When they’d been so close back at the brewery, Ernestina’s interruption came as both welcome and unwelcome. But at the theater, with no threat of interruptions, she found her resistance losing ground to the desire to be loved and cherished. She’d been on her own too long. Not only in a romantic sense, but from nearly all human connection. Not even realizing how much she missed it until the possibility of it arose.
Erik held back, even as Mabel was certain of the magnet-like pull between them. She was convinced that he felt it, too. There was a look in his eyes. A linger in his touch as he’d helped her back into her coat after they put away the paints and prepared to leave.
She knew that he had his own hurts and maybe he was wise enough to be cautious, knowing that two wounded people shouldn’t take such risks. His strength said much for his character. But despite her hopes that the war would even out the disparities between men and women, she still longed for the man to make those kinds of overtures.
If Erik wanted to kiss her, she was ready to let him. But she would not be the first one to do so.
Making good on his promise to Helga, he got Mabel back to the Koehler mansion before supper, but declined the house-keeper’s invitation to stay and eat. He said he had to return to check on the new temperature controls at Pearl.
Helga walked away from the front door before Mabel stepped in, a move that seemed to be intentional in its discretion. Perhaps she was more of an ally than she let on.
Mabel and Erik remained on the porch, its hearty marble arches casting misshapen shadows across the floor as the sun descended in the west. They’d been alone for hours in the theater, but this moment had all the trappings of a man walking a woman home after an evening out. She felt far more nervous here.
Then Mabel saw a curtain in the window next to them rustle and a little girl’s face peeked out. One of the young cousins: Lotte, if she recalled correctly. Helga appeared, her reflection distorted by the panes, as she pulled the child away.
Mabel could tell that Erik had noticed, too. He smiled and looked down as his feet.
“Well, I need to get back,” he said. “You have a good night.”
“You, too.”
He rocked back on his heels and she could hear the flutter in his voice. That told her as much as a kiss might have.
“See you soon?” he asked.
“I’d love that.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Yes.” It came out in a whisper.
She would never have guessed that so much could be conveyed in so brief an exchange. But, as she’d learned from taking Mrs. Koehler’s dictation, life had so many more shades than what could be expressed in mere words.
“Where did we leave off?” asked Mrs. Koehler, when they met in the parlor the next morning. The sun had returned and sent its rays through the prism glass, casting tiny rainbows on Mabel’s notebook.
“You were returning home from Germany with the recipe and the yeast for Pearl.”
“Ah, yes. Our new beginning. Life is full of beginnings, isn’t it? They offer so much hope—at the start. Then comes the tarnish. But the beginnings are nice while they last.”
1898
I was so proud of my husband. With his acquisition of the Pearl recipe and my involvement with the German community in town, the brewery quickly grew to producing thirty thousand barrels a year. It became such a popular brew that all the other, official names of the company were forgotten: City Brewery, San Antonio Brewing Association. It was soon known just as “Pearl,” fitting for something that became such a treasure to San Antonio. A pearl of great price.
That particular milestone happened much more quickly than any of us anticipated, and much more slowly than Otto wanted. I made him an apple cake in celebration, though our good cheer was dampened when my monthly blood flow occurred later that evening.
Otto Koehler could achieve anything he set out to do, but he could not give us a child.
To be fair, it might have been my own defect, but we didn’t bicker over who was to blame. In typical Otto form, he threw himself into work and denied any disappointment on our childlessness. And all too quickly, I lost my husband to it again.
It was difficult to ignore the ache I felt to be a mother.
I felt another fissure grow between us and I longed for us to be united. We were such excellent partners when we didn’t shut each other out or wallow independently. But we were each too stubborn to lean on the other in this sorrow.
Instead of children, flesh and blood, Otto drank his beer and mulled over other investments. Railroads and mining ventures. I think he imagined himself to be the next Cornelius Vanderbilt. He seemed to grow bored by the process of beer making and began to spread himself into so many activities that he rarely saw sunshine. His skin again took on that pallor that concerned me, but nothing would entice him to slow down his maniacal pace.
I wasn’t his yeast. I wasn’t his lucky charm.
I wasn’t his anything.
Otto next sought to have Pearl earn the XXX rating, a designation going back to medieval times and coveted among brewers. When European royalty traveled in the countryside, they would send a courier ahead to sample the local beers. If the taste was adequate, they marked the door with an X. A double XX would indicate that it was very good, and a XXX that it was exceptional. The designation stuck all these centuries later and it was Otto’s newest obsession.
I would have thought he’d find some peace having finally reached this pinnacle. Instead, he had the idea to expand our tiny fortune into real estate.
I could hardly argue with him where the brewery was concerned. As the brand grew and the coffers swelled, he oversaw the expansion of the facilities. Bricks and iron to protect against fire, and the finest brewery architect in the country: August Martizen out of Chicago. We were not equipped to produce enough beer to fill half of it, but Otto was one to think ahead to the future. He was certain that someday Pearl would be big enough to need all the empty space he was enclosing. He even bought acres and acres of surrounding land with designs to grow beyond anyone’s imagination.
