She practically fled to the car, using the excuse that she wanted to load the items that Emma had given to her and Grace—then she decided to wait on the sidewalk for her mother to tie up all the loose ends in the apartment.
The warm spring day had turned chilly by late afternoon, and Suzanne shivered as the sun disappeared behind the apartment building. Signs of the season were harder to find here in the densely populated city, but as she waited she spotted dandelions on a small triangle of grass across the street and budding green leaves on a scraggly tree near the corner. She thought of the changes her great-grandmother had endured coming to America and wondered if God had devised the seasons as a reminder that nothing in life remains the same.
She looked up at the square brick building and found Emma’s living room window on the third floor. Would moving to the suburbs be difficult for her grandmother after so much time? Then she thought of the changes that lay ahead in her own life after the death of her ten-year-old marriage, and she shivered again.
A few minutes later her mother and grandmother emerged through the doors of the apartment building. How different they were—from head to toe! Grace’s curly hair was beautifully styled; Emma wore her straight, silver hair short and casual. Grace’s feet were shod in expensive Italian leather pumps; Emma’s feet sported cheap canvas deck shoes. How different their personalities were too! Grace was so much more cautious and conservative than her uninhibited, fun-loving mother. But then, Suzanne and her mother were very different women as well. Suzanne never would have worked her way to the top at New Woman magazine if she had been as passive as Grace.
Emma gave Suzanne a hug and kissed her good-bye. “Thanks for all your help, dear. And please don’t fight with your mother on the way home, all right?” She said it with a smile, and Suzanne couldn’t help smiling in return.
“That’s one of the things I’ve always loved about you, Grandma—you don’t give long lectures.”
Grace was unusually quiet on the drive home, deeply withdrawn into her own thoughts. Suzanne wondered what those thoughts were and if she was upset about something, but she decided not to ask. She really didn’t feel much like talking either. Almost against her will, she found herself thinking about her great-grandmother’s story again.
There was another important difference between her and Louise, one she hadn’t wanted to mention. While Louise had barely known her husband when they’d married and had later learned to love him, her story was the opposite—she and Jeffrey had started out deeply, passionately in love. They had begun their marriage as “one flesh,” but those bonds had long since died, along with the sparks and the flames.
Jeffrey had made his choice, she had made hers. And although she would never admit it to her mother, she was already seeing the consequences of those decisions in her daughters’ lives. Amy had been unusually disobedient and rebellious lately, Melissa overly emotional and clingy. They were both reacting to all the tension at home. Maybe things would improve once Jeff left for good.
Suzanne glanced at her mother and saw her surreptitiously wiping a tear. She was probably still crying over the happy ending to Louise’s story. Grace always cried at happy endings. Sue remembered her own reaction to the story and wondered why she hadn’t allowed herself to cry. Was she smothering her emotions as Louise had?
She sighed and merged the car into the racing freeway traffic. There was no room in her life for mawkish sentimentality. Like Louise wading out into the flood, she would have to be very strong in order to survive her new life alone.
* * *
A week after her mother gave her the photograph album, Grace sat alone in her kitchen leafing through it, brooding about the mysteries of her past. The black-and-white photos, faded and brittle with age, offered no hints to help her unravel Emma’s riddles, and the unanswered questions revolved endlessly in Grace’s mind like a carousel. She would grab hold of one and ride it for a while until the journey to nowhere made her dizzy, then let it go to ride the next one.
She turned each page of the album slowly, careful not to loosen the glue on the old-fashioned corner-mounts. Emma’s elaborate script, scrawled in white ink on the black pages, was nearly illegible, so she studied the mute faces instead. Some, like her father’s and her grandparents’, were known to Grace only by these photographs. What other expressions had animated their features besides this one, frozen forever by the camera?
Grace sat by the bay window in her breakfast nook, the only cozy spot in her sleek, echoing kitchen. Earlier that day her entire house had been polished to perfection by her weekly maid service, and she hated to disturb the vast, gleaming rooms. She could think of plenty of other things to do besides wasting her time with this scrapbook, but the paralyzing lethargy she felt seemed soul-deep.
When the kitchen doorbell suddenly rang, she was tempted to ignore it until she peered through the window and saw that it was Suzanne. She was dressed in a business suit, and Grace realized with a start how late in the afternoon it was. Suzanne was on her way home from work already. How had the empty day flown by so swiftly? Grace planted both palms on the table and wearily pushed herself to her feet.
“Why do you always ring the bell?” she asked as she opened the door. “Didn’t I give you a key?”
“I didn’t feel like sorting through all these to find it.” Suzanne held up an enormous key ring jammed with at least two dozen keys.
“Are all those really necessary? What on earth are they all for?”
“I have two locks on each door of my house,” she recited. “I need an ignition key and a trunk key for both of our cars, one key is for your house, one’s for my mother-in-law’s house, one’s for my post office box—and the other dozen are all from work.”
“I’m glad my life isn’t that complicated.”
