to the seashore while Charlotte stays home with a headache. Oh, a headache. A hangover, let’s call a spade a spade. Elfriede tells herself that’s how Charlotte copes with the grief.
Anyway, she doesn’t mind. Let Charlotte have her elixirs of whiskey and grief, while Elfriede has the children all to herself. Johann loves the seashore. Already he knows how to swim in the surf without being swept away, though Elfriede’s careful to keep him on the sand when the waves are too rough. He’s big and sturdy, like his father was; in fact, he’s so big and so sturdy, so whitely blond and so loyal, he might almost be Gerhard himself. During the moments she holds her son in her arms, she doesn’t feel the loss of his father at all.
The girls are more content to play on the shore, except for Ursula, the indomitable elder. Well, who could blame her? Like her father, like her brother, she’s built on a sturdy frame. Sometimes Elfriede looks at her and wonders where the devil they’re going to find a husband for her. Yes, there’s the stain of bastardy, but it’s more the size of her, the strength of Ursula. Only an unusually large, unusually strong man can cope with her. Or else a smaller man who wants to be coped with? Perhaps. Her younger sisters are more dainty. Blond and pinkish. Of course, the baby’s only eleven months old, so it’s hard to tell for certain. She sits on the edge of her blanket right now, under a new striped umbrella, eating sand in calm handfuls. Poor baby, Charlotte was seven months along with her when Gerhard’s appendix burst. She never saw her father’s face, heard his voice, felt his big hands cradling her as he had the others. These things happen. Life’s uncertain. Charlotte—convinced this tragedy was the retribution of a vengeful God—took to her bed when the peritonitis set in. Didn’t leave it until after Gertrud was born, one month later and four weeks early, and a little life returned to her eyes. Well, who wouldn’t perk up, producing a beautiful baby like that? The Lord giveth and taketh away, Charlotte said, putting the baby to her breast, naming her after her dead father, and Elfriede felt her own grief lifting as she gazed at the small, sad faces in the nursery, who now loved her and needed her more than ever.
Well! But that’s all in the past. Those sad faces are happy again. Children, they’re more resilient than adults, and anyway their memories are fleeting. Even Ursula’s too young to really remember her father clearly, a year after his death, and Johann . . . well, Johann’s like Gerhard and doesn’t wear his emotions like garments. An expert at pretending all’s well, that certain truths don’t exist.
Noon, and the sun’s gone fierce, burned away the last of the haze. Elfriede, in her bathing costume of dark blue serge, feels as if she’s boiling alive. Because there’s no one else about on this stretch of wild beach, she removes her stockings and shoves them in the basket. The children are naturally unaffected. Elfriede climbs to her feet and lifts Gertrud into her arms. Johann has just disappeared into the guts of a cresting wave. Ursula’s chasing a screaming Frederica into the water’s edge. Elfriede squints and reassures herself that their hats are still in place, shielding their precious faces from the sun. She carries Gertrud toward the water. She can swim a little, but swimming’s impossible when you’re carrying a baby on your hip, so she just wades into the mad, bubbling wash of surf, enjoying the pull of the undertow on her bathing dress, the sting of salt against her calves, the relief. She swings Gertrud downward and the baby kicks her legs in the water and laughs, and all the while Elfriede keeps her left eye on Johann, emerging now on the other side of the wave, tossing his white hair gleefully, and her right eye on the girls as they race along the water’s edge. You never stop. Always, always, some part of your brain maintains this awareness of each child. Like the hum of a bumblebee, exhausting and unceasing and necessary to life. At night, when she tumbles unconscious into bed, she’ll sleep right through the bang of a Florida thunderstorm outside her window, but a single cough from the other end of the corridor jolts her wide awake. In other words, motherhood.
Elfriede glances toward