Homeland

by John Jakes

  The trips seemed to calm him, help him reorder his thoughts. Sometimes when he came home he would talk for hours about where he’d been, what he’d done. After other trips, however, he said nothing, not even mentioning his destination. Ilsa didn’t distrust her husband, or imagine he had a mistress somewhere. Yet the silences disturbed her, for she felt they were occasioned by some deep spiritual darkness that never entirely left him. Pessimism born in the dark and cold of northern Europe was expected, even joked about among Germans. Joe’s malaise was more profound. It was a side of his nature that baffled her; a room in his soul from which he excluded her; a wall he built that she could never scale.

  Ilsa Crown loved her husband unreservedly. She knew and accepted all of his characteristics, good and bad. His moods. His ferocious ambition. Joseph Crown was a man driven to succeed. He’d been that way since the day she met him, and it was this drive that had brought him success and riches. His drive enabled her to live and raise her children in fine surroundings. But there was a bad side to it. Joe was also driven to order the world as he wanted it. Which, given the haphazard and changing nature of life, and the contradictions in human beings, frequently led to conflict.

  During the merriment of the holidays it was easy to forget or ignore conflicts within a family. But the season was over, there was only the celebration of the Epiphany remaining. Pauli had brought diversion, novelty, good cheer to the household, but that too would soon wear off. And she and Joe had argued over alcohol again, as they’d argued before, many times.

  In the kitchen hung a plaque in German. It had belonged to her mother. It said Des Hauses Glück Zufriedenheit. “The house fortune is contentedness.” Ilsa sat at the breakfast table an unusually long time that morning, wondering whether the contentedness of her house was about to be disturbed even more in the months to come.

  Ilsa Crown was four years younger than her husband. She had been born Ilse Schlottendorf, in Bavaria, in 1846. Her parents were farm people who produced only one child.

  She had grown up in surroundings she loved—a typical Bavarian Bauernhaus, a sturdy wooden structure which combined the family residence and the family barn under one steep red-tiled roof. Her bedroom was located directly above the barn, and her childhood lullaby was the restless lowing of the milk cows. One of her best memories was of the family gathering in the farmhouse kitchen on a winter night, eating their supper in the warmth from the great stone stove covered with geometric-patterned glazed tiles. From that room had come the kitchen plaque with its message about contentment.

  In Bavaria, she had helped with chores, growing strong and tough from the work. She had displayed a keen intelligence, and something of an independent spirit. But she didn’t rebel, she was a respectful and conventional girl. When her mother went out wearing a bonnet, the symbol of a Hausfrau, Ilsa dutifully slipped on a wreath, the mark of a young woman still unmarried.

  Her favorite time of the year was Ostern, Easter. After the mountainous snowfalls of winter, and the somber penitence of Lent, Ostern brought the springtime, and the village bon-fire in which the straw man representing Judas was burned. It brought the unforgettable sight of large wooden wagon wheels stuffed with straw, set alight in the dusk, and rolled down hillsides. To this day, she occasionally dreamed of the Easter wheels tumbling through the darkness, shooting off sparks and fire.

  Several years of bad weather and poor crops, and her father’s talent for failure, drove the family to the wall in Bavaria. The farm was sold for much less than its value. Just enough money for railway tickets to Bremen, and steerage tickets to New York. The Schlottendorf family made the journey in 1856, when Ilsa was ten.

  They passed through Castle Garden and, on the advice of friends in the old country, traveled directly to Cincinnati. The city on the hills above the Ohio River was one of three in which Germans from the first great midcentury wave of immigration settled in large numbers, the others being Milwaukee and St. Louis. It was in Cincinnati that Ilse Americanized her name by changing the e to a. Someone suggested she consider the name Elsa, but she wrote it a few times and didn’t like the look of it.

  The Schlottendorfs rented a small house in the Fifth Ward, near the canal, in the large German section called Over-the-Rhine. When Josef Kroner arrived in Cincinnati a year later, he took a cheap room in another part of town.

