Emma smiled mischievously. “You just want my reasons for ammunition—so you can argue with me and show me the error of my ways. Papa used to do the same thing with his reluctant parishioners.”
“Look, I don’t care if you attend services or not, but I care very much that you’re estranged from God. You never want me to talk about Him, you don’t read the Bible, you never go to church unless there’s a wedding or a baptism . . . I’ve never seen you take Communion in my entire life. What I don’t understand is, why? Why won’t you have anything to do with God?”
“You don’t know for certain what goes on between me and God.”
“That’s the point. I need that certainty. I need to know where you’ll be for eternity. Can’t you please give me some assurance?”
Emma walked to the window, silent for a moment as she looked out at the beautifully landscaped lawns. “Papa baptized me as a baby, you know, and I used to go to church with my parents when I lived at home. Then Karl and I went to Papa’s church after we were married. I know what the Bible says, but . . .” Emma didn’t finish. It was as if she’d reached a locked door that she refused to open.
“Something must have happened. Why won’t you tell me? Does it have anything to do with my father? Or with your sister Eva’s death?”
Emma finally turned to face her again. “I can’t go to church with you Grace, I’m sorry. But if you give me time . . . maybe I can find a way to answer some of your questions, okay?”
“All right.” It would have to be. There had always been doors her mother refused to open, and no amount of coaxing would change her mind. But what of Suzanne’s suggestion that they play detective? After all these years, was it possible to find the keys and unlock the secret doors herself?
She pondered the idea as she unpacked a box of kitchen utensils, stuffing them into an already jammed drawer. Then she wandered into her mother’s bedroom to set a picture of Amy and Melissa on her mother’s nightstand. The stand had a small drawer, and Grace opened it to see if it was as crammed as all the others. It was empty, except for an aged sheet of gray writing paper with the now-familiar handwriting, printed with the same blue fountain pen.
To my beloved Emma,
I am haunted by numberless islands, and many a Danaan shore, Where Time would surely forget us, and Sorrow come near us no more; Soon far from the rose and the lily, and fret of the flames would we be, Were we only white birds, my beloved, buoyed out on the foam of the sea!
Grace’s hand trembled as she put the poem inside the drawer and closed it again. She thought she had known her mother well, but she really didn’t know her at all. How many hidden drawers and closed doors were there in her life? What other secrets was she hiding?
Back in the living room, Grace studied her mother as she would a stranger. Emma hummed to herself as she searched in vain for a place to store the same stack of dish towels she had tried to put away earlier. Finally, she opened the lid of the garbage can and dropped them squarely into the trash.
“Mother!”
“Oh, who needs them. I never dry my dishes anyway.”
“But you can’t just throw away a perfectly good set of dish towels!”
“I’m eighty years old, dear. I’ve earned the right to be eccentric.”
“Maybe Suzanne can use them.” As Grace fished them out of the garbage she spotted an unopened carton, forgotten beside the broom closet. “Oh no. What’s in this one?” She opened the flaps and unwrapped a pink sugar bowl—it was the box of depression glass. “I thought you were going to sell these to the antique dealer.”
“Please don’t be angry, dear, but I just couldn’t bear to part with them.” Emma took the sugar bowl from Grace’s hand and held it like a priceless heirloom. “Remember how you and I used to have tea parties with these dishes? We called them our ‘good china,’ and we’d make butter and sugar sandwiches, and pretend we were eating caviar.”
Tears sprang to Grace’s eyes before she could stop them. “I used to think our tea parties were more wonderful than any held by the queen of England.”
Emma wrapped her arms around her and held her tightly. “Oh, but they were, Gracie! They were!” When she released her again, Grace carefully wiped her eyes.
“Would you mind if I changed my mind, Mother? I think I’ll take the dishes home after all.”
