“I must go. I’m so sorry, Ernst.”
“You must go?” His voice was mocking as he sniffed and curled the earpieces of his glasses into place in a gesture I knew as well as the shape of my own thumb. “You’re not compelled to do anything. You’re choosing this, and you’re an ingrate and a fool to do it.”
I was grateful to him for this, because being angry in return was easier than feeling sorry. Even more assuaging to my emotions was the black eye Ernst gave Oskar the following day.
“I didn’t put up any fight,” Oskar assured me. “I owed it to him to stand still and take whatever he wanted to give me.”
∗ ∗ ∗
“I understand that you love him,” my mother said. She was sitting at her vanity table, letting me brush out her hair with her silver-backed brush, a task that had always encouraged our confidences, perhaps because we didn’t have to look directly at each other as we spoke or because the gentle stroking silently communicated some necessary reassurance. “I understand that you love him,” she repeated, underlining the sentence with her finger on the burled wood of the tabletop. “And there is nothing to be done about that. But your father and I worry that he seems to care so much about what he’ll do, what he’ll achieve, no matter what it might cost someone else.”
“Why do you say that?” I sought her eyes in the glass.
“Martha told me that he nearly ruined her sister.”
“His mother?” I was used to hearing about Martha’s sister’s delicate emotions.
“No, they have an older sister, a maiden lady. Her name is Ida.”
“I don’t see how he could have harmed her,” I said indignantly.
As my mother told me the story that Martha had told her, I studied her hair, which gently resisted the boar’s bristles I was pulling through it. Gray strands stood out among the brown.
“It seems Oskar had the idea a few years ago to extend the life of the electric lightbulb. Or maybe to make it brighter. Something like that. Anyway, Ida had lent Oskar’s brother some money for a project of his, so it seemed only fair to do the same for Oskar, especially when he seemed so sure of this scheme. That’s what upset Martha, that he behaved as if he knew what he was doing, when he’d had hardly any training at all for that sort of thing. A class on mechanical science at Oberlin. A conversation with some visiting so-and-so. He got carried away, Martha says. He convinced Ida to give him more and more money, a great deal in the end, and then he gave it all up as a failure. Martha says her sister is greatly reduced and she believes worry over money has affected Ida’s health.”
This wasn’t pleasant to hear, but I wasn’t dismayed. The Dettweilers were understandably angry with Oskar—and with me—for disappointing Ernst. It wasn’t surprising that they looked for ways to judge him harshly.
“I’ve no doubt that Ida did lose money,” I said, meeting my mother’s gaze squarely in the glass again, “but from all you say, it’s clear that it was freely given and that Oskar used it sincerely for his work. All scientists fail far more often than they succeed. That’s the nature of experimentation. Such things must have happened often to your Professor Von Rhein.”
She shook her head. “Professor Von Rhein knew what he was about. This boy seems only to know what he wants.”
Which, I thought with a thrill, was me.
∗ ∗ ∗
I told Oskar the gist of my mother’s complaint. He ought to know, I said, the way they were twisting things. And I suppose I hoped that he might defend himself with an explanation I could carry home.
“It would have worked,” he said, “in time. My aunt understood that perfectly well. She wanted to give me more support, because she knew I’d pay her everything I owed her and more. It was my father who made us fail. He wouldn’t allow her to give me the backing I needed to see it through. Originality frightens him.”
My mother, I suspected, might take Oskar’s father’s side, but I believed that I, like Oskar and Ida, was unafraid of bold ideas. I would help Oskar to see his plans through.
I suspected, too, that much of my parents’ unhappiness derived less from disquiet over Oskar’s character and more from the loss of their long-nurtured vision of the happy Schroeder-Dettweiler family. And if Oskar were only going to replace Ernst, we all might have foreseen a time when the Schroeder-Swann family might have been equally happy; however, the house in the newish neighborhood and the peony garden were lost as well. For it turned out that marrying me wasn’t going to change Oskar’s plans to go to California. We were wedding with what might have appeared to be almost unseemly haste on the twelfth of July, because Oskar’s father had arranged a job for him in the West. He’d contacted the son of a friend who was doing research at the University of California in Berkeley.
