Eve's Daughters (19 page)

It took several minutes for Emma to pry herself away from all her admirers, but eventually she and Grace made their way back to the suite.

“I told you you’d make friends in no time, Mother.” Emma linked her arm through Grace’s. “Those sound like my words to you on your first day of school.”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to be condescending.”

“I’m glad, dear. Now, where shall we begin? Why, Suzanne! How did your mother rope you into this?”

Suzanne was on her knees, sorting through a box of sheet music from the 1940s. She shrugged. “I needed to get out of the house. Jeff took the girls to a Saturday matinee. He’s trying to prove he’s an ideal father now that I’m divorcing him.”

“That’s such an ugly word,” Emma said with a sigh.

Suzanne stood, dusting her hands on the seat of her blue jeans. “Grandma, I was also wondering if you’d be willing to talk a little bit about your divorce. You said the other day that it was your fault Karl left you—but I always thought you left him because he didn’t want Mom.”

“Oh dear,” Emma murmured as she sat down on the arm of her sofa. “And here I thought you came to help me unpack.”

Grace eyed her mother with alarm. Emma no longer looked as young and carefree as she had a few moments before in the lounge. Why did Suzanne have to upset her by dredging up the past? Yet at the same time, if Emma did share the story of her divorce, giving a realistic portrayal of the heartaches a single mother faced, maybe it would help heal the rift in Suzanne’s marriage.

“Can’t we talk and unpack at the same time?” Suzanne asked.

“Of course, dear. Just give me a minute while I think where to start. . . .”

“Why is everything in such a mess?” Grace asked. She meant her mother’s suite, but her question seemed weighted with a double meaning. “Wouldn’t it have been simpler to empty one box at a time instead of rummaging through fifteen of them?”

“Probably. But I was looking for things, you see, and I was in a hurry.
Freida wanted to borrow one of my crochet books, and Stella Grabinsky needed some wrapping paper, and Lester couldn’t find his knife sharpener, so I said he could use mine, and—”

“That’s why everyone loves you so much, Grandma. You’re generous to a fault. I think you’d even give away your heart of gold if someone needed it.”

Emma frowned. “I’m not the saint you girls think I am. That’s what I meant the other day when I said that I shared some of the blame for my divorce. It wasn’t black and white, you see. And Karl wasn’t the evil villain. He was a generous, hardworking man, and even if what he wanted me to do was wrong, he had his own reasons for it.” She picked up a pile of dish towels lying on the back of the sofa and carried them across the room to the kitchenette. She opened one drawer after another, discovered they were already full, then carried the towels back to where she’d found them.

“And your divorce won’t be all Jeffrey’s fault either, Suzy,” she continued. “You two were once deeply in love. I know you were, I saw you together. What you had was very rare and precious, but somehow or other you let it die. The problem with Karl and me, right from the start, was that we were so very different. And without that common ground to water and till, our love never had a chance to grow. . . .”

THIRTEEN

I clearly recall two events from my childhood, growing up in Bremenville. The first was the night we escaped from the flood when I was four years old, and the second was the warm July day when I was six that Papa’s surprise arrived. He had ordered it, like everything else in our house, from the Sears Roebuck company in Chicago. Papa was always one of Mr. Sears’ best customers. In fact, the company could have photographed every room in our house, pasted the pictures together, and called it their catalogue. If Sears had sold proper Christian husbands, Papa probably would have ordered four of them for us from the catalogue too. He trusted Mr. Sears.

This day turned out to be almost as exciting as the Fourth of July, which we had just celebrated the week before. Around ten o’clock, the stationmaster’s son rode his bicycle out to our farm to tell Papa that a huge crate addressed to Reverend F. Schroder had arrived from Chicago on the morning train.

Papa’s grin stretched ear to ear. “Pack a picnic lunch,” he told Mama. “We’re all going to town.”

“What is it, Papa? What did you buy this time?” Eva and I jumped around him like two grasshoppers in a hayfield.

“Can’t tell you,” he said. “It’s a surprise.”

