The First Emma

by Di Maio, Camille

  The girl nodded and remained in what must have been an uncomfortable position. “Then please call me Mabel.”

  “Fair enough.” The niceties were out of the way, and in the German fashion of her ancestors, Emma saw no need to spend undue time on chatter.

  “Helga, please show our guest upstairs. Give her the French room.” She saw Helga wince at the order, a harbinger of what Emma’s family was likely to think about this newcomer and her placement in the choicest of suites. But it was no matter. It was her own business and they would have to abide by her wishes.

  “Mabel,” she continued. “We will have dinner at eight this evening. I know that may be late, but we run things according to brewery hours here and that is after the day shift ends. It’s nothing fancy on the week nights, so don’t expect a banquet.”

  “Of course not. Thank you, Mrs. Koehler. I mean, Emma.”

  As the footfalls of the two younger women began their ascent up the grand central staircase, Emma looked after them. It had been so long since she herself had seen the rooms on the second and third floors. Their magnificent views. The brocade curtains and the lace coverlets that she’d chosen in all of their world travels. Silk sheets from China. Wool rugs from Turkey.

  And the nursery with its wooden toys from England and Holland.

  How she’d wished to fill it up with children. To hear the echoes of laughter through the halls. And even the cries. Emma would have kept her children close to her own bedroom, and though she could have afforded it, she would not have had nannies fussing and bustling about.

  Instead, that part of her heart had been closed and she’d made an adequate substitute by opening wide the doors of her home to the migration of family. They needed her and this house needed them and Otto needed a wife who would aid him in producing enough beer to flood the river that wound its way through the lower street levels of the city.

  What Emma needed was never anyone’s consideration.

  This city was named for the patron saint of lost items. Apt. Because Emma had lost much.

  .

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  IN THE MORNING LIGHT, Mabel was better able to see the room she’d been given. The space was nearly the size of her entire Baltimore apartment. She felt like Rapunzel in a tower from this third-floor height. A bench seat curved around the nook in the turret, covered in cushions made of paisley chintz, with shelves beneath them offering a variety of books. A quick inventory of them showed that none of the spines had seen a bit of cracking, but they were meticulously dusted. The kind meant more for display than for reading. In the middle of the room, she’d slept in a four-poster bed made of a whitewashed wood. Blanket upon blanket was piled upon it, all white, and topped with a down covering that was comfortingly warm.

  Even the washroom was luxuriously appointed with an iron tub boasting enormous claw feet and an elaborate mirror that hung above the sink. Fashioned after one at Versailles, Helga had told her. An imitation. But an expensive one.

  Mama would have loved this, she thought. Ginger, too.

  After a breakfast of oatmeal and toast with strawberry jam, she tucked her notebook under her arm, stashed a pencil behind her ear, and made her way to the drawing room minutes before eight o’clock, as she’d been instructed.

  “I like a girl who appreciates the importance of timeliness.”

  Mabel jumped at Mrs. Koehler’s voice. She hadn’t expected her to be here already, but then she noticed blankets and a pillow stacked neatly on a sofa across the room. Is this where she slept?

  Mrs. Koehler cleared her throat and folded her arms, resting her elbows on the side of her wheelchair. “Are you ready to get started or am I interrupting a daydream?”

  Mabel pulled her hair back with two hands and tied a ribbon around her blond hair. She shook her head.

  “I’m ready.”

  She was surprised at the lack of a hello or how do you do but thought it best to adapt to Mrs. Koehler’s manner.

  “Good. You may sit at that desk in the alcove, where the light is best. We’ll work for a couple of hours or until I’m tired and need a rest. There is much to cover.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She smoothed her skirt and sat in the high-backed chair by the window. It was not comfortable, not as much as the sofa might have been, but she could last for two hours or so. Perhaps it was meant to keep her awake.

