Stowe, Vermont
August 1957
Georg's eyes widened, and his half-awake, groggy brain suddenly burst to life.
"Maria…?"
"I mean it, Georg. Bed me, bed me good. I'll beg, if I must."
Georg rubbed his eyes, trying to process this. He hadn't thought ahead to the morning after the marathon that was the night before, but he had certainly not expected this, of all things.
"I don't mean to sound ungrateful," he rumbled at last, "but Maria, I admit I am a bit flummoxed. We need to take this slowly, make sure you don't have injuries, take care that you don't get sick."
"I cannot have any more children, that has been seen to," she said, brow furrowing. "I am stronger every day. I don't understand."
"Maria, so many of your infections started in the urinary tract, and that was without any of this." He gestured to them, to their naked bodies in the tangle of sheets.
"You can't possibly mean you regret this…?" Maria trailed.
"God, no," Georg said quickly. "No, never! I only mean that we must still take care."
Maria studied her husband, then said sharply, "I won't be without our intimacy anymore. I won't force you into being convinced, but we've gone too long letting fear come between us. I won't do it anymore."
"There is living without fear, and then there is being reckless."
Maria stared at her husband, and her face hardened, and she shook her head in disappointment. Pulling the sheets away from herself, she got out of bed and went into their bathroom. "Forget I said anything," she said, her voice cracking as she left him.
Immediately thereafter came the sound of the shower sputtering to life, and the sounds of Maria getting inside of it.
Georg looked around him, feeling helpless, observing the evidence of their passion strewn about the bed and the floor, and bowed his head. What he was accustomed to was to let her have this silence, to have this space alone, and in these moments, he intended to let her have them.
But then he heard a sob.
Feeling the rising panic in his chest, he threw the blankets off of him and immediately hurried into their bathroom. What he found was his wife inside the shower, sitting in the corner that water did not reach, her knees drawn up to her chest, arms wrapped around her legs, hair plastered to her forehead, bawling as though her heart had been ripped from her chest.
Georg thought he might have stepped into some sort of vortex. Abruptly, time stretched around him and he wasn't standing just outside their shower anymore, watching Maria's wet body wrack itself with sobs. He was back in her hospital room, hearing that selfsame sob and finding her collapsed inside the tiny bathroom, half-sitting and half-kneeling in a puddle of blood that came from inside her, indicative of the loss of their child. She was clinging to a pole, vomiting, and unable to stop shaking. Utterly beyond herself. Too close, too similar to another time, another place, where the love of his life was too ill for him to stop it, too ill for him to help, and there was nothing he could do to save her.
Voices echoed in his mind, traveling across time and space, playing events over and over for him in the here and now.
The thing that stopped it was searing pain in his knees.
He had fallen to the floor of their shower, drenched now, water growing cold, and there was water all over the bathroom floor from where it had flowed out around him, travelling down his body, off his legs and feet, or over the very platform, because his presence diverted the flow of the waterway.
"Oh, God!" Maria gasped, and her voice was high-pitched as she said it.
The next thing that Georg was aware of was stabbing pain in his knees, and Maria's arms wrenching him toward her, surrounding him, holding him close. He thought he saw blood mingle with the water and disappear down the drain in a spiral, lacing through like ribbon.
"You hurt yourself," she choked, sobbing still as she spoke. "Please don't keep doing that! I need you, Georg. I need you."
He supposed he must have caught the skin of his knees on the shower track when he fell. There was an awful lot of blood.
"Please," Maria begged, rocking him now, even as it sounded like her nose was full of snot from the crying. Her voice thick, she pleaded, "Please, Georg, stay here. My name is Maria. It is 1957. We live in Stowe, Vermont. That is in America. We have twelve children. Their names are Liesl, Friedrich, Louisa, Brigitta, Kurt, Marta, Gretl, Rosemary, Johannes, Eleanore, Matthias, and Nathaniel. You were married to Agathe—"
"Nathaniel?" he croaked.
"Yes," she nodded, without thinking, desperately grateful that he was responding. "Nathaniel. A gift, heaven-sent, so brief, but very much here, to help us heal."
"Heaven-sent," he repeated.
"If you hate it, we can choose something else," she said, her voice high and uneven. "Rosemary suggested it, that we name the baby, so we can talk about it. Make it more real. But it's silly, really, we don't have—"
"No!" Georg said sharply. "He was real, Maria. So small. So tiny. I… when you collapsed… it was dreadful… Nathaniel."