  Despite a new infusion of hope, and enthusiasm for visionary schemes, Ilsa’s father failed once again. With two partners, he bought a hillside tract on the river near the city. The partners were convinced that, since this part of America resembled the wine regions of Germany, they could import cuttings from the Rhine and the Mosel, and after a few years have a profitable winery. But the climate was wrong, the growing season too short, the winters too severe. The fledgling industry quickly died, and with it her father’s last hope. What happened in the months after the vineyard failed scarred her forever.

  Ilsa didn’t meet her future husband until the stormily eventful summer of 1861. The Union was at war with the rebel South, young men were enlisting, young girls like Ilsa were thrilled by the sight of so many uniforms, and Cincinnati itself, though officially in the Northern camp, seethed with divided loyalties. The city was a major depot for runaway blacks following the Underground Railroad north to Canada and freedom. It was also heavily infested with secesh sympathizers, many of them related to former slaveholders in the torn and bloody state of Kentucky across the river.

  The “Men of ’48” who settled in America were almost solid in their loyalty to the Union. They hated slavery and all those who practiced it. So did their wives. Ilsa’s mother worked as a volunteer nurse for Quakers operating the local Underground Railroad. The Schlottendorf household contained a small library of abolitionist literature, including Mrs. Stowe’s famous novel and the writings of Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison. Attendance at abolitionist rallies was another part of this discipleship of freedom.

  Thus, on a muggy night in August of 1861, Ilsa Schlottendorf went with her twenty-year-old second cousin, Mary Schimmel, to an abolitionist gathering at the local hall of the Odd Fellows Lodge.

  Several white orators addressed the crowd in turn, mixing their denunciations of slavery with emotional declarations that the war was necessary to destroy the system forever. The evening’s final speaker was a black man with woolly gray hair, an Alabama-born Dahomian named Turk. He told of the sale of his wife and two tiny children by his financially pressed white owner. He then described what happened when he protested this enforced sundering of a family.

  Turk slipped off his shirt and stepped forward to the row of smoking lamp chimneys at the front of the platform. When he turned around the audience cried out with one voice. Young Ilsa almost swooned at the sight of the criss-crossed scars on Turk’s back.

  By the end of Turk’s presentation, the audience was howling for Rebel blood. Everyone left the hall with a renewed determination to support the war, even though it now seemed unlikely that a Union victory would come quickly, or at small cost.

  Ilsa and Mary were buffeted by others as they passed through the doors. A steamy darkness awaited, thick with river vapors that blurred the stars. Now where did we tie the buggy? Ilsa asked herself. The vacant lot, nearly pitch-black, ran beside the wooden lodge hall from front to back, all the way to the next street. Because of the crowd they’d been forced to picket their horse and buggy at the extreme rear of the lot.

  People from the meeting were hurrying to leave, pulling out in their wagons and shays. Ilsa fanned herself as they walked in clouds of dust churned up by the departing vehicles. Suddenly she gripped her cousin’s arm.

  “Mary, look, there’s our buggy. What are those men doing to it?”

  Two men, silhouetted against the lanterns of a grogshop on the next street, had apparently chosen a buggy at random and were slashing at the traces of the horse. The freed horse bolted into the street and galloped away.

  “Here, what do you think you’re doing?” Ilsa exclaime
d, running. Her overweight cousin panted to keep up. Ilsa was too angry to be frightened. “Get away, that’s our property,” she cried, flinging herself on the nearest man.

  “Ow, you Dutch bitch,” the man yelled, ramming his elbow into her breast. Hurt, Ilsa reeled against Mary. “Let’s take care of these two nigger lovers, Jud.”

  “Oh, my God, my God,” Mary moaned in German. Terrified, Ilsa looked around the vacant lot. People were still leaving, the wheels of their vehicles raising huge dust clouds. The dust made vision poor. Ilsa and her cousin were completely alone, unnoticed …

  “Grab her, Tom,” Jud said. The other man leaped at Ilsa and held her from behind.

  “You Reb monsters,” Ilsa cried, wrenching and kicking. The man holding her spun her around.

  “Quit that, God damn you.” He hit her in the face with his open palm. Everything whirled: the dust, the dim lamps on the grogshop, the blurry summer stars. Ilsa staggered and fell on one knee in a clump of weeds. Suddenly she heard the man called Tom exclaim, “Jesus, look out!”