“And I’m glad I don’t have to sit around in an empty house all day.” The mumbled words were loud enough for her to hear, but Grace chose to ignore them.
Suzanne handed her a manila file folder. “These are the design samples for the crisis pregnancy center logo. I’ve been reminding Jeff that he promised to do them for you weeks ago, and he finally scribbled them off last night—in between his endless calls to Chicago. If you don’t like any of them, don’t feel you have to use them. You won’t hurt Jeff’s feelings because he doesn’t have any feelings. There’s a new art director at my magazine who does great work—I can commission her to design a few.”
Jeffrey had sketched six designs in a variety of styles from modern to ornate, all beautifully and professionally rendered. Grace couldn’t help admiring her son-in-law’s creative talent. “Tell Jeffrey these are wonderful, thank you. The board will have a tough time choosing.”
Suzanne took a mug from the cupboard and poured herself a cup of coffee. “Speaking of choices, has the board had any luck finding a director yet?” There was a nasty edge to her voice that made Grace sink into her chair in the breakfast nook and rub her eyes.
“Don’t start on me, Suzanne. It’s been a trying week, moving your grandmother.”
Suzanne’s voice softened as she refilled Grace’s cup, then took a seat across from her. “I’m sorry. I just wish you’d listen to your heart and not to Daddy.” Grace didn’t answer. She felt so inexplicably close to tears, she didn’t dare. “You look a little down, Mom. What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know . . . exhaustion from the move . . . these photographs . . . I never imagined that moving my mother would stir up such a cloud of memories. Every time I look at these I feel pressured to sort through the memories and deal with them too, whether I want to or not.” She turned one page in the book, then another, without seeing any of the photos. “I can’t stop thinking about what my mother said the other day when we were packing. ‘Your father loved you more than life itself.’ Do you remember that, Sue? Didn’t it strike you as odd?”
“Grandma explained what she meant, didn’t she?”
“She attributed it to old age, but you and I both know she isn’t senile. I
had the distinct feeling she was hiding something.”
“Actually, I did too. But if that really was the truth—if Karl Bauer really did love you more than life itself—then everything else she’s told you about him was a lie.”
“I know. That’s why I’ve been in such a muddle the past few days. It’s very unsettling to have holes suddenly poked in the fabric of your life. I wish I could mend them, but how? Sue, the truth couldn’t possibly be worse than this terrible uncertainty, could it?” When Suzanne simply shrugged, Grace turned to the back of the album where there were several blank pages. She removed a folded piece of gray writing paper and handed it to her. “Read this. I found it stuck in the back of this scrapbook.”
Suzanne unfolded it and read the handwritten words aloud:
“‘To my beloved Emma,
When you are old and gray and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.’”
“Wow . . .” Suzanne breathed.
“I don’t recognize the handwriting,” Grace said, swallowing.
“I could be wrong, but I think this is a poem by Yeats. I’ll look in one of my anthologies when I get home.”
“I know that my mother bought this photo album when we lived on King Street, but for the life of me, I can’t imagine who would give her a love poem.”
Suzanne refolded the page and handed it to Grace. “If I were you, I’d search out the facts and deal with the past head on. Have you ever gone back to the town where Grandma came from and talked to her family—your family?”
“I didn’t think it was a good idea to rake up the past.”
“Closure, Mom. Don’t you ever wonder what really happened between her and your father?”
“Of course I do. I’ve wondered about it all my life. When I was a child the other girls would hound me about him. Who was he? Where was he? Why didn’t he live with us? Was he in jail? Divorce was a rare and scandalous event back then.”
“Did you ever confront Grandma and ask her to tell you more about him?”
“It didn’t occur to me to question her until I became a teenager. Then when she refused to answer my questions, I decided to run away and find Karl Bauer myself. I even bought a bus ticket to Bremenville, but the man who ran the bus depot knew my mother, and while I was waiting for the bus to arrive, he sent for her. She and I had a terrible fight. The more I insisted on going, the more upset she became until finally, for the first time, she told me that my father didn’t want me—that he had tried to make her abort me. By the time she finished the gruesome story, she had me convinced that if I went anywhere near him he’d want to kill me all over again. That was also the first time I learned what he did for a living—that he owned a drugstore in Bremenville.”
“You’re an adult, not a teenager. Surely you’re mature enough to handle your father’s problem for what it was—Aw problem, not yours.”
“It took a huge toll on my mother to have to tell me the truth that day. And there was something else. A sense of . . . I don’t know . . . a sense that I was hurting her by wanting more love than she could give me. She always insisted that she and I were a family, complete in ourselves. I think it would still hurt her if she found out I was looking for my family somewhere else.”
“Then don’t tell her. Besides, I’d like to know more too. He is my grandfather. We have a right to know the truth.”
“We went to Bremenville once to find him. Do you remember?”
“No, when was that?”
“We had driven up to the state park for a picnic one Saturday, all four of us. You and your brother were in grade school at the time. On the way home I saw the signs for Bremenville, only twenty miles or so off the main road, and I asked your father, please . . . couldn’t we at least just see the town? It was summertime and beastly hot riding in a car without air conditioning, so I was amazed when he agreed to stop. You know how your father hates to change his plans.”
