Some things you know before you can possibly know them. Other things persist in their mysteries, untranslatable: wet latch of rain pelting a red silk parasol, but not the rain itself, not the sky that shed them. Leaves, forests, birds, clock-cases, ribs splayed under a fine, sun-struck skin. Bodies are not figments, are not time, split and fusing atoms, desire in fugue state, the stars in their courses. Secrets within, like another person. Savage, grief offers two paths, one back to waking, the other deeper into the dream. If we step toward waking, do we stop dreaming, afraid of what the dream might see? A hunger so implacable we might put out a hand and touch it. Not everything can speak what it suffers.
When Otto Wenner got to thinking this way, he wondered if his winter woolgathering was a sign of late life rejuvenation or of impending death—the fact, at seventy-one, of his eight-decades-old cells dying out and spreading dread through him, as it did when he woke, repeatedly, at night, his heart jolting. Just the evening before, he’d dreamed of his Uncle Augustus’s candy shop in a Philadelphia brownstone. He’d been in the whitewashed cellar among the copper pots and burners, the nineteenth-century molds for making clear sugar glass animals—amber horses, claret elephants, ducklings green as emeralds. He was inside a sugar egg, the kind some called “enchanted,” looking toward a ship’s porthole rimmed with green leaves made of icing, like a laurel wreath. What lay beyond made his chest thump, a large hand reaching inside, and Otto had awakened in his dark room, speaking German. He shook himself now, eyes glancing toward his work-bench, where his large hands often moved, freckled and antique among the scattered worm-springs, slip rivets, sheets of oiled Japanese paper. Glue pots and brushes. Woodcarving knives. Dusty bolts of moth-eaten umbrella silks. The window had darkened to the blue of coming snow.
Otto stepped outside onto the porch of his little cabin on the property of Paradise Close. Fresh air, he thought, might help loosen his constricted chest. Behind him, back inside the house and workshop, through the static of a Philadelphia radio station, someone was talking about a coming snow storm. Otto stepped down from the porch, rounded a corner of the cabin, and fetched a sturdy shovel from a lean-to set against the north wall. Best to have a shovel inside the house, should the snow be bad. Not that he felt much like shoveling snow these days, his chest heavy, his ankles swollen.
Otto stood with the shovel on the porch. The impending blizzard got his mind meandering again, again back to his boyhood in Philadelphia, and of how, when his mother had at last been able to cross the sea to America to join him, she had been detained in a place along the Delaware with other immigrants who were sick. And so as often as he could he would leave his uncle’s bakery, where he worked, and run all the long way across the city, down to the wharves, where in a large building they held the passengers who were too infectious to move into the streets and houses with their families. He’d look up at the way-station, guessing which window might be hers. If she looked out, was well enough to stand up and do so, maybe she would see him, and know how much he missed and loved her, though he hoped, too, that she would not know that he sometimes could not remember her face. He recalled her smell, though: goat milk, oats, soap. Dumplings. Potato peelings, her wrists sunk in a bucket of silky water.
And would she recognize him, grown so much taller these past two years since he’d come over with his uncles and their families? She had stayed behind in Germany to nurse his dying father, who was now buried across the sea, never to be seen by Otto, or anyone, again.
Most mornings as a boy in Philadelphia he’d worked at the bakery of his dead father’s brother Fritz, hauling burlap and linen sacks of flour and sugar from wagons down into the cellar, catching rats, sweeping, running things up and down the stairs. Uncle Fritz did the baking—breads, rolls, cheesecakes—in the cellar at night, and Otto slept there on a kip in the sugary warmth of dough and ovens. It was Fritz’s wife and daughters who ran the shop at street level by day. In the afternoons, Otto would work with another uncle, Harald, his mother’s brother, who was employed by an umbrella maker and purveyor. The owner kept a fancy shop, but Harald would go from door to door on his behalf, repairing umbrellas on doorsteps, around to the backs of businesses, on the street, at the gentlemen’s clubs, anywhere around the city. The boy Otto helped to carry the tools in a cupboard strapped to his back, bristling inside with the necessary ribs and tips and patching cloths. A paper of needles. Spools of thick thread. Cloth. Shears. Those were the days when people held on to things, didn’t throw them out for a new one, Otto thought. And a thing was hand-made, and made well.
