She went around the house, Helen, until she was outside the room where the children are huddled. She felt along the wall, and found a board that was loose and weak. While Italo and Regina stood ready at the front door, Helen worked her fingers under that loose board, gained a decent grip on it. She was quiet. None of the children noticed her fingers sliding steadily across the wood. None of them heard her easing the board back. It isn’t until she tears the board free, all at once, thrusting her arm inside and catching one of the children, Giovanni, by the hair, that the children are aware of their danger. Helen jerks her arm back, smashing Giovanni against the wall. She releases him, and he falls to the floor, motionless. She swipes at one of her own children, who dances away from her grip, and then she starts pressing on the board to the right of the one she ripped away. She’s coming in.
Before she can pry off that second board, however, Italo and Regina are in the room. The sight of their son lying in a heap on the floor tears a pair of wails from them, and they rush at the place where Helen has broken through, knocking over several of the children in their haste. Helen tries to withdraw her arm, but she isn’t fast enough, and hammer and pan blows rain down on it. More bones splinter and crack, one of them puncturing her white skin and spilling black blood. Italo stops his attack to grab Giovanni by his shirt and drag him out of harm’s reach, but Regina continues to pound Helen’s arm. When Italo relates these events to Rainer the following morning, Rainer will think that the sight of his wife’s fury unnerved his friend. By the time Regina pauses her assault long enough for Helen to draw her arm out, it isn’t so much an arm anymore as more of a flipper. Regina strikes the wall once, twice, screaming, “What words do you have for me now?” Helen doesn’t answer. Regina hits the wall a third time and throws the pan clattering down. She turns to tend Giovanni, who’s unconscious but alive, while Italo goes to check outside. He can think of few things he’s less inclined to, but he doesn’t know what else to do. Helen is gone. Italo follows the trail of her strange blood and muddy footprints out into the street, where it ceases, as if she’s walked off the earth.
Italo’s too exhausted from the evening’s events to seek out Rainer. That, and he doesn’t want to leave his family alone, unguarded. He can’t understand why the dead woman is so interested in these children, but this is the second attempt she’s made on them, and that suggests the possibility of a third. He waits out the night in a chair set outside the children’s room, his hammer in one hand. The following morning, he doesn’t leave for work until the children are all off for school. He’s exhausted and afraid, and that’s a bad combination for a stonemason. Twice, he almost injures himself. He sees Rainer, but it isn’t until lunch that he can unburden himself to his friend. Rainer’s guessed something happened from the look on Italo’s face. While they eat their packed lunches, he listens attentively to Italo recount the events of the previous night. When the story is finished, Rainer says, “That was bravely done.”
Italo shrugs. “The woman is still out there. She will return.” Rainer looks away, and Italo asks, “Why the children? What does such a creature want with children?”
“I am not sure,” Rainer says. “Maybe she wants to regain the life she cast away.”
“Do you believe that?” Italo asks.
“No,” Rainer admits. “I’m not sure. I’m not sure what I think, but I believe you should continue to defend those children.”
“Of course,” Italo says.
“You know,” Rainer says, “I have books that may be of help to us. Last night, I read something that may be of help to us. We shall see.”
Italo starts to ask him what he learned, but it’s time to go back to work. If he thinks he’ll ask Rainer on the walk home, he’s mistaken, because, when the whistle blows, Rainer’s daughter Gretchen is waiting for him. Italo hears her say something to her father about Lottie, and then Rainer is off, running flat-out for home. Italo catches Gretchen’s arm before she can follow him. “What is it?” he asks.
“I don’t know,” she says. “Something happened to my sister. My mother says she met the dead woman. Now she’s asleep and she won’t wake up.”
XI
Indeed, Lottie had encountered Helen. The meeting occurred while she was at work, at the camp bakery. Lottie had been having a tough time at her job recently, the direct result of all the weirdness swirling around her. As a rule, she liked working in the bakery. It wasn’t much in the department of intellectual stimulation, but that was part of its appeal. Instead of sitting at a desk all day, poring over old volumes in search of the answers to obscure questions, as her father loved to do, Lottie was engaged in a much more immediate enterprise. You mixed the necessary ingredients, heated them in the oven, and in an hour or two you had your result, to be enjoyed by men on their way home from work. There’s a particular satisfaction comes with such things. It’s like what you feel cooking at a diner. On the good days, at least.
There’s more than the pleasure of this work, for Lottie. There’s the pleasure of work itself, of having a job. This is a time, remember, when girls, especially girls from genteel families, are supposed to stay at home and learn piano. Had the Schmidts stayed in Germany, that’s more than likely what Lottie would have done, ornamented her parents’ drawing room, until she was ready to ornament some young fellow’s arm. Had she insisted on working, Rainer would have found her something appropriate to the daughter of a professor. He’d have made her his assistant, given her enough money to foster the illusion she was helping him.
Needless to say, coming to America changed everything. Lottie worked in her aunt’s bakery in the Bronx because her mother’s sister demanded it, and Rainer and Clara were too much in need of the extra money she could earn to fight that demand. Once she had that experience, and since the family had not yet climbed back to their old social station, Lottie had a much easier time convincing Rainer and Clara she’d do much more good working at the camp bakery than she would sitting at the camp school. Rainer wasn’t happy, but neither could he argue the economics of the thing. Clara kept her own counsel, though Lottie thought her mother pleased in a way she did her best to keep secret. They worked at the camp bakery together, Lottie and Clara, and Lottie enjoyed it in a way she’d never enjoyed working with her mother at her aunt’s. There, under the watchful eye of her older sister, Clara had been constantly tense, waiting for the reproval her sister sprinkled as liberally as the powdered sugar on her donuts. If she could correct Lottie before her sister did, Clara jumped at the opportunity, with a sharpness that made Lottie flinch.
Since they moved to the camp, though, Clara’s behavior has undergone a sea-change. Outside her sister’s radius, Clara is relaxed, forgiving, and even funny. To Lottie’s surprise and embarrassment, she’s learned that her mother has a great talent and memory for dirty jokes, which she never fails to indulge while they’re making long breads and pastries. It’s won her popularity with most of her fellow workers, male and female, with whom Lottie has been shocked to see her mother enjoying the occasional cigarette. “You don’t tell your father,” Clara said to her when she first spied her puffing away. The thought hadn’t even crossed Lottie’s mind, since she was sure Rainer would never believe her. She wouldn’t dream of imitating her mother’s behavior. She’s pretty sure that Clara’s new-found liberalism doesn’t extend to her oldest daughter. But once her initial surprise has faded a bit, Lottie has found that she likes this Clara better than the one who made her time working at her aunt’s an exercise in extended misery. She still misses her old mother, the one she had in Germany, who sang bits from Mozart operas in a high, ringing voice as she went about the house, but she’s come to seem more and more distant to Lottie, a pleasant ghost.