead more ma.s.sive, his nose sharper and wider, his lips fuller. It was almost unseemly, I thought, how much of his face there was. He dipped his large head in the gesture of a bow. When he raised his eyes to meet mine, his bright gaze, a blue unsoftened by gray or green, struck me as somehow rude, intrusive.

"Trudy is an agitator, too," my father was saying. "She marched for the eight-hour day with her Miss Dodson."

"Her Miss Dodson?" Oskar frowned and turned his eyes to me again.

To my consternation, I felt my cheeks grow hot under his intense regard. "One of my teachers," I managed. "A woman of high ideals."

"Who nearly lost her position, in consequence," Ernst said, shaking his head. "A very foolish woman, really."

"It doesn't sound that way to me," Oskar said.

My father swept a hand through the air. "Enough politics! We've got to catch a schooner before she goes right on to Kenosha."

I said my piece then, firmly, knowing the condescending look with which Papa would answer me, a look I couldn't fight the way I could my mother's sharp words; knowing, too, that Ernst would add concern to that look, and that they would unite against me, tying my feet with their twine. "Papa, I hope you'll take me along today."

"Trudy, we've already discussed this," my father said. "No papa would put his daughter in such discomfort, not to mention danger, and no captain would allow it."

"What about our bicycle, Trudy?"

"No one buys a bicycle in the winter!"

Ernst looked hurt.

"I'm sorry, Ernst, but I don't think you or my father are looking at this fairly. I'm not suggesting that I'll be a help, but I'm not a child. I do know enough not to fall in, you know, and I can keep myself out of the way. Why can't I see, just like Oskar here, how it works, what my own father does every day? Please, Papa."

"Another time, Trudy. In the summer, perhaps," my father said absently. He was studying a chart he'd drawn from his desk.

"I think you ought to let her go," Oskar said.

My father and Ernst stared at him. I stared, too. I'd certainly not expected any help from Little O.

"Let her sit in the pilothouse," he went on. "She'll be cold and bored and miserable, and that will be that."

As if I were a spoiled infant. I was so outraged that I didn't know what to say.

"Keffer won't like it," Ernst said.

"I'm not entirely against annoying Gerhart," my father said.

"You might come, too, Ernst," Oskar said. "Keep her company."

"No, thank you." Ernst was angry with me, though because I'd been short about the bicycle or because I'd gotten my way, I couldn't tell.

My father, rejecting my overcoat as too fitted about the arms for easy movement and too loose in the skirt for safety, had me dress in old clothing of his: a suit of gray woolen underwear, a wool shirt, and navy trousers that flapped ridiculously around my legs.

"And this." He held out a ma.s.s of green so dark that it was almost black, the sweater his own mother had knit for him when he'd left Hamburg. He'd told me this story so many times that the garment, with its p.r.i.c.kly fibers, its engulfing darkness, its soapy lanolin smell, had come to embody for me the grandmother Gertrude for whom I'd been named but had never met. When I pulled it over my head, I felt the weight of her sorrow at her son's defection to a distant country dragging my shoulders down.

The sweater had caught in my combs. While I regathered my toppled hair in a girl's braid down my back, my father stuffed a pair of his old boots with newspaper. He opened a large oilskin coat big enough to wrap around me twice, tied an oilskin hat on my head, and held out huge three-fingered leather mittens, lined with fleece, for me to push my hands into up to my elbows, dressing me as he had years ago when he'd taken me down toboggan runs.

"Now, don't let the mermaids find you," he said, chucking me under the chin.