I interrupted. “Well, so did Frana. She had a dream of a future.”
Gustave clicked his tongue. “The difference is that Mildred is a disciplined woman-strong-and Frana seemed to me an idle dreamer. Let me just say that I was happy that Mildred and her mother were at the theater that day. Mary Allibone looked at me as if to say-what kind of place do you have here?”
I rolled my tongue into my cheek. “Did you tell this to Chief Stone?”
“Of course. For what it’s worth.”
“A place in New York, across from the theater,” I echoed.
Gustave Timm shrugged and made ready to leave, saying he had to meet his brother Homer for supper at the Sherman House. “It’s an obligation I have a couple times a week.” He made it sound onerous. “Mildred thinks Homer demands too much of my time. She thinks he controls me-that I’m too passive.”
I was curious. “You know, Mr. Timm, when you arrived a couple years back, no one thought you were brothers. You don’t look alike…”
“Of course we do. He’s older by a decade, yes. And a tad heavier, and darker complexioned, but we both take after our mother-prominent chin, big eyes, and”-he laughed-“the floppy ears we cover up with wild hair.”
My father said what I was thinking. “Perhaps it’s the personality. Your brother is very serious, while you…”
“It’s the nature of the profession. He deals with schoolchildren, day in, day out, and over the years he’s developed a severe exterior. Sometimes I think he’s forgotten how to laugh at things. When you run a theater where half of your shows are rollicking, roustabout comedy revues, and when actors miss performances, or when snowy nights keep Appleton home in front of the fireplace, well, you learn to laugh a lot.”
I remembered my conclusion that the brothers disliked each other. “You don’t live together?”
I sensed my father’s disapproval again. Edna, the inquisitor.
Gustave kept his smile but it thinned considerably. “It’s the same old story. Proximity breeds contempt. As boys, with a ten-year age difference, we fought tooth and nail. You know, we do love each other-he’s the one who recommended the job at the theater two years back-but we know better than to spend too much time together.”
Like Fannie and me, I thought: blood-curdling battles royal. Over the hem of a dress. Over the dropping of a saucepan. Over an innocent sarcastic barb from one sister to another.
“I keep expecting your brother to leave for the East to join his wife or for her and the children to return here.” I stopped, sensing a violation. My father was frowning.
A long silence. “Sophie may not be returning to Appleton. Homer begs her to, as she’s no longer in a sanitarium, of course, and he misses his boys. But she delays. She seems to enjoy a marriage of…distance. Each year Homer plans to tender his resignation, head East, and reunite. But each year Sophie…suggests he’d best stay here…” He stood. “I’m airing family laundry on the Ferber porch. Mildred says I talk too much.” His ready smile. “She says silence is a virtue. Spoken like a true librarian.” And he was off, tipping his hat and walking away.
After a while my father said, “They don’t like each other.”
“I know that.”
“But you have a way of intruding into people’s lives, Pete.”
“I’m curious, Bill.”
“You can’t stop asking questions.”
“I know.”
“Family business is private. There are secrets in every home.” A sloppy grin. “Remember that, Edna, when you write your books someday.”
A smile of my own. “I have to get back to the office.” I leaned over and kissed him on the cheek.
When I returned home that evening, Kathe Schmidt was in the backyard walloping the stairwell runner with a beater. From the kitchen I could hear her creaky, off-key voice:
Casey would dance with the strawberry blonde
And the band played on
He’d dance ‘cross the floor…
She didn’t know how the stanza ended because she repeated those same three lines and paused, mid-line, and then began again, as though she were a wind-up toy that malfunctioned. I thought I’d go mad. I wanted to scream: with the girl he adored. It was not singing but some labored keening, mindless and mechanical. Her thoughts were elsewhere, perhaps in a dark place.
Fannie, kneading dough for strudel, her hands and elbows coated with flour, simply raised her eyebrows when I pointed to the backyard. “Fannie,” I began, but my sister held up a powdery arm.
“No, stop. Leave her be.”
I wandered into the parlor where my father slumped in a chair, his head nodding as though to a song in his head. He roused as I walked in, said hello, though he did not to want to talk. I didn’t linger.
Heading up the stairs to rest before supper, I saw my mother enter the parlor and speak sharply to him, a low, cutting remark. “How can you sit in the same chair all day?”
I froze. I hated it when my mother carped at the helpless man. Herself a driven woman whose energy demanded movement, she had little patience with a husband whose blindness was only the last in a series of failures-from business and money to, well, marriage. Lamentably, she had seen him as ineffectual long before the blindness struck. She had little tolerance with his placid movement through life, his desire that the world be painted in soft rainbow pastels, with muted chamber music underscoring his inactive days. She balked at that. Cut from a different cloth, steel-ribbed, taut, indomitable, she wanted her daughters to be molded similarly. Jacob Ferber was willow, she was oak.
She’d had a bad day at My Store. I could always tell because she assailed her sitting, immobile husband. She couldn’t help herself.
“The bank manager stopped in today.” A cold voice. “Again. Money due.” A bitter laugh. “And I can’t even discuss it with you.” I saw her punch a pillow on the settee and shift an end table so it was just out of his reach. She mumbled as she disappeared into the kitchen, “Chicago.” I cringed. It was, I knew, a prayer. It seemed to be the word that let her survive these bleak moments. Salvation in Chicago, sheltered among her family. A number of times I’d heard my mother and Fannie whispering about the ultimate move to Chicago. I always filled in the missing words: when father dies. The store would be sold, the house and furniture sold…and Fannie would marry the shopkeeper there she’d flirted with for years, an earnest fellow everyone loved, though I thought him lackluster.
Where would I be? I often wondered as I eavesdropped. Would I be the unmarried sister tending to sniveling brats through windy Chicago winters?
Something had shifted in the Ferber household these past few months. My mother’s outbursts-her attacks-had long been volcanic. Her anger went on and on, thunderous, until the rafters shook. Fannie had inherited that anger and largely directed it at me. But lately my mother had become…quiet. Coldness replaced fury when she talked to my father. She had stepped backward and realized she didn’t have to care anymore.
Upstairs I lay on my bed, burying my face in a pillow. Outside Kathe Schmidt was singing those same three lines. There was no escape, I thought. None whatsoever. Madness creeps into this home from the very corners.
Later, I found myself alone in the kitchen with Kathe. Last time we’d fought, and I regretted that. This time I vowed to be silent and decent, two qualities I had trouble executing.
“How are you, Kathe?” I asked, quietly.
Kathe looked up from the potted chicken she was spicing. She looked ready to cry.
“What’s the matter?”
Kathe made a smacking noise with her lips, sighed. “Nothing.”
“Something’s the matter.”
“It’s mein vater.” In a sloppy blend of German and English, she described her suffering father. She sobbed like a sickly child. It was like watching a dumb farm animal caught in a trapper’s cruel leg iron, squirming and flailing-helpless before the randomness of life. Kathe cried that life at home was horrible; her father sat all the day long on a chair in the kitchen and faced an empty table, while her mother, a maddened hen, clucked around him. August Schmidt, I learned piecemeal, had lost the will to live: a desire never to return to his lowly job as janitor, surely; but more so, a nagging belief that there would be a sudden rapping on the front door and he’d be led away in irons-to be hanged by the state. August Schmidt would start to whimper and slip from his chair to the floor, slumped like an old dog, afraid of noise and sudden movement. Her mother moved like a ghost through the halls, whispering that the family would flee back to Germany.