Adelsverein

by Celia Hayes

  “Margaret’s son, Peter?” she exclaimed when Dolph reported that his cousin had come from Austin expressly to look after them. Dolph lingered in the doorway to the shop storeroom, a box of the Nimitz’s dishes in his arms. Pepper the dog was trailing him as faithfully as a brindled shadow. “Why did you not tell me of this before? I saw him among the guests at the wedding last night. I thought he was someone I knew, but from the shop! Where is he now, Dolph? You should have said something to me!”

  “Oh, but I did.” Dolph sounded apologetic. “You were busy with the wedding and all. Uncle Hansi has hired him. He’s bunking in the Sunday house with Jacob and Fredi and me.” Her son braced the box of china against the doorjamb in order to shift his grip. “He’s out in the garden now, Mama, helping Anna take down the lanterns.”

  Magda felt rather foolish; she’d heard the voices of Anna and the littler children already at work in the garden, but never thought to lift her eyes from the ruled columns of the account books. She loved the garden of Vati’s L-shaped house at the corner of Market and San Antonio Streets. She had overseen creation of many of its features: the stone-paved terrace and pots of herbs, the rustic benches and chairs, set all about underneath a pair of towering bronze-leafed oak trees. Those trees alone were all that were left on Vati’s town lot, out of the great forest that stood in this place when they had come out from Neu Braunfels twenty years before. Vati built his house and shop from timbers hewn out of the other trees. His small granddaughters gathered acorn cups underneath to make little dishes and cups for their dolls. Vati had also planted a pear tree sent by his naturalist friend, Mr. Lindheimer, and his daughters made conserve from its golden fruit. Meanwhile Vati grew old and frail in a house which was as much a beloved refuge as the one they had left behind in the Old Country.

  The War Between the States had forced Magda Becker, her sister Liesel, and their children to return to live under her father’s roof, driven by the provost marshal, the Hanging Band, and Confederate Army agents brandishing orders to confiscate food stores and farm wagons, and to draft sons and husbands. They remained because of the store, which was as demanding as a colicky baby, and because Liesel flatly and irrationally refused to return to Hansi’s deserted Live Oak farmstead.

  Magda was a slender woman in her forties, with features that had always been thought too sharp, too forceful to be beautiful, but had mellowed with middle age into something usually described as handsome. Always, though, those features were animated by undoubted intelligence. She preferred to dress simply, having more important things to do than go mooning over her own reflection in the glass. Of late, the concerted efforts of Liesel and Liesel’s daughter Anna, coupled with pointed reminders from Hansi about being in a position where it was necessary to look like a prosperous woman, had induced her to set aside the threadbare, black-dyed calico and homespun she had worn all during the war.

  She thought she had put aside personal vanity when she buried the one man in the world that she ever wanted to look beautiful for, that one man who she believed had even thought her beautiful. This morning she had almost accidentally achieved a degree of quiet elegance. She had looked at herself in the glass that morning and felt a mild flicker of pleasure at her reflection, wearing the dress that Liesel had copied from the latest fashion paper. The new fashion for narrower skirts and long bodice cut with plain sleeves flattered her slim figure, as well as a bosom slightly more generous than it had been when she was a girl, thanks to bearing children.

  As she tallied up the expenses of hospitality for Rosalie and Robert Hunter’s wedding party, Magda had the last cup of the morning coffee at her elbow; not that she felt the need for a stimulant, but real coffee was a joy to be savored after shortages during the war. So was the satisfaction of hosting a merry and well-attended celebration. Rosalie—their dearest little sister, adopted but no less loved for all that—had married the man she loved. Even when she feared that he had died in the fighting in the east, all during those months that she had no word, no letters, not a whisper of assurance about Robert Hunter and his fate, Rosalie held on to hope. Robert would live and return to her. That he had was a matter of deep joy for her, and no small satisfaction for Magda Becker.