He remembered now, pulling a hand away from her, dripping in her blood, pulling the fabric away from her body so better to grab onto her and get her out of the small room. But her legs wouldn't work, and she was in between pain and awareness, and her unwell body insisted on following the edicts of nature, expelling the evidence that she had ever conceived life that treasured Christmas day.
He had been there, beside her, holding her, holding back tears as he realized what was happening. When the nurses came to help, and made certain that the placenta was delivered whole, he had looked over at his pale wife now back in her bed, blanket covering her as she slept, dressed in a fresh hospital gown, thick gauze between her legs, and asked the nurse who was disposing of the contents of Maria's womb if there was anything to see.
The nurse had looked over at him with such kind pity, it made him angry. So he'd growled at her again, mustering all the authority of his military rank, demanding to know if the baby that was now lost had discernible form. Sufficiently intimidated, the nurse had nodded, and then vacated the room.
Against his better judgment, he had gotten up to look. Slowly pulled away the towel that covered the bowl, and closed his eyes. For a brief moment before this, he had wished Maria was awake to share it, but now he was glad that she wasn't. It was better this way. It would be bad enough, for her, without having to see the small, fully-formed thing that would have been their fifth child.
He had stared at it, wondering what to call it. Was it a baby? It didn't look like a baby. It didn't look like a fetus, either, which is what the doctors and nurses had called it. But it was more than ball of cells. Before he could think any further, the head nurse had appeared, brusquely chastising him and whisking away with the bowl, pulling the towel back over as she went. He hadn't thought of that moment since, too overwhelmed with the pain of not knowing how to call it, that little red thing that was in the shape of a human yet was still too small to live.
Now, he knew. Maria had figured it out. He would call it Nathaniel.
He liked the idea of a son. Five sons. Seven daughters. Still not even, but just right.
The dam inside him broke, then, and it all unleashed. There was no now, there was no then, there was only before and after a great beyond, and suddenly it was all too real that he had been moving in the reality of both parts, thinking so naively that he knew what one should know, but truly he knew nothing.
Maria told him later that he howled. She told him how he seemed to disintegrate, how when she turned off the water, got to her feet, and helped him heave himself to his feet to lead him back to their bed, he shook violently. She laid him down in their bed and bound his wounded knees, promising to disinfect them later, then crawled into bed beside him, wet and cold herself, and laid there with a hand over his racing heart, murmuring all the things that were true, bringing him slowly back to her, bit by bit.
They had fallen back to sleep, and were next woken by the rapping of a concerned child on their locked bedroom door, saying that it was nearly noon and were they quite alright?
"Yes," Maria had called out, rubbing her eyes and yawning as she did so, but when she turned to look back at her husband, it was with an expression on her face that so clearly asked, "Are we?"
He swallowed, whispering in a hoarse voice, "I don't know, Maria. I don't know."
Her solution was to saddle up the draft horse and ride together to her favorite mountaintop plateau at the end of a hiking trail above their own property. It bespoke his total exhaustion that he did not protest firstly the riding of the large animal, nor secondly the sharing of the horse, when it was Maria whose life was so endangered by the potential of a fall, especially on rough terrain. She knew he had no fight left and was thus taking advantage.
"We need to talk," she said, her knees drawn up to her chest as she looked out across the expanse of the mountain range once they were sitting on the ledge together, a blanket spread over the rock. The horse was tethered a short way away, happily grazing on grass. She was seated across from him, and it did not escape his notice just how far they were from each other after the events of last night. Would this forever be their curse? So wonderful together that they could not be close? That the closeness would shatter them indefinitely and repeatedly?
Were they actually quite terrible for one another?
"You're having episodes," Maria said plainly. "You've been having them since I was in Boston. Tell me why they started. Tell me truly."
Georg looked over at his wife. Could he say it, this horrible truth? That he hated, having seen what he had, just how callous she had been? How quick she had been to blame him, and he to blame her—and for what? The gift that would have been their child?
"It started with Nathaniel," he said. "And how you were angry with me for letting it happen between us."
"And now?" she asked.
"Now… all I could think this morning was of how ill you have been. And how you said that you depended on me to protect you from your worst instinct to do things that would bring you to harm. Even no longer able to have a baby, you can get so awfully sick, and we don't know why, or how to stop it."
