Adelsverein

by Celia Hayes

  “Oh, yes,” Magda sighed, “it was very protracted; soaking for hours in the mineral waters, baths and massages and constantly drinking of it, and special meals. Tedious for the rest of us, but it did her much good.”

  “I think it was the effects of everyone fussing over her constantly,” Lottie observed.

  “For shame, Lottie,” Magda chastised her. “That was most uncalled for!”

  “No? Oh, Mama—you hardly ever left her side! While Grete and I and Horrie enjoyed ourselves, you hovered over her like a nurse, like a mother hen with one chick! Even Onkel Hansi eventually got bored and went to England to buy horses with Dolph and Cousin Peter!”

  “Before that—we did return to Albeck, though,” Magda pointed out.

  “Yes, but you traveled thence in a stuffy closed carriage with her, while the rest of us rode in an open barouche!” And she added with a shudder, “And what a place it was! Grete and I could scarce believe the wretchedness of it! Those tiny houses and that awful, awful man!”

  “Lottie, it was not like that before,” Magda exclaimed with some heat. “It was our home once before and we remembered it very fondly.”

  “With advantages,” Lottie interjected. “So when did Onkel Hansi decided on dragging us all to that backwards little village?”

  Magda laid her arthritis-knotted hand on Mouse’s head. The Peke roused from sleep and looked at her with his bulging eyes almost liquid with adoration. Magda had always felt the cold quite dreadfully, and now she felt it even more. “We made an excursion to Ulm almost as soon as we had rested from our long journey! We were so eager to see our old home; I still cannot decide if we hoped it had changed, or remained exactly as we remembered in every detail! In Ulm, much had changed. Aunt Ursula’s children had long since emigrated. And Uncle Simon, your Opa’s dearest friend? He had died also, his children and his nephew scattered to the four winds. We could not even find the street where their shops had been, for that part of town had all been new-built! The more we tried to recall where everything had been, the more those memories escaped us, like water in the palm of your hand! But Albeck . . .Albeck was the same,” Magda sighed bitterly, “just the same. Hansi had written to his brothers, Jürgen and Joachim—his parents were long-dead, of course. His father died the year after we departed, his mother sometime during the War Between the States. But his brothers still lived in Albeck.”

  * * *

  And so they went out from Ulm on a late summer day, a day achingly like the day when they had departed, over thirty summers before. The children were mad with excitement, although Horrie and Peter stood a little apart from all this. Their connection to the homeland was slight at best. Heinrich Becker, Margaret and Carl’s grandfather, was from Kassel in Hesse. A soldier in the Landgrave’s regiments that had been brought to America to serve the British, he had deserted and married the daughter of a Pennsylvania family of Anabaptists, and never regretted either action. Those ties and memories the Beckers had of their ancestral heritage had long decayed by the time Alois Becker crossed into Texas with his children, his ox teams and Conestoga wagon—all but the language they spoke among themselves and the songs they sang to the children. This new land had claimed them, just as it had claimed her children in turn. Magda looked from the narrow slit in the curtains drawn over the windows of the closed coach, which was all that Liesel could bear, on this hottest day of mid-summer. Oh, at least it wasn’t as hot as it would have been in Texas, she thought resignedly.

  Her breath caught in her throat; this was the very place, the place where Hansi had stopped his cart and held three-year-old Anna up in his arms.

  “Look,” he called to them all at that moment, as their carts halted beside the road out of their village, “look back, for that is the last sight of Albeck! Look well, and remember—for that is the very last that we will see of our old home!”

  They had looked back obediently but with no small emotion, looked back at the tiny huddle of roofs around the church spire, a little ship afloat in a sea of golden fields; Hansi and Liesel with baby Joachim, the child who was fated to die at sea, and Magda with her parents and little brothers in the second cart, on their way to a new life in a new country. ‘Gehe mit uns in Texas’ was the slogan: Come with us to Texas!

  “I never thought we would return,” she said to her sister, the two of them in the stifling coach. “I never thought anything would induce me to set foot on a ship again.”