* * *
“Any idea where I can put these?” Grace asked with a sigh. She stood with Suzanne in the middle of her chic, contemporary dining room, trying to find a place to display the depression glass. Spread out on the marble tabletop, the gaudy pink and green dishes looked like painted prostitutes among her home’s carefully coordinated neutral tones. Stephen would never allow her to display the thick pressed glass in the china cabinet beside her Royal Doulton china and Waterford crystal.
“Put them anywhere you want, Mom. And don’t you dare let Daddy talk you out of them.”
Grace smiled ruefully. “I don’t suppose you’d care to stick around and watch the fireworks when he sees them?”
“No thanks. I get all the fireworks I want at my own house.”
“What on earth was I thinking when I took these silly things?” she said, sighing again. “I guess finding that second love poem turned my brain to sentimental mush.”
“You found another poem?”
“Didn’t I tell you? It was in Grandma’s nightstand, written on the same gray paper, in the same handwriting as the first one.”
“Let’s see it!”
“I left it in the drawer where I found it.”
“Oh, thanks a lot! Was it signed or anything?” Grace shook her head. “Well, from the way Grandma described him, we know Karl Bauer didn’t write them.”
“Mother did say she had a lot of suitors before she was married, remember? It must be from one of them.”
“I had dozens of boyfriends too, but I wouldn’t keep their old love poems for fifty years. You know, Grandma’s story raised more questions than it answered. Did she ever explain exactly why Karl didn’t want any children?”
“He probably never gave her a reason. I gather he was a man of few words and strong opinions.”
“And I still don’t understand why she ran away from her own family as well as her husband.”
“I guess because she knew they would take Karl’s side. That old-world, nineteenth-century concept of a wife being her husband’s property died a slow, hard death.”
Suzanne gestured to the depression glass. “I’m not so sure it’s dead.”
“I’ll ignore that last comment.” Grace scooped up the empty carton and carried it out to the kitchen. Suzanne followed her a moment later, looking at her watch.
“I think I’ll head home. Jeff hasn’t spent this much time with the girls in their entire lives. He’s probably fed up with fatherhood by now and is letting them watch horror movies on cable TV.”
“Here, don’t forget these dish towels. You know, I just don’t understand my mother at all. She throws out a dozen brand-new towels and keeps fifty-year-old love poems . . . not to mention these silly things.” Grace brandished the cigar box containing the miniature vestments. “Can you imagine? I made these when I was four years old!”
“It makes perfect sense, Mom. You wanted the depression glass because the pieces have very special memories for you. Obviously, the poems and the vestments must mean something special to Grandma. The question is, what?”
“Well, unless she decides to tell us, we’ll never know.”
“Not necessarily. I’ve been thinking . . . you and I will both be on our own the last weekend of this month, with Jeff leaving for Chicago and Daddy going to his medical convention. Why don’t we drive to Bremenville and play detective?”
“Have you given any thought at all to going with Jeff and at least trying to look for a job?”
“No, so let’s not get into it.” Suzanne’s lips clamped tightly shut, as if that was the end of the discussion. Then, unable to keep her anger inside, it spewed
out a moment later like soda pop from a shaken bottle. “He brought home job listings from all the Chicago newspapers the last time he went there, with possibilities for me circled in red ink! Can you imagine the nerve? I didn’t speak to him for days!”
“He’s trying to salvage your marriage, Sue.”
“Why should I give up my career at a magazine I love, my seniority, my retirement benefits—just because I’m the woman and he’s the man? That’s so Victorian it’s obscene!”
Grace thought of her two little granddaughters, growing up as she had without a father, and her eyes filled with tears. If only she could find a way to make Suzanne change her mind. Grace knew she was partly to blame; she had sacrificed too much of herself for Stephen’s sake and now Suzanne was determined not to make the same mistake. Her mother was right—they were like wooden nesting dolls, each woman shaped by the choices her mother had made. The only way to break that pattern, Emma had said, was to study the past and learn from it.
“Suppose I agreed to go on this fact-finding mission of yours up in Bremenville?” Grace finally said. “How would we go about it?”
