During this confused time while their father was searching and calling their mother’s name, the sisters hugged each other in a state of numbness beyond shock, terror. Their father seemed at times to be rushing toward them with the eye-bulging blindness of a runaway horse — they hurried out of his path. He did not see them except to order them out of his way, not to trouble him now. From the rear entry door they watched as he hitched his team of horses to his buggy and set out shuddering for Ransomville along the winter-rutted Post Road, leaving the girls behind, erasing them from his mind. As he would tell afterward, in rueful self-disgust, with the air of an enlightened sinner, he’d actually believed he would overtake Gretel on the road — convinced she’d be there, hiking on the grassy shoulder, carrying her suitcase. Gretel was a wiry-nervous woman, stronger than she appeared, with no fear of physical exertion. A woman capable of anything!
John Nissenbaum had the idea that Gretel had set out for Ransomville, seven miles away, there to catch the mid-morning train to Chautauqua Falls, another sixty miles south. It was his confused belief that they must have had a disagreement, else Gretel would not have left; he did not recall any disagreement in fact, but Gretel was after all an emotional woman, a highly strung woman; she’d insisted upon visiting the Hausers, her family, despite his wishes, was that it? — she was lonely for them, or lonely for something. She was angry they hadn’t visited Chautauqua Falls for Easter, hadn’t seen her family since Christmas. Was that it? We were never enough for her. Why were we never enough for her?
But in Ransomville, in the cinderblock Chautauqua & Buffalo depot, there was no sign of Gretel, nor had the lone clerk seen her.
“This woman would be about my height,” John Nissenbaum said, in his formal, slightly haughty way. “She’d be carrying a suitcase, her feet would maybe be muddy. Her boots.”
The clerk shook his head slowly. “No sir, nobody looking like that.”
“A woman by herself. A—” a hesitation, a look of pain, “—good-looking woman, young. A kind of a, a way about her — a way of—” another pause, “—making herself known.”
“Sorry,” the clerk said. “The 8:20 just came through, and no woman bought a ticket.”
It happened then that John Nissenbaum was observed, starkeyed, stiff-springy black hair in tufts like quills, for the better part of that morning, April 12, 1923, wandering up one side of Ransomville’s single main street, and down the other. Hatless, in farm overalls and boots but wearing a suit coat — somber, gunmetal-gray, of “good” wool — buttoned crooked across his narrow muscular torso. Disheveled and ravaged with the grief of a betrayed husband too raw at this time for manly pride to intervene, pathetic some said as a kicked dog, yet eager too, eager as a puppy he made inquiries at Meldron’s Dry Goods, at Elkin & Sons Grocers, at the First Niagara Trust, at the law office of Rowe & Nissenbaum (this Nissenbaum, a young cousin of John’s), even in the Five & Dime where the salesgirls would giggle in his wake. He wandered at last into the Ransomville Hotel, into the gloomy public room where the proprietor’s wife was sweeping sawdust-strewn floorboards. “Sorry, sir, we don’t open till noon,” the woman said, thinking he was a drunk, dazed and swaying-like on his feet, then she looked more closely at him: not knowing his first name (for John Nissenbaum was not one to patronize local taverns) but recognizing his features. For it was said the male Nissenbaums were either born looking alike, or came in time to look alike. “Mr. Nissenbaum? Is something wrong?” In a beat of stymied silence Nissenbaum blinked at her, trying to smile, groping for a hat to remove but finding none, murmuring, “No ma’am, I’m sure not. It’s a misunderstanding, I believe. I’m supposed to meet Mrs. Nissenbaum somewhere here. My wife.”
Shortly after Gretel Nissenbaum’s disappearance there emerged, from numerous sources, from all points of the compass, certain tales of the woman. How rude she’d been, more than once, to the Dieckmans! — to many in the Lutheran congregation! A bad wife. Unnatural mother. It was said she’d left her husband and children in the past, running back to her family in Chautauqua Falls, or was in Port Oriskany; and poor John Nissenbaum having to fetch her home again. (This was untrue, though in time, even to Constance and Cornelia, it would come to seem true. As an elderly woman Cornelia would swear she remembered “both times” her mother ran off.) A shameless hussy, a tramp who had an eye for men. Had the hots for men. Anything in pants. Or was she stuck-up, snobby. Marrying into the Nissenbaum family, a man almost old enough to be her father, no mystery there! Worse yet she could be sharp-tongued, profane. Heard to utter such words as damn, goddamn, hell. Yes and horseballs, bullshit. Standing with her hands on her hips fixing her eyes on you, that loud laugh. And showing her teeth that were too big for her mouth. She was too smart for her own good, that’s for sure. She was scheming, faithless. Everybody knew she flirted with her husband’s hired hands, she did a hell of a lot more than flirt with them, ask around. Sure she had a boyfriend, a lover. Sure she was an adulteress. Hadn’t she run off with a man? She’d run off and where was she to go, where was a woman to go, except run off with a man? Whoever he was.
In fact, he’d been sighted: a tower operator for the Chautauqua & Buffalo railroad, big red-headed guy living in Shaheen, twelve miles away. Or was he a carpet sweeper salesman, squirrelly little guy with a mustache and a smooth way of talking, who passed through the valley every few months but, after April 12, 1923, was never seen there again.
Another, more attractive rumor was that Gretel Nissenbaum’s lover was a thirty-year-old Navy officer stationed at Port Oriskany. He’d been transferred to a base in North Carolina, or was it Pensacola, Florida, and Gretel had no choice but run away with him, she loved him so. And three months pregnant with his child.
There could have been no romance in the terrible possibility that Gretel Nissenbaum had fled on foot, alone, not to her family but simply to escape from her life; in what exigency of need, what despondency of spirit, no name might be given it by any who have not experienced it.
But, in any case, where had she gone?
Where? Disappeared. Over the edge of the world. To Chicago, maybe. Or that army base in North Carolina, or Florida.
We forgave, we forgot. We didn’t miss her.
The things Gretel Nissenbaum left behind in the haste of her departure.
Several dresses, hats. A shabby cloth coat. Rubberized “galoshes” and boots. Undergarments, mended stockings. Knitted gloves. In the parlor of John Nissenbaum’s house, in cut-glass vases, bright yellow daffodils she’d made from crepe paper; hand-painted fans, tea cups; books she’d brought with her from home — A Golden Treasury of Verse, Mark Twain’s Joan of Arc, Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise, missing its jacket cover. Tattered programs for musical shows, stacks of popular piano music from the days Gretel had played in her childhood home. (There was no piano in Nissenbaum’s house, Nissenbaum had no interest in music.)
These meager items, and some others, Nissenbaum unceremoniously dumped into cardboard boxes fifteen days after Gretel disappeared, taking them to the Lutheran church, for the “needy fund”; without inquiring if the Hausers might have wanted anything, or whether his daughters might have wished to be given some mementos of their mother.