Of course, there’s nothing for you at the university, Mr. Swann had written. But Philip, being a responsible young man, supports his studies clerking part-time at the customs office in San Francisco, and in that capacity he’s heard of a lighthouse keeper in need of an assistant. You’ll have to take a test to prove you can read and write, and there’ll be an interview, but I would think you would do all right with that.
Oskar had been bitter at this letter’s condescending tone and resentful, too, that his father presumed that he required help. He’d scoffed at the job for a day or so, but he understood, now that he was taking a wife to California, that he needed something more definite than a vague and glowing sense of opportunity there. Soon enough, he’d decided that working at a lighthouse might provide a chance for some truly independent trials with the engines he’d been working on in an environment, as he put it, “untainted by everyone else’s ideas,” and he was quite cheerful about his prospects.
“My father thinks to teach me a lesson with this. He wants to make me into the sort of plodding person who dutifully does his rounds, seeing no farther than the end of his nose. I’m sorry to be dragging you to who knows where. But I’ll make gold of this, you’ll see. An isolated setting will help me to focus. The lighthouse will be like an incubator, and in a year or two, we’ll come back with something that’ll surprise them all.”
I protested that I needed no apology and didn’t care whether the lighthouse would be an incubator or merely a means of earning a living. From the safe and dully familiar perspective of my room on Tenth Street, the notion of going someplace as unusual and romantic as a lighthouse was enticement enough. It would be a grand adventure, I told my mother, and after all, we’d not be gone forever.
My mother couldn’t hide her despair or contempt. “A lighthouse! In California! An enterprising young man would find far better opportunities here in Milwaukee.”
She was chopping citron and candied cherries for a stollen during one of these not infrequent outbursts, in her distraction uncharacteristically allowing bits of the fruit to escape onto the floor.
I collected them as I answered, feeling that I was the cool woman and she the frustrated girl. “Oskar says there’s too much complacency in this city. People care only for cleanliness and order.”
This was a sharp comment, since we were both well aware that she valued cleanliness and order a great deal. “They’re complacent,” she said, marshaling her dice with the blade of her knife, “because this is a good place to live. Most people I know here have no reason to complain about their lives.”
“I suppose we’re not like most people, then.” I brushed the errant sticky stuff from my hand into the dustbin, thinking with secret scorn of my parents’ smug friends, the men with their whiskers and beer, the women with their curls and playing cards.
∗ ∗ ∗
Our wedding day was gray and cloud-clotted, and my hair, alert to the threatening storm, rose from my head like wires to meet the silver brush as my mother struggled to make the strands lie flat and neat under the wreath of rosebuds Lucy had fashioned for me. The wreath was reproach as well as ornament; Lucy and I had long planned a double wedding, and I’d ruined that, too.
As penance fo
r the upset we’d caused, I’d refused a new dress, but Gustina, who had a talent for decorative needlework, had festooned the bodice of my gray silk with a rope of embroidered pink blossoms and sewn a pink gather inside the kick pleat to match. In this, I stepped across the parlor carpet to the mantel at eleven o’clock. When Oskar touched my hand to slip on the ring, a jolt of static made me gasp.
“Of course, your mother wasn’t up to the trip,” said Oskar’s father—whom I thought of privately as “the great man”—over luncheon. “Given the state you’ve put your aunt Martha in.” He himself had come all the way from Washington, where he was advising some committee. “And you know the demands on your brother.”
My mother had set the table with the delicate blue Haviland, reserved for the finest occasions, and I feared it would break under the pressure of the great man’s knife, with such firmness did he attack his cutlet.
“Yes,” Oskar said. “I understand.”
“What I’m not sure that you understand,” Mr. Swann continued, a triangle of pale meat quivering on the end of his fork, “is that henceforth you must be different.”