“Are you serious? You’d really go?”
“I would love to find Mother’s sisters, if they’re still alive, and help her make peace with her family. Do you suppose we could locate them after all this time?”
“Sure. There are books that tell you how to go about tracing your roots. We could look up our Bauer relatives too, along with the Schroders. We’ll have to leave on a Friday, though, so the government offices will be open. Then we can stay overnight and snoop around some more on Saturday.”
“Fridays are out. That’s when I get my hair done.” The scorching look Suzanne gave her said more to Grace than a twenty-minute lecture on priorities. “All right, all right, I could change my appointment. But will you be able to get Friday off?”
“I’ll turn it into a writing assignment. Genealogy is a hot topic at the moment, and it would make a great feature article—minus our family secrets, of course.”
“What about the girls? Would we take them with us?”
“Jeff’s mother would love to get her hands on them for the weekend. He has her convinced that we’re all moving to Chicago as soon as school is out and she’ll never see them again. So are we going or not?”
Grace hesitated, suddenly unsure if she really wanted to learn the truth about the past. But when she remembered the locked door between Emma and God, she knew she had to find the key.
“This is crazy, Suzanne.”
“I know. That’s what makes it so much fun.”
* * *
“What’s the plan?” Grace asked, yawning, “or are we just winging it?” Five-thirty in the morning seemed a dubious hour to be launching into uncharted territory. She stowed her suitcase in the trunk of Suzanne’s car and sank into the passenger’s seat beside her.
“Here, I bought you some coffee,” Suzanne said as she started the engine. “According to this great book I’ve been reading, we can find all sorts of records—divorce papers, marriage licenses, death certificates—at the county courthouse. It’ll be easier to find Grandma’s sisters if we know their married names. My plan is to arrive at the courthouse as soon as it opens and try to find what we need before noon. That will give us time to drive to Bremenville and poke around there for the rest of the day.”
Grace sipped her coffee slowly as they drove to the expressway and headed north, allowing the over-boiled brew to nudge her into consciousness. The sun hadn’t risen yet, but streaks of red smudged the sky on her right. It seemed an ill omen, like bloody handwriting on the wall.
“Remind me again why we’re doing this?”
Suzanne smiled playfully. “Want a little heat on your feet, Mom? Are they feeling a bit cold? . . . Take a look in that folder on the backseat. I wrote up a list of objectives so we’d stay focused.”
“You are just like your father,” Grace said as she reached into the backseat. “I’m surprised it isn’t labeled Battle Plans.”
The top sheet in the folder had the word OBJECTIVES typed in capital letters. Grace read the list to herself.
(1) Find Grandma’s sisters: Sophie Schroder Mueller (husband Otto)—born 1895—??
(2) and Vera Schroder? born 1905—??
(3) Locate information about Louise and Friedrich Schroder—church in Bremenville.
(4) Find out why Grandma was estranged from them.
(5) Information about Karl Dietrich Bauer—born in Dusseldorf, Germany 1894—??
(6) Divorced from Grandma c.1925?—Why?!
(7) Why didn’t Karl Bauer want children?
(8) Information about Grandma—Emma Schroder Bauer—b. 1900 in Bremenville.
(9) Who sent her the love poems?
Mentally, Grace added two more objectives of her own: (1) Find the reason for Mother’s estrangement from God, and (2) Demonstrate to Suzanne what a mistake it would be to divorce Jeff. But what if their findings caused an ancient, crumbling skeleton to topple out of the closet? Grace closed the folder and shuddered. The fact that she was searching for answers implied that she suspected Emma’s version of the past was incomplete or misleading. Did she really want to risk uncovering an unpleasant truth? She flipped on the radio to drown out these nagging thoughts.
They reached the county courthouse just as it opened at nine o’clock. The huge nineteenth-century brick building sat on the town square in a grassy, tree-shaded park. The clock in the tower, like the sleepy town itself, had come to a halt more than a decade ago. The fact that it had stalled at five minutes to midnight seemed another ill omen to Grace, although she couldn’t have said why.
“Corinthian columns,” Suzanne informed her, pointing to the pillars that framed the entrance.
“See? Aren’t you glad you took that art history course in college?” Grace had intended it as a joke, but when Suzanne frowned and hurried up the steps without answering, she realized her mistake—Suzanne had met Jeff while taking that art history class.
By eleven-thirty, with the help of a clerk, they had unearthed a marriage certificate for Emma and Karl, and for Emma’s two sisters, learning that the youngest one, Vera, had married Robert Schultz in 1927. They found death certificates for Eva, who had died in the 1918 influenza epidemic; for Karl Bauer, who had died of cancer in 1969; and for Emma’s older sister, Sophie, who had died of heart failure in 1970.
“But there doesn’t seem to be a death certificate for Grandma’s youngest sister, Vera,” Suzanne said when she’d finished searching the most recent files.
“Good!” Grace smiled. “Maybe there’s a glimmer of hope that Vera is still alive and can be reunited with Mother. Maybe all this digging will yield sweet fruit, after all. How about a coffee break to celebrate?”
“In a minute.” Suzanne’s dark head was bent over a file containing divorce records.
Grace pulled a moist towelette from her purse and carefully wiped the dust and ink from her fingers. She had forgotten her earlier misgivings and was beginning to feel euphoric when Suzanne suddenly looked up from the file, her eyes wide with surprise.
“Oh boy. You’d better sit down, Mom.”
“Why? What did you find?” Grace was afraid to ask, certain from the expression on Sue’s face that she’d see a leering skull or a pile of old bones.
“I found Grandma’s divorce certificate, granted in 1926. Are you ready for this? It was Karl, not Grandma, who petitioned the court for a divorce.”
“That’s not so surprising. She deserted him.”
“But the stated grounds for divorce, attested to by two witnesses, was marital unfaithfulness. According to Karl Bauer, Grandma committed adultery.”
“That’s ridiculous!” But Grace had a horrible, sick feeling in the pit of her stomach, nonetheless. “What a horrible thing to do, slandering my mother’s reputation like that!”
“Mom, according to this, she never contested the charges.”
Grace’s stomach turned over again. A
gainst her will, she pictured the woman who had been caught in the act of adultery and brought before Jesus. A crowd of leering, self-righteous men gathered around to accuse her, pointing fingers. “I wonder who the two witnesses to this alleged adultery were?”
“No offense, Mom, but your father sounds like a real jerk.”
“If he was spreading lies like this around Bremenville, it’s no wonder my mother left town and never returned.”
Suzanne stared at the document as if it contained encoded secrets. “I don’t understand why it took two years, though. Grandma left him in October of 1924, you were born in May of 1925, but the divorce wasn’t finalized until November, 1926.”
“Do you suppose he tried to coax my mother to move back in with him all that time?” Grace mused. “Could he have seen me as a baby and changed his mind about not wanting children? Maybe that’s why my mother said he loved me.”
Suzanne closed the file. She gathered all the photocopied documents they’d requested and stuffed them into her folder. “Well, we can congratulate ourselves,” she said. “We’ve managed to answer one question on our list—who your aunt Vera married—and we’ve raised about two dozen new ones.”
EIGHTEEN
* * *
“I can’t believe our luck!” Suzanne replaced the receiver on the motel phone. “Not only is Great-aunt Vera alive and well and living here in Bremenville, but she has just invited us to come and see her in half an hour. She sounded as spry as Grandma on the phone. I’ll bet she can answer our questions.”
“Wonderful,” Grace said flatly. She was lying across one of the motel beds with her arm draped over her eyes, wondering again why she had agreed to come. She had pursued the truth, hoping to restore order to Emma’s and Suzanne’s lives, but her own life was being thrown into chaos instead. Still reeling from the discovery that her mother had been accused of adultery, Grace wasn’t sure she was ready to face any more surprises.