  Rosalie and Robert had departed very early, impatient to at last begin their life together. They had headed for Robert’s tiny farm on a branch of the Pedernales, some five or six miles from town. Magda recalled how, years ago after their own wedding, she and her children’s father had driven away from Friedrichsburg on a fall morning, pearlescent with mist rising from the creeks and all of the promise of a happy future spread out before them. Just as well she had not known of the limits that a cruel fate had placed on that future. She prayed with all her heart that Rosalie would have a long lifetime with her man, and that they would be able to grow old together in a way that she had been denied.

  Now Magda looked out into the garden, still thinking on weddings. She recalled her own, remembered also that brief and uncomfortable visit to Austin for another wedding and the generosity of her husband’s only sister, Margaret. Now she watched as Margaret’s son stood half-way up a sturdy ladder, unhooking a tin oil lantern from a hook set into a sheltering branch. Peter steadied himself with his maimed arm, and laughed as he handed the lantern down to Anna, waiting below. They were too far across the garden for her to hear what Anna was saying. Magda’s little daughter, Lottie, and Liesel’s daughter Grete and son Willi—all too young for school—helped by carrying the lanterns into the house. As many of them had been borrowed from neighbors, the older boys would return them after school.

  “My God,” Magda exclaimed to Dolph, pity and a kind of indignation warring in her. “That poor lad—take care of us? What a ridiculous notion! He looks like something we would hang old clothes on and put out in the cornfield to frighten the birds! And his arm—”

  “Don’t speak of it to him like that, Mama.” Her son finally set down the box of dishes, and came to stand behind her at the window. “I don’t think he cares much for pity. Which would be the true reason, I think.”

  “I do not understand. What other reason would he have?” Magda turned away from the window to look at her son, being reminded yet again and with another wring of her heart that he had grown so tall. Her eyes were on a level with his now, calm and meditative and very, very blue in the squarely Saxon features which unmistakably marked those of Becker blood.

  As Pepper nudged at his hand he answered thoughtfully, “Papa told me once, of wildcats or some such which had taken a hurt. They went off to their den to lick their gashes, and not suffer any others to come near. Coming here . . . is a kind of den. He can’t stand people fussing over him, making a thing about his arm.”

  Pepper whined softly, and Dolph affectionately patted the dog’s head. Creatures followed Dolph everywhere—horses, dogs and cats, even the chickens in the yard. It had prompted Vati’s dear friend Pastor Altmueller to make a humorous comparison to St. Francis and his animal friends.

  “It doesn’t look like Anna is doing anything of that,” Magda ventured.

  Her son looked mildly amused, “No. It’s as good as a play to listen to them. They carry on like cats and dogs. I think he’s a bit sweet on her because she doesn’t carry on all girly.”

  Magda agreed. “Anna is the last girl in the world who could be accused of being missish.”

  “As soon as we take the dishes back to Captain Nimitz, Uncle Hansi has a wagonload of shingles for Neu Braunfels. Cousin Peter is going along, to get a sense of how things work.” Her son hefted the box again.

  “I presume he will take his meals with us, here,” Magda asked. “And that you have told your Aunt Liesel to set another place for him?”

  “Yes Mama, when we’re not on the road,” her son answered, pacifically. He took the box of dishes through the storeroom. Through the opened doors, Magda could hear the horses standing in harness to the smallest wagon, jingling their tack impatiently. The sound of laughter floated in from the garden as
Dolph called to his cousin. Magda smiled to hear it. So good a thing, after the blight of the war and never knowing whom to trust, of half dreading to open a letter or the newspaper for fear it might bring bad news, leaping out like a wicked sprite. The war had taken so much from her—husband and home, and nearly the life of her youngest child. For a time she also had wanted to curl up like an animal in its den, grieving and licking those savage wounds. She knew what it felt like, to give in to that impulse, when life shattered into a hundred thousand pieces.

  “Be happy,” her husband had bade her, the very last words he said to her as the Hanging Band led him away. “Take care of the children. Be happy.” And so she had tried. She forced herself out of her room upstairs and shouldered responsibility not only for her children, but for Liesel and for Vati. Over the endless empty days of the last three years she had been picking up and reassembling the tiny shards of her life, and her children’s lives. Be happy. Take care of the children.