  In heavily accented English, someone was shouting. “Leave those women alone, what kind of vermin are you?” Ilsa saw a small, spare figure snatch their buggy whip from its socket. He laid it across Tom’s face.

  Tom howled. The stranger kept whipping him. “Get out of here, you yellow dogs. Get out of here before I kill you both.”

  The Rebs wasted no time. They limped from the lot and disappeared down the rutted street. The stranger dusted off his heavy black coat and smoothed his hair. He was a young man, small and trim. He carried himself with authority.

  He stepped over to the clump of weeds where Ilsa had fallen. He held out his hand. She clasped it, feeling the strength in it. With his help she stood up.

  In German he asked, “Are you all right?”

  “Yes. But my cousin—what about her?”

  The stranger knelt over Mary, who lay near the buggy, eyes closed. “Only fainted, I think. This is terrible. Friends told me there might be Southern partisans outside the hall, but I had no idea they would get so ugly.” He began to pat Mary’s cheek with one hand and massage her wrist with the other. Suddenly his head lifted.

  “Oh, forgive me, I’m being impolite. I failed to introduce myself.”

  Ilsa managed a shy laugh. “Well—under the circumstances—”

  Mary Schimmel groaned and sat up. The stranger stepped away, and faced Ilsa. By the grogshop’s light Ilsa clearly saw his strong young face for the first time.

  “My name is Josef Kroner,” he said, and bowed.

  Ever afterward, Ilsa said that was the exact moment she fell in love with him. If it wasn’t absolutely true, memory made it so, and it became part of the family history.

  Josef Kroner, age nineteen, was employed at Imbrey’s Brewery, one of several such firms, all German-owned, in Cincinnati. He had been at Imbrey’s four months, having moved over from a lowly job at Rugeldorfer Ice, which furnished ice to many homes and business clients, including Imbrey’s.

  The moment the Ohio River froze, so Josef told Ilsa during the time they were getting acquainted, virtually the whole work force at Rugeldorfer’s devoted itself to harvesting ice with crosscut saws. They worked sixteen and eighteen hours a day, in snow, sleet, or subzero temperatures; the season was short, and the demand was great. Lager beer was becoming popular, but before lager could be sold it had to be allowed to age, or rest, in cool cellars or caves. This required ice, tons of it. Most breweries didn’t have ice plants. Imbrey’s hired young Josef specifically to design, build, and run an ice plant on the premises.

  While Imbrey’s was a good old company, dependable if not spectacular, Josef’s future there became uncertain the moment war broke out. The whole community of Over-the-Rhine was afire with patriotic zeal. After Josef and Ilsa met, one of the first things he told her was that he shared that zeal, and wanted to march off with thousands of other Germans, many of whom couldn’t even speak English, to fight for his new country. He had in fact already signed enlistment papers with Colonel W. H. H. Taylor’s 5th Ohio Volunteer Cavalry—“I handle horses at the icehouse, it’s more experience than most cavalry recruits can offer.” He would report to Camp Dick Corwin, near Cincinnati, in early September.

  Hearing that, Ilsa was excited, yet strangely sad. The oddly mixed reaction was her first realization that she liked this brown-eyed, straight-backed young man very much.

  Josef didn’t propose to Ilsa until after the war. By that time he’d adopted the name Joe Crown. He was a toughened veteran, having ridden all the way to Savannah and through the Carolinas with the cavalry of Generals Sherman and Kilpatrick. He had been wounded twice, but he talked very little about his war experience and evaded Ilsa’s direct questions about it. He seemed to brood whenever the subject came up. Ilsa decided it was a mystery she would never fully understand.

  Joe made his proposal simply. “Will you do me the honor of becoming my wife, Ilsa?”

  She answered from her heart. “I don’t know.”

  He looked stunned, then wounded. “You say you love me. You’ve said it several times.”

  “I do love you. But I don’t love your business.”

  There was the problem. He’d declared his ambition as soon as he came home to Cincinnati. He intended to leave Imbrey’s as soon as he could. Launch out on his own, build his own brewery. His own fortune; his own life.

  “You see, I want no part of anyone connected with brewing or distilling,” she added.

