Karl’s mother sprinted hastily between the dining room and the kitchen unwrapping casseroles, searching for serving spoons, and stopping from time to time wondering what she had been racing for next. Her sister Claudia was doing the same thing, with far less grace. Yet, none of the guests were in any great hurry to eat anything. It was nine in the evening and most had congregated at the bar in the basement. The older crowd sat in the dining room and lined the living room in borrowed folding chairs with their plates on their laps, nibbling cookies, and sipping decaf coffee.
Karl came into the kitchen silently from the back entrance as he had so many times in his youth for a midnight snack, and stood against the far wall watching his mother and aunt. He never understood their relationship. Aunt Claudia’s husband had been in the Marines and unfortunately died in a nameless skirmish that hadn’t qualified as a war. But he was dead nonetheless. She had moved back to Heiland from California after his death, bought the house two blocks away, and had never put any great effort into remarrying. She had somehow considered the idea unfaithful. She spent most days now with his mother in a brand of conversation that to outsiders would appear as rude and overly critical—a conflictive equilibrium that balanced on verbal affronts and terminating glances. But they had been that way as long as Karl could remember, and it was apparent that without that sharp edge of borderline anger they would both shrivel up and die of boredom.
He tried to smile when his mother realized he was there. She quickly reattached a piece of hair that had fallen from the top of her head. She glared at him, and he knew she was rehearsing in her mind some grand line of questioning. She had always done that, as if by hesitating the impact of her words would compound in value.
“Everything looks nice, mom.”
“Nobody’s eating a thing,” she whispered loudly.
“They’ll eat tomorrow after the funeral.”
“I suppose.”
Claudia came back in the kitchen, noticed the two of them together, and hastily retreated to the dining room.
“Where’s Dee?” his mother asked.
“She’s downstairs talking with Laura.”
“Dee’s a wonderful girl, ya know.” She said the words as if she were lecturing him on the attributes of drinking milk. Drink from Dee. She’s good for you.
“I know she is, mom. She’s my best friend in Heiland.”
His mother went to the cutting board, picked up a huge knife, and started chopping broccoli. “You could do worse than marry your best friend,” she said.
“And if my best friend was a man?”
“You know what I mean,” she yelled softly. “Besides, people have thought a that, ya know.”
Maybe that would have been easier. Simply say he was gay and she could pray for him and make everything better.
“Mom, I’m not ready to marry. I have nothing to offer anyone at this point.”
She stopped chopping to stare at him. “You could teach like Uncle Jack.”
“Teach where?” he said. “Jack had a PhD and regretted having gone so far in education.”
She pushed a cauliflower onto the block and whacked right through it like a guillotine severing a head. “He did not.”
“The hell he didn’t. We discussed it many times. He said he should have stopped with the bachelor’s or master’s. Anything beyond that was overkill.”
“How can ya say that. He was a wonderful teacher.”
“He was the best professor I ever had. But that’s not the point, mother. He learned to accept it. He wanted to write, but by the time he finished his PhD there was nothing original left in his mind.”
She thought for a moment carefully. “You could write here.”
“Maybe after a frontal lobotomy.”
Her knife chopped furiously, sending cauliflower flying everywhere. “What’s wrong with here?”
“It’s not just location. It’s a state of mind. I could be here, but my mind wouldn’t be. I need to experience Europe now while I’m young.”
He turned away from her, wanting to escape back to his room. Wanting to flee even farther back to Munich. He stopped and thought for a moment. He had to do this now, or he would never make her understand anything. He turned slowly to confront her, and calmed himself inside.
“There’s this little church in a small dorf on the border of Austria that I go to once in a while. It’s over four hundred years old. Mozart performed there when he was sixteen. My God, there’s not a structure in this country that old. Indians were still living in teepees and picking meat out of their teeth with tiny bones back then.”
She pointed the knife at him. “But—”
He forged ahead. “I sit in those smooth wooden pews and I can almost feel the power of his presence. It’s said that Goethe went there in his early twenties, saw Mozart play, and dreamed of bringing the Faust legend to life on the stage. It’s just overwhelming to think that I might have sat in the same spot as Goethe.”
