Gertrud was dressed in a faded Mother Hubbard smock. She had a tiny, pinched face, a small crinkly nose, a little mouth. One more sad hausfrau, I thought, the hidden-away drudge with wrinkled skin and the ill-fitting blue-white false teeth that glistened like piano keys in the flickering gaslight. She had none of her dead daughter’s beauty. She sat, stood, sat down again: nervous. I wondered what folks ever visited this isolated farmhouse. Who talked to this scattered, lonely woman?
As we sipped coffee in silence, the back door opened and Oskar Lempke and his three husky sons lurched in, stopped dead in their tracks, and looked ready to retreat back to the fields and the barn. One of the boys carried a pail of beer, and it swung back and forth in his grip. Nervous, he sloshed some suds on the pine floor, and the old man mumbled, “Du unverschamter Hund.” The lad narrowed his eyes, fierce. Oskar Lempke, looking at his wife and then at my father, said he appreciated the condolence call, though he didn’t seem to. He and his sons sat down in a rigid line, stiff as tree trunks. I looked at all three boys, Frana’s older brothers, all in their early twenties, perhaps, blunt-muscled and thick and blond-cowlicky, farm boys and mill workers, all with wide cherry-red faces and hands as broad as ham hocks. Plodding oxen, brutal farm animals themselves, dull. No one said a word; each stared straight ahead. I’d met one of them in a harness shop months back, with Frana at his side; and my memory of him was clear. He kept spitting on the floor.
The brothers seemed inordinately fascinated with Fannie who, conscious of their unblinking stares, fidgeted in her seat. There was rawness in their stares. A barnyard hunger. My mind flashed to Jake’s whispered gossip…Frana’s fear of her brothers, her dread of going home…the brother who bothered her…
In the awful silence, my mother repeated her sympathies. Frana’s mother swallowed and looked away, but I found Oskar’s reaction alarming. The tough-looking man, all bulk and weathered line, seemed teary-eyed, putting the backs of his palms against his eyes, and trembling.
Silence.
Then he spoke, his German accent thick, “Maybe we did wrong thing, locking her up like that.” He pointed upstairs. “She was rebel, that girl, she was, meine Kleine. Fought like wild rabbit. So we nail the bars on the window and we learn you cannot nail in someone who is already living outside the house.”
His wife whispered, “We was going to send her to family in Germany. To a nunnery. Is stricter there. I make her dresses but she has to have the Amerikanische gown. America is too-too much freedom. The…” She waved her hand in the air. “The…the…open space…”
One of the brothers grunted, or had he belched? He looked pleased with himself.
Everyone turned at the sound of heavy clomping. Christ Lempke was dragging himself down the stairs. He nodded to us and fell into a chair, out of breath. I knew he’d once worked at the Eagle Manufacturing Company, building silo feed cutters, making good money, a hard-working man, well-liked; but his war injury kept him home. Staring at us with hooded, distrustful eyes, he sneered, “I hears you talk. Enough. Frana was girl who chose to dishonor…”
Gertrud made a tsking sound, but Christ went on, “She should have been in nunnery since little girl, no? Too much looking in the mirrors, too much the Amerikanish sass in the mouth, too much with the boys throwing stones at the window at night.” His voice rose louder and louder. I thought it peculiar that in this house of grief, this man could only speak ill of the dead beautiful girl. Oskar Lempke stood, tottered a bit, stared down at his hectoring brother, and then left the room, not saying a word. Christ Lempke stopped talking.
We hurriedly stood. No one had touched the strudel.
At the front door Gertrud Lempke touched my sleeve. “She mentioned you. I remember. From school, maybe.”
“Yes.”
My mother started to say something, but Gertrud Lempke whispered, “Would you like to see her room?”
No. No. God no. But I nodded, and Fannie and I followed Mrs. Lempke up the narrow stairs, leaving our parents waiting downstairs. She opened the door to Frana’s bedroom at the back of the house, and in the first flush of gaslight I saw one small window crisscrossed with bars, with nailed wooden panels. Shivering, I felt we were violating the dead girl’s bedroom; but I was surprised by the small space, a crawlspace, really, with sloping ceiling just under the roof, a space that was probably a closet converted into a bedroom. A small wrought-iron bed was covered with an old, faded down-feather quilt embroidered with folk patterns, ripples and cascades of red and green floral patterns. It was torn at the edges, with bursting fabric at the center. A simple homemade bureau with a missing drawer was painted a dull green, a stolid paint intended for a floor; and the wide-planked flooring was covered with an oval rag-weave rug, the threads loose. A shadowy mirror in a dull brown frame was nailed by the back window, most likely to catch the sunlight in the morning. On the dresser stood a water pitcher, some brushes, pins, and inside an unclosed wardrobe, I spotted Frana’s dresses, her bonnets, her finery.
A Wisconsin nun’s cell, cloistered and forgotten among the leftovers of a family. But on the wall just inside the door Frana had pinned pages torn from magazines and newspapers, stories of New York and Broadway and theater, of well-known actresses. A grainy print from a magazine like the Century or Scribner’s-with a black-and-white likeness of Lillian Russell. There were also some glossy chromolithographs from magazines like Demorest’s, with bright, blotchy colors, actresses like Mary Allibone in her celebrated role as Juliet, the wide-eyed, winsome tragedienne staring into space, hands extended, hair askew. It was a popular print, the one used on the poster when Allibone performed at the Lyceum. Unframed, ripped, tacked on, the print stared back at me, haunting; a talisman of color in an otherwise drab lifeless room. It blazed like a noontime sun in its shadows. I could scarcely turn away from it. It was compelling…awful.
Suddenly I felt faint and wobbled. I’d disliked the vain and fickle Frana with her ribbons and her lace and her fluttery coy manners, her cheap flirtations, her prettiness. We talked now and then, we socialized, we moved in similar circles of young people. In this monastic chamber, illuminated by that midnight sun of an actress in her glossy colors, I saw Frana as a lonely, desperate girl, a lost child in the home of pain, overwhelmed by a new world. I wished, all of a sudden, that I’d paid attention to her. There were things we could have told each other. Maybe.
But maybe not.
Chapter Fourteen
Caleb Stone stopped to say hello as I walked up College Avenue, heading to My Store, and he was uncharacteristically eager to gossip. I was hoping his organ-grinder monkey Amos Moss was elsewhere, but Caleb I liked. I didn’t think him too bright, yet I considered him honorable and fair. We chatted about some ruckus he’d broken up at a beer hall, and he joked, “Not really headline news, I’m afraid, Miss Ferber.” Then the usually laconic chief told me that Jake Smuddie was no longer attending classes at Lawrence University, which surprised me.
“You probably know that he sits in that gazebo in City Park.” He leaned into me. “I sat with him. He was a little testy with me. Seems to think his father sent me over to bring him back to the college.”
“And had you spoken to his father?” A little testy myself.
Caleb Stone nodded. “The father-Herr Professor-did speak to me. He’s worried about his lad, of course, but I said that the boy ain’t doing anything illegal, so far’s I can tell. Not going to your classes at the university ain’t a crime, though it’s a questionable choice of behavior for someone whose father is a high muck-a-muck on the faculty there.”