A House of Tailors (3 page)

four

The heavy drapes in the sewing room were tightly drawn. Covered with dried mud, I sat in front of the table, my face filthy. Surrounded by the forms and the shelves filled with spools of thread and packets of ribbon, Mama and Katharina paced . . . from the window to the sewing machine to the chairs against the walls. Katharina clenched her hands tightly together as she and Mama tried to decide what to do about me.

Friedrich and Franz sat on the bottom step in the hall peering in at me, probably glad they had stayed home in bed this morning.

This morning! Such a long time ago.

I kept whispering how sorry I was in between Mama's “If only . . .” and Katharina's “You could have been shot by our own soldiers!”

Soon Frau Ottlinger slipped in the front door. Usually dressed so carefully, now she looked disheveled, her hair poking up as she ran her fingers through it. “Dina,” she said. “What have you done?”

“It was only a pattern,” I began.

“That soldier,” she said. “He swears that you are a spy.” She fanned her face with her hand. “I told him you didn't live in Breisach, that I had never seen you before.”

“Suppose the soldiers come here?” Friedrich asked.

There was silence. “How can we keep her hidden?” Mama said at last, and began to cry.

Katharina seized the Uncle's letter and looked at Mama.

“Oh, Katharina,” Mama said.

“It can't be helped,” she answered.

I looked from one to the other, then reached out to Katharina. “What are you thinking?”

“You will go to America instead of me.”

Frau Ottlinger nodded slowly. “Yes, that's the thing to do. Of course.”

I shook my head. “Do you think I would do that to you? Never.”

Katharina knelt down next to me, smoothing my hair, then pressing my hands in hers. “We can't take a chance. You must leave before they find you.”

Mama was already nodding, and before I could say a word they were scurrying around, pulling out the old trunk, rushing past each other on the stairs with folded clothing and Mama's best shawl. Mama thrust a sturdy skirt into my hand: “To wear on the trip.”

And Frau Ottlinger hurried home to ask her husband to drive me to Freiburg within an hour.

Freiburg. To my grandmother's house.

“You'll stay there until the passage is arranged.” Mama sighed. “From there to Hamburg and then a ship.”

If I had been brave, I would have given myself up to the soldiers. Instead, I bowed my head over the skirt, my tears dripping on the cloth, ashamed of what I had done.

For the first time I realized how much I loved this house and the river. How terrible it would be never to hear Friedrich and Franz laughing and playing on the stairs. And Mama!

But the worst was Katharina. How could I leave and know I would never see her again? How had I not thought about this before?

Katharina bent over the trunk, her eyes on the ceiling. “Soft fabrics to bring for Barbara's baby, and ribbons.” She reached up, pulling yards of pink silk off the shelf.

I changed my clothes and then sat there, numb, looking around at the room I would never see again, and then at my brothers. They'd grow up, become men, and I wouldn't be there to see them. How well would they remember me . . . their sister who left when they were so young?

And then the hour was gone. The trunk was filled and closed, waiting in the hall. Mama cupped my face in her hands. “Will you write every week?” she asked.

I nodded, unable to speak.

“I'm not much of a letter writer,” she said, “but I'll try. And I'll think of you every day for the rest of my life. Know that, Dina.”

My brothers, solemn for once, stood on the step, looking the way they had when Papa died.

I said goodbye to Katharina in the hallway. She emptied her pocket. “Take this,” she said, handing me her treasure, a small envelope of buttons Papa had carved the year before he died.

At the last moment, I ran up the stairs to get my Sunday hat. I brought it down to Katharina. “I want you to have this.” How bitter I felt. I loved this hat, but because I was greedy to make an even better one, I had deprived Katharina of her right to go to America. Now she would be the one to stay, and I to leave.

She held it in her hands, turning it, looking down at it. “You are the best of us, Dina.”

I closed my eyes. “I won't have to sew again,” I said, trying to smile. “Not in America.”

And then we were holding each other, hugging each other, until Friedrich said, “Herr Ottlinger is here.”

We broke apart and I went down the front steps without looking back.

Brooklyn, New York

1871

five

I angled for a place near the railing of the ferry, stepping around packages of every shape I could imagine and through knots of people, practicing my English: “I beg you parrdon.”

They paid no attention. All of them were talking and pointing to the shore, so close we could almost reach out and touch it. I felt as if I could almost grasp a chunk of soil in my hand.

Was I the only one alone? I glanced at a family over my shoulder, two children clutching their mother's skirt and another in his father's strong arms, his small fingers tangled in the man's beard.

I stood there shivering, tucking my hands into my sleeves. Who knew what had happened to my gloves on this long journey? But never mind. It was almost over.

After leaving Breisach, I had stayed in Freiburg at my grandmother's house. I had waited there for days until my cousin Karl could take me as far as Hamburg, where they had arranged passage for me. I had crossed that ocean alone on a miserable ship; fifty-seven days it had taken!