"And," Maria said quietly, "all that I could think this morning was what a joy it was to be close to you again. You were there with me, Georg, instead of outside of it all."
"That's what I thought, on Christmas, when you invited it," he said. "I let myself go, I believed it would be alright, I thought you thought that, too. But I was wrong."
"We were wrong," Maria said. "But I don't know if it could have gone any differently. We are so far gone from who we were—who we were, that is a lifetime and many bizarre thoughts ago."
Georg blinked, then looked at his wife, hard. Slowly, he said, "You wouldn't change it, then?"
She shrugged. "How can I?"
He shook his head, wordless.
Taking a deep breath, Maria forged ahead, sensing that he might hear her. "I am glad we were together, even though there were consequences. I am glad, because sometimes I need reminded that there is more in this world than the constant come-and-go of the pain that I carry."
Here, she paused, studying her husband, studying his face, his bent posture, his stillness. When she thought the moment for her next words to land had come, she opened her mouth and said forthrightly, "I love you madly, and I believe we are both disposed best toward showing that love through intercourse. It was precious to me on Christmas, just as last night is so dear to me now. I cried this morning because your refusal smarted of bitter rejection, and I did what I did last night with the pain and the fear shouting at me not to. The rejection smarts even now."
"Oh, God!" Georg burst out. "God, Maria, don't you think I wanted to say yes, with every fiber of my being? I love what we have, and you are right, especially about me. Sex is the center of that expression, and means more than I can ever say that we have what we have, even if it's now so fragmented."
Maria was staring at him with that calculated, hard gaze of hers, the gaze that made Georg feel like she was analyzing and judging him, and it stoked fury in him. He wanted to fight, and yell, and shout, and scream—at last. God damn it, if she wanted a fight, a fight he would give her!
But then, she opened her mouth: "I don't think that's what's really bothering you."
The fight, built up like a tidal wave inside him, crashed down at once, only to be taken over by rage at the presumptuousness of her statement.
She seemed to notice this—was there something in his eyes that gave it away?—and jumped ahead of him, stopping him from saying anything he might later regret. She said frankly, "Georg, I don't mean to pervert our intimacy by letting pain and fear rule it any longer. This time, I am asking you to help me build it again. I should have made my meaning plainer, but that is what I wanted from you this morning. It wasn't just an act of physicality that could hurt me, it is something so much greater and so much more important."
Here it was. That thing she was trying to have both ways. The truth erupted from his mouth and he was powerless to stop it: "But Maria, what if you get sick again? If we do this, what if it means you are never well again?"
He was surprised to hear how angry he sounded. How rough. How sharp. It seemed to him that he might be trying to scare her, to push her away, just with the depth and breadth of this anger. Something flickered in her face, and he thought she might flinch, pull away, turn around, get up and walk away, leave him alone—and, well, any and all of it, he thought was well-deserved. He knew better.
But instead of any of this, Maria slowly reached out and grasped his hands, and held them fast when he tried to pull them away from her in the burning shame that was the knowledge that what was started could not be undone, that infection could be spreading inside her body already, and that in a week or in a month's time, she would burn with fever and spend another month in hospital, again and again, until finally her kidneys could do no more and it was the end of her. He could not bear that shame and guilt a second time. He had sworn not to make the same mistake twice, God damn it all!
"Georg," Maria said firmly, in a voice that would book no argument, a voice that commanded his attention and respect, "I will get sick again. It does not matter what we do or do not do. This is why we cannot make everything about my illness, anymore. It will happen. We know this. So, please, tell me why you are so distressed."
The way she said "please"—he heard the plea, he heard the shake and waver of her voice in that single, simple moment, and he realized that he owed her what was her due, and so, shoulders dropping in defeat, anxiety took the place of rage in his mind and shoulders, and he told her the rest.
Drawing a shaky breath, he murmured, "There was so much blood, Maria, and from such a tiny thing. I saw him, while you slept, before they took away the bowl. I don't know why I looked. Maybe I thought it would help. Maybe I thought that I was above conventional wisdom that these are women's things, and wanted to see if it was half as bad as suggested."
Brow furrowing, Maria asked, "Was it?"
"It was worse," he answered. "Twice as bad, perhaps. Not because of what it looked like, but because I didn't know—don't know—what it should be called. What place is there in this world for something that is between life and death, but has nevertheless had a beginning and an end? One no one knew about, or planned for, yet it was there? Was it real, or unreal?"
