The Bigness of the World
The year that ilsa maria lumpkin took care of us, Martin was ten going on eleven and I, eleven going on twelve. We considered ourselves almost adults, on the cusp of no longer requiring supervision, but because our days were far more interesting with Ilsa in them, we did not force the issue. Her job was to be there waiting when we arrived home from school, to prepare snacks and help with homework and ask about our days, for our parents were deeply involved at that time with what they referred to as their "careers," both of them spending long hours engaged in activities that seemed to Martin and me nebulous at best. We understood, of course, that our mother did something at our grandfather's bank, but when our father overheard us describing her job in this way to Ilsa, he admonished us later, saying, "Your mother is vice president of the bank. That is not just something." Then, perhaps suspecting that his job seemed to us equally vague, he took out his wallet and handed Martin and me one of his business cards, on which was inscribed his name, Matthew Koeppe, and the words PR Czar. For several long seconds, Martin and I stared down at the card, and our father stared at us. I believe that he wanted to understand us, wanted to know, for example, how we viewed the world, what interested or frightened or perplexed us, but this required patience, something that our father lacked, for he simply did not have enough time at his disposal to be patient, to stand there and puzzle out what it was about his business card that we did not understand. Instead, he went quietly off to his study to make telephone calls, and the next day, I asked Ilsa what a czar was, spelling the word out because I could not imagine how to pronounce a c and z together, but she said that they were people who lived in Russia, royalty, which made no sense. Ilsa often spent evenings with us as well, for our parents kept an intense social calendar, attending dinners that were, my mother explained, an extension of what she did all day long, but in more elegant clothing. Ilsa wore perfume when she came at night, and while neither Martin nor I liked the smell, we appreciated the gesture, the implication that she thought of being with us as an evening out. She also brought popsicles, which she hid in her purse because our parents did not approve of popsicles, though often she forgot about them until long after they had melted, and when she finally did remember and pulled them out, the seams of the packages oozing blue or red, our two favorite flavors, she would look dismayed for just a moment before announcing, "Not to worry, my young charges. We shall pop them in the freezer, and they will be as good as new." Of course, they never were as good as new but were instead like popsicles that had melted and been refrozen -- shapeless with a thick, gummy coating. We ate them anyway because we did not want to hurt Ilsa's feelings, which we thought of as more real, more fragile, than other people's feelings.
Most afternoons, the three of us visited the park near our house. Though it was only four blocks away, Ilsa inevitably began to cry at some point during the walk, her emotions stirred by any number of things, which she loosely identified as death, beauty, and inhumanity: the bugs caught in the grilles of the cars that we passed (death); two loose dogs humping on the sidewalk across our path (beauty); and the owners who finally caught up with them and forced them apart before they were finished (inhumanity). We were not used to adults who cried freely or openly, for this was Minnesota, where people guarded their emotions, a tradition in which Martin and I had been well schooled. Ilsa, while she was from here, was not, as my mother was fond of saying, of here, which meant that she did not become impatient or embarrassed when we occasionally cried as well. In fact, she encouraged it. Still, I was never comfortable when it happened and did not want attention paid me over it -- unlike Ilsa, who sank to the ground and sobbed while Martin and I sat on either side of her, holding her hands or resting ours on her back.
"But it's his bank," I replied.
"Yes," said my father. "But the money is not his. It belongs to the people who use the bank, who put their money there so that it will be safe."
Again, we nodded, for we understood this about banks. In fact, we both had our own accounts at the bank, where we kept the money that we received for our birthdays. "He stole money?" I asked, for that is how it sounded, and I wanted to be sure.
"Well," said my father. "It's called embezzling." But when I looked up embezzling that evening, I discovered that our grandfather had indeed stolen money.
"And what about our mother?" Martin asked.
"It's complicated," said our father, "but they've arrested her also."
"Arrested?" I said, for there had been no talk of arresting before this.
"Yes," said my father, and then he began to cry.
We had never seen our father cry. He was, I learned that day, a silent crier. He laid his head on the table, his arms forming a nest around it, and we knew that he was crying only because his shoulders heaved up and down. I sat very still, not looking at him because I did not know how to think of him as anything but my father, instead focusing on the overhead light, waiting for it to click, which it generally did every thirty seconds or so. The sound was actually somewhere between a click and a scratch, easy to hear but apparently difficult to fix, for numerous electricians had been called in to do so and had failed. I had always complained mightily about the clicking, which prevented me from concentrating on my homework, but that day as I sat at the table with my weeping father and Martin, the light was silent, unexpectedly and overwhelmingly silent.
