Mother nodded slowly, frowning. These conversations with my aunt seemed always to give her pain, an actual ache behind the eyes, yet she could no more resist them than Aunt Connie. She said, wiping at her eyes, “Pappa was a man of pride. After she left us as much as before.”
“Hmmm!” Aunt Connie made her high humming nasal sound that meant she had something crucial to add, but did not want to appear pushy. “Well — maybe more, Nelia. More pride. After.” She spoke insinuatingly, with a smile and a glance toward me.
Like an actress who has strayed from her lines, Mother quickly amended, “Yes, of course. Because a weaker man would have succumbed to — shame and despair—”
Aunt Connie nodded briskly. “—might have cursed God—”
“—turned to drink—”
“—so many of ’em did, back there—”
“—but not Pappa. He had the gift of faith.”
Aunt Connie nodded sagely. Yet still with that strange almost-teasing smile.
“Oh indeed, Pappa did. That was his gift to us, Nelia, wasn’t it? — his faith.”
Mother was smiling her tight-lipped smile, her gaze lowered. I knew that, when Aunt Connie left, she would go upstairs to lie down, she would take two aspirins and draw the blinds, and put a damp cold cloth over her eyes and lie down and try to sleep. In her softening middle-aged face, the hue of putty, a young girl’s face shone rapt with fear. “Oh yes! His faith.”
Aunt Connie laughed heartily. Laugh, laugh. Dimples nicking her cheeks and a wink in my direction.
Years later, numbly sorting through Mother’s belongings after her death, I would discover, in a lavender-scented envelope in a bureau drawer, a single strand of dry, ash-colored hair. On the envelope, in faded purple ink Beloved Father John Allard Nissenbaum 1872–1957.
3
By his own account, John Nissenbaum, the wronged husband, had not had the slightest suspicion that his strong-willed young wife had been discontent, restless. Certainly not that she’d had a secret lover! So many local women would have dearly wished to change places with her, he’d been given to know when he was courting her, his male vanity, and his Nissenbaum vanity, and what you might call common sense suggested otherwise.
For the Nissenbaums were a well-regarded family in the Chautauqua Valley. Among the lot of them they must have owned thousands of acres of prime farmland.
In the weeks, months, and eventually years that followed the scandalous departure, John Nissenbaum, who was by nature, like most of the male Nissenbaums, reticent to the point of arrogance, and fiercely private, came to make his story — his side of it — known. As the sisters themselves gathered (for their father never spoke of their mother to them after the first several days following the shock), this was not a single coherent history but one that had to be pieced together like a giant quilt made of a myriad of fabric-scraps.
He did allow that Gretel had been missing her family, an older sister with whom she’d been especially close, and cousins and girlfriends she’d gone to high school with in Chautauqua Falls; he understood that the two-hundred-acre farm was a lonely place for her, their next-door neighbors miles away, and the village of Ransomville seven miles. (Trips beyond Ransomville were rare.) He knew, or supposed he knew, that his wife had harbored what his mother and sisters called wild imaginings, even after nine years of marriage, farm life, and children: she had asked several times to be allowed to play the organ at church, but had been refused; she reminisced often wistfully and perhaps reproachfully of long-ago visits to Port Oriskany, Buffalo, and Chicago, before she’d gotten married at the age of eighteen to a man fourteen years her senior… in Chicago she’d seen stage plays and musicals, the sensational dancers Irene and Vernon Castle in Irving Berlin’s Watch Your Step. It wasn’t just Gretel wanting to take over the organ at Sunday services (and replacing the elderly male organist whose playing, she said, sounded like a cat in heat), it was her general attitude toward Reverend Dieckman and his wife. She resented having to invite them to an elaborate Sunday dinner every few weeks, as the Nissenbaums insisted; she allowed her eyes to roam the congregation during Dieckman’s sermons, and stifled yawns behind her gloved hand; she woke in the middle of the night, she said, wanting to argue about damnation, hell, the very concept of grace. To the minister’s astonished face she declared herself “not able to fully accept the teachings of the Lutheran Church.”
If there were other more intimate issues between Gretel and John Nissenbaum, or another factor in Gretel’s emotional life, of course no one spoke of it at the time.
Though it was hinted — possibly more than hinted? — that John Nissenbaum was disappointed with only daughters. Naturally he wanted sons, to help him with the ceaseless work of the farm; sons to whom he could leave the considerable property, just as his married brothers had sons.
What was generally known was: John woke in the pitch-dark an hour before dawn of that April day, to discover that Gretel was gone from their bed. Gone from the house? He searched for her, called her name, with growing alarm, disbelief. “Gretel? Gret-el!” He looked in all the upstairs rooms of the house including the bedroom where his sleep-dazed, frightened daughters were huddled together in their bed; he looked in all the downstairs rooms, even the damp, dirt-floor cellar into which he descended with a lantern. “Gretel? Where are you?” Dawn came dull, porous and damp, and with a coat yanked on in haste over his night clothes, and his bare feet jammed into rubber boots, he began a frantic yet methodical search of the farm’s outbuildings — the privy, the cow barn and the adjoining stable, the hay barn and the corncrib where rats rustled at his approach. In none of these save perhaps the privy was it likely that Gretel might be found, still John continued his search with growing panic, not knowing what else to do. From the house his now terrified daughters observed him moving from building to building, a tall, rigid, jerkily moving figure with hands cupped to his mouth shouting, “Gretel! Gret-el! Do you hear me! Where are you! Gret-el!” The man’s deep, raw voice pulsing like a metronome, ringing clear, profound, and, to his daughters’ ears, as terrible as if the very sky had cracked open and God himself was shouting.
(What did such little girls, eight and five, know of God — in fact, as Aunt Connie would afterward recount, quite a bit. There was Reverend Dieckman’s baritone impersonation of the God of the Old Testament, the expulsion from the Garden, the devastating retort to Job, the spectacular burning bush where fire itself cried HERE I AM! — such had already been imprinted irrevocably upon their imaginations.)
Only later that morning — but this was a confused, anguished account — did John discover that Gretel’s suitcase was missing from the closet. And there were garments conspicuously missing from the clothes rack. And Gretel’s bureau drawers had been hastily ransacked — underwear, stockings were gone. And her favorite pieces of jewelry, of which she was childishly vain, were gone from her cedarwood box; gone, too, her heirloom, faded-cameo hairbrush, comb and mirror set. And her Bible.
What a joke, how people would chuckle over it — Gretel Nissenbaum taking her Bible with her!
Wherever in hell the woman went.
And was there no farewell note, after nine years of marriage? — John Nissenbaum claimed he’d looked everywhere, and found nothing. Not a word of explanation, not a word of regret even to her little girls. For that alone we expelled herfrom our hearts.