  She let her gaze linger a moment in the garden. The younger children would be off to school shortly, and she must unlatch the door to the street to the cool of the morning and prepare for another day of business. Dolph and Peter clattered away in the little wagon, driving towards Main Street to return the Nimitz’ hotel crockery. As soon as Anna was finished with the lanterns, she would sweep the sidewalk in front of the shop window, water the tubs of colorful oleanders sitting outside with a bucket of water from the well, and sprinkle some of it in the street to settle the dust. Magda bent her head over the books again; had they paid as much as six dollars each for beeves? Really, that was too much. Perhaps Hansi had done someone a favor, paying so much over value in the market, for only two of them.

  The sound of Liesel’s voice floated across the garden, chiding Anna’s fifteen-year¬-old sister Marie about washing the last of the breakfast dishes. A moment later, Liesel herself burst into the office like a calico whirlwind, wringing a dishcloth between her hands and demanding breathlessly, “Is he here? Have you seen Vati? He was in the parlor a moment ago, and how he’s not and the front door is standing wide open!”

  “No, he’s not come through the shop. Dolph or I would have seen him.” Magda corked the ink bottle and laid down her pen, trying valiantly to hide her own concern. Vati had become forgetful of late, and terribly impulsive, apt to take it into his head to walk across town to visit his old friend, Pastor Altmueller, or decide to pick grapes from the tangled thickets beside Baron’s Creek without saying a word to anyone. All three of his daughters worried about this, but Liesel worried the most. She had always been moody, mercurial in her feelings. As Vati often observed, she was either on top of the tallest tower or down in the cellar. Lately she had been more and more often in the cellar. “Maybe he went upstairs to his room.”

  “No.” Liesel wrung the cloth in her hands, twisting it as tight as a length of wood. “I sent the boys upstairs to look. His room was empty.”

  “It’s only been a few minutes,” Magda answered, soothingly. Her sister had never looked anything like her; a plump pretty wren of a woman, with blue-grey eyes, apple-pink cheeks and fair curly hair that was fading almost imperceptibly to grey. More and more she resembled their mother, who had died of ship fever and been buried at sea before they’d ever set foot in this country. Vati slipped now and again, calling Liesel by her mother’s name, another reason for concern. “Lise, I must open the shop, but he can’t have gone very far. You and I can go look for him up and down the street. I’ll look a little way along San Antonio, if you look along Market Square. Come along then, he should be in sight if he has only just gone.”

  She rose from her chair and took Liesel by the arm, but as they went through the shop and into the hall her sister pulled back from her, as if she were a reluctant small child no older than their daughters Lottie and Grete, the almost-twin cousins.

  “Why can’t Dolph and the boys go look for him!” Liesel stood irresolute.

  Magda stepped out onto the front stoop, shading her eyes against the morning sun as she looked along the store fronts on Market Square. “They’ve already gone in the wagon,” Magda answered. “I don’t see him anywhere! What are you waiting for, Lise? Come along, you said yourself he can’t have gone far.” She caught Liesel’s arm and pulled her out onto the sidewalk, wondering with no little exasperation what was wrong with her sister. “For heaven’s sake, Lise, don’t worry about your shawl and bonnet, just go look for Vati!” She shoved her sister in the general direction of Main Street and went in the other direction, around the corner and a little way down San Antonio Street, past her own store window. There were folk about, but none of them were Vati; none of them a slender, elderly man pottering about like a gentle, near-sighted gnome. Oh, where could he have gotten to, just when she had to open the shop!

  She hurried a little way along the street; no Vati anywhere in sight. The children—yes, send out the children to search, before they went to school. She doubled back upon her footsteps. Upon rounding the corner again, she found her sister exactly where she had left her, frozen stock still on the sidewalk, her pleasantly rounded face now tinted grey from dreadful fear.

  “What is the matter with you!” she cried, and shook Liesel’s shoulders. “I told you to look for Vati!”

  Liesel only shook her head, gasping, “I—I couldn’t, Magda.” She began to shake violently under Magda’s hands, gasping as if she had just run a long footrace. “There’s something . . . something . . .I can’t.”

