“Ed?”
Violet noticed her husband was chuckling, the same nervous twitter that always surfaced when beset with nerves. The same way he’d behaved when performing with Cerise at the Father-Daughter Banquets or when giving his toast at the retirement party. At least this time he hadn’t chosen to lead with his awful clown joke.
“Well,” Ed said, “I certainly hope BiolTech hasn’t cut paychecks so drastically you’re forced to supplement your income.”
For gracious’ sake.
Violet didn’t know this man. At least, she couldn’t recall meeting him at the retirement party or at any of Ed’s corporate picnics. But she did know enough about human behavior to see that he would rather die than stand there for one more second with what she could only assume was his sperm in a bag.
“No, well,” the man started. “Angie and I are trying to jump-start a family. So to speak.”
Ed was now at his side and, Violet was horrified to see, shaking his hand.
“Say no more. Say no more. Went through a bit of the troubles ourselves back in the day. I found it helpful to push a diet high in folic acid—kale, spinach, beet greens. Your swimmers will be back in the game in no time.” He gave the man a nudge, shoulder to shoulder. “Your colon won’t complain, either, come to think of it.”
Violet looked at her watch. Twelve minutes. It would take Ed at least five to wrap up his conversation, even in the face of that poor man’s desperate glances toward the door. There just simply wasn’t enough time.
“Well,” she said to Cynthia, the rough-and-tumble receptionist about whom she would soon be writing her complaint. “What a pleasure to have benefited from your brilliant insight.”
Violet allowed herself to admit defeat.
At least for today.
Christmas 1996
Dearest loved ones, far and near—
Evergreen Tidings from the Baumgartners!
I hope this letter finds you surrounded by family and friends, steeped in the joy so abundantly offered us each holiday season.
We all send reports of good health and interesting work this year. Our dear Ed, of course, remains tucked away in his laboratory. His research into common bowel disorders is now showing great promise and he believes the team is within sprinting distance of a breakthrough. I hope to have bountiful news to share in next year’s letter.
Lovely little Cerise is hardly little anymore (though she’ll always be a petite speck of a thing, tiny feet and all (oh, how I envy her!)). Her 9th birthday just passed us by, leaving this awestruck mother to wonder, where did the time go?
Unfortunately for us, third grade has been an exercise in perseverance. The biggest obstacle is not the work, but keeping Cerise challenged—I can’t tell you the number of phone calls I am forced to exchange with her teacher each week (a well-intended but past-her-prime warhorse). I can say with certainty that no other mother faces such unnecessary schoolmarm commentary with unnerving regularity.
“Cerise is letting other children copy her work.”
“Cerise corrected my spelling in front of the whole class.”
“Cerise brought a copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in for silent reading time.”
Obviously, anyone with eyes can see that the child is not disruptive, but bored! (Though where she found a copy of that book, I’ve yet to discover.) She’s already tested out of her grade level in math and reading. So until this school of ours learns to create an environment in which her industrious brain is fully engaged, our little Cerise will find ways to do it herself.
On the bright side, I continue to keep myself busy while Ed and Cerise are out of the house. This fall I had the good fortune to sit on the Parent Advisory Committee for the Minneapolis Public School Board of Education—an enlightening experience, to say the least. You can’t imagine the complaints parents raise! Therefore, as an Advisory Parent, let me remind those of you reading this humble letter that it is not the school’s job to make sure your son enjoys his homework (it is called “work,” after all) or that your daughter be allowed to skip first period due to her late-evening dance class. I, for one, refuse to grant permission for lazy parenting, and said as much to my committee colleagues, freely and often. (Oh, how I could go on about this! But I will refrain, for fear it would kill your Christmas spirit.)
All of this cheerful banter, however, is but a screen to mask the devastating sadness we feel at the passing of my father, Thomas Odenbach, two weeks ago. One minute he was asking my mother for tuna salad on toast, the next minute he was gone. The Lord’s hand was swift and decisive and the doctors told us there was nothing they could have done.
Needless to say, not a day goes by that I don’t mourn his loss. He was a pillar in the community, in the church and in my life. He held his standards as high as his head and expected no less of me or my brothers. I can still hear his voice reminding me, “Violet, the truth may not be pretty, but it must always be told.” And so you have my father, Thomas Odenbach, to thank for the knowledge that you can always trust me to be truthful.
Christmas Blessings to each and every one of you,
Ed and Violet Baumgartner
24
Violet
VIOLET THRUMMED HER fingers on the locket at her throat, lost deep in her worry. She could feel her pulse, beating like rain through the locket’s gold heart, quickened with questions to which there were no simple answers. What. Thudump. Was. Thudump. She. Thudump. Going. To. Do. Thudump. Thudump. Thudump.
Yesterday had not gone at all as planned. It had begun with the fiasco at the lab and ended with her having been shocked and not a little bit horrified by her disaster of a neurologist.
“Two more weeks, I oughta think. Then you can ease back into normal life. See how it goes.”