  “Are we almost there?” Liesel asked, almost wistfully. “I would so like to see Vati’s old house again, although I suppose it is much changed. Do you suppose the new owners would let us go inside? We lived there so happily. I would like Grete and Harry and Christian to see. Do you remember how we milked the cows in Vati’s barn? The morning after Vati and Hansi decided that we would accept the Verein’s offer of lands and transport?”

  “Yes, and I told you that Vati and Hansi had already decided upon it, so all we could do was to put the best countenance upon it and be brave,” Magda answered. She found her sister’s hand, neatly gloved and lying in her lap, as the coach swayed down the narrow road. She gave it a comforting squeeze and added, “You were brave, Lise—as brave as you could be.”

  “No I wasn’t,” Liesel gulped. “I could only put on a bold face as long as you or Vati and Hansi were with me. As soon as I was alone, such fears crept out of dark corners to overwhelm me! I could not bear it when Hansi went to drive for the Confederate Army—and then to lose my little boys and Grete to that cruel frontier!”

  “But Grete was restored to you,” Magda answered swiftly. “And Hansi and your other sons have had such success as they never dreamed of, that Vati never dreamed of! Surely that must be added to the ledger-book, Lise! Do you not also remember how you also had dreams, that you would marry Hansi and I would marry a prince and live in a mansion full of books and come to visit in a fine coach? That was your dream, sister. Does it not seem to have come true?”

  “Oh yes,” and Liesel laughed a little, “but at such a cost! But Hansi says all such things have costs. Until the race is completed, one may not even begin to know if the cost was worth paying!”

  “No, one does not,” Magda agreed. “But I would never have married if I had remained in Albeck; my children would never have been born—so for me it was worthwhile!”

  “I suppose.” Liesel sighed again, as the coachman reined his teams to a stop. The coach rocked forward and then swayed as Hansi opened the door.

  “We’re here, Lise-love! Your father’s house! It’s owned by a man in Ulm and there’s tenants living in it now! There doesn’t seem to be anyone about, so I don’t suppose we should venture any farther than the yard.” He helped Liesel down, and Dolph reached up to take Magda’s hand.

  The sunlight dazzled her eyes as she stepped down from the coach. The barouche was stopped a little beyond the gate into Vati’s old farmyard; Anna and the girls stood under the archway, looking curiously within.

  “Needs a fresh coat of whitewash,” Magda said at once, her heart in her throat. The wooden gates stood wide open. She was struck with the sudden notion of how incongruous they all appeared, in their bright fashionable dresses and neat leather shoes, standing in the trodden muck of Albeck’s narrow street, like butterflies lighting down on a dung heap, while hens picked at odd bits of greenery and grain between the cracks of the cobbled yard within.

  “It’s so much smaller than I remembered,” Anna ventured at last. “I thought it as large as a mansion and the stable a good distance from the house. I did not recall everything crammed so tightly together!” Her nostrils flared delicately as she added, “Truly, Papa, how did we endure the muck pile so close to the house windows, especially on a hot summer day?”

  “Muck was gold to us then, Annchen,” Hansi answered exuberantly. “Every shovelful was precious, spread on the fields in the spring.”

  Beside Magda, her son shook his head in mild amusement. “Oh, Lord, Uncle Hansi—all I need do is pasture the cattle in one of my f
ields until they have added enough muck to it, without the bother of the hands carting it around.”

  “We did things differently, back then,” Hansi answered. It seemed to Magda that he had a catch in his voice, as if he too had just realized how far he had journeyed from this place. The cattle baron, they had called him at the Stephanienbad, in his fine-cut coat, waistcoat with a heavy gold watch chain spread across a rich expanse of silk brocade, and elegant leather boots that had never stepped through a freshly spread layer of muck in the fields.

  “Oh, look, Hansi, they have put pots of geraniums by the door, just as Mutti used to do!” Liesel exclaimed.

  The door to the house opened, and a woman in a plain dark dress without any hoops, and a vast dirty apron tied around her waist, stepped out of the dim doorway. She stared at them, mute with astonishment for a moment before calling nervously, “Did you have need of something from us, madams and sirs?”