Suzanne made a stern face. “‘Let’s stick to the plans, here,’” she said, in an uncanny imitation of Stephen. “‘No need to change well-laid plans.’”
“That’s him,” Grace said, smiling. “Anyhow, Bremenville turned out to be a quaint little town, nestled in a valley in the mountains. I imagine it’s a tourist trap by now, with the lake and all, but back in the ’50s it was relatively undiscovered. You could tell it was settled by Germans because the village looked as if it had been plucked right out of the old country and transplanted to America. Even the names on the stores and the mailboxes were German. The Squaw River divides the town in half, and although it looked peacefull enough when we were there, I couldn’t help remembering Grandma’s story about the big flood when she was a child. Especially when it started to rain as soon as we pulled into town.”
Suzanne twirled her hand impatiently. “And the point is . . .”
“The point . . .?”
“Did you find your family or not!”
Her impatience irritated Grace. “You’re your father’s daughter, Suzanne. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. And I am getting to the point. We stopped for gas on the outskirts of town and it seemed to take forever for a fill-up, especially since I’d been waiting all my life to find my father. So when Stephen rolled down the window to pay for the gas, I asked the attendant if there was a drugstore in town. ‘Sure,’ he says. ‘Bauer’s drugstore, straight down Main Street about four blocks. Can’t miss it.’
“There’s no way to describe how it felt to be so close—thrilling and terrifying at the same time. I was in Bremenville, four blocks from my father’s drugstore! Stephen asked the attendant if the Bauers still owned it, and I was afraid I’d never be able to hear his answer above the drumming of the rain on the roof and the hammering of my heart.
“‘Yes, sir,” he said.‘Karl Bauer has run that store for as far back as I can recall.’
“We pulled out of the gas station, but only drove about a block down the street when all of a sudden the sky opened up in a tremendous cloudburst. The rain just poured down. I’d never seen anything like it before—or since. Stephen had to pull over and stop because we absolutely could not see a thing.”
“I remember now!” Suzanne said. “That was unbelievable! I thought for sure the car was going to fill up with water and we were all going to drown.”
Grace took a sip of coffee. “I was getting worried too. The rain went on and on—probably for a good ten minutes. When it finally let up, we started inching our way down the street again, but about a block later the entire intersection was flooded. Stephen didn’t dare drive through it, so he took a detour around the block, and by the time we dodged all the flooding on the side streets we ended up lost.”
“So you never found his store?”
“Oh, we eventually found it. Stephen was a man on a mission, you know. The store looked like something out of a bygone era . . . striped awning out front, ornate soda fountain with those little wire chairs, a row of old-fashioned glass medicine bottles with stoppers. But Bauer’s drugstore was closed.”
“No!”
“It was ten minutes past six by then, and the store had closed at six o’clock. Evidently on Saturday night, the entire town closed up at six o’clock. By the time we got back to the gas station, that was closed too. There wasn’t a soul we could ask for directions to Karl Bauer’s house—not that I would have dared go to his house! Getting up the nerve to go into his store was one thing, but going to his
house? No, it just wasn’t meant to be.”
Suzanne rolled her eyes. “You know, I really hate it when you start all that ‘Divine Destiny’ stuff. Name one good reason why God wouldn’t want you to meet your father? Aren’t you curious about him? Don’t you want to know more?”
“Aside from curiosity, what would be the point? Besides, he was several years older than my mother, so he must be long dead by now.”
“What about Grandma’s family . . . whatever happened to her sisters?”
Grace paged through the scrapbook to find the old-fashioned studio portrait of four little girls in starched white dresses and high-button shoes. “That’s her older sister, Sophie, who was born in Germany; that’s Mother; that’s Eva; and that’s the baby, Vera. As far as I know, when my mother left Karl, she never saw her parents or her sisters again.”
“Doesn’t that strike you as terribly strange, Mom? Avoiding Karl is one thing, but turning her back on her own family? It doesn’t make sense.”
“I know. Grandma would never even talk about them. I was very surprised when she told us her mother’s story last week.”
“I’ll go to Bremenville with you if you want to play detective. This time we’ll check the weather report first,” Suzanne added with a grin.
Grace slowly closed the photo album. “No, let’s just leave things the way they are, Suzanne.”
Long after her daughter left, Grace remained at the kitchen table, too weary to move. At last she opened the scrapbook again to the only picture she’d ever seen of Karl Bauer. He stood behind her mother on their wedding day, only slightly taller than Emma, but his vast shoulders and thick-set build seemed to dwarf her slender frame. His hair and full beard were dark, his flowing mustache hid all but a sliver of his mouth from view. His broad face was dramatically handsome with high, well-defined cheekbones and dark, curving eyebrows. Grace stared longest of all at his eyes, studying them for a glint of cruelty that might have forewarned Emma of her future. But no matter how long she gazed, Grace couldn’t read any emotion in them at all.