  Magda put her arm around her sister. “There’s nothing out here, Lise, nothing to be frightened of! Look . . .Lise, little one . . .there is no one about on the street to give affright.” Liesel appeared paralyzed with terror, trembling and stammering incoherently as Magda half led and half dragged her into the house. Magda’s concern was only partially mitigated by the relief of seeing Vati, with her younger son and daughter Hannah, coming briskly from the direction of Main Street. Once inside, the walls of Vati’s house as comforting as an embrace, Liesel’s terror seemed to lessen, although her trembling did not.

  Magda begged again. “What is the matter, Lise, what did you see?!” But Liesel only clung to her, as if a child, breathing in deep gasps. She recovered some composure just as Vati and the children appeared through the front door.

  Sam’s boyish good cheer vanished as soon as he saw them clinging to each other like shipwreck survivors. “Mama! What’s the matter with Auntie?”

  Hannah clutched her brother’s hand as Vati exclaimed, “Lise-love, what has happened, what is the matter?” He took Liesel in a soothing embrace, murmuring endearments, as if Liesel were a child as small as Lottie or Grete who had newly awakened from a nightmare.

  “I don’t know, Vati, I don’t know!” Liesel sobbed. “I was just so frightened! I felt like I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move, and we couldn’t find you, anywhere!”

  “There, there,” Vati patted her cheek. “Nothing to fear, Lise-love, nothing to fear. Let us go out and sit in the garden, my dear child….”

  “No!” Liesel shook her head, a new spark of panic in her eyes. “No, I don’t want to go outside!”

  “Well, we’ll sit in the parlor, then,” Vati replied instantly. “I shall tell you the most extraordinary thing, Liesel-love. I thought I saw Son Carl!” He walked with Liesel into the parlor. “I was sitting and reading over my dear friend Von Roemer’s account—such a clever young man—of his travels hither and yon, when I looked up through the garden window! Really, I was so terribly certain!”

  Magda stood in the hallway with Sam and Hannah as if she had been rooted to the spot. Vati’s voice floated out of the parlor and Liesel murmured something in reply, too softly for Magda to hear. She turned to her younger son. Sam was shifting impatiently from one foot to another, with his bundle of schoolbooks on a strap over his shoulder.

  “What did Opa say to you?” she demanded. Eleven-year-old Sam bounced through life, unquenchably exuberant and seemingly as impervious to damage as an India-rubber ball.
Compared to his older brother, he was as transparent as the clear green water in Baron’s Creek.

  Now he answered, “He came running after us and he said he had seen Papa driving a wagon down San Antonio Street and wasn’t it splendid that he was home at last?” For a moment Sam looked heartbreakingly mature. “Don’t cry, Nannie, you know Opa was mistaken.” From the pocket of his roundabout jacket he produced a perfectly disgusting calico handkerchief, which he handed to her. Hannah, ten and timid, still had nightmares about the Hanging Band that had come to their stone house in the Guadalupe River valley and taken away their father. “Here, blow your nose. He couldn’t possibly have seen Papa. Papa is dead. I think he must have seen Cousin Peter or Dolph. They both look a little like Papa, from the back. And I said so to Opa—‘Opa,’ I said, ‘that’s our cousin from Austin, he was at the wedding party, he’s come to guard wagons for Uncle Hansi, don’t you remember?’ And after a while, Opa looked so sad, and he said, ‘Oh, so it must be—you are right!’ And then he began to laugh at himself for being so forgetful and running out of the house without his hat and coat. He said he was getting so old he was forgetting everything!” Sam tilted his head thoughtfully to one side. “Mama, that was something awfully big to forget, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes, it was, Sam,” she admitted. Her heart was wrung with despair for Vati’s growing infirmity.

  Sam hitched up his book bundle and took his sister’s hand. With a cheerful voice he said, “I guess I will just have to learn enough to remind him of everything he forgets.” The school bell clanged across Market Square, and he added, in the tenacious and cheerful manner that he shared with Vati when they both were roused with a fresh thirst for enlightenment, “Still, Opa knows so much! I expect it will take him forever to forget it all.”