  “Yes and no, madam,” Hansi answered, cheerily. “For we are old residents of Albeck. This house was once my father in-law’s; my good wife and her sister once lived here! Do you have any recollection of Christian Steinmetz and his kin?”

  “Old Steinmetz the watchmaker?” the woman answered warily. “Whose daughter married the younger Richter boy and they went all off to America? I came here with my husband from Erbach on the other side of Ulm ten years ago; we knew them not. They were gone years before that.” She shrugged her shoulders, as if it was of no note to her; and of course it wasn’t, Magda realized. She and her family were tenants. They weren’t of Albeck in the way that Vati had been. “They say,” the woman added with indifference, as she threw a handful of grain towards the chickens, “that most of them either died of disease or were carried away by Indians. What were they thinking, going off to that place? Full of barbarians it is. Why would any sensible body leave here and go to there, my man says! What’s the matter with being content with what you have right here?”

  “Nothing much, madam,” Hansi agreed with a cheery smile, “unless you aren’t content with it and want better! I am Hansi Richter; Jürgen and Joachim are my older brothers!”

  “Aye?” The woman looked skeptical, “Jürgen Richter never said much about a brother in America, then.”

  “I don’t suppose I spoke all that much about him either, once I was in America.” Hansi’s cheer looked a bit dimmer. “But may I ask a favor, Madam? My wife and her sister once lived here and we had thought to show our children this very house. Might we come inside so that they might see?”

  “Only as far as the kitchen, mind,” the woman answered, warily. “The upstairs is let to another tenant and my youngest is asleep in the other room so you mustn’t make any noise—I’ll have no peace until she goes back to sleep.” She patted her hair, uncomfortably, as if suddenly and most embarrassingly aware that it was falling out of its pins. “Let me have a moment, sir, madams—I left something on the fire.” She dove into the doorway again, untying her apron as she did.

  Magda said, “Oh, dear. She’s in the middle of her work, and the kitchen is all disarrayed. We have embarrassed her, asking to see all that.”

  “Well, I’m not her landlord or her husband so why should I care?” Hansi asked reasonably.

  Anna laughed, “Oh, Papa! You should know, any proper housewife hates for strangers to see a mess in her house! We should wait for courtesy, at least a few minutes.”

  “But not for too long,” Hansi replied, “for my brothers are expecting our arrival shortly.”

  “Mama,” Lottie whispered tremulously to her mother, “must we go inside? I really don’t want to, it looks awfully squalid.”

  Magda reproved her. “Lottie, this is your grandfather’s old house, where we all lived until we committed to immigrate to Texas.”

  Lottie replied, “Mama, I think Opa improved himself no end; this place is awful. It may be quaint but it is tiny and it smells!”

  Magda sighed. Vati’s old house in its present condition did indeed suffer by comparison in her memory, not to mention compared to the Becker ranch house and to Hansi’s grand San Antonio mansion. But surely, Mutti and Vati, they had kept it in better condition than this. She and Liesel had scoured the stoop and swept the courtyard daily; Hansi had white-washed the walls every couple of years. Surely Vati’s house had not seemed so humble and plain when it was their home!? Surely Mutti had kept it to a higher standard than it presently was, with an indefinable air of air of poverty and neglect?

  “We will not stay long,” she said. Lottie and Grete immediately appeared much cheered.

  It was not so bad within, when the woman of the house finally made a welcoming gesture, inviting them to step across the stone threshold of the main door. Five hundred years and more of human activity had worn an achingly familiar gentle declivity into the doorstep. Magda thought of how often her own footsteps had carried her in and out of that door, busy about the business of Vati’s farmhouse when she was a girl. She stepped through that oh-so-familiar door—so much the same, so much different!

