Spite? Not John Nissenbaum. He was a proud man even in his public humiliation. It was the Lord’s work he was thinking of. Not mere human vanity, at all.
That spring and summer Reverend Dieckman gave a series of grim, threatening, passionate sermons from the pulpit of the First Lutheran Church of Ransomville. It was obvious why, what the subject of the sermons was. The congregation was thrilled.
Reverend Dieckman, whom Connie and Nelia feared, as much for his fierce smiles as his stern, glowering expression, was a short, bulky man with a dull-gleaming dome of a head, eyes like ice water. Years later when they saw a photograph of him, inches shorter than his wife, they laughed in nervous astonishment — was that the man who’d intimidated them so? Before whom even John Nissenbaum stood grave and downgazing.
Yet: that ringing, vibrating voice of the God of Moses, the God of the Old Testament, you could not shut out of consciousness even hours, days later. Years later. Pressing your hands against your ears and shutting your eyes tight, tight.
“‘Unto the woman He said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow shalt thou bring forth children: and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee. And unto Adam He said, Because thou hast harkened unto the voice of thy wife, and has eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shall thou eat of it all the days of thy life: thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field; in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return to the ground; for out of it thou wast taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.’” Reverend Dieckman paused to catch breath like a man running uphill. Greasy patches gleamed on his solid face like coins. Slowly his ice-eyes searched the rows of worshipers until as if by chance they came to rest on the upturned