Master Butchers Singing Club

  Yet after she was gone, Roy indulged in a worship of those pictures. Some nights, he lighted a line of votive candles on the dresser and drank steadily, and spoke to her, until from deep in his cups she answered. Then, as candles played across the old photographs that Roy reverenced and he saw Minnie’s face clearly, he remembered her eyes transformed and softened by words he’d spoken. But what could Roy do with bliss remembered? Where could he put such a thing when he could no longer experience its power? During the first years after Minnie took her leave, a sorrow about which Roy would never speak and a time when Delphine was no more than a baby, Roy bounced in and out of drink with the resilience of a man with a healthy liver. He remained remarkably sloshed, even through Prohibition, by becoming ecumenical. Hair tonic, orange flower water, cough syrups of all types, even women’s monthly elixirs, fueled his grieving rituals. Gradually, he destroyed the organ he’d mistaken for his heart.

  As her father began to drink out of a need produced increasingly by alcohol and less by her mother’s memory, Delphine reached her tenth year. After that, she knew her father mainly as a pickled wreck while her mother remained youthful and mysterious in the pictures on the dresser. The blur of movement, the obscuring chicken, made her look so lively. Just what killed her, Roy would never say. Delphine thought it a wonder nobody in the town ever drew her aside and took the satisfaction of whispering that secret in her ear. But since no one did, she concluded that no one knew. In that void of knowledge, Delphine’s mind had darted forward constructing fantasies, shaping her mother’s story out of common objects, daydreaming her features in shadows of leaves and shapes of clouds.

  Delphine was sure, for instance, though Roy had never verified her theory, that the objects in her own tiny closet of a room once belonged to Minnie. The lacquer bureau, the picture of a wave crashing on a rock. Her prize was a wooden box. In it, she kept a small, white stone wrapped in the end of a ripped muslin scarf. Sometimes, when longing gripped her, she opened the cigar box, which still gave off a sweet and fleeting aroma of tobacco and cedar. Ceremoniously, often in the late afternoon when sun slanted through the western window of her tiny room, Delphine wound the scarf around her wrist and put the white stone in her mouth. She lay there sucking on the stone, memorizing its blunt edges with her tongue, wrapping and unwrapping the scarf from her wrist in a white haze of comfort.

  When she was twelve years old, she put the stone back in the box and simply quit the habit. She replaced it with a more grown-up awareness of what she’d missed. Watching other girls with their mothers sometimes made her head swim, her neck ache, but she’d borne it. She had always been too stubborn and shy to approach an older woman—a teacher, the mother of a friend—with her need. But it had been there all along, sometimes buried, sometimes urgent, especially in times of difficulty. Now, as Delphine drove the car into town, she was glad that in their desperate struggle with the smell she and Cyprian hadn’t burned down the house, because she missed the photographs of her mother that Roy kept stashed in the top drawer of the black lacquer bureau. She wanted to look at them, to sit with the familiar mystery. She was afflicted with a sudden and almost physical need to open the cigar box, too, and remove the white stone. She stared ahead at the road and wished an old, pure, useless wish: that just once, for a moment, she’d had the gift of a clear look at her mother’s face. It was in that fit of longing to see the face of her mother, then, that Delphine entered Waldvogel’s Meats, and met Eva Waldvogel.

  FIVE

  The Butcher’s Wife

  THE FIRST MEETING of their minds was over lard. Delphine was a faceless customer standing in the entryway of Waldvogel’s Meats, breathing the odor of fir sawdust, coriander, pepper, and apple-wood-smoked pork, a rich odor, clean and bloody and delicious. She walked forward eagerly and put her strong fingers on the counter.

  “One quarter pound of bacon. I’m going to fry some fish in the grease.”

  “What kind of fish?” asked Eva pleasantly. Her accent was heavy, but she didn’t stumble over words. She always started conversations with new customers, and this young woman, though familiar, was neither a regular customer nor an acquaintance. She stood behind the shining display cooler filled with every mood of red—twenty or thirty cuts of meat, summer sausage, liver sausage, beer sausage, veal, blood, Swedish, Italian and smoked pepper sausage, glistening hearts and liver and pale calf thymus, sweetbreads, as well as a great box of the delicately spiced, unsmoked, boiled wieners for which people stood in line on the days Fidelis made them fresh.