Now there was only this last bit, the ferry from Castle Garden to the dock. I had gotten through all of it. I was a world away from home and my family.

Again I was reminded of something I had thought of so many times: Katharina guiding me across the great stone bridge over the Rhine, holding my hand. I must have been only four or five years old. She had hoisted me up so that I could see a passing barge that left a smooth white V in the river, and we waved to the pilot in his ribboned hat and striped jersey.

“Someday, Dina,” she had said, “I will sail on a ship a hundred times the size of that barge and go to America. I will walk along Madison Square and have dinner in the Fifth Avenue Hotel like in the picture over our bed.”

I could see her in a hat with ribbons blowing in the breeze. “I will go to America, too,” I had said.

Oh, Katharina.

Leaning against the railing now, I saw buildings on each side of the water. They weren't nearly as grand as the ones that lined the river at home, I thought uneasily. There were no castles, no great bridges.

I closed my eyes, remembering that storm that had come up out of nowhere on the trip.

That Friday morning the waves had been flat, and it seemed we were skating across a huge pond. By afternoon, it was as if a madman stirred the ocean with a giant spoon, creating waves that were high enough to cover the ship.

And the wind! That gigantic wind. Trunks slid and people screamed, but I couldn't hear them, only saw their open mouths. It was the wind I heard, circling over us, around us, a hundred times louder than the train that thundered down the tracks along my river.

With Papa's Bible in both hands, I promised God that if I lived through this storm, if I ever put my two feet on land, I'd never eat a morsel of food or wet my mouth with a drop of water on Good Friday again. I would keep that promise; I knew I would, even if I lived to be an old woman.

Now in back of me on the ferry was a family from Frankfurt. I caught bits of their conversation, their long wait on the stairs, shivering with cold and fear, to see the doctor at Castle Garden, the examination of their eyes when he rolled back the lids with a buttonhook.

A buttonhook!

I never wanted to think of that examination again. How the doctors had poked and prodded while I stood there, almost numb with embarrassment, wondering if they were going to chalk my coat with an X and send me straight back across the ocean.

But I didn't want to think about where I had come from, either, Mama standing in the doorway, one hand to her throat, tears streaming down her cheeks. The boys. Katharina. I felt a choking in my throat.

I wiped my eyes with one hand, wondering why the thought of coming to America had so excited me in the first place.

The ferry was close now, and people's faces on the dock became distinct, some of them smiling, some looking anxious as they waved to us.

I searched those faces, remembering the Uncle as I had seen him years before. But there were so many people packed together in a mass, and so much noise. Some of the voices spoke German. “Here, Glenda, look here!” “Peter. Darling . . . I'm over here.”

The boat hit the dock with a screech and an enormous crash, and I nearly lost my balance. I straightened my hat . . . and there below me was the Uncle, looking older than I remembered. He was tall and straight, his hair gray now under his hat, his beard trimmed, his scarf blowing against his cheek.

At that moment the gangplanks were lowered, and people began to stream off the ferry like the beans Mama funneled from their canvas bag into her pot.

The Uncle motioned to me to wait.

I could do that, couldn't I? Wait for one minute while everyone else raced down to the dock, waving their arms, or pushing trunks and wicker baskets? I could wait to see this rich land, the Uncle's beautiful house, Barbara, his wife.

The Uncle had written Mama that he worked for a woman with so much money that when meat was ordered, the butcher stood on the scale with the side of beef and charged for both weights.

Suddenly I was wild with excitement. I raised my hand to wave, thinking of the needles that had stabbed my fingers every day since I was four, the hours in front of that sewing machine, running up seams, turning collars, binding blankets and sheets.

No more! I would never sew again. Well, a rip in the seam of my skirt or a hole in the toe of my stocking. I almost hugged myself with joy. Never mind the soldiers who looked for me, or my dear river, or the cathedral bells that tolled away the hours. I was in America!

six

At last it was my turn to go down the gangplank. I tried to remember what Mama had told me about being a lady, about being correct. But I ran the last few steps, my hat skimming off my head and sailing down on my back, held only by the woolen ties against my neck.

I ran straight into the Uncle's arms.

He was surprised—no, more than surprised. He was shocked.

I stepped back. “I'm here,” I said a little uncertainly. I raised one shoulder in a half shrug. “Me instead of Katharina.”

“I see that.” He didn't smile. “Wait until I bring your trunk.”

I stood there, waiting forever, it seemed, watching the sea of people around me and the foaming wake as the ferry began its trip back to Castle Garden, until he returned carrying my trunk on his shoulder. We began the walk to my new home.

I remembered the last time the Uncle had come to Breisach. I couldn't have been more than five, sewing a bit of lace on my doll Gretchen's coat.

