Spotlight: Ash Wednesday by Paula McLain
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On Ash Wednesday in 1908, Swiss German immigrant Fritz Hirter arrives at his children’s school, where he is the lone custodian. But soon after lessons start, a fast-moving fire breaks out—its cause is unknown, but its effects are horrifying. Although Fritz is soon cleared of any responsibility for the catastrophe, the community continues to suspect him, supremely testing Fritz and his family.
Paula McLain’s Ash Wednesday is part of A Point in Time, a transporting collection of stories about the pivotal moments, past and present, that change lives. Read or listen to each immersive story in a single sitting.
Excerpt
As soon as steam begins to rise from the boilers and Fritz feels confident that all is running well, he carts the spent fuel to the ash heap on the north side of the building, where he covers his mouth and nose with a handkerchief, pinching his eyes shut before he dumps the wagon. Even with these precautions, the soot billows out in a cloud before settling wherever it likes, into his shoes and the cuffs of his coveralls, coating his graying hair and eyelashes. The handkerchief helps, but he still takes in too much dust. Some days he coughs up phlegm that appears almost black against his handkerchief, making him wonder if his lungs might give out before his body.
He’s forty-six, older than he ever saw his own father, back in Switzerland. There’s a familiar thorn, sharp as a blade, whenever Fritz remembers his home country, though he tries very hard to resist. Thinking of his father only calls up his mother. The way she stewed apples from their orchard in the winter months, stirring the iron pot with a worn wooden paddle, adding nutmeg at the end for Fritz, not minding that the spice was expensive and hard to come by. Her skin always smelled of apple peels to him, tangy and sweet. His mother was like the house they lived in, warm and simple and good. She was everything that made him happy as a child. Fritz wanted only to be near her until the day, when he was five or six years old, that his father had whirled around, as if noticing Fritz at his mother’s skirts for the first time, and cuffed him on the ear.
“Should we find you a dirndl to wear like your sisters, and not Kniebundhosen?” he needled, his face large and pink in front of Fritz’s as he dropped to one knee. A stranger, suddenly, in his father’s body.
“Leave him be, Hans,” his mother said, putting her arms around Fritz, while his father muttered something to himself and walked away. Were his sisters watching? Fritz can’t remember anymore, but he supposes they must have been, staring at him as he cried. After his father left, his mother held him close against her neck, though her murmured reassurances and kisses on his stinging ear couldn’t fully reach him, as much as he wanted them to. The simple comforts of childhood dissolving in a saucer of humiliation.
From then on, Fritz worked determinedly to show his father and himself that he wasn’t soft and fearful but brave, even if that meant pretending, from time to time, to be bolder than he felt, and leaving behind the things he loved. His mother’s tears were terrible when he moved away at fifteen to work in a factory in Lindau, where he learned how to operate steam boilers like the ones he’s responsible for now. As practical as the end result was, nothing about abandoning his home had been easy for Fritz. A small, seemingly unkillable part of him wanted to turn around and hold his mother that day, taking in her apple-peel smell one last time, but he knew if he didn’t keep walking, he would never truly grow up and meet life’s demands.
Two years later, with thick calluses on his hands and a back already strong from loading coal and carting ash, Fritz began courting a sturdy, round-cheeked German girl in Dingelsdorf and soon found himself boasting about going to America in a few months, hoping to impress her. He was walking her home after a public dance in the village hall on a night so crisp Fritz’s breath hung white in the air. The comment had been a lark, something a boy says to a girl he wants to kiss, but Eva had stopped in her tracks and looked at him as if seeing someone else there in Fritz’s shoes. Someone daring enough to launch across an ocean with nothing in his pockets.
“I’d love to go to America,” she said without blinking. “I’d go tomorrow if I had the fare.”
Fritz had known Eva only a few weeks and in that time had focused on how pretty she was. But now he saw her spirit flicker. “Maybe we’ll go together,” he said, surprising himself for a second time. Eva’s courage seemed to be calling up his own. The longer he looked into her face with its square jaw and bright gray eyes, the more he wondered if he had been searching for someone like Eva without being aware of it. A spark to set his own slow fire going.
About the Author
Paula McLain is the author of New York Times bestsellers The Paris Wife, Circling the Sun, Love and Ruin, and When the Stars Go Dark. She has received the Cleveland Arts Prize, the Academy of American Poets Prize, and the Goodreads Choice Award for Historical Fiction. Find her at www.paulamclain.com.