  “Don’t know yet,” said Delphine. “They’re still swimming in the river.” She immediately recognized the woman behind the counter as the same woman who’d won the race in the dirt lot two days before. She felt familiar with her, and spoke with more assurance than she might have otherwise. “One strip is for bait. Then I figure that if we don’t catch the fish, we at least eat the rest of the bacon.”

  “This plan is wise,” said Eva, weighing out the best pieces of lean bacon. With a new customer, she was always very careful with quality, and gave a small present as an enticement to return.

  “Try this lard,” she insisted. “For fish, it is good. Very cheap and to save it you let the cracklings settle and pour off the top. Get your bacon for tomorrow. Now, there is lard and there is lard.”

  Eva reached into the glass case cooled by an electric fan. “My husband was back in Germany a master butcher—not like Kozka, who no more than was a war cook—my Fidelis has learned a secret process to render fat. Taste,” she commanded. “Schmeckt gut!”

  Eva held out a small blue pan of the stuff, and Delphine swiped a bit on the end of her finger.

  “Pure as butter!”

  “Hardly no salt,” Eva whispered, as though this was not for just anyone to overhear. “But you must have an icebox to keep it good.”

  “I don’t have one,” Delphine admitted. “Well, I did, but while I was gone my dad sold it.”

  “I seen you here, I seen you there,” said Eva, “but still I cannot place. If you please, your father’s name?”

  Delphine liked Eva’s direct but polite manners and admired her thick bun of golden red hair stuck through with two yellow lead pencils. Eva’s eyes were a heated green striated with silver. There was, in one eye, an odd gleaming streak that would turn to a black line when the life left her body, like a light going out behind the crack in a door. At present, those eyes narrowed as the question of the lard, the icebox, the father who sold the icebox, were forming a picture in Eva’s mind. She waited for more information.

  “Roy Watzka,” Delphine said slowly.

  Eva nodded as she wrapped and secured the package all in one expert sweep, and took Delphine’s money. She counted the change into Delphine’s hand. The name told her all that she needed to know. “Come with me.” Eva swept her arm around back of the counter. “Here I will teach you to make a mincemeat pie better than you ever ate. It’s all in the goddamn suet.”

  “Where did you learn to speak English?” asked Delphine.

  “Close listening to the butchers,” said Eva.

  As Delphine came back around the counter and followed Eva down the hall, she peeked at the office cascading with papers and bills, at the little cupboards that held the men’s clothes and who knows what, at the knickknack shelf set into the wall and displaying figures made of German porcelain. These figures were of little children—one picked roses, another led a small white goat. They entered the kitchen, which was full of light from big windows set into thick walls, placed over the sink. Here, for Delphine, all time stopped. She took in the room.

  There was a shelf for big clay bread bowls and a pull-out bin containing flour. Wooden cupboards painted an astounding green matched the floor’s linoleum. Bolted to the counter was a heavy polished meat grinder. The table, round, was covered with a piece of oilcloth printed with squares. In each red-trimmed square there was printed a bunch of blue grapes, or a fat pink-gold peach, an apple or a delicate green pear. There w
ere no curtains on the window, but pots of geraniums bloomed, scarlet and ferociously cheerful. The whole place smelled generously of fresh rolls.

  Upon walking into Eva’s kitchen, something profound happened to Delphine. She experienced a fabulous expansion of being. Light-headed, she felt a swooping sensation and then a quiet, as though she’d settled like a bird. She sat in the sort of solid square-backed chair that Cyprian favored for balancing while Eva spooned coffee beans out of a Redwing crock, into a grinder, and then began to turn a little iron hand crank on a set of gears that gnashed the roasted beans. The grinding made a lot of noise, so Eva just raised her eyebrows at Delphine over the little mahogany box as she cranked. A wonderful fragrance emerged. Delphine took a huge breath. Eva, hands quick and certain, dumped the thin wooden drawer full of fresh grounds into a coffeepot made of gray enamel speckled with black and white. She opened a handle on her sink faucet and got the water out of that, not a pump, and then she put the coffeepot on the stove and lighted the burner of a stunning white gas range trimmed with chrome swirled into the title Magic Chef.