“Is it something for the farm, the church, or the house?” Sophie asked. She was nearly eleven and much better at guessing games than Eva and me.

“It’s for the house, Liebchen,” Papa replied.

That really stumped me. I couldn’t imagine what else we could possibly need for the house. As far as I could tell, every room was already stuffed to the brim with gewgaws and gimcracks. Then I remembered all the books piled on the floor of Papa’s study. Maybe he had finally bought a new bookcase to hold them all.

“Who is the surprise for?” I asked, hoping to show up Sophie with my cleverness.

“It belongs to all of us,” he said, laughing, “and that’s all I’m going to say! No more hints!” Although we begged and pleaded with him, he wouldn’t relent. He waded through the kitchen toward the back door with the three of us attached to his legs like leeches. “Do you girls want to come with me to borrow Mr. Metzger’s wagon?” he asked.

Of course we did! That was part of the ritual whenever a crate arrived at the station from Sears. We would ride our two horses bareback across the fields to the Metzger farm—Papa and Eva on the big gelding, Sophie and me on the mare, hanging on to her mane and to each other for dear life. Then we’d hitch the horses to the Metzgers’ farm wagon to fetch Papa’s latest prize home from town.

By the time we returned to the parsonage with the borrowed wagon, Mama had packed a lunch and changed from her everyday cotton wrapper into a long summer skirt and shirtwaist. “You girls come in the house and get ready too,” she called from the back door.

Ready? I was ready! But Mama made us all come inside and wash our faces and tie clean pinafores over our dresses and, worst of all, put on shoes. Accustomed to going bare, my feet felt hot and pinched, imprisoned in Sophie’s cast-off high-buttons. Sophie fastened a Sunday ribbon in her hair, but I couldn’t be bothered. I wet my hands and slicked back the loose tendrils that had escaped from my braids, then raced out to the wagon again. I pitied baby Vera, who had just celebrated her first birthday. With only thin tufts of hair on her round, pink head, she was forced to wear a scratchy, starched bonnet to protect her scalp from the sun. She tugged on her bonnet strings and grunted like a baby pig, desperate to free herself.

When we arrived at the train station, it seemed as though the whole town had gathered to ogle Papa’s enormous crate. A half-dozen ragged Bauer children crawled all over it, trying to peer through the planks to see what was inside. It had huge arrows and warnings painted on all four sides that said
This End Up!
Whatever it was, it obviously had a bottom and a top that couldn’t be mixed around.

The crowd parted to let Papa through, just as I imagined the Red Sea had once parted for Moses. Papa shook the stationmaster’s hand. “Do you have a pry bar I could use, Amos?” he asked.

“Are you gonna open it up here?” old Amos asked in astonishment. I held my breath with the rest of the crowd.

“Yessir. It says on the guarantee that I’m supposed to inspect it at the depot, and if I’m not completely satisfied with the quality or the tone, I can
return it to Chicago and they’ll send me my dollar back.”

“A
dollar
?” Amos cried. “They sent this all the way from Chicago for only a dollar?”

“That’s right,” Papa said proudly. “It’s called the ‘no money in advance’ plan. The balance is on deposit at the Bremenville bank until I see whether or not this instrument is as good as the advertisement claimed.”

Everyone stared at Papa in awe. He had to be just about the smartest, most well-educated man in Bremenville. A prickle of excitement scampered down my spine at his words:
this instrument
. It was no ordinary bookcase after all, but something truly wondrous!

Wood creaked against nails as Papa carefully pried off the front of the crate. I glimpsed a dark, reddish form beneath wads of excelsior. Then a hush fell over the crowd as Papa removed the packing material and we all caught sight of his latest surprise. It was a full-size, American Home upright parlor grand piano, with a twenty-five-year guarantee. The wood, beneath a layer of dust, was rich mahogany with recessed panels, engraved with swirling leaves and vines. Fancy carved pillars held up the keyboard—and it even came with a stool and an instruction book. It was so magnificent that for a moment, no one could speak.

“That’s a mighty fine-looking piano you have there, Fred,” the station master finally said in a hushed voice. Everyone nodded in agreement. I almost said
Amen
.