  “Let’s begin.” Mrs. Koehler wheeled herself over to the other side of the desk, taking great care over the plush rug. Mable wondered if she should offer to help, but something about the woman’s demeanor indicated that she neither needed—nor wanted—assistance.

  Mabel pulled out the fountain pen she kept for the purpose of writing shorthand. She’d been trained in the Pitman method, its phonetic symbols drawn out through thick and thin strokes. When she’d first seen the system, it looked like the scribbles a child might draw, but as she understood that sounds replaced letters, she appreciated the brilliance of its simplicity.

  Mrs. Koehler cleared her throat again. “I’m an old woman, Mabel Hartley. And when one gets to my age, you start to reflect on the life you’ve lived and what your time here meant. I have no illusions that by this time next year, I’ll be six feet under the dirt and there will be nary a flower on my grave.”

  Mabel’s throat tightened. The reaper was a familiar visitor, having wielded his sharp sickle too many times in her small family. Though she’d only just been introduced to the woman in front of her, she did not care to imagine her end being as near as she implied. She began to protest, but was cut short.

  “To that point,” said Mrs. Koehler, “I’ve given a great deal of thought as to what I want to say. My family is set for money and I will leave with little worry on financial grounds. But these are trying days for women and I believe I have a story that may offer hope.”

  Trying times indeed. Men were off at war, women were holding up the home front, feeling its precariousness in their blood. Like a tower of playing cards that would tumble in the wind. If Mrs. Koehler, shriveled by age and handicap, could be a source of inspiration, Mabel was happy to be the instrument through which it came to light.

  She pressed her pen against the yellow, lined notebook.

  “Where shall we start?” she asked.

  “In the middle.”

  Mabel looked up, confused, but Mrs. Koehler explained.

  “Yes. It’s an odd place to begin one’s story. I’ll give you that. But a necessary one. You see, Mabel, my husband died almost thirty years ago. We’ll get to the sordid details of that at another time. He enjoyed successes in many endeavors. But brewing beer was his great love. And mine. It was part science, part art, and lacking children, that building you see off in the distance became the only offspring we had. We nurtured it, sacrificed for it, fed it as one would for any child and it was poised to grow into something quite magnificent.”

  Mabel nodded, scratching out every other word, trying to keep up. She could write a clearer copy later in her bedroom.

  “Otto and I spent long evenings on the porch talking about our plans. And though he was the named president, a good number of the ideas he presented were at my suggestion. Our marriage was a quite a partnership. If not in romantic ways, at least in business.”

  Mabel paused and bit her lip at this admission. She would have imagined the owners of this magnificent mansion to have a love story that equaled it. But if Mrs. Koehler had any intention of expounding on that statement, she didn’t say so. In the matter-of-fact way that Mabel had already begun to witness in her, the woman pressed on. She picked up her pen once again and took down the dictation.

  “When was the first time you imbibed, Miss Hartley?”

  Mabel looked up. Emma’s expression was stern: she expected an honest answer.

  “Imbibed?”

  “Yes. Drank alcohol. When was the first time you tasted alcohol?”

  “I—I never have.” It wasn’t merely that she was two years shy of the legal age. It wa
s that drinking had consumed her father, body and soul. For all she knew, it tasted like the nectar of angels. But his foul breath and irrational temper under its influence was enough to render her a teetotaler.

  But she couldn’t say these things. Not to a stranger.

  Mrs. Koehler grimaced. “Exactly. My parents were German and in their day, babies suckled beer almost more often than mother’s milk. So when the first stirrings of Prohibition came about, we thought it quite ridiculous and dismissed the possibility. But as their cause gained ground in Texas and later across the nation, Otto and I traveled to St. Louis frequently to confer with Adolphus Busch, who ran the mighty Anheuser-Busch brewery. It was predicted that brewers across the country would be bankrupt if the dry craze swept the nation as it began to look like it would.”