  “My God,” Delphine exhaled. She didn’t have a word to say. But that was fine, for Eva had already whipped a pencil out of her hair and grabbed a pad of paper to set down the mincemeat recipe. Eva’s writing was of the old, ornate German style, and she was an awful speller, at least in English. The last tiny shortcoming made Delphine grateful—in fact, it was a great help to her, for Eva appeared so fantastically skilled a being, so assured, the mother also (she soon learned) of four sturdy and intelligent sons, the wife of a master butcher, that she would have been an unapproachable paragon to Delphine otherwise. Delphine—who never had a mother, who cleaned up shameful things in her father’s house, who toughened on cold and hunger, and whose lover balanced six chairs and himself upon her stomach, Delphine who was regarded as beneath notice by Argus’s best society, and yet could spell—stole confidence from the misspelled recipe. At that moment, she made a strategic decision.

  Since sooner or later this Eva, whom she already dearly wished to have as a friend, would learn of what happened in the house of Roy Watzka, Delphine decided to tell. True, she would be immediately associated in Eva’s mind with a sordid mess, but the older woman would know anyway, soon enough. Delphine understood, moreover, that she was in possession of a valuable thing. A story, a source of gossip, perhaps even the making of town myth, was hers. Hers to give to Eva, who could always say, First thing the girl came to me half undone, the poor kid, and she told me. . . . And so, exhausted and dispirited though she was, and still disgusted by what she had been through during the past three days, Delphine related to Eva all she’d just experienced. With the understanding that it was a prime piece of town gossip, she said offhandedly, only, “you’re the first to know.”

  Eva heard the story with a prelate’s fearless gaze, and although she was not asked for absolution, provided it in the form of the fresh coffee and a cinnamon bun exquisitely dotted with raisins and sugar and butter. Because the horror was just beginning to seep into Delphine’s own mind, it filled her with gratitude to be treated in a very simple, human way. It was only when one of Eva’s youngest sons, a strong little boy of five or six years, round-faced with brown curls, ran into the kitchen, asked for and got a roll, and ran back out, that Delphine burst into tears. All along, she had been shielding her mind from the actuality of that child in the cellar. She hoped they’d kept him drunk, or that in some way he’d found comfort in being with his parents at the last. Face to face with his unthinkable end, Delphine felt again the old shocking powerlessness. The little house she’d grown up in seemed determined to teach her just how cruel life was, and always to spare her so that she could ponder.

  This is shameful, she thought, her face in her hands as she sobbed, to come to this woman’s house and cry my heart out! But Eva seemed used to people crying at her table. That or she was lost in knowledge of the events that Delphine had recounted. Eva murmured, “Shoosh.” From time to time she put a hand on Delphine’s shoulder and provided more coffee.

  “You weep seldom,” she said, which made Delphine feel somehow impossibly strong and heroic.

  “True,” said Delphine, though it was the second time she’d wept since her return to this town, where her father would always be known, now, as the man too drunk to hear three people dying in his cellar.

  LEAVING THE BUTCHER SHOP with a chunk of wrapped lard, the bacon, three oranges, six onions, bread, and a stick of summer sausage, Delphine thought it might be possible for her to face her father once again. She drove toward the house, bumping clumsily along, skirting the larger pits and holes. Meeting Eva had put her into a dreamy state—it was much like being in love but it was also very different. That Eva had taken notice of her, even taken her into the kitchen, that Eva had given every sign of wanting to know Delphine, it was all too sudden a pleasure. By the time Delphine turned down the long, sorry curve and caught first sight of the little house, she decided it was probably a one-time thing, a kindness on Eva’s part. Or that her weeping would have surely frightened her off. Even so, she was very grateful that Eva had invited her into her kitchen.