Maria shook her head and said softly, "I don't know, Georg. I'm sorry, but I just don't know."
Sliding closer to her husband, Maria leaned in to kiss him, doing so in that way she had that he loved, where it was tender and gentle, but so full of longing and promise, the kind of kiss that when she was young, had meant that in the night, he would meet its partner. She called it her wildness, but he called it lust.
"Rose seems to know better than we do," Georg said when his wife pulled away. "Suggesting that we choose a name. It sounds so odd on its face, but it helps me, Maria. It does."
"I think she has the benefit of the outsider's perspective," Maria said quietly. "She can see the situation clearly, through a lens similar to our own because she is our daughter, but not the same because she is her own person. And she can also see it without all the emotion and feeling attached to muddle it. She feels sympathy for me, but she is not the one suffering. She has clarity."
Georg swallowed, wondering how to say the next thing that sat in his mind, hard and heavy, and sure to hurt his wife, again. It would bring her up close to the pain that was tearing them apart, just as she reaffirmed that need for space. Perhaps if he could say it only in reference to himself… well, there was only one way to know.
"I am a failure," he said into the silence that had fallen between them. "I failed to protect you, which led to a pregnancy, which led to illness, and then I failed you and Nathaniel when I didn't notice you had gone. What if I had noticed just a minute sooner that you were awake? What if I had known what to do when I saw the pool of blood? Could it have been any different? I hold myself responsible for all of it, because one decision could have produced such a different outcome."
Maria was quiet for a while, staring out over the skyline. This admission was what she had been looking for months ago, just after returning home from her hospital stay. It was the very thing she had thrown in his face, and now she wondered if, in her anger, she had put something there which was not there at all. She knew the odds of a successful pregnancy with her condition were slim to none. Her age was a compounding factor, also, and there was no way to know if the pregnancy had caused the infection, if the events leading to the pregnancy had caused it, or if she had, in fact, been perfectly well when Nathanial was conceived and the illness had come on its own, as it had so often before, and took the baby from her in its blithe indifference for anything other than its persistent, destructive presence in her life.
She thought, too, of how what her husband said now was in direct contrast to what he had said to her when she awoke in the hospital and asked pointedly if she had miscarried. He had said that it was not her fault, not anything she had done, something that had just ended. He had sounded so sure of it, and though she struggled to believe it herself in those moments, knowing too much of the illness that wracked her again at that moment, his surety had been calming and comforting.
Maria wondered if that surety had been real, or if he had said it to convince himself. Perhaps it had been real, until she accused him otherwise. She felt such sorrow that she had taken that truth from him, then, for she could see now that the details did not matter, and on its face, in the heart of the matter, he had always been correct.
"We failed each other," she said at last. "Not our baby. Nathaniel was never ours to have, but I believe he was ours to know so that we could find each other again. I have to believe that." Maria turned to her husband, grasping his hands tightly in her own, and said urgently, desperate that he understand her, "Georg, losing him just weeks earlier, I would have simply thought I had a heavy cycle brought on by how late it came. I would never have known."
There was a gravelly strain to Maria's voice as she said these things, and it leant a weight to her words which otherwise might have sounded primarily perfunctory. Things she was supposed to say, not things that were necessary to say. But, he knew, for somewhere in the annals of his mind he remembered her telling him that she had trained in midwifery for a while, that she knew the scientific, momentary fact of things better than most, even if she did not ever put it to use. She was not saying this to placate. She was not parroting the response of a pitying doctor. She understood this. It was what it was, and what would be, would be.
Slowly, he said, "Sometimes I wish we didn't know."
Maria sighed. "I feel every other minute that I wish I didn't. And then I am glad I do. And then I wish again that I did not. Over and over."
Georg peered at his wife, looking at her carefully. Her voice cracked as she said this, and her lip trembled, and tears leaked out of the corners of her eyes.
"What happened with Nathaniel makes this illness you have too big, too real, too much, in a way that I am not used to or prepared for," he said to her. "What the past fourteen years have been, that came slowly, over time. This happened so fast, it feels like a torpedo launched into our midst."
The left side of Maria's upper lip twitched as he mentioned the torpedo. Too late, Georg realized that his comparison gave away the depth of his struggles since she had left to convalesce in Boston. She wasted no time addressing it.
"You're having flashbacks from the Great War, aren't you?"