Oskar opened his mouth to object, but his father didn’t need to raise his hand to indicate that interruption wouldn’t be tolerated.
“Thus far in your life,” he went on, “you’ve behaved largely like a child on Christmas morning, running from one shiny object to the next.” He paused to insert the meat into his mouth, work his jaws, and swallow. “Given that this is your nature, I would not have advised you to marry, but you didn’t ask for my advice. You never do.” Hurt momentarily muddied his stern expression. “This young girl,” he went on, “isn’t to be cast aside when you lose interest in her.”
“Sir!” I broke in. “Oskar will not lose interest in me!”
Mr. Swann turned his large head in my direction. “You misapprehend, if you believe I’m belittling your charms. Whether he turns his attention elsewhere or not will have nothing to do with you. To be flighty is his way.”
“It is not!” I exclaimed, although I was aware that it was I who sounded childish now.
“I’m not going to be like Manfred,” Oskar said petulantly, “plodding along the conventional path.”
“I’d be the first to agree that you’re not like Manfred. I would point out, however, that the occasion of your marriage affords an ideal opportunity to recognize that there’s a good deal of worthy and profitable work to be done by all sorts of people. Not everyone can dazzle.”
Oskar didn’t look at his father; he glowered at the pale blue rosebuds on his plate instead.
“In any case,” the great man went on, “I’m not here to argue about your path, as you call it. Only to satisfy my conscience that I’ve done all I could for a girl my sister-in-law tells me is a very fine person, which I’m sure you comprehend”—he turned to me—“means a great deal, given the bitterness you two have caused.”
“Surely we need not speak of such things today,” my own father put in.
After this, although the great man went on eating with gusto, the rest of us could swallow only a bite or two of the fruitcake and whipped cream that followed.
When I went to my bedroom to change into my traveling suit, I discovered my mother checking again the contents of the trunk she’d so carefully packed and which could hold so much less than she wanted to send with me, especially since the railway charged by the pound. In keeping with the local disapproval of our plans, there were few gifts, and in any case, we would not have taken many. The idea, Oskar had reminded me, was not to re-create my parents’ parlor in the West. So the ginger jar and the cake plate depicting city hall, the cut-glass water jug and matching glasses would have to remain in Milwaukee. I could bring the silver pickle fork.
Had Gustina starched the linen waists? my mother wanted to know. Did I have my belt and a good supply of cloths? Oughtn’t I to bring my old silk chemise as well as the new one? After all, it had some wear left, and it took up very little room. We’d been through all of this several times already, but the trunk—the very one that had accompanied my mother from Hamburg—was a cord between her and me, and she was terrified lest she forget to supply it with some essential item.
“I don’t see your button box. Did we put it in?”
“Mother!” My emotions had reached a point of exquisite tautness, like the E string on my violin, and the tuning knob kept turning. “I’m sure the West is well supplied with buttons!”
“We don’t know that,” my mother sobbed. “We don’t know anything!”
And then I was in her arms and we cried a bit together, which did much to relieve us both.
“Oh!” my mother said, wiping her eyes. “There’s something else you must have!”
She hurried into her room and returned with the toilet set from her vanity. The silver pieces, engraved with monograms, flowers, and insects, were old-fashioned and heavy, beautiful in their way, but clearly the taste of another era. Among them was a pair of nail scissors, and she used these to cut a lock of my hair, which she’d so often brushed. She curled it around her finger to make a loop. I knew it would go into her locket, along with the silken curls of her sons.
She wrapped the toilet articles in a length of flannel and pushed them into my valise. “You’ll have a grand adventure,” she said tearily, “as I did.” At her words, I remembered that she’d never returned to the home she’d left, and I felt a prickle of regret and fear. We repeated the assurances we’d given each other concerning frequent letters and a journey for my parents to San Francisco before too long, and we gripped each promise as tightly as we would the rungs of a ladder.