“Let’s see what it sounds like.” Papa wiped his hands on the seat of his pants and carefully lifted the keyboard cover. Ivory and ebony gleamed in the sunlight. His long fingers found the keys he wanted—and out came music! I hadn’t even known that Papa could play! Several familiar hymns eventually took shape—liberally sprinkled with wrong notes and false starts. Even so, it was clear to me that this was the finest piano in the whole world.

“Are we going to keep it, Papa?” I asked when he finished a stumbling version of “Ein Feste Burg.”

He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “I don’t know, Liebchen. It sounds to me like they left an awful lot of wrong notes in it at the factory.”

My heart froze, then I saw the corners of Papa’s mouth twitch as he suppressed a grin. Sophie caught on a few seconds before I did.

“You’re teasing us, Papa! Those wrong notes are in your fingers, not in the piano!”

He laughed out loud, and I knew that the piano was mine. “
It belongs to
all
of us
,” Papa had said, but in my heart it was mine. I wormed my way
between everyone’s legs so I could touch it and claim it. In an instant, I fell in love with the feel of the cool, smooth keys beneath my fingers. I sounded one note, then another and another. I heard rollicking music in my head—hundreds and thousands of notes and melodies—and I vowed that one day they would spring magically from my fingers.

We ate our picnic lunch in the park beside the train station while Papa and the other men nailed the crate shut again and loaded it onto the wagon. The four Bauer boys—Wilfred, Paul, Karl, and Markus—came home with us to help unload it. Not trusting any of them—especially Markus—I rode in the back of the wagon to guard my precious cargo. Markus was three years older than me and, according to Sophie, a renowned prankster at school. He had dark, shaggy hair that hung in his eyes, and he wore a smirk of superiority on his wide mouth as if laughing at the whole world and everyone in it. I couldn’t imagine what he could possibly find to laugh about—his clothes were little more than rags and his bare feet were always stained three shades darker than the rest of him with ground-in dirt. Shopkeepers would suddenly grow more alert whenever Markus wandered into their stores, and I felt the same way every time he came around.

Papa drove the wagon slowly, carefully, all the way home. After a while, I discovered that if I pressed my ear to the side of the crate I could hear faint, chiming chords whenever we hit a bump. I closed my eyes and listened, imagining that I heard angels playing their harps in heaven.

“What in the world are you doing,
Katze
?” Markus asked. He called me Katze because I loved to chase the cats that lived in our barn.

“Nothing. I’m just resting my head.” I didn’t want to share my secret, but before I could stop him, Markus pressed his ear against the crate and discovered it for himself.

“Hey! You can hear music!” he announced to all his brothers. “Put your ear on it and listen!” If it hadn’t been such a terrible sin to hate someone, I would have hated Markus.

When we pulled into the yard, I didn’t see how the four scrawny Bauer boys could ever heave that huge piano up the porch steps and into our house. But Papa—wonderful, wise Papa—had figured everything out already. He pried loose a section of porch railing, then backed the wagon up to it. Once the crate was opened, the piano simply rolled off the wagon, across the porch, and right into our parlor on its own little wheels. He paid each of the Bauer boys for helping him—even Markus who, to my mind, hadn’t done much of anything. He allowed them to plunk the keys and spin around on the piano
stool a few times as part of their reward, then gave them each a couple of Mama’s apple fritters and packed them off to town on foot.

At last—and forever—the marvelous Sears Roebuck American Home upright parlor grand piano was mine!

Because she was the oldest, my sister Sophie was allowed to take piano lessons with the organist from church. At first I was green with envy—another terrible sin—but it soon became obvious to me and everyone else that Sophie would never find her way out of Book One. She couldn’t carry a tune if you put it in a bushel basket for her, much less play one on the piano. When her square, chunky fingers hit the ivories, it sounded as if a herd of Holsteins had stepped on a bees’ nest and were stampeding across the keyboard. She was supposed to practice for half an hour every night, but she would ask every five minutes if her time was up. And the way she squirmed on the piano stool, you would have thought it was crawling with fire ants.