“He who has borne the weight of his father’s melancholy from childhood on is like a child who has been taken from its mother with forceps and who always bears a physical trace of the mother’s pain.”
SØREN KIERKEGAARD
“My own father suffered from melancholia.”
REGINE OLSEN
When the morning call finally ended and the hired carriage rolled away through the icy ruts in the snow, Regina stood for a moment outside her front door in her white fur-lined hat, cape, and boots. The spring snowfall had transfigured Copenhagen overnight, whitewashing the streets, the churches, the bridges, and the roofs of the houses and palaces for as far as Regina could see. Regina’s home, the second in a row of town houses known as the Six Sisters, lay on a finger of land stretching out to the sea. Dark, tense waves lashed at the pier that edged her street. The air smelled sweet and sharp, like spring rolled up in winter. It was the sort of morning on which every young girl imagines, just for a moment, a prince on a white horse charging toward her through the snow, with marriage on his mind.
But the street was empty.
Head bent low against the falling snow, Regina pushed open the front door of her family’s town house and listened. She heard her sisters, brother, and mother laughing together in the blue sitting room to her right. She heard Anna, the housekeeper and cook, humming in the kitchen beyond. But the one voice she strained to hear was silent.
She knew where her father was without having to climb the wooden staircase. Although a Councilor in the Finance Ministry, he had not emerged from his room to go to work this morning. She imagined his body having made a double of itself, an imprint in the down mattress, a heavier, depressed self that held him captive to his bed. Regina longed to go to him, to raise him out of bed by his shoulders, to drag him downstairs and make him laugh until tears came into his eyes, but she knew that his door would be locked.
She slipped through the narrow hallway and out the back door into the tiny garden beyond. The snow swirled around her, seeming to change the color of the air. A layer of glassy ice trapped each branch and leaf. Regina sat on the bench in the middle of the frozen garden and looked out on the canal behind the house.
She prayed. She prayed for so long that she felt as if her prayers must be frozen in the air around her. Lord, let my father choose life. Lord, let me be an instrument of thy peace.
The door creaked open behind her.
“I feel as if I am looking at a painting,” the Councilor said, seating himself beside her. He wore only dark trousers and white shirtsleeves, the twilled cloth of the shirt stretched tight over his stout stomach.
“Frozen Girl on Bench,” Regina said, trying to hide her surprise at his appearance. That was fast, Lord. “Are you cold, Father? Shall I fetch you a coat?”
What she really meant was, “Are you well? Are you alive?
Can you think of anyone but yourself?” She glanced at his face. The edges of his eyes slanted down into two thin wrinkles, as if he were permanently amused. But she knew better than to trust the irony of the mirthful outer sweep of his eyes. It was the bewildered look within his brown eyes that moved her and challenged her to wield her most engaging brushstrokes.
“Suffering,” he said, “is an illusion.” His eyes glimmered, a light dusting of snow now coating his brown hair and sideburns.
“Of course,” Regina responded. “It only looks as if we are frozen. On the inside, we are burning up.”
The Councilor smiled. And as he smiled, Regina felt her shoulders relax.
Thank You, Lord, for allowing me to be the instrument of thy peace, she whispered silently in her heart.
“I’m glad you came to rescue me,” she said out loud. “I was beginning to feel a little sorry for myself out here all alone.” She usually didn’t voice such thoughts to her father, for she had learned by watching her mother that her mission was to cheer, charm, and entertain him.
“Loneliness, like suffering, is good for you,” he told her. “I rejoice when my children suffer.”
“Of course you do. Because loneliness, like suffering, is an illusion.”
“How is it,” he asked, “that you’re able to accept and challenge everything I say, all at the same time?”
Regina grinned. She observed her father’s eyes again to see if his melancholy lingered there, like a cat sleeping in an alleyway. He looked tired, but she could tell by the way he was taking her in, the way he was enjoying her gentle quips, that the depression had released him from its all-encompassing grip.
And with that realization, Regina felt freed. She felt freed to dream her own dreams, to desire her own desires, and she allowed herself to ask the question that was burning in her mind.
“What do you know of my new history teacher, Fritz Schlegel?”
The Councilor looked out at the softly falling snow. “A promising young man, by all accounts. His father was well liked before he died. What do you think?”
“He will do,” Regina said, speaking the language her father had taught her—the language of understatement, of using words to say only part of what she meant, while she let her heart-shaped face and the spring in her small, soft body suggest much more.
“Although … .” The Councilor shrugged. “I have always found the Schlegel family rather … ordinary.”
Regina pictured Fritz Schlegel’s tall eager frame, his earnest eyebrows, and his kind brown eyes. The image dulled, slightly, in the shadow of her father’s words.
They sat in silence, the snow falling all around them. The silence grew too much for her. Her shoulders tensed, notching tighter and tighter. She felt she must fill the open space between them, bond him to her. She heard herself say, her tone light, “I am glad you are with us again.”
The Councilor did not move his body, and yet Regina sensed his spirit withdraw from her, the way souls are depicted as departing from corpses at the moment of death in medieval paintings. Attuned like all children to the silent language of her parents, Regina felt her own body freeze. By speaking of her father’s depression, by mentioning the unmentionable, she had given it a power he abhorred.
He didn’t answer, and pain slipped back in behind his eyes. Desperate to change the subject, Regina began to chatter about Mrs. Rordam, Thrine, and the young man with the fork. She tried to undo with words the damage her words had done. She babbled. He did not respond.
The door banged behind them. Regina’s three older sisters approached, all buxom, all small. While the image of one almost glowed with warmth, and the second with sweetness, the third seemed as cold and stiff as the frozen branches of the garden. Regina tensed up further, waiting for the assault from Olga, the eldest.
“There you are.” Olga stamped the snow off her shoes and took her father’s arm with an officious air, as if she already knew that Regina had failed in her duty. The Councilor stood up.
Marie, the second oldest—a pretty, merry girl—laughed and took her father’s other arm. “Come,” she said. “What could you two possibly find to do out here in the cold?” Cornelia, the third, creased her kind eyes in concern.
Their father laughed an over-hearty, fake laugh, but it was still a laugh. Regina exhaled in relief. Only then did she realize she’d been holding her breath.
“All right, all right,” the Councilor said, “I’m coming.”
Before following her sisters, Regina looked back at the garden. The snow muffled all sound except the faint murmuring of the iced leaves of the holly bushes. In this magical world, a world in which her father’s revival had given her permission to hope, she’d begun to dream again about Fritz Schlegel. She thought about the way his lips parted slightly when he listened to her, as if—she could not help but think— he was waiting for her to kiss him.
Lord, she prayed, if only You will give me the desire of my heart, I know I will be happy. Let Fritz Schlegel fall in love with me. Let him want to marry me. Let us have beautiful, laughing children together. Grant me a miracle.
She imagined her words rising from her mouth and mixing with the swirling snow around her. And as she surrendered her prayers to her dreams, a small, precious part of her self broke off and departed with it, so lightly, so easily, that she barely even felt it go.