by Otto Penzler
Shortly after Gretel Nissenbaum’s disappearance there emerged, from numerous sources, from all points of the compass, certain tales of the woman. How rude she’d been, more than once, to the Dieckman’s!—to many in the Lutheran congregation! A bad wife. Unnatural mother. It was said she’d left her husband and children in the past, running back to her family in Chautauqua Falls, or was it Port Oriskany; and poor John Nissenbaum having to fetch her home again. (This was untrue, though in time, even to Constance and Cornelia, it would come to seem true. As an elderly woman Cornelia would swear she remembered “both times” her mother ran off.) A shameless hussy, a tramp who had an eye for men. Had the hots for men. Anything in pants. Or was she stuck-up, snobby. Marrying into the Nissenbaum family, a man almost old enough to be her father, no mystery there! Worse yet she could be sharp-tongued, profane. Heard to utter such words as damn, goddamn, hell. Yes and horseballs, bullshit. Standing with her hands on her hips fixing her eyes on you, that loud laugh. And showing her teeth that were too big for her mouth. She was too smart for her own good, that’s for sure. She was scheming, faithless. Everybody knew she flirted with her husband’s hired hands, she did a hell of a lot more than flirt with them, ask around. Sure she had a boyfriend, a lover. Sure she was an adulteress. Hadn’t she run off with a man? She’d run off and where was she to go, where was a woman to go, except run off with a man? Whoever he was.
In fact, he’d been sighted: a tower operator for the Chautauqua & Buffalo railroad, big redheaded guy living in Shaheen, twelve miles away. Or was he a carpet-sweeper salesman, squirrelly little guy with a mustache and a smooth way of talking, who passed through the valley every few months but, after April 12, 1923, was never seen there again.
Another, more attractive rumor was that Gretel Nissenbaum’s lover was a thirty-year-old Navy officer stationed at Port Oriskany. He’d been transferred to a base in North Carolina, or was it Pensacola, Florida, and Gretel had no choice but run away with him, she loved him so. And three months pregnant with his child.
There could have been no romance in the terrible possibility that Gretel Nissenbaum had fled on foot, alone, not to her family but simply to escape from her life; in what exigency of need, what despondency of spirit, no name might be given it by any who have not experienced it.
But, in any case, where had she gone?
Where? Disappeared. Over the edge of the world. To Chicago, maybe. Or that Army base in North Carolina, or Florida.
We forgave, we forgot. We didn’t miss her.
The things Gretel Nissenbaum left behind in the haste of her departure.
Several dresses, hats. A shabby cloth coat. Rubberized “galoshes” and boots. Undergarments, mended stockings. Knitted gloves. In the parlor of John Nissenbaum’s house, in cut-glass vases, bright yellow daffodils she’d made from crepe paper; hand-painted fans, teacups; books she’d brought with her from home—A Golden Treasury of Verse, Mark Twain’s Joan of Arc, Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise, missing its jacket cover. Tattered programs for musical shows, stacks of popular piano music from the days Gretel had played in her childhood home. (There was no piano in Nissenbaum’s house, Nissenbaum had no interest in music.)
These meager items, and some others, Nissenbaum unceremoniously dumped into cardboard boxes fifteen days after Gretel disappeared, taking them to the Lutheran church, for the “needy fund”; without inquiring if the Hausers might have wanted anything, or whether his daughters might have wished to be given some mementos of their mother.
Spite? Not John Nissenbaum. He was a proud man even in his public humiliation. It was the Lord’s work he was thinking of. Not mere human vanity, at all.
That spring and summer Reverend Dieckman gave a series of grim, threatening, passionate sermons from the pulpit of the First Lutheran Church of Ransomville. It was obvious why, what the subject of the sermons was. The congregation was thrilled.
Reverend Dieckman, whom Connie and Nelia feared, as much for his fierce smiles as his stern, glowering expression, was a short, bulky man with a dull-gleaming dome of a head, eyes like ice water. Years later when they saw a photograph of him, inches shorter than his wife, they laughed in nervous astonishment—was that the man who’d intimidated them so? Before whom even John Nissenbaum stood grave and down-gazing.