  A fire burned brightly in the hearth, gleaming from the copper pans hanging over it; but those pans were not as brilliantly polished as Mutti would have had them. Reassuringly, the kitchen was not a pit of slovenly disorder. Bunches of herbs still hung in their accustomed places, and the pieces of rustic furniture were not any fewer, or of worse quality, than what had been before. Indeed, the dish cupboard was the same, as Magda thought when she looked at it closely. It had been too large, too heavy to remove from the room without taking it to pieces, so Vati had relinquished it with all the other household fittings. Now it was filled with someone else’s dishes, not the blue-and-white plates that Mutti had packed so carefully in wood shavings and put into the back of one of Hansi’s sturdy farm carts. Now those very plates, which had survived the long journey and the years afterward, filled the shelves of the dish cupboard of Vati’s Friedrichsburg house.

  “Vati, your grandfather, he used to read in a chair set in this very place,” Liesel was pointing out the deep-set fireplace, almost an inglenook in itself, to Anna’s sons and Grete. “Late into the night, after supper. In winter, it was the warmest place in the house. And when he was in Ulm, at his shop in the city, there I would set and nurse my children.”

  “Our room was upstairs,” Magda said softly to Dolph and Lottie. “Lise and I shared a little room under the eaves. From when we were children, until Liesel and Hansi married.”

  “It seems very cramped,” Dolph pointed out, ducking his head under one of the age-darkened roof beams that spanned the fireplace end of the kitchen.

  Peter added, and Magda could tell that he was smiling under his heavy mustache, “How many times would I have concussed myself, Cuz, before I took to walking around like a hunchback?”

  A window filled with small roundels of bottle-green glass looked out from the kitchen, into the street. Like a sleepwalker, Anna moved towards it. “It is so very small,” she said in a voice of wonder. “This window was above my head, once. It seemed to be as tall as a church-window, but I could not see out of it.”

  “You still cannot, Anna-my-heart,” her husband pointed out with dry wit. “That glass is as thick as a pot lid.” He took her hand, and placing his other arm around her waist, added softly, “Yes, I daresay this quaint little place has charm enough for the sentimental—but all the same I am glad you came away.” Magda saw that Anna leaned towards his embrace, as if she were glad of it.

  “I think we should go, Hansi,” she said to her brother-in-law. “We are in the way of this good woman’s work of a morning. This is not our house. It has not been such for years.”

  “I wish we could have seen upstairs,” Liesel said, wistfully, with a look of longing over her shoulder towards the little door that led into the stair-hall.

  Hansi answered, “No sense in it, Lise. I don’t think the children are much interested, and Magda is right—we have been enough of an interference. Let’s walk down to my brothers’, though, hey? It’s not suc
h a long way, we’ll tell the coachmen to meet us there.”

  They bade the woman of the house good day. Hansi lingered behind and Magda thought he gave her a little money. “For your trouble, good madam,” he said.

  As Magda went out into the farmyard, her son took her arm. “Now I see what Vati and the others were thinking of,” he remarked.

  “Thinking of?” Magda asked, much puzzled.

  Dolph explained patiently, “What they were thinking of, when Vati built his house, and the other old settlers built theirs.” Dolph waved his hand around the courtyard, and the little street beyond. “A place like this, mostly. Solid and close together. That kitchen was the pattern for the one in Vati’s house, and the one that Berg built for Papa. Only,” he added in a rush of candor, “I think ours are better. Not so cramped.”

  “And windows one can see out of,” Peter added. In the bright sunshine outside, Anna opened her parasol, as did Lottie and Grete. Magda watched Liesel carefully; no, no sign yet of her descending in a rush to her deep dark cellar, or one of those fear-inducing megrims.

  “I am glad to have seen Vati’s house again,” she announced, cheerfully breathless, “but Annchen is right; I had forgotten how very small it was!”

  “You live in a mansion now, Lise,” Magda was quick to point out.

  She took Liesel’s arm as Hansi emerged from the house and took her other, saying jovially, “Ah well, at least we can hope for a warmer welcome from my brothers, hey?”

  Magda recalled Hansi’s older brothers very well; they were as like to him as Hansi’s older sons were like each other, stolid and stubborn, good company when they felt like it, with the same temper that never came out until provoked beyond reasoning. They had teased her roughly, as boys would, when they were all at the village school together. She was not pretty and meek like the other girls, and so gave back as good as she got, but Jürgen and Joachim had come and bid them farewell from this very courtyard, on the day the departed to take ship from Bremen.