The Edge of the Earth

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 glass 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 carcass off the sideboard, I collected four wineglasses 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 glasses 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 class 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 classrooms 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 doorknob 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 doorknob, 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 massive, 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 mass 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 prickly 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.

  In summer, we’d often gone to the beach under the low bluffs of Juneau Park to enjoy the sun and the water. Once, when I was a very little girl, I’d filled my pinafore pockets with stones, in the way of children, then climbed up on a pier and run to the end of it for no reason that I could remember. I’d been following a bird or the light on the waves or maybe only listening to the sound of my own feet thumping hollowly on the wood.

  Suddenly, my father had stood huge over me, his face contorted, his fingers pinching my wrist. “Never!” he’d spat. “You must never run out on the pier alone!” He’d bent close and pointed at the waves shimmering—I did remember that, the sun bouncing off the facets of the water. “The mermaids live under there,” he’d said darkly in German, the language of anger as well as affection in our house. “They take little girls like you, especially little girls with heavy stones in their pockets. They will snatch you with their long, wet fingers and drag you to the bottom of the sea.”

  “But you would save me,” I’d protested.

  “Sometimes, liebchen,” he’d said, softening, “you must also do your best to save yourself.”

  I’d been duly afraid, but as he walked me back toward safety, my hand in his, I’d peeked down at the spaces of shadowed water visible between the boards of the pier, trying to glimpse the world his warning promised.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  While we’d been inside the building, the snow-swollen clouds had begun to leak. The flakes were heavy, clumping even in the air, and when they settled on the men’s dark coats, their intricate fretwork glowed in sharp relief. Swaddled like a doll in so many layers that I could barely move my limbs, I followed my father and Oskar over the railroad tracks and across the road. A layer of white had already covered the boards of the dock. Our footprints, the two men’s definite and mine slightly blurred from the shuffle of my too-large boots, were the first to mar it.

  In the boiler room—which my father called the guts of the boat and which, with its shiny metal valves and pipes and cylinders, did indeed look like a mechanical version of what Miss Dodson had exposed when she lifted the flap of skin that covered a frog’s belly—the men examined joints and pressures and had some words with the boilerman while I stood waiting, absurd in my oversized trousers and sweater and coat. Then we climbed the ladder to the pilothouse, a crystal perch, the upper half of all four walls being windows that admitted a clear view of the endless green-gray water. The lower half of the walls was paneled in a glowing birch, and in the center, like a varnished wooden sun, stood the wheel. As we came in, Gerhart Keffer turned from the chart he’d been examining at a small table in the corner.

  He acknowledged my father’s introductions with a curt nod. “Cold day for a boat ride.”

  “They’re here to learn the trade,” my father joked.

  Keffer removed a tin from his pocket and put a dip of tobacco under his lip as he looked at me. He said nothing. I blushed.

  “Trudy could be on watch,” Oskar suggested. “Wouldn’t hurt to have an extra pair of eyes on a day like this.”

  He and my father left me, their feet clanging down the metal rails of the ladder. In a minute or two, the engine began to thrum and the floor to vibrate.

  “She’s free!” I heard my father shout.

  Keffer, a small man whose head barely cleared the top of the wheel, seemed to be listening for a certain pitch in the sound of the engine. Apparently hearing it, he eased a long lever forward. The tug slid away from the dock.

  For a long while I did nothing but stare at the sky, gauzy and gray as a dirty bandage and filled with frenzied flakes, which seemed to dive straight at me, bits of the sky made solid. The effect, together with the roll of the floor as the tug alternately crested the waves and sank between them, was mesmerizing and dizzying. When I was young, I’d wished that my father captained a schooner rather than a tug. Tugs were prosaic, workmanlike ducks; schooners, with their sharp sails aligned and their sleek prows, were gulls. At every moment, I half imagined I could see the wings of a birdlike schooner emerging from the snow.

  A glob of Keffer’s spit clanged into the brass cuspidor at his feet, making me jump.

  “It’s snug in here,” I said, partly to steady myself, partly to be polite.

  “Huh,” Keffer grunted. He worked the tin of Red Indian from his pocket and dipped again.

  “In all of this water,” I went on—my mother had trained me to be friendly, to draw people out—“how do you know which way to go to find the schooner?”

  He shrugged.

  “And in weather like this, it must be nearly impossible. Won’t you tell me how it’s done?”

  “What for?”

  “Well,” I said, taken aback, “because I want to know.” My parents and my teachers had always applauded my curiosity. Even my friends professed to admire it.

  “Waste of time,” he said, his eyes fixed on the water
through which we were plowing. “Begging your pardon,” he added superciliously.

  Chastened, I trained my eyes on the receding shoreline, which now slipped and slid beyond a film of tears. I was cold, bored, and miserable, as Oskar had predicted.

  My father clanked up the ladder again. Fresh, freezing air surrounded his body like a halo. “So, Tru,” he said jovially, taking the wheel from Keffer and dismissing him with a nod, “maybe you’d like to drive?”

  I saw Keffer frown, and I waited until he’d left the room before I moved to stand behind the wheel. It was a lovely thing, varnished so thickly it seemed to be encased in amber. Though I was nervous, it was easy enough steering in open water; all it required was resting my palms on the smooth pegs. Keffer needn’t think he’d been doing anything so remarkable.

  We went on a long while, until I could no longer make out the shore. For all I knew, we might be about to run aground in Michigan. We were sheltered from the wind in the pilothouse, but it was cold enough that our breath rose in clouds around us. My father frowned and trained his telescope through each of the windows in turn.

  “May I go out on the deck to watch? I think I could see more clearly,” I said.

  “You’ll get too cold.”

  “Papa. I’ll be all right.”

  He sighed and opened a trunk that was built against one of the walls. “If you put this on first.” He held out a life jacket. Grudgingly, I let him settle yet another layer around me, but I didn’t stop to tie the vest closed before I hurried down the ladder to the deck.

  I was too cold almost instantly. The bullying, frigid wind bored through all my layers of fabric, and a steady wash of biting spray stung my face. I tried to look into the storm, northeast, the direction from which the Maria Theresa should be running toward us, but the snow seemed to be driving with fixed purpose directly into my eyes. The flakes stuck to my lashes, blurring my view. I felt dizzy again, staring on and on so hard at nothing. I was beginning to feel sick, too, with the incessant rise and fall of the deck, the numbness in my fingers and toes, and the flakes rushing at me so relentlessly. Although I wouldn’t have admitted it, I wished the job were done and I safely home, drinking chocolate, even writing about Napoleon. Finally, I lost my breath, as if the wind had stolen the very air from my mouth, and I had to turn away and cover my face with my mitten.