  “Wait,” he exclaimed. “Those are two different trades. Beer’s good, beer’s German, brewers are fine upright people.” He reminded her that it was the German brewers of America who had helped finance the war by encouraging and supporting the 1862 Internal Revenue Act that put a one dollar tax on every barrel of beer sold.

  “I know that,” she said. “But I have memories, Joe. Memories of my poor father.”

  “Your father’s dead. You’ve never told me much about him, but you said he died while I was away.”

  “Papa is the reason Mama is an exhausted woman. For more than five years, she has worked six days a week at Kammel’s Bakery. She had to support us because Papa couldn’t. He was a drunkard. You met him only once or twice before you went to war, you probably never suspected.”

  Joe said nothing. Perhaps he had suspected. She didn’t want to know.

  “He always drank,” she said. “Mama thought drink was the reason he couldn’t do well managing the farm. Here in America it got worse. After his vineyard failed he drank almost constantly. He drank anything, wine, corn whiskey—even grain alcohol. For a while his men friends tried to help, find work for him, but he couldn’t hold the most menial job. The night the town celebrated the defeat of the South at Gettysburg, he got drunk again, fell in the canal and drowned. So you see why I don’t care very much for anyone who helps another human being to that kind of end.”

  Ilsa Schlottendorf married Joe Crown anyway, because her enormous love overcame her distinctly un-German feelings against beer. For many years, as a young wife, a young mother, she fitted into the expected pattern, and never criticized her husband’s business, or spoke against it.

  Of late that had changed.

  Of late many things were changing for the Crowns.

  When Ilsa composed herself and left the dining room, she went to the largest room on the first floor; her personal domain. The kitchen.

  In many ways Ilsa Crown’s character and interests were unusual for a person of her background and station. Her relationship to her kitchen, however, was distinctly conventional. Since long before her wedding to Joe, she had recognized that a perfekte Küche was the sign of a proper German home, and as a wife she devoted hours and years to achieving and maintaining it. The effort—the kitchen itself—comforted her spirit when things were unsettled.

  Ilsa and Louise, a small and gray and mouselike woman, exchanged nods and murmured greetings. Louise was just finishing preparation of the light dough for Nudeln. Joe liked Nudeln spr
inkled with vermicelli and fried in country butter. Ilsa would work the dough, and Louise wouldn’t object; indeed, she expected it. A German-American wife cooked much of her family’s food, even if she had a whole squad staffing her kitchen.

  Ilsa’s kitchen was equipped with a great old claw-footed monster of a wood stove, but otherwise it was airy and neat. Copper pans of all sizes hung from precise rows of ceiling hooks. Wooden and metal utensils—spoons, knives, cleavers, meat saws—were likewise racked on the walls so as to be easily seen and reached. In the arrangement and operation of her kitchen, the Hausfrau demonstrated her precious Tüchtigkeit. Her skill; her efficiency.

  Louise laid a heavy pastry board on the work table, next to the butcher block. Then she turned the dough from a basin onto the board. Ilsa brought a flour canister to the board. After opening the eyelets on the lace cuffs of her dress, and pushing the cuffs up near her elbow, she sprinkled out a carefully considered handful of flour and began to knead it into the dough.

  Louise lifted the lid from a pot on the stove. The smell of simmering chicken stock enriched the already flavorful aromas of the kitchen and the adjoining pantry, where Ilsa heard someone knocking about.

  “Who is in there, Louise?”

  “Delivery boy from Frankel’s. He’s new. I gave him coffee because he asked.” Then Louise whispered behind her hand, “Asked in a very nervy way, too. I’ll bet you Frankel won’t keep him long.”

  Ilsa felt the dough stiffening slightly. But it had to be stiffer yet. She didn’t work the dough by recipe, or by the clock, but by experience and instinct. She had first helped her mama prepare Nudeln when she was four. The rhythmic push and tug of the dough began to lift her spirits.

  Whistling, the butcher’s delivery boy sauntered out of the pantry. He was a tall gawky thing, perhaps nineteen or twenty. His skin was very white, his eyes dark brown and darting. He wore black trousers, a black vest, a white shirt with the sleeves pink-stained by the products of Frankel’s meat market. He set his empty coffee mug on a chair and tipped his cloth cap. His black hair was combed and curled into an oiled lock on his high forehead.