She had always known, he knew. She had known when she came home to him, booking no arguments and immediately falling back into the routine of drawing him out of himself. With confidence and stalwart determination, she had tried to keep him present. Further, she grew better and stronger by the day, and it meant that she was more able to do things such as this, where they now sat atop a mountainside summit, alone and undisturbed, with only their horse snuffling and snorting occasionally in the background.
He wondered how much of what she did for him now was because she did not know how to break through, and how much was waiting for the right opening. Perhaps it was a bit of both, for the last weeks had been mostly about her and her illness, when they talked, and he deftly turned the conversation around into a different direction when it came too close to something hot and sharp for him, using other issues and problems they needed to discuss in order to distract her from the things that were truly at issue.
Well, he would not do her the disservice of lying, or downplaying, now that she'd grasped her chance with both hands, and a heart apparently wide open.
Looking at her directly, he nodded and said clearly, "Yes."
She let out a long breath at this admission, and said, "I had hoped not, but assumed so. I am sorry, my love. Terribly sorry."
It was all out in the open, now, they both realized. Every possible stone that could have been left unturned, had now been picked up and turned over, revealing the grimy, wet, deep, messy underside—the biggest most of all. The air, if it was possible, felt electric, dense, full of taunts but awaiting promises.
"What do we do, now?" Georg asked. "We are still doing what we have always done, and yet it proves insufficient. Perhaps it is not we who are failing, but our methods?"
Maria considered this, then nodded. "I think I know what I have to do." She turned her head away from him. "It won't be easy," she muttered, voice shaking. "I may not like what I find out, and neither might you."
"Maria?"
She turned to look at her husband, and it was with eyes so sad and resigned that Georg thought he felt his heart seizing from the pain of it.
"You have already done one thing that was right. Even though it was difficult, and hurt like hell, and we went about it all wrong, you did it. Now, you can do the next thing, and not have it be empty effort. Do you see that?"
She nodded and whispered, "I do. I wondered what always stopped me, before, but now I know, I think. It was this, it was Nathaniel. The last thing between me and my health that could have made everything else I have to do now truly worthless can now no longer occur. So, now I have to see the kidney specialist."
They had talked about it and around it so much up to this point, but now Maria had claimed ownership over the choice, and it was time to make the move.
"Georg?" Maria said softly. Her voice was so gentle, so tender.
He looked at her, wondering at what he was about to hear.
"I would like it if you would talk to someone. About your nightmares. The episodes. I know there are people like Brigitta who only work with soldiers. I think they call it shell shock, here. She might know someone."
Fear rose up high in Georg's chest at this request from his wife, and his first instinct was to snap at her for it. But, pausing in the moment, he was suddenly aware again of where it was that they were, and he understood explicitly that to do so would be to ruin everything they had accomplished on this precipice. So, he bit his tongue, and tried to think about why fear held onto him.
Meanwhile, Maria nervously filled the silence: "It's just… I want to be there, but experience has shown that I am not equipped, not really. I can help you come back to the present, but I cannot keep you from leaving, and as I have now been reminded, I can also send you away. That is not a good thing, for either of us. You must learn how to end it."
It sounded so… lonely. He did not know if he could do this without Maria. She knew everything about him, everything that he had ever been, and ever would be. She was the only one he trusted. How could some stranger help him better than she could?
His mind jumped to Nathaniel. How could he articulate to a stranger how he felt about that entire event if he could not even say it explicitly to Maria? But as he ruminated on this thought, something in his brain seemed to knock loose, and Rosemary came so clearly to mind. What had Maria said? That naming their lost child had been Rosemary's idea? And hadn't she also said something about Rosemary being entirely outside of the situation, despite being their daughter?
He supposed that if there was anything a child did not share with their parents, it was conceiving and losing a child. It happened in the privacy of four walls and a locked door, and so often it ended that way, as well.
Perspective.
That's what Maria had said. That Rosemary could see the situation more clearly because she had perspective, for she was not up close and personal in the situation herself. How easy it would be to scoff the simplicity of her empathetic condolences and the innocent suggestions to make the grief easier. How easy it would be to scoff that ease of knowing clearly because she was young, childless, and not in the midst of these awful thorns.
But that wasn't even remotely fair, nor was it relevant.
"I… I don't know how to talk about this, Maria," Georg said at last. "But I will think about it, and I will let you know what I decide."
If she was disappointed by his response, she masked it well. She simply nodded, standing to her feet, and gestured that he should join her. "That will do, for now," she said.