His mother stared at him blankly, as if he had just recited a German poem. Then she turned back to her vegetables. “There’s nothing wrong with new,” she said defiantly.
“That’s the whole point. There’s nothing wrong with new. Do I have to do something just because everyone else is doing it? Let those who can’t write, teach. We need good teachers. But let those who can write, write. Jack knew that he could write once, but that gift was gone and it killed him day after day. He didn’t want that to happen to me. He wanted me to give it my best shot. I’m doing that.”
“Wouldn’t it be better to write full-time?”
“Of course. But I have to pay my bills.”
Neither of them were aware that their voices had risen. Claudia came back into the kitchen and tried to hush them, but Karl’s mother fended her off with a dramatic wave of the knife, so her sister escaped once again through the swinging door.
“You’ve been in Germany for over three years. Haven’t ya seen enough? You could always go back on vacation.”
He felt like beating his head against the wall. He knew this conversation had been brewing for three years and he dreaded the thought of it actually occurring. He could never win without completely alienating himself from her.
“It’s not the same,” he finally said.
“I don’t understand ya, Karl. Your brother and sister both have fine, respectable jobs. There’s nothing wrong with conventional.”
Karl tried to stop himself, but it was no use. He was steaming now. “Danny is a Goddamn bookkeeper and Laura is a clerk at the county courthouse. Laura hates her job. Nothing changes from day to day. The same old paperwork. She’s a bureaucrat. Danny looks after other people’s money and wishes he had some of it. He probably likes his work because it makes him feel good to screw the government out of tax dollars by shifting the paper mill’s money into different accounts. And let’s face it, they haven’t actually done all that well in the love and marriage department.”
She turned the knife on him again, her arms flailing in the air. “That’s not fair,” she yelled. “Wanda was always a . . . . Danny shoulda never married her. Laura and Will are another story. I still haven’t found out what happened with them. And Danny is an accountant.”
“He’s not even a CPA. Besides, accountant, bookkeeper, electrician. What’s the difference? The point is they are not all that happy with their lives. I’m happy.”
It had actually come down to that. Comparing lives as though they were discussing elementary school grades. He never wanted it to reach that point.
She looked at him now as a mother would to a murderer son behind bars. Tears had formed at the insides of her eyes and she wiped them away briskly with a towel as if leaving them would destine her to failure. She tried to chop the vegetables, but the knife would barely slice through.
“I don’t want to fight. I just got here.”
He knew they would never discuss this again. That’s how they were in his family. Things would churn and boil inside until finally the pressure cooker would blow its top. Then there would be uncomfortable glances for weeks, barely a word spoken, until another issue would supplant the prior one.
She took in a deep breath and recovered herself. “Have ya talked with your father?”
“No. I didn’t see him at the wake.”
“He was talking with the lawyer.”
“Did dad make all the funeral arrangements?”
“Most of them. Uncle Jack had a will with almost everything spelled out.”
“A will? He used to say . . . .” He trailed off without finishing. “Where’s dad?”
“Where do ya think?”
“The shop? With all these guests?”
“Afraid so.”
Karl slowly walked out into the dining room. Aunt Claudia, sitting in a chair in the corner of the room, gave him a painful smile as he passed. Finally a few people had built an appetite and were picking over the food.
Heading straight for the basement, Karl found Dee and Laura sitting on stools behind the bar mixing drinks as best they could. Karl grabbed a bottle of beer from the old refrigerator behind the bar and took a long swig. Then he reached his head over and kissed Dee on the lips quickly. He whispered in her ear, “I’ve gotta go talk with my dad. I’m going in.”
She raised her brows and tried to smile. “Good luck.”
It was common knowledge in the Schwarz household that when Frederick Schwarz, Karl’s father, was in his shop he wasn’t to be disturbed. The shop had become a haven from any problem for as long as Karl could remember. The shop was in the far back corner of the basement, without windows, and nearly soundproof from the entire house. Frederick Schwarz had built it himself with the sound specifications one of his major features.