  Mabel wondered if she would have sided with the prohibitionists if she’d grown up at that time. Perhaps such a crusade would have saved other families from all hers had endured. It was not a question she’d ever pondered. Yet in front of her sat a woman whose very life and legacy had been built on a foundation of hops and yeast and barley.

  Mrs. Koehler voiced what Mabel didn’t. “Are you against it, then? The drink?”

  What could she say to this? She had to choose her words carefully.

  “I suppose not in every circumstance.” She shifted in her seat, trying to conceal her discomfort.

  “So you would have voted wet back in the day? You’d have been on our side?”

  Mabel held her breath. It was too soon to head back to Baltimore.

  “To be honest, I’ve never given any thought as to how I would have voted.”

  This was true, at least.

  “Hmph.” Mrs. Koehler pulled her wire-rimmed glasses from her face and rubbed her eyes. Then she squinted, and Mabel felt naked under the scrutiny.

  The old woman pressed for more. “Would you have voted to put thousands and thousands of people out of a job? Hundreds at my brewery alone?”

  She hadn’t thought of that. Her father had been ruined by alcohol, but how many fathers had been equally ruined by its prohibition? Thing were never as simple as they seemed.

  “I’d never want to see anyone out of a job.”

  Mrs. Koehler—for she could not think of this formidable woman by her Christian name—put her glasses back on and rested against the back of her wheelchair.

  “That’s the problem with young people today. You don’t know your history. If we’d learned something from the last war, we wouldn’t be in the current mess, but no one studies the past as they ought. Look—”

  She wheeled herself closer so that the armrests butted up against the desk. She tapped a knobby finger on the glass-topped wood.

  “I was in charge of the livelihoods of hundreds of people in my employ. That’s husbands with wives and children who relied on me to make the brewery succeed. I didn’t do it because I needed money. Otto left me more of that than I could spend in ten lifetimes. I did it because I could not bear to see anyone starving and anguished. Worrying over how they would bring home the next meal. I grew up that way, in my littlest years. I could not inflict that on anyone.”

  Mabel nodded. “But that was out of your control. Prohibition wasn’t your fault.”

  “Maybe. But there is much in life that is out of our control. The answer is not to give up and crumble. The answer is to find a way around it, no matter the difficulty. No matter how impossible the obstacles.”

  Running a large brewery, even as its sole product was deemed illegal, seemed like an insurmountable task. But that, perhaps, was the very story Mrs. Koehler wanted to tell.

  “So what did you do?”

  The first smile of the day spread, thinly, across Mrs. Koehler’s face. “Ah, what did I do? My dear, that is the exact meat of what I want to have you record for me. Because I didn’t lose one single employee during that time. Not one. All this while being told that women didn’t have the heads or stamina for business.”

  Mabel set the pen on the desk and intertwined her fingers, resting her chin on the perch they made. She looked at the older woman, the topography of wrinkles spread across her ancient face. How many times had she passed women of that age in the street as she hurried to work? Their secrets hidden beneath the vicious mask of age that robbed them not only of their beauty but of the regard of later generations?

  She considered it in a new light. And it saddened her. She would never know her own mother this way. Mama died while there was still sparkle in her eyes, while her perfect skin was lovingly cared for with morning and evening doses of Noxzema moisturizer.

  Mama’s story would not have been as grand as that at which Mrs. Koehler hinted. But listening to the older woman, in a way Mabel couldn’t explain, could let her do what she’d never be able to do for her mother.

  She rubbed her temples, picturing the enormity of the responsibility Mrs. Koehler had taken on after her husband’s death. A woman running a business—an empire of sorts—was unthinkable today, let alone thirty years ago. To steer it through the double storms of Prohibition and the Great Depression was miraculous.

  No, not miraculous. Heroic. To say otherwise was to deny Emma Koehler all the credit due for accomplishing something of that magnitude.

  Mabel suddenly found this job very intriguing for its own sake. Not only as an escape from Baltimore and all the blows it had dealt her.

