Chapter 23
Twenty-Three
Gertrude never invites you to join her for dinner. Her invitations are always for a stroll in the garden, or an afternoon in her sitting room. Cyrus steals you away from your house repairs, and the two of you make for the palace, where you spend a whole afternoon laughing with your sister.
Gertrude asks a servant to bring her two children, a son and a daughter: Lustig and Margarethe.
Hearing the daughter’s name, you cannot help but think of your own sister, who was named Margarethe but called Gretel all her childhood.
Unlike your sister, Gertrude’s daughter does not use the diminutive, which makes it a little easier to overcome the shock.
Their mother gets a polite hello, you get a perfunctory hi, but they run toward their Uncle Cyrus with total, complete, iridescent joy.
Gertrude sits back in her chair, wine stem held between gloved fingers.
She watches her youngest brother join the future of the kingdom on the carpeted floor, where Lustig commands him to “play horsey.”
Cyrus, bless him, brays like a noble steed.
“Um,” says Margarethe, “Uncle Cyrus isn’t a horse, he’s a pegasus!”
You cover your mouth with your hand to hide your smile. While the two of them argue semantics—horse, or pegasus?—you catch Gertrude’s eyes. Such satisfaction there, but also such exhaustion, and such sadness.
“Sometimes I think I failed,” she says.
You look at Cyrus with his niece and nephew. Lustig sits astride Cyrus’s back, and Cyrus crawls along on all fours. No, not all fours. He doesn’t put any weight on his wing. You think of the little girl in the marketplace who ran into you on her way to ask about that wing.
My sister did make me a man again, and she worked very hard to make that happen.
But she didn’t do it right!
“Oh, Gertrude,” you sigh, rubbing your palm through your beard, “you did all that you could and more.”
“Cyrus talks about the worst years of my life as if they were some grand adventure. Well, for him, they were a grand adventure. He wasn’t the one trapped in silence, trapped in marriage, trapped in motherhood, nearly burned.
It wasn’t up to him to do everything to break that curse.
And now my children want wings. They don’t understand that wings aren’t something you should want.
They don’t understand all the blood and blisters that went into fixing those wings. ”
She looks at the gloves on her hands. So do you. There was a time when you were there to soothe the pain, and then, suddenly, you were gone.
The children laugh. Cyrus laughs, too. All three of them keep playing their game in their own separate world.
“They don’t understand,” you say, “because they don’t have to understand. You’ve protected them. Their lives aren’t like our lives. Isn’t that a good thing?”