The newspapers called him crazy.
I intercepted worried letters from investors, banks and private parties who’d financed Pearl now that it was seeing success. But they were upset about the rapidity of his expansion. I answered their concerns, withholding my own. My husband was many things, but he was not a fool when it came to business and he did not need voices of dissention to distract him. Not if it was going to work.
And he was right. Production increased to an astounding sixty thousand barrels a year in a short time with the ability to be able to store ten thousand more.
The newspapers called him a genius.
It only fed his lust for more.
Left alone again, I resorted to other means of getting my husband’s attention, the only one that had, even for a short duration, brought him back to me. It wasn’t for my sake alone that he needed to slow down. I was concerned for his health. His breaths were shallow at the slightest exertion and his eyes sagged where once they’d been bright.
I made him promise to come home early enough one evening so that I could make dinner for us, and to my surprise, he agreed. I visited a market and learned how to use lime juice and goat cheese and tomatoes to make a sauce to pour over beef, a nod to our adopted town. I slipped raspberries into white wine for a change from the beer.
Candles were lit, one in front of each of our chairs, their flickering glow landing on his empty seat as one hour and then two ticked beyond the appointed time.
At nearly three hours since the plates had been set, the key turned in the lock and a bedraggled Otto slumped in, dropping his coat to the floor. I looked down at our meal, long since grown cold even as I was determined not to.
I pursed my lips and held back the flow of angry words that wanted to escape. Challenging Otto only served to become a war of wills. One that I was quite sure of stalemating, for I could be as formidable as he if I cared to.
I rose from my chair and pulled him into my arms, forcing platitudes that I only half-meant.
“Oh, darling. You must have had such a long day.”
He rubbed his eyes with fisted hands, unaware of my touch.
“The shipment of labels for the bottles came in. Two Xs. Two. Not three. It will be a week before they can send new ones and I’m not shipping out our beer with an inferior designation.”
“Isn’t that something for Daniel to look after?” I asked, referencing the man who oversaw such things. “Is it so utterly necessary for you to be there to manage every little detail?”
He looked up at me at last, resentment poisoning his glance. “Yes, it’s necessary. What if he hadn’t caught the mistake? It would be telegraphing to the world that our beer is substandard and I’ll not have that.”
I knew Daniel to be excellent in his attention to the minutia of the brewery and had long been frustrated that Otto couldn’t relinquish control to people who’d been extensively interviewed for their competency. Did he expect that it should all be on his shoulders? Or that mistakes never happened?
I didn’t pursue the long-worn conversation. At least not with that tactic. If I had any hope of bringing my husband around to my thinking, I would need other measures.
And I’d prepared for that very thing. After settling him into a chair in front of the fireplace and bringing him a beer, I slipped into our bedroom and pulled a nightgown from my bureau. It was an indulgence and I was grateful that Otto knew nothing about women’s garments or else he would be appalled at what I’d spent on something that he’d only see as serving a limited function. But we were making an enviable salary now and it was a worthy investment if it meant saving our marriage and bringing some sense of normalcy to Otto’s life.
The peignoir was magnificent. Made of white bridal lace from France with silk chiffon so delicate and thin that it rendered the whole thing unnecessary, at least if modesty had been the aim. But it was the opposite of my aim. I needed to remind my husband of what we once had.
I shivered; the evening was cold and I was wearing so little. I pulled a magazine from under my pillow, a gift from Mrs. Terroba. It was a Victorian piece full of poems and illustrations that were, let’s just say, far from what we imagine of the Victorians. I didn’t even know if such things were legal, but she’d acquired it and given it to me much in the same vein as she’d taught me of the aphrodisiac natures of chocolate and chili. Though I hadn’t worked for her in a year since her daughter had come from Monterrey to live with her, we saw each other socially and she continued to share secrets that made me blush.
This was no different. I flipped through its pages—already quite familiar to me—and pressed it against my beating heart. Normally, I wore long flannel to bed and pulled my hair up into the tight bun befitting of a married woman. Would releasing my curls from their pins and wearing something that was almost nothing pique Otto’s interest? Or disgust him?
The illustrations in the magazine were that of a fallen woman. Not of a wife.
But Mrs. Terroba assured me that it was the perfect combination: a wife who did more than lie on her back would keep her husband’s attentions better than one who was too prudish to be inventive with him.
I hoped she was right.
She was right.
Otto would have had to be either ill or made of metal to have ignored so lavish an offering on my part, and I can say summarily that he was neither. Once again, he came home to me in the evenings and rekindled an enthusiasm for our partnership, both in the boardroom, and the bedroom.
A woman of today might scorn the notion of using these wiles to achieve what she wants, but there was so little on the side of women at the time that we had to make use of whatever we could—even the power of our own bodies—as we quietly strove to make advances where we could.
And so I did, and I felt no shame for it. He was my husband, after all. And it was for his own good, or so I hoped.
