With that money, he had bought the farmstead in North Dakota and opened the shop. He had worked skinning steers and butchering hogs eighteen hours a day to bring Eva, Franz, and then Tante to abide with him. His forbearing, kind mother, and his father, strict and distant, he missed. And his brother, who now shared the family business. But there was work and more work, always more of it, always he was behind what should be done. There was no question, now, of leaving even to visit his family. He read their letters and set them aside before they penetrated to the still center of his person, where he could feel such a thing as loneliness.
Tante took the letters back and slipped them into her purse with a grimace of dissatisfaction. She concentrated even harder on making him aware of her list of shocking true facts about Delphine. He waved her off. She bit her lip at his defense of the Polish woman. Fumed with frustration. To other people, she couldn’t go too far in her criticisms, she could not include her brother, lest his business be spoiled and his customers frequent the butcher on the other side of town. Some of her resentful angers had to simmer; then, as stews do, they thickened. She brooded on the grave injustice dealt her by her brother and fantasized returning to Ludwigsruhe. These imaginings, also, grew thick with detail and brimmed with improbable incidents. For instance, into her mind there came the picture of her return complete with boys — well, maybe not Markus, but the other three. Or the twins alone. That could be done.
The way she saw it, she could not return to Germany alone, having failed to find a husband in this new land of men unwinnowed by war. She had to return with something. Motherless children would do. As the heroic guardian of her brother’s children, she could reenter town life as their aunt, not an old maid aunt but an aunt with dependents. She would have some status. Otherwise, what was there?
Sometimes, in her spare little house, her sitting room dominated by the cheap teacher’s desk she’d bought secondhand at that, her mind jumped like a rat in a cage. She couldn’t keep doing bookwork like this, drying up a little more every day, becoming brittle as the pages she wrote on and stiff as the figures she added and subtracted. And yet, if the truth be known, what was all that attractive and important about having a husband? Her friends each had one, and all they did was complain about their men’s dingy remarks, their gross habits, their absences, or boast about the types of foods and quantities they ate. There wasn’t any real use that she could see in a husband, unless he was rich. And without a rich husband, she had only the books of three struggling concerns to balance — Krohn Hardware, Olson’s Café, and the butcher shop — and they could hardly pay her the pittance she asked. So it seemed to her that the only way out of her stark room was to find a rich husband, or to get rid of Delphine and somehow wangle Emil and Erich away from their father while they were still young enough to charm others and not so old as to give her any trouble.
Of course, there was another way. She could, herself, make money. She thought about it. Make money. Nothing occurred to her. She thought about it some more and came to believe it was her only hope. The wish for money began to turn in her brain with a frantic compulsion. She dreamed dollars, dreamed oceans, dreamed of walking off a steamer back to Germany wearing a fur coat. Money danced behind steel bars at night, just out of her reach. One afternoon, over her pale meal of bread and one white veal sausage, a thought struck her that seemed so crazy and outlandish she put it aside. But it came back. She found herself unable to think of anything else.
By the time she got up the next morning, Tante had decided to sell the last remaining piece of her grandmother’s jewelry, a cameo that her grandmother had left her, a large and spectacularly carved profile of a woman both demure and sensual. The carving was very fine, and the face sensitive and yet a little wild, the cream hair flowing into the pink of the shell. Tante had admired the cameo as a child, and when she took it from its hiding place, a tiny aperture in the wall behind her dresser, she remembered how she had touched it, softly, pinned to lace at her grandmother’s throat on a sunny day at a garden picnic. Times long past. For her it represented all that was secure and comfortable, all that was irreproachable and solid about her life in Germany before the war. She wore it often, too often, to remind herself. To give it up was no small thing. But she was determined. She put the cameo inside a sock and put the sock in her purse. She would sell it, and with the money she would buy a new and fashionable suit. Wearing that suit, she would go to the bank and not leave until she had a job that would eventually, somehow, because it was situated near a large amount of cash, all the money in the town, make her rich.
DELPHINE NEARLY FELL over when she saw Tante, later that week, wearing not the black dress she had inhabited like a second skin, but a skirted suit welded from some fabric of an unusual metallic sheen and stiffness. The thing looked to have been cut and soldered together much like an armor. Tante looked invincible, which was her intention. As she walked to the bank owned and run by the only man in town she knew could afford steaks every night of the week, she felt that things were going to change for her. The suit would do it, she was positive. As she sat outside his office, waiting, and even as she looked at all the bank tellers and clerks, younger, all young men, she still had faith in the material of the suit she wore. The suit’s glazed weave sustained her. And even when she was refused a position of any type at the bank, the suit helped her not to lose her belief. She decided to walk down the street, up the street, all over town, and not to quit until she had a position that would bring her money — whatever it might be. Whoever might hire her. The suit would find the place. The suit would bring her there.
So maybe, said Delphine to Cyprian later, the thing was magnetic. It looked it. How else should it happen that Tante should be struck by a car that looked to have been made of the same substance as what she wore? Dragging her feet, worrying the one dime in her purse, Tante crossed the street without looking and was hit by the car of Gus Newhall, the former bootlegger who now sold patent medicines, just coming from the bank, where he’d made a substantial deposit. The car upended Tante in the dust and rolled her sideways into a tree trunk, but didn’t do actual, serious damage to her person that could be seen from the outside anyway. The suit wasn’t even dusty, but when smoothed gave off the same luster as before. Tante righted herself, pushed away the arms of alarmed witnesses, and would have told Gus Newhall that he was a reckless fool, a swine, a dog’s blood cur, only he was a good customer to Fidelis. So she shut her mouth and staggered off, already aching. She made her way to her house. In her front room, on a thick oval of braided rag rug, she lay down. Steadily and with a German effectiveness and efficiency that surprised even herself, she cursed everyone she’d met that day starting with the jeweler who had bought her beloved cameo and who would not, she was certain, trade it back for the suit that had betrayed her.
FRANZ WAS RIDING Mazarine Shimek’s bicycle and Mazarine was balancing. Her rear end fit into the U of the curved handlebars, and Franz held tight to the rubber grips on either end. He tried to peer over her shoulder, under her lightly sweatered arm, onto the road before them. He tried not to look at the way the lilac-flowered material of her dress stretched over what rested on the handlebars. Her feet, knees together, white anklets and heavy boy’s tie shoes, were carefully placed on the front fender. Her light brown hair was long and curled out of the dull, frayed ribbon she used to hold it back. Strands of it brushed the end of Franz’s nose, or touched the top of his lip, or grazed his cheek, as they rode into a light breezy wind on their way to the airfield.