Eventually, when the umbrella shop owner passed away, Uncle Harald inherited all of the deceased man’s inventory and tools. The markets had crashed by then, and Otto left the city, moving with Uncle Harald to a property across the Delaware in southern New Jersey, up along Rancocas Creek, to this very cabin, where they’d set up a small shop and household on a farm owned by the Schade family, originally German people also, and known for taking in strays. Otto was himself a young man by then, in his twenties, but because he and his uncle rarely spoke to one another, he never fully understood the reason for the move to this particular spot, which seemed, to the younger man, as remote as the moon.
Almost unbelievably, though, Harald had kept many of his city customers, one in particular, a high-end clothier, who came loyally once a month despite the Depression with a wagon to fetch specially commissioned items to take back, fine silk parasols for ladies, elegant lampshades, over-sized brollies for golfers. Some with hand-carved handles—an ivory swan’s head and neck, fine-turned, burled maple. Some, Otto realized early on, shaped like phalluses. Others cleft like a woman’s parts. Quite a market for these, actually, judging from the orders, Harald doing the carving at the workbench by hand, quietly, deliberately, Otto helping out with repairs, keeping the books. People somehow found the place. Fewer and fewer came, though, as the years passed, until finally business trickled to a stop, and customers no longer made their way to the cottage in the woods of Paradise Close, to have their old umbrellas and lamp shades repaired or to buy a new one.
It had been winter on the one day in particular that Otto was remembering from his boyhood, months after the last boat from Bavaria had come up the Delaware that year. That afternoon, the river was frozen up in big blocks and chops, and he’d run out onto the ice, slipping, no gloves or mittens, his breath trailing behind him, and he recalled hearing in the school he sometimes attended about how General George Washington, the first American president, had braved the ice of this very river to cross over into Trenton Town and win a battle against the surprised and drunken Hessians. That story made him wince. Hessians, some boys said, were Germans, and Otto would go silent then, hoping not to be noticed. He much preferred to learn what he could from reading the piles of books his Aunt Louisa, Uncle Fritz’s wife, who had been trained as a teacher in Bamberg, brought home from the lending library: Goethe, Tolstoy, Alger, German and English editions of Dickens, Melville, Stevenson. The many newspapers.
That cold day he’d clambered out over the floes, reckless, free, he was a pirate from one of these stories, on the bounding main, clenching an invisible dagger in his teeth, the skeletal winter copses of New Jersey on the far shore transformed into a flotilla of ships approaching, until a man on the city side of the river walked out to the dock’s edge, waving his cap, his arms, and shouting at him, his adult voice thin in the frozen air, calling him back off the ice, over to shore.
Otto had expected to be scolded when he scrambled up onto the pier, his fists blue and numb when he shoved them into shallow pockets, eyes cast down. But then a voice from above and a hand on his shoulder, firm, fatherly, was relaying the news that his mother—“Frau Wenner, yes, ja?”—had died earlier that very week, not of typhoid, as it turned out, but of peritonitis, sadly, and he, this gentleman, a doctor he was, or maybe a priest, though he wore no collar, was truly sorry to have to impart the news to him this way; he had been just preparing to write to the uncles. He had seen Otto waiting outside on many days, even in the rain, and Otto must become a little man himself now, because his parents were both dead, and he was old enough and deserved to be told the truth.
Peritonitis. It was a word unknown to Otto that day, but one whose syllables he’d repeat and then later learned all too well. By the time he reached adulthood he’d known six family members, adults and children, uncles, aunts, cousins, to die from it, swiftly, often overnight or in the course of a single day. The word filled him with a particular grief, a sense of disbelief, bad luck, shame, and waste.
But that was years, years ago. Now, from the porch of a small cabin on the property of the Close, as a black cat wreathed his stiff blue ankles, old Otto watched the first icy flecks of incoming storm materialize among the fallen vine trellises of the far field with the subtle threat of a migraine aura. The sky toward the river, hidden behind hedges thick with pheasants, rabbits, appeared to stir like fabric and concussed a moment. Could that be thunder? Thunder in a snowstorm? Another smothered pock like gunshot, then a staccato tick of ice pellets on the tin roof above. His thoughts turned to Ida, still at the marina and to Windy Bill, alive out in his shack over the creek, as far as Otto knew. Remnants, all of them, himself included, of times long past. Who would be out with a gun in this weather? Otto wondered, closing the door and locking it, as if to shut out the alarm, the storm, the racket inside him.