Otto’s renewed vigor quickly inspired him to turn his sights toward building a home for us, focusing his excessive energies, at least, on something other than becoming the next captain of industry. I argued that a little cottage on Dolorosa or Zarzamora would provide more than enough room for our needs. After all, we had no children to fill it. But in true Otto form, he barged on ahead designing the very home we sit in now.
He believed he would not be respected in the community until we had a house befitting our newly minted status, and he told me that every businessman worth his salt either built his own mansion or renovated an important historic one. I quite liked the stately houses south of us in King William and suggested as much, but Otto wanted to be close to Pearl, which limited our ability to move into something that already existed.
It was a tremendous endeavor, much of which fell on my shoulders. Otto was a man of big plans. I was the woman who made them happen. When he said he wanted a study with a turret, I sat with the architects and planned out every curve. When he said that we should have a large porch made of Texan stone, I did the research to source it from a quarry outside of Austin. Some of his contributions were odd, such as the cross on our door or the bare-chested carving on the fireplace, but I humored him with these and did not ask questions.
In the end, it cost us a hundred thirty-three thousand dollars to build, as expensive a home as I was aware of in San Antonio.
I thought that would be the end of it. The pinnacle. We would have Pearl. We would have the house. And we would have each other.
I should have known better.
Entrusting the house I didn’t want to my care, he was now free to return to even more new pursuits: the Continental Mining Company and the Monarch Mining Company. The latter was in Idaho. You can only imagine the journey to get all the way up there from here and my nights were once again cold and alone. Now, in a house in which my lone voice echoed.
And that wasn’t the end of it. He invested in the American Lignite and Briquette Company of Texas.
Coal.
At least his railroad investments made some kind of sense. He cut his teeth sinking money into Panuco Mountain and Monclova Railroad in Texas. And when he was satisfied that he’d mastered that industry, he came full circle to helping establish the Texas Transportation Company. And I say full circle because it was Otto’s idea to have the San Antonio Brewing Association lay a track from Pearl to Sunset Station because horse drawn carriages were no longer sufficient to transport the amount of beer we were brewing. New supplies came in by railroad.
Word spread that Otto was unstoppable in his quest to always be growing. Even dear Adolphus wrote and pled with him to slow down. Though, I must say, tensions were still at a peak after Otto left them high and dry at Lone Star. I believe Adolphus wrote more out of concern for me than he did for my husband. I’ve committed his note to memory, for it addressed what I could not seem to say:
“You take good care of the brewery and promote its interest to the fullest extent; this is a far better investment than dabbling in mines and all kinds of outside affairs which give nothing but worry and bring losses. Now you have no children and there is no early reason why you should burden yourself with all these responsibilities and cares; you ought to live like a king and enjoy life.”
Still, he was unstoppable. Seeing an opportunity to sell XXX Pearl in an even more lucrative way, he built saloons throughout San Antonio. That way he made money on the wholesale and the retail. One still remains. The Scholz Palm Garden downtown.
The only time I outwardly doubted Otto was when he insisted on buying the defunct Hot Wells Resort and Sanitarium. It had burned down twice and sent a previous owner into bankruptcy and I was certain that there was some kind of curse cast upon it. Even though I didn’t believe in such things.
I pled with him not to purchase it, but he went ahead against my warnings.
And I believe I c
an trace every subsequent misfortune that befell us to that moment.
.
CHAPTER TWENTY
TO MABEL’S SURPRISE, Mrs. Koehler took a tissue from a bag attached to her wheelchair and dabbed it at her eyes. Though she’d known her for only a couple of weeks, she’d never seen the old woman be anything less than stoic.
Mabel shifted in her chair. Today she was on the Queen Anne and its back and seat were particularly uncomfortable. As if all the furniture in the room had been designed for the purpose of keeping visits to short intervals.
Mrs. Koehler crumpled the tissue in her hand and leaned over to place it back in the bag. But she leaned too far. Before Mabel could catch her, the old woman had fallen to the floor, clutching her chest. She hit her head on the wheel’s metal casing and a gash cut across her head. Drops of blood began to spill onto the white carpet.
“Helga!” Mabel screamed for the housekeeper, then rushed to the floor. She lifted her up, noting that she weighed considerably less than Mabel would have thought.
She heard Helga’s steps echo off the grand staircase and Frieda, too, rushed in from the kitchen. Together, they picked Mrs. Koehler up and laid her on the sofa. Her breathing was shallow and labored, but at least it was present.
“I’ll call for a krankenwagen,” said Frieda, turning back toward the foyer.
“No.” Helga’s German accent was forceful even in the small word. “I’ll drive her to Green Memorial. I can get her there faster. Frieda, help me get her into the car and then stay with the house. Someone will need to be here to receive news. Miss Hartley, call Mr. Garrels at the brewery. He’ll want to come be with her.”
“I will.”
Mabel left the parlor and hurried over to the study, where she knew the telephone to be. She’d never used one outside of Mr. Oliver’s office, and rarely then. She picked up the black receiver, only to hear other voices on the line.
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