Despite our careful preparations, there was a scramble in the end. A wagon had been hired to carry us to the depot, and the four of us rode to the train, my parents unconsciously seating themselves on either side of me so that Oskar was obliged to take the bench opposite. The rain held off, sulking, and the water in the air brought out the city’s summer smells: the yeast and malt of the breweries, the blood and fat from the meat-packers and the tanneries, and the general effluvia that rose from the river.
“I think there must be some way to post letters,” my mother said, “even from a lighthouse. Don’t you think there must, Felix?” It was not the first time she’d worried this issue. My father took her hand.
Our leave-taking seemed to stretch me fine as a thread of pulled taffy, and I longed for the train to arrive, to board it and be away, so that I could gather myself and turn my attention fully one direction, toward my new married life in the West. At the same time, I wished that the minutes on the platform would never end.
Without regard for my feelings either way, the train arrived from St. Paul, puffing and sighing in huge clouds of steam, its wheels shrieking against the tracks as it stopped. My mother lifted the gray grenadine veil from my face to kiss me one final time. There was a confusion of porters and ticket stubs, and at last Oskar and I were seated side by side on a velvet bench inside one of the cars. I knelt on the seat like a child and leaned out of the window, and my mother and father came and stood below. We were finished with wishes and promises, and we waited without speaking for the train to pull us apart. At the first lurch, I reached down my hands and my parents took one each, but I felt their fingers only for a moment because the wheels were rolling. As the train drew away, I saw my mother cross her hands over her heart, her gaze directed upward as if in supplication, and tears came to my eyes.
Then Oskar put his hand on my shoulder and coaxed me with gentle pressure into the car. “I’m sorry I’m taking you away.”
I put my own hand over his, which was warm and firm and helped hold back the loneliness that had begun to fill me like cold water rushing into a cistern. “No,” I said, “you aren’t taking me. We’re going together.”
When we’d first sat down, he’d put our case awkwardly on the seat between us, and he rose to push it onto the rack overhead. I was acutely aware of its contents. More than the wedding ceremony or the leave-tak
ing, the intimacy with which, inside that valise, his wooden-handled hairbrush lay beside my silver one and my bleached and ironed nightdress nestled against his striped muslin shirt, arms and tails tangling, made me know that I was now married and so a different person from the girl I’d been that morning. I was yoked to him.
CHAPTER 9
I CHANGED INTO MY duster, and for the rest of the afternoon, I laid claim to our narrow stone house, teasing cobwebs out of the corners of the ceiling, chipping hardened grease off the stovetop, washing the floors until the water in the bucket was no longer black.
I saved the second bedroom for last and then went at it with a broom and dustpan and a length of dirty oilcloth I’d found stuffed in a kitchen cupboard, intending to wrap up the whole mess and fling it into the ocean, jars and all. As I began to sweep, however, I thought of the children, their eagerness and sincere interest in their collection. I abandoned my broom and searched the outbuildings until I found a number of empty crates. These I filled with everything that didn’t smell, and I lined them up along one wall. Only the things that reeked did I fold in the oilcloth and bury at sea.
By early evening, I was pleased with my work and pleasantly exhausted. Face washed, hair neatly coiled, and duster exchanged for corset, shirtwaist, and skirt again, with a smart black bow tied around my neck, I thought myself a charming picture of domesticity as I stoked the fire in the cooker, arranged potatoes to simmer in a pan with some milk, and coated a pot with lard in readiness to shirr some eggs.
I heard clanging from the kitchen next door as Archie Johnston prepared his own meal and the bang of a door as he went out, presumably to cover his shift at the light. I closed a letter to Lucy and inked an address on the envelope. Expecting Oskar every moment, I set the table with the lighthouse china and the linen napkins my mother had stashed in the trunk. I slid the potatoes from stovetop to oven, selected a can of peas and one of pineapple from my colorful store of canned goods, and pounded them open with a chisel and hammer I’d found in a drawer. Oskar didn’t come. I read from The Prisoner of Zenda, the novel I’d chosen from among the books in the “library.”
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