  “I’ll have a kitchen like that someday,” she said out loud.

  The sight of the sheriff’s car and the gangly boy-deputy, an undertaker’s hearse, and a couple of curious neighbors, as well as Cyprian disconsolately juggling in the corner of the far field, reminded her that day would not be coming soon.

  THE TOWN FUNERAL DIRECTOR and mortician, Aurelius Strub, was in charge of hauling out the bodies, along with his wife, Benta, and his young niece and apprentice mortuary assistant, Delphine’s friend, Clarisse. Clarisse stood to inherit the business, Strub’s Funerary, the most advanced and well-respected funeral practice in that part of the state. Her future had complicated her high school relationships, as one by one her classmates realized that if they lived their lives in Argus, they would eventually wind up in the resolute, rubber-gloved hands of Clarisse Strub. Pretty Clarisse, who got an A+ in the dissection of a flatworm. Flirtatious Clarisse, who already knew the art of using makeup in the next life, as well as this one. Clarisse, whose brilliant and mocking glance had dimmed for a time when she suffered a secret and shocking infection, the cause of which was never determined. To cure the disease, which may have originated with a body whose syphilitic condition was unknown, for even then she had assisted in the embalming room from time to time, under her aunt’s supervision, Clarisse underwent a complex long-term treatment. Her cure was overseen by Doctor Heech, who insisted that a dead body could not possibly have transmitted the disease and viewed her infection with a sober suspicion. His method of treatment consisted of intravenous salvarsan and deep-tissue mercury injections, both extremely unpleasant. Clarisse was toughened to them, but Delphine had quailed to see her poked. She’d held her friend’s hand all through, nonetheless. The only day they’d not minded was the day when the treatments had made Clarisse’s gums bleed and Heech had conditioned them with a cocaine rub. Delphine was the only one besides Doctor Heech who knew what had happened, and the only person, other than family members, who was ever admitted into the sanctum of the Strub Funerary basement.

  Clarisse wore a sacklike white gown, a green mask, gloves of india rubber, and smoked glasses, but her curly black hair gave her away, and even the hard realities of her vocation hadn’t dulled the singular light in her face. The sight of Delphine caused her to rip off her mask and gloves and then, torn between excitement at seeing her friend and the gravity of the situation, she threw out her hands and stepped closer. She looked around to see if anyone was watching, for the Strub family practiced resolute control and reverence in the presence of the dead, and she should not be seen joking about with a friend. Finding that they were alone, Clarisse screwed her face into a mask of hideous intensity. They had acted together in town theater as first and second witch in Macbeth.

  “When shall we three meet again,” she hissed. “In thunder, lightning, or in rain?”
r />   “When the hurly-burly’s done, When the battle’s lost and won,” Delphine went on.

  The two could have gone on and on like this, for they knew practically the entire play as they’d understudied Lady Macbeth, and everyone else in the cast, but Aurelius appeared with a grim-looking package, and Clarisse made signs for talking later. Delphine mimed sympathy. They could communicate perfectly with facial expressions. Clarisse twisted up her face and from one side of her mouth croaked, “Like a rat without a tail, I’ll do, I’ll do, and I’ll do.”

  Before she returned to her work, with a flash of intrigue, she pointed to Delphine’s tent, across the field, and at Cyprian, who with his shirt off was practicing his gymnastic exercises and his balances on a chair dragged from the kitchen. Clarisse winked over the hygienic green mask and then turned to continue with her difficult tasks. They were going to have to vat the bodies right in the yard, Delphine saw. A three-sided canvas screen had been set up just beyond the door and the smell of formalin and rubbing alcohol came from behind it. Jugs of distilled water were neatly lined up on the grass. There was a sense about the scene, now, of efficiency and seriousness. When the Strubs appeared to take charge of the dead, there always was a sense of relief. Clarisse was still regarded as a bit exuberant, but the Strubs generally developed the right temperament for the job, a matter-of-fact sympathy not at all unctuous, oily, or sweet. The town relied upon them. The dead were complicated in their helplessness, and made everyone around them helpless, too, except the Strubs.