  “Emma,” she started, though the familiar nature of it still sat uncomfortably on her tongue. “What is your goal with having me here? Do you intend for this to be an article? A book?”

  Dear God, please don’t let her say a book. Mabel felt inadequate enough as it was and the idea of having a narrative of that magnitude sit on her inexperienced shoulders was daunting.

  “What do you think it should be?”

  Mabel paused. Mrs. Koehler wanted her opinion? No boss—certainly not Mr. Oliver—had ever wanted to know her thoughts. A myriad of possibilities came to mind, but it was difficult to settle on exactly the right one.

  “How about … how about we don’t settle on anything yet? I just take notes and we can decide from there.”

  Mrs. Koehler smiled again, this time wider than the first. Mabel had the feeling that she’d passed some sort of test.

  “Quite prudent, my dear. You would have made a good brewer. It takes patience and a watchful eye. No need to rush any decisions.”

  Mabel felt her cheeks warm, sensing that Mrs. Koehler didn’t distribute compliments loosely. It gave her the dose of confidence she needed, having worried that Mrs. Koehler would regret choosing a girl so inexperienced in this field.

  “So,” she started, flipping back through three pages of notes. “If that is the middle, should we now continue with the beginning?”

  Mrs. Koehler nodded and wheeled her chair back to the edge of the rug. Her rose-scented perfume lingered.

  “Yes. The beginning. Pick up that pen. We have a lot to cover.”

  .

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  1886

  “TEXAS?”

  Otto might as well have said that he wanted us to move to the moon. It was as foreign to me as the Germany of my parents’ life before they each immigrated. I’d been told stories of the small house Papa grew up in. The one that boasted magnificent views of Alps. I’d only seen mountains in picture books and in the tears my mother shed when she thought I wasn’t looking. She’d never felt settled despite the expansive community of “our own people.” She’d even been robbed of her language, pressed upon by my father to learn English and to expunge every trace of an accent that marked them as foreigners.

  Of course, she was my second mother. The one my father married when I was only five years old, having lost my birth mother three years prior. I was the eighth and last child of that union, born to Helen, whom I could not remember, but whose eyes and chin mine were said to resemble. She was a ghost to me, known only in photographs, just as the mountains were.

  Marianna came along and became the
one who inherited “Mama” as a term of endearment. But only from me. Married at the age of forty-three, she was much too old to give my father more children. And as he was nearing sixty himself, that was fine with him.

  My other siblings called her Bertha, a secondary name she abhorred. Which was probably why they used it. They all remembered our mother, having been born early enough to recall the sound of her voice when she sang lullabies like Guten Abend, gut’ Nacht. I heard those only as castoffs. Second-hand, never as good as my mother was supposed to have sung them. Johanna, Catherine, John, Caroline, Anna, and Herman made special mention at Christmas of our mother’s Plätzchen cookies. Which, though she tried, Marianna could not replicate even half as well.

  Only my sister, Dorothy, remained silent about poor Marianna. But that’s because she’d died the same year as my mother and they were buried next to each other under the shade of a large elm tree at Bellefontaine Cemetery.

  So I had two mothers. The one who was supposed to look after me as an angel in heaven and the always morose one I knew in the flesh and who never ceased to pine for her homeland of Hanover.

  As the youngest, Papa treated me like his prinzessin. He would hoist me upon his shoulders when my little legs were too weary to continue our walk along the banks of the Mississippi. And from that vantage point, I imagined myself to be a giant: all-powerful, undefeatable. Sentiments he encouraged. I grew up unaware that the world would look so unkindly upon my gender.

  Still, I was a product of an age that made me feel the sting of obligation to follow where my husband led and when my own Otto glistened with enthusiasm for the opportunity to manage a brewery nearly a thousand miles away, I could not refuse.

  But I was appalled. What could San Antonio possibly hold that my beloved St. Louis did not?

  Even our namesake was more illustrious.

  St. Louis was named after a king of France. San Antonio, after a poor Italian friar.