Two more weeks. Just what did he think he was playing at? In fact, she’d asked him that very question.
“Well,” he’d said, “I’d like to think I’m playing at getting you back to full neurological function.”
He and his laissez-faire care. As if there wasn’t a baby coming or a nursery to decorate or a daughter keeping secrets or a husband who couldn’t get the sheets on the bed without entangling himself to the point of near choking. Not to mention a best friend whose married life was beginning to show as much wear and tear as her living room carpet.
Ed had, sure enough, found River City Brews and brought home the requested six-pack. But he hadn’t said a word about bumping into Richard. “Didn’t see anything unusual,” he’d said, picking Violet up from Eldris’s house. “Nice day for a drive, though. A good excuse to get out of the house. And come to think of it, isn’t Barb’s birthday in July?”
Plus, ever since yesterday’s foray into Fertility 101, Violet hadn’t been able to shake the picture of her daughter knees-up on some cold slab of an exam table, vials and tubes and bright lights and doctors speaking in hushed tones all around her. The thought that her grandchild had begun its life in such a stern, sterile way haunted her every thought.
Though, too, she knew that if Cerise had conceived the baby in the natural way she wouldn’t have wished to picture that event, either.
Perhaps a baby’s conception just wasn’t anyone’s business.
Then as resolutely as her thoughts had come, she pushed them aside and pulled a blank sheet of paper from the binder in front of her. She picked up a freshly sharpened pencil and began to sketch the Baumgartner family tree.
Sometimes, there was no answer but to move on.
She began with Ed’s side, which was fairly easy. He was one of only two siblings and his sister had not married. Violet’s family, on the other hand, was larger. She was the eldest of four children, though the only girl among them. Growing up she’d thought of her brothers like a litter of puppies, careless and messy and wrestling about on the floor. Thankfully they’d grown into decent family men.
She skimmed the diagram and noticed that Ed’s family hadn’t suffered many divorces, either—only one, and that was his great-uncle Oscar who fathered three children in swift succession, then joined the World War II Navy and never came home. He didn’t die; that would have been too easy. He was simply convinced that life at sea was preferable to home, wife and family. So after four years of waiting, his wife, Martha, marched down to the courthouse and got her walking papers.
No wonder neither of Martha’s sisters married.
That made three unmarried women on Ed’s side: his sister and two great-aunts. Violet looked at her own side of the tree and counted four unmarried women—three great-aunts and her favorite, Auntie Tate. She’d been asked to marry several suitors but she said she never considered any of them suitable enough. Instead, she taught school in Southern Minnesota for forty years and shared a spacious two-bedroom apartment for twenty of them with a fellow teacher and spinster named Rube. Violet loved Tate and Rube. Visits with them meant summer picnics on the lawn and walks downtown to the taffy shop and the chance to run her fingers gently along Rube’s collection of delicate china dogs.
Wasn’t it funny the things you’d never considered before.
Could it be that Tate and Rube were something more than just Auntie Tate and her loyal friend Rube? Could it be that maybe, just maybe, Cerise hadn’t been the first in their family to find love in another woman?
In a moment of inspiration, she pulled a new sheet of blank paper from her portfolio and began:
Dear Mrs. Hesse,
My name is Violet Baumgartner and I have the pleasure of knowing your daughter, Barbara Hesse.
Cincinnati Independent Times
March 17, 2018
Historic Mount Auburn Home at
Center of Preservation Debate
Hesse House, one of the many Gilded Age mansions built high atop the hills of Mount Auburn, is at the center of a debate about how to preserve the city’s history and, moreover, just who should pay for the building’s upkeep.
The home’s current owners, Elliott and Amanda Hesse, were in the final stages of selling the property to the Frontenac Group, a boutique hotel developer known for its small but upscale properties, when the sale was abruptly halted last month by a joint lawsuit from the Ohio Preservation Alliance and the Preserve Cincinnati Foundation. The suit argues that the property cannot be sold for development, as the neighborhood in which it sits is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and is thereby federally protected.
“Hesse House is a near-perfect example of Romanesque Revival architecture and represents Cincinnati at the height of its stature in America,” said Preserve Cincinnati’s Director, Ellsbeth Mariner. “To lose it to developers is unthinkable and we are determined to prevent that from happening.”
Historians and architects throughout the nation would seem to agree on the home’s prominence, as the Hesse House boasts numerous citations in architectural textbooks and on websites for house-obsessed Americans, which name it as one of the country’s best and only remaining Romanesque Revival homes. The style is recognizable by its exteriors of large, square stone, dramatic rounded towers and Roman arches over windows and doors. “Traditionally,” says Mariner, “Romanesque Revival is found in public buildings such as courthouses and universities. Only the wealthiest few could afford the heavy, grand materials required for that sort of design.”