Then, without first consulting me with his eyes, our custom in matters relating to our parents, Martin slipped from his chair and stood next to my father, and, after a moment, placed a hand on my father's shoulder. In those days, Martin's hands were unusually plump, at odds with the rest of his body, and from where I sat, directly across from my father, Martin's hand looked like a fat, white bullfrog perched on my father's shoulder. My father's sobbing turned audible, a high-pitched whimper like a dog makes when left alone in a car, and then quickly flattened out and stopped.
"It will be okay," Martin said, rubbing my father's shoulder with his fat, white hand, and my father sat up and nodded several times in rapid succession, gulping as though he had been underwater. But it would not be okay. After a very long trial, my mother went to jail, eight years with the possibility of parole after six. My grandfather was put on trial as well, but he died of a heart attack on the second day, leaving my mother to face the jury and crowded courtroom alone. Her lawyers wanted to blame everything on him, arguing that he was dead and thus unable to deny the charges or be punished, advice that my mother resisted until it became clear that she might be facing an even longer sentence. Martin and I learned all of this from the newspaper, which we were not supposed to read but did, and from the taunts hurled at us by children who used to be our friends but were no longer allowed to play with us because many of their parents had money in my grandfather's bank and even those who didn't felt that my mother had betrayed the entire community. We missed her terribly in the beginning, my father most of all, though I believe that he grieved not at being separated from her but because the person she was, or that he had thought she was, no longer existed, which meant that he grieved almost as though she were dead.
Of course, as Ilsa walked us home from her cottage that day, we had no inkling of what lay ahead, no way of knowing that the familiar terrain of our childhoods would soon become a vast, unmarked landscape in which we would be left to wander, motherless and, it seemed to us at times, fatherless as well. Rather, as we walked along holding hands with Ilsa, our concerns were immediate. I fretted aloud that our parents would be angry, but Ilsa assured me that they were more likely to be worried, and though I did not like the idea of worrying them, it seemed far preferable to their anger. There was also the matter of Ilsa herself, Ilsa, who, even with her hat on, seemed unfamiliar, and so Martin and I worked desperately to interest her in the things that we saw around us, things that would have normally moved her to tears but which she now seemed hardly to notice. Across our path was a snail that had presumably been wooed out onto the sidewalk during the previous day's rain and crushed to bits by passersby. I stopped and pointed to it, waiting for her to cry out, "Death, be not proud!" and then to squeeze her eyes shut while allowing us to lead her safely past it, but she glanced at the crushed bits with no more interest than she would have shown a discarded candy wrapper.
As we neared our house, I could see my father's car in the driveway.
"Can we visit you again, Ilsa?" I asked, turning to her.
"I am afraid that will not be possible, children," she said. "You see, I will be setting off very soon -- really any day now -- on a long journey. I suspect that I may be gone for quite some time."
"Are you going to see the ocean?" I asked. At that time in my life I could not imagine anything more terrifying than the ocean, which I knew about only from maps and school and movies.
"Yes," she said after giving the question some thought. "As a matter of fact, I believe that I will see the ocean. Have you ever seen the ocean, children?" Martin and I replied that we had not.
"But you must," she said gravely. "You absolutely must see the ocean."
"Why?" I asked, both frightened and encouraged by her tone.
"Why must we?"
"Well," she said after a moment. "However can you expect to understand the bigness of the world if you do not see the ocean?"
"Is there no other way?" Martin asked.
"I suppose there are other ways," Ilsa conceded. "Though certainly the ocean is the most effective."
"But why must we understand the bigness of the world?" I asked.
We were in front of our house by then, and Ilsa stopped and looked at us. "My dear Martin and Veronica," she said in the high, quivery voice that we had been longing for. "I know it may sound frightening, yet I assure you that there have been times in my life when the bigness of the world was my only consolation."
Then, she gave us each a small kiss on the forehead, and we watched her go, her gait unsteady like that of someone thinking too much about the simple act of walking, her white hat bobbing like a sail. At the corner she stopped and turned, and seeing us there still, called, "In you go, children. Your parents will be waiting," so that these were Ilsa's final words to us -- ordinary and rushed and, as we would soon discover, untrue.