Odette Smuddie walked in, smiling, but nervous; her hands kept grazing her face as though she wanted to stop herself from saying something. She extended her hand.
I apologized for the intrusion and identified myself. “I’m a close friend of Jake-Jacob-and I had to be on campus, and he’d said to say hello if I’m in the neighborhood and…”
Odette Smuddie actually made a yelping sound. “I’m afraid Jacob is not here right now, Miss Ferber…”
“Oh, I’m so sorry.” I stood.
Mrs. Smuddie went on, “No, please stay a bit. For tea. Please. He never has guests, and I’m worried about him…” She stopped. “Please, have tea.”
In the parlor, settled into an overstuffed armchair, I gazed at the shelves of cut-glass vases, the table with the cushy vellum photograph album, the fireplace with the veined marble mantel, the wrought-brass and copper chandelier, the dark mahogany paneling, and the ceiling with the elaborate plaster rosettes. The housemaid served me a cup of tepid tea and a piece of apricot torte. Not bad, I thought. It needed a little more cinnamon and orange rind, but…
“I’m worried about Jake, too.” I swallowed.
I got no further. Herr Professor rumbled in, a bull of a man, thick-chested and bursting out of a Prince Albert coat as crisp and pristine as Switzerland. On his expanding vest I spotted the obligatory watch fob and a pin that identified him as part of some German Unity lodge. The man had more gold plate on him than a self-aggrandizing Prussian general.
“And you might be?” he demanded, not warmly.
Odette jumped up, flustered, banged her elbow against the back of the chair, and fell back down, slumping like a rag doll.
“I’m Edna Ferber.” I rose and half-bowed. I made my excuses for intruding, but Herr Professor regarded me with forbidding gray-black eyes, the color of an approaching storm. I looked away because the man frightened me. Around Appleton the epithet most commonly used with him was: gebildeter. A cultured man. To me, he was a harsh schoolmaster with a hickory switch.
I almost faltered. “I’m a friend of your son, and I wanted to say hello. I know it’s unseemly but…”
“But young women do not pay visits to young men,” he grunted.
“I came…”
“You are a reporter. I know you. You’re the one who thinks we Methodists are prone to vice.” I blushed. In my account of President Plantz’s afternoon tea, I’d mentioned that cards were played, a throwaway line added to my innocuous account. Card playing was forbidden on campus. Apologies were proffered (Sam Ryan wasn’t happy with me), but obviously Herr Professor remembered my indiscretion. I needed to stop imaginative jottings in my notebook.
“I am his friend. That’s why I’m here.”
“He has no friends.” He scratched his bushy moustache. “He’s always been a soft, yielding boy. I thought football and whippings would turn him into a man, but Jacob would rather gaze at the moon than tackle the world out there.” He actually pointed through the window at the twilight sky. As though ordered-Herr Professor, Odette and I-turned to see the complex, unmanageable world outside, ignored by the absent Jake Smuddie who was probably sitting out there now, most likely in that gazebo.
“Jake is a smart young man.”
Herr Professor was ready to end the conversation. “He’s lost.”
“Lost?”
“To us.” He pointed to his wife.
Dressed in a too-elegant dress to be an at-home gown-a red serge evening dress with strands of black piping (I made a mental note to discuss it with Fannie)-Odette was obviously one of the ornate possessions on show in the cluttered drawing room, a figurine among the porcelain bric-a-brac, the morning glory phonograph, the heavy tiger oak table, the brocade chairs, the feathered pillows. Was she a household pet that would jump at the slightest noise and bolt meowing from the room to hide behind the woodpile at the hearth? I thought of Frana’s sad mother, Gertrud Lempke, herself the invisible member of the family. Two women from different worlds, but so alike.
“I know Jake’s been through a great deal of…” I paused. “The murder of Frana.” There, out there: blunt, purposeful, smack up against his hermetically sealed academic tower.
Herr Professor thundered. “Jacob is not here.”
“Miss Ferber.” His wife stopped as her husband glowered at her.
I was not through. “It’s important that he not be connected with her death…”
Herr Professor, cold, cold. “I do not blame my son, though perhaps you assume I do. A weak boy, coddled by a silly woman. An only child, hiding in the corners of this house. There are such women in the world as this Frana, a wayward…”
He searched for a word, and I interrupted. “She was a young girl.”
A raised voice, thick and coarse. “She was a seducer-a sinner, Jezebel, temptress. I constantly pulled him away from her hold. He told me that she’d found a man to make her happy, an older man, hardly a surprise. But when she hurled him away, he…he lost his focus.”
“This older man…”
“A myth, let me tell you. Because even after that…that abandonment I saw them together. She was toying with him. We are Methodists and we’re not into such shenanigans, young woman.”
“Her family was going to send her to Germany. To a nunnery.”
“Catholics!” he erupted, venom in his tone. “Germany has no place for her. She was what America does to young people. Germany is a distant memory.”
I remembered an interview Herr Professor had given Byron Beveridge for the Crescent: He was a noted orator and writer on the topic of “Honor the German Language,” part of a Wisconsin-based group of Social Democrats whose essays in the Deutsch-Amerikanische Buchrucker-Zeitung protested the loss of the German language as detrimental to their culture in America. The war cry was “German at home!” Deutsch in Amerika. Herr Professor had made it his cause and often dropped his leaflets at the Crescent office. One leaflet oddly blamed a recent diphtheria epidemic on the moral decline of America. He’d also protested the Oneida Indians casting votes during municipal elections, claiming they were all drunkards and fools. Jake had never mentioned his father’s zealotry, and once, when someone brought it up as we sat with sarsaparillas in the drug store, he walked away.
Herr Professor went on. “I thought her death would solve our family problem.”
That was a horrendous sentence, cruel. “Frana Lempke didn’t deserve to die…”
Herr Professor was walking toward the door and I followed. “Sometimes one death can redeem other lives. Sacrifice.”
“You think she had to die?”
“Her behavior made it her destiny.”
“I think…”
He held up his hand, signaling an end. “But she seems to have taken our son with her.” He actually stomped his foot on the floor. “As you can see, he’s not here. Thank you for your visit, Miss Ferber. I trust we will not find ourselves quoted on the front page of the Crescent.”
The housemaid was holding the front door open, and I walked out.
Wrapped in a woolen jacket, Jake Smuddie sat in the gazebo in the gathering twilight. “What?” he said as I approached.
“I stopped in to see you at your home.”
“That must have thrown the house into a panic.” He barely managed a wan smile.
“Sort of.”
“We only entertain Methodists.”
“They told me you weren’t there.”
“I only go home late at night…to sleep.”
“Your father allows this?”
“He doesn’t know. My mother sneaks me in.” He shrugged those football shoulders. “Where else can I go?”
“This isn’t an answer.”
“It is for now.”
“You left your classes at Lawrence?” I slipped onto the bench, inches from him. In the fuzzy fading light I saw a tired face, the sharp, handsome features washed out, pale.