“You will be a good tailor like Uncle Lucas,” Mama had said.

“Wait.” He had picked up the tiny coat. “You do it like this, the lace underneath so the stitches don't show.”

I had pulled it back. “No, like this. It's my doll, my doll's coat, my lace.”

I wondered if he was remembering the same thing. How could I have forgotten that even then we rubbed each other like emery? Was he disappointed not to have Katharina there? Katharina, who was quiet and soothing, and never in trouble.

I swallowed. The Uncle had been right about the lace, of course. But what was I thinking of? Sewing had no place in my life from this moment on.

I chattered to him all the way, ignoring the cold gray day. “Katharina sent soft cloth for the baby, Maria,” I said. “Barbara can run up nightgowns and shirts. And there's pink flannel, the softest pink for a blanket, and rolls of ribbons, rose and green. I will embroider roses and leaves on the binding for her myself.”

I stopped. Had I said that? But what was a little embroidery for a baby? I couldn't count that as sewing, not at all.

It was a long walk through the streets, and several times the Uncle stopped to shift my trunk from one shoulder to another. But I didn't mind the distance at all. I stared at the stone houses, one attached to the next, like the ones in my own city.

There was a difference, though: the streets were filthy. Every time we turned a corner, I expected to see the houses become grander, the streets cleaner. But when we finally reached the last corner and the Uncle put down the trunk once more, and pointed, I saw our house.

I drew in my breath. Such a tall house. True, there were droppings from the horses in the streets, and bits of coal and sawdust that rose up in eddies and settled again as a rogue wind turned them from one direction to another. But the size of this house!

Would I have one floor all to myself?

By the time we entered the vestibule I knew I was mistaken. “The top floor is ours,” the Uncle said.

Only the top?

My heart fell, but I told myself it was all right. I didn't need a whole floor; all I needed was a bedroom of my own.

We began the climb. I followed the Uncle up the stairs, holding on to the broad wooden railing, breathless as we navigated the steps and the stairwells.

One woman peeked out of a doorway and nodded at us, her head covered with a kerchief, a broom in her hand. And on the next floor was a girl who looked almost like Katharina. She smiled at me shyly before she closed the door again.

On the top floor, the door was open, and Barbara stood there, beautiful and slim, just as I had pictured her, and so tiny she didn't quite reach the top of my head. She waited for us, arms out.

I flew into those arms, hugging her, and was surprised to notice the lovely smell of cinnamon. In back of her was Aunt Ida, Mama's older sister, looking so like Mama, except that her cheeks were round and full, her arms straining at her sleeves. She covered my face with kisses, patting my cheeks with soft, plump hands. “Ah, Dina, Margarete's daughter.”

And Barbara said, “Look, Dina, a surprise for you.”

Propped up on the sewing machine at the other end of the hall was a letter. I recognized Katharina's handwriting. But the other thing I noticed made my heart lurch inside my chest, my breath almost stop. I looked at the red patterned carpet, at the machine with a chair in front of it . . .

. . . and underneath the machine, the rug was worn bare, almost all the way through to the floor. Worse than our rug!

In that second, I knew this was a house of tailors, no different from my own, except that it was poorer.

“You sew,” I blurted out.

The Uncle blinked. “Of course I sew. Every minute I can when I'm not working for Mrs. Koch.”

I took a step backward. I tried not to act shocked. Where had I ever gotten the idea that people who lived in Brooklyn were all rich?

What had I done? I asked myself. What had I done?

15 January 1871

Dear Dina,

I am sending this letter on even though it may reach Brooklyn ahead of you. I like to think it will greet you when you arrive. How much we miss you! There seems to be a hole at the dinner table. No one to laugh with, no one to tease, no one to reach for second and third helpings.

First the news of the war.

After the French lost Fort Mortimer and then the castle at Neuf Breisach, the soldiers left our town. They went on to lay siege to the French fortress at Belfort, but that fortress held out, still holds out.

A soldier returned, asking questions about you in the shops. It must have been that terrible soldier who followed you that day. Even though no one answered him, it seems he is determined to find you. How glad I am that you are far away and safe.

But there was one unusual happening, Dina. Do you remember a third soldier? His name is Krist. He has a fencing scar and blue eyes almost like Papa's. Somehow he found out that you lived here. Don't worry. He came to see if you were all right. He has no use for the two soldiers who chased you, but he's glad that you are far away and safe.

You'll know that Mama was very impressed with him when I tell you that every time he comes, she puts out her best tea set.

Krist. Isn't that an interesting name?

Dear Dina, I send hugs and kisses. Franz and Friedrich cry for you.

Your loving sister,
Katharina

And on the bottom in Mama's heavy script:

Dearest child, how much we all miss you! Grandmother said you were very helpful. I hope you will be helpful to Barbara, too.

Love,
Mother