Albert Ingersoll Hesse was one of the men who could. A wealthy German immigrant who claimed to have been sent to America by parents frustrated with his insatiable lust for horses and women, he made his immense fortune—once estimated at more than two billion dollars by today’s standards—by dominating Cincinnati’s waterways, shipping crops up the Mississippi from the south and, more importantly, iron ore and steel to mines and factories along the Missouri.
The Hesse family sold off its shipping assets in the 1970s and ’80s, and that financial shortfall is felt most prominently, according to Albert Hesse’s great-great-grandson, in the maintenance of his family’s hand-me-downs.
“I am burdened with Hesse House simply because of my last name,” says Elliott Hesse, the home’s current owner. “The stone is crumbling, the electrical is a mess. When we inherited the house, it was still steam heated. If these organizations want the home preserved, they are either going to have to step in with the money or let us sell to a party who is willing to pay.”
This isn’t the first time local preservation agencies have intervened to stop the loss of buildings they consider of historical and architectural value. A number of homes throughout the Cincinnati area are now under the care of nonprofit organizations or maintained through public-private partnerships. Hesse House, however, is the first case in which the family seems willing to walk away from the property in order to prove a point.
“I’m here to remind them that no one has ever been able to tell a Hesse what to do,” says Elliott Hesse.
A decision on the pending lawsuit is expected in June.
25
Violet
VIOLET REREAD THE letter a third time.
Mrs. Baumgartner,
I was surprised and honored to receive your letter and would be happy to comply with your request. Please see the attached list of questions, which, in so answering, will allow me to narrow the information we provide, as our family maintains more than 300 years of genealogical detail in its archives.
Such language. Such sophistication. It made her spine tingle.
The Hesse family didn’t simply track its history; it maintained genealogical detail, a family archive. People of this stature would never have settled for the spiral-bound, mimeographed mishmash the Baumgartners passed from one generation to the next.
How wonderful that you’ve made acquaintance with our daughter, Barbara. We have always called her Gigi and, as it was only after her departure to Rensselaer that she became Barb, I assume you do not know her full name to be Barbara Ambrose Ingersoll Greer Hesse, names richly woven throughout the tapestry of our history.
Barb had grown up a Gigi? She couldn’t picture it. Though that lovely red hair of hers did have a regal nature about it, reminiscent of days long gone, of feudal principalities and castles and velvet-clad princesses who cut locks of hair for brave knights as a talisman against death in battle.
For heaven’s sake. She didn’t have time for daydreaming.
Now, did Mrs. Hesse mention their family tapestry in the literal or figurative sense? She penciled a note: Hesse crest?
Oh, how Violet loved names. Always had. She’d been told she was named after her mother’s favorite flower. Though, who knew how much of her family lore to trust.
But long before she’d been taught to doubt, she’d met a handsome young man by the name of Baumgartner, which literally meant “gardener.” She couldn’t help but swoon. What could be more romantic than to become Violet Baumgartner, the gardener of her mother’s favorite flower? Over the years, several German speakers had pointed out that Baumgartner was more accurately translated as “tree gardener,” but she found that lessened the charm.
And, oh, how she’d loved choosing a name for her daughter. Cerise, of course, was French for “cherry,” and while they didn’t have any French heritage in the family, the name came to her the instant she saw her daughter’s face. There couldn’t have been a more fitting name for her beautiful rosy-cheeked baby, nor a more wonderful complement to the Baumgartner name. This time, cherries even had the added benefit of growing on trees.
/> Violet simply loved names. The history. The imagery. The discovery.
She pulled a fresh piece of stationery from her supplies and began.
Dear Amanda,
Please forgive my forward nature and allow me to call you by your first name, as your letter led me to believe we can be good friends. In exchange, I hope that you will call me Violet.
Please find enclosed a list of specific details requested for the nursery project.
Additionally, I wonder if you may be willing to help me solve a mystery most pertinent to both of our families...
26
Cerise
IT WAS THE smallest item of clothing Cerise had ever seen. She’d called it a shirt but Vicky—the only female research lead in their entire building with kids—had been quick to correct her as she pulled the tiny white gift from the box.
“It’s a onesie. See,” she said, pointing to the three sturdy snaps along the bottom. “It snaps just under baby’s butt. Keeps them snug and warm—like a one-piece. Get it?”
Cerise ran a gentle finger along the yellow-and-green thread embroidering the words Say Mama on the front. She felt as if she’d just been handed someone else’s dry cleaning.
“Uh-huh.”
“I couldn’t find your registry in any of the stores, so I just got you something small for now.”
“Yeah.” The cotton seemed no more than a swatch, no bigger than a handkerchief. “We started to register, but got sort of overwhelmed and never finished.”
Vicky laughed and took a sip of her iced tea. “A lot to take in, I know.”
They were sitting in the same retro-chic diner where they’d gone for lunch dozens of times, eating the same wild rice chicken salads they always ordered. Their favorite waitress, a woman whose name tag read “Marge,” but her real name was Maggie, sat them against the far wall under the ancient tin sign that read, Restroom for paying customers only. Outhouse out back for everyone else.
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