Karl entered quietly and closed the door behind him. It seemed as though nothing had changed, but he was sure that it had. The two corner walls, that were front structural cement blocks covered with Styrofoam insulation and paneling, were still lined from corner to corner with three-level bookshelves. But there were only a few reference books in the room. The shelves displayed dozens of carved wooden ducks, decoy size, lifelike images in full color. Every detail down to tiny pinfeathers were meticulously and accurately depicted.
He watched his father sitting at a sturdy wooden table, a bright lamp focused on the chunk of wood in his large hands, the sharp bevel cutting tiny slivers that would be the bird’s wing feathers, and Karl realized anew where much of his youth had escaped him. It wasn’t as though Karl had cared to change what had been preordained, with his own preoccupation with sports and girls, but he had often wondered how things might have been different had his father been less obsessed with his wooden ducks.
Karl noticed his father’s body seemed to have shrunk, with his shoulders hunched over. His head, receding with streaks of gray, was far too large for his body, as if God had made a mistake. His father would never make the same mistake with his ducks. They were perfect.
After finishing a delicate cut, his father pushed his wire-rimmed glasses farther up his nose and lifted his head up toward Karl. Although older than Uncle Jack by almost six years, his face appeared much younger. There were few wrinkles in a face that rarely smiled or depicted even curiosity or wonder through expression. It was a face that had lived an agoraphobic existence, the pale smooth skin preserved for an existential re-emergence. And it had always been a face difficult for Karl to read. Now was no exception.
“I didn’t see you at the wake,” Karl said, moving closer to the work bench.
His father stared blankly at him. “I was in the back taking care of some business.” He paused for a moment. “Have you lost weight?”
Karl hadn’t thought about it since he didn’t have a scale in Germany, but when he assessed himself now the possibility did exist. “I don’t know. Maybe.”
“Don’t they feed you over there?”
“They would be me, dad. I eat.” He wasn’t sure where this was leading, or why.
“Your mother worries about you,” he said, changing subjects as always, almost as quickly as he changed blades while carving.
“Some things never change, I suppose,” Karl said. “She’ll probably be worrying about her children when she’s ninety-five and Danny’s seventy-five.”
“How are things in Germany?”
“Fine.” He knew his father was asking more because he was expected to ask than for any real concern. When his father just stared at him, Karl added, “My job keeps me busy. I seem to be on the road more than not. But that’s what the job is.” He looked at his father and wondered, as he had many times in the past, how he and Jack could have been brothers. Then he thought about himself and his brother Danny and it became clearer. Genes are strange things indeed.
“Are you still skiing?” he asked, with a sardonic tone.
“Till human voices wake me, and I drown,” Karl said.
His father glared at him quizzically.
“Yes, until the day I die,” Karl said.
Frederick Schwarz leaned back in his chair, crossed his arms, and studied his son.
Karl went over to a lower shelf and admired one of the ducks he hadn’t seen before. It was a beautiful Red-breasted Merganser with a green head and red eyes and fully extended head plumage. The tiny pin feathers on its chest, brown with black specks, were so detailed the duck appeared to be stuffed or at least frozen in time. His father had gotten better over the years, he thought.
“This is a nice Merganser,” Karl said.
His father swiveled in the chair. “I just finished it last week.”
His father displayed only two ducks at a time upstairs on the fireplace mantle. He would change them out monthly, and only Karl would notice. To others a duck was a duck.
Karl made a move toward the door, but his father stopped him by asking, “How long will you stay?”
“I have to be back in less than six days. I have to give a city tour in Austria and Switzerland.”
His father nodded. “That should be nice.”
“I think so.”
“See you in the morning, son.”
Karl nodded and left. Outside the door he could hear the muffled laughs of people in the bar area down the hall. He felt strange about the conversation he had just had. It had seemed much more civil than any he could remember. As if his father had died too and was trying to atone for things he had done in the past. He slowly walked toward the bar, confused.