Yet: that ringing, vibrating voice of the God of Moses, the God of the Old Testament, you could not shut out of consciousness even hours, days later. Years later. Pressing your hands against your ears and shutting your eyes tight, tight.
“‘Unto the WOMAN He said, I will GREATLY MULTIPLY thy sorrow and thy conception; IN SORROW shalt thou bring forth children: and thy desire shall be to THY HUSBAND, and he shall RULE OVER THEE. And unto Adam He said, Because thou hast harkened unto the voice of THY WIFE, and has eaten of THE TREE, of which I commanded thee saying, THOU SHALT NOT EAT OF IT: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shall thou eat of it all the days of thy life: THORNS ALSO AND THISTLES shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field; in the SWEAT OF THY FACE shalt thou eat bread, till thou return to the ground; for out of it thou wast taken: for DUST THOU ART, and UNTO DUST SHALT THOU RETURN.’” Reverend Dieckman paused to catch breath like a man running uphill. Greasy patches gleamed on his solid face like coins. Slowly his ice-eyes searched the rows of worshipers until as if by chance they came to rest on the upturned yet cowering faces of John Nissenbaum’s daughters, who sat in the family pew, directly in front of the pulpit in the fifth row, between their rigid-backed father in his clothes somber as mourning and their Grandmother Nissenbaum also in clothes somber as mourning though badly round-shouldered, with a perceptible hump, this cheerless dutiful grandmother who had come to live with them now that their mother was gone.
(Their other grandparents, the Hausers, who lived in Chautauqua Falls and whom they’d loved, the sisters would never see again. It was forbidden even to speak of these people, Gretel’s people. The Hausers were to blame somehow for Gretel’s desertion. Though they claimed, would always claim, they knew nothing of what she’d done and in fact feared something had happened to her. But the Hausers were a forbidden subject. Only after Constance and Cornelia were grown, no longer living in their father’s house, did they see their Hauser cousins; but still, as Cornelia confessed, she felt guilty about it. Father would have been so hurt and furious if he’d known. Consorting with the enemy he would deem it. Betrayal.)
In Sunday school, Mrs. Dieckman took special pains with little Constance and little Cornelia. They were regarded with misty-eyed pity, like child lepers. Fattish little Constance prone to fits of giggling, and hollow-eyed little Cornelia prone to sniffles, melancholy. Both girls had chafed, reddened faces and hands because their Grandmother Nissenbaum scrubbed them so, with strong gray soap, never less than twice a day. Cornelia’s dun-colored hair was strangely thin. When the other children trooped out of the Sunday school room, Mrs. Dieckman kept the sisters behind, to pray with them. She was very concerned about them, she said. She and Reverend Dieckman prayed for them constantly. Had their mother contacted them, since leaving? Had there been any . . . hint of what their mother was planning to do? Any strangers visiting the farm? Any . . . unusual incidents? The sisters stared blankly at Mrs. Dieckman. She frowned at their ignorance, or its semblance. Dabbed at her watery eyes and sighed as if the world’s weight had settled on her shoulders. She said half-chiding, “You should know, children, it’s for a reason that your mother left you. It’s God’s will. God’s plan. He is testing you, children. You are special in his eyes. Many of us have been special in his eyes and have emerged stronger for it, and not weaker.” There was a breathy pause. The sisters were invited to contemplate how Mrs. Dieckman with her soft-wattled face, her stout-corseted body and fattish legs encased in opaque support hose, was a stronger and not a weaker person, by God’s special plan. “You will learn to be stronger than girls with mothers, Constance and Cornelia—” (these words girls with mothers enunciated oddly, contemptuously). “You are
already learning: feel God’s strength coursing through you!” Mrs. Dieckman seized the girls’ hands, squeezing so quick and hard that Connie burst into frightened giggles and Nelia shrieked as if she’d been burned, and almost wet her panties.
Nelia acquired pride, then. Instead of being ashamed, publicly humiliated (at the one-room country schoolhouse, for instance: where certain of the other children were ruthless), she could be proud, like her father. God had a special feeling for me. God cared about me. Jesus Christ, his only son, was cruelly tested, too. And exalted. You can bear any hurt and degradation. Thistles and thorns. The flaming sword, the cherubims guarding the garden.
Mere girls with mothers, how could they know?
4
Of course, Connie and Nelia had heard their parents quarreling. In the weeks, months before their mother disappeared. In fact, all their lives. Had they been queried, had they had the language, they might have said This is what is done, a man, a woman—isn’t it?
Connie, who was three years older than Nelia, knew much that Nelia would not ever know Not words exactly, these quarrels, and of a tone different from their father shouting out instructions to his farm hands. Not words but an eruption of voices. Ringing through the floorboards if the quarrel came from downstairs. Reverberating in the windowpanes where wind thinly whistled. In bed, Connie would hug Nelia tight, pretending Nelia was Momma. Or Connie was herself Momma. If you shut your eyes tight enough. If you shut your ears. Always after the voices there came silence. If you wait. Once, crouched at the foot of the stairs it was Connie?—or Nelia?—gazing upward astonished as Momma descended the stairs swaying like a drunk woman, her left hand groping against the railing, face dead-white and a bright crimson rosebud in the corner of her mouth glistening as she wiped, wiped furiously at it. And quick-walking in that way of his that made the house vibrate, heavy-heeled behind her, descending from the top of the stairs a man whose face she could not see. Fiery, and blinding. God in the burning bush. God in thunder. Bitch! Get back up here! If I have to come get you, if you won’t be a woman, a wife!
It was a fact the sisters learned, young: if you wait long enough, run away and hide your eyes, shut your ears, there comes a silence vast and rolling and empty as the sky.
There was the mystery of the letters my mother and Aunt Connie would speak of, though never exactly discuss in my presence, into the last year of my mother’s life.
Which of them first noticed, they couldn’t agree. Or when it began, exactly—no earlier than the fall, 1923. It would happen that Pappa went to fetch the mail, which he rarely did, and then only on Saturdays; and, returning, along the quarter-mile lane, he would be observed (by accident? the girls weren’t spying) with an opened letter in his hand, reading; or was it a postcard; walking with uncharacteristic slowness, this man whose step was invariably brisk and impatient. Connie recalled he’d sometimes slip into the stable to continue reading, Pappa had a liking for the stable which was for him a private place where he’d chew tobacco, spit into the hay, run his callused hands along a horse’s flanks, think his own thoughts. Other times, carrying whatever it was, letter, postcard, the rarity of an item of personal mail, he’d return to the kitchen and his place at the table. There the girls would find him (by accident, they were not spying) drinking coffee laced with top-milk and sugar, rolling one of his clumsy cigarettes. And Connie would be the one to inquire, “Was there any mail, Pappa?” keeping her voice low, unexcited. And Pappa would shrug and say, “Nothing.” On the table where he’d dropped them indifferently might be a few bills, advertising flyers, the Chautauqua Valley Weekly Gazette. Nelia never inquired about the mail at such times because she would not have trusted her voice. But, young as ten, Connie could be pushy, reckless. “Isn’t there a letter, Pappa? What is that, Pappa, in your pocket?”
And Pappa would say calmly, staring her full in the face, “When your father says nothing, girl, he means nothing.”
Sometimes his hands shook, fussing with the pouch of Bugler and the stained cigarette-roller.
Since the shame of losing his wife, and everybody knowing the circumstances, John Nissenbaum had aged shockingly. His face was creased, his skin reddened and cracked, finely stippled with what would be diagnosed (when finally he went to a doctor) as skin cancer. His eyes, pouched in wrinkled lids like a turtle’s, were often vague, restless. Even in church, in a row close to Reverend Dieckman’s pulpit, he had a look of wandering off. In what he called his earlier life he’d been a rough, physical man, intelligent but quick-tempered; now he tired easily, could not keep up with his hired men whom he more and more mistrusted. His beard, once so trim and shapely, grew ragged and uneven and was entirely gray-grizzled, like cobwebs. And his breath—it smelled of tobacco juice, wet, rank, sickish, rotted.
Once, seeing the edge of the letter in Pappa’s pocket, Connie bit her lip and said, “It’s from her, isn’t it!”
Pappa said, still calmly, “I said it’s nothing, girl. From nobody.”
Never in their father’s presence did either of the sisters allude to their missing mother except as her, she.
Later when they searched for the letter, even for its envelope, of course they found nothing. Pappa had burned it in the stove probably. Or torn it into shreds, tossed into the garbage. Still, the sisters risked their father’s wrath by daring to look in his bedroom (the stale-smelling room he’d moved to, downstairs at the rear of the house) when he was out; even, desperate, knowing it was hopeless, poking through fresh-dumped garbage. (Like all farm families of their day, the Nissenbaums dumped raw garbage down a hillside, in the area of the outhouse.) Once Connie scrambled across fly-buzzing mounds of garbage holding her nose, stooping to snatch up—what? A card advertising a fertilizer sale, that had looked like a picture postcard.
“Are you crazy?” Nelia cried. “I hate you!”
Connie turned to scream at her, eyes brimming tears. “Go to hell, horse’s ass, I hate you!”
Both wanted to believe, or did in fact believe, that their mother was not writing to their father but to them. But they would never know. For years, as the letters came at long intervals, arriving only when their father fetched the mail, they would not know.
This might have been a further element of mystery: why the letters, arriving so infrequently, arrived only when their father got the mail. Why, when Connie, or Nelia, or Loraine (John’s younger sister, who’d come to live with them) got the mail, there would never be one of the mysterious letters. Only when Pappa got the mail.
After my mother’s death in 1981, when I spoke more openly to my Aunt Connie, I asked why they hadn’t been suspicious, just a little. Aunt Connie lifted her penciled eyebrows, blinked at me as if I’d uttered something obscene—“Suspicious? Why?” Not once did the girls (who were in fact intelligent girls, Nelia a straight-A student in the high school in town) calculate the odds: how the presumed letter from their mother could possibly arrive only on those days (Saturdays) when their father got the mail; one day out of six mail-days, yet never any day except that particular day (Saturday). But as Aunt Connie said, shrugging, it just seemed that that was how it was—they would never have conceived of even the possibility of any situation in which the odds wouldn’t have been against them, and in favor of Pappa.
5
The farmhouse was already old when I was first brought to visit it: summers, in the 1950s. Part red brick so weathered as to seem without color and part rotted wood, with a steep shingled roof, high ceilings, and spooky corners; a perpetual odor of woodsmoke, kerosene, mildew, time. A perpetual draft passed through the house from the rear, which faced north, opening out onto a long incline of acres, miles, dropping to the Chautauqua River ten miles away like an aerial scene in a movie. I remember the old wash room, the machine with a hand-wringer; a door to the cellar in the floor of that room, with a thick metal ring as a handle. Outside the house, too, was another door, horizontal and not vertical. The thought of what lay beyond those doors, the dark, stone-smelling cellar where rats
scurried, filled me with a childish terror.
I remember Grandfather Nissenbaum as always old. A lean, sinewy, virtually mute old man. His finely cracked, venous-glazed skin, red-stained as if with earth; narrow rheumy eyes whose pupils seemed, like the pupils of goats, horizontal black slats. How they scared me! Deafness had made Grandfather remote and strangely imperial, like an old almost-forgotten king. The crown of his head was shinily bald and a fringe of coarse hair bleached to the color of ash grew at the sides and back. Where once, my mother lamented, he’d been careful in his dress, especially on Sundays, for churchgoing, he now wore filth-stained overalls and in all months save summer long gray-flannel underwear straggling at his cuffs like a loose, second skin. His breath stank of tobacco juice and rotted teeth, the knuckles of both his hands were grotesquely swollen. My heart beat quickly and erratically in his presence. “Don’t be silly,” Mother whispered nervously, pushing me toward the old man, “—your grandfather loves you.” But I knew he did not. Never did he call me by my name, Bethany, but only “girl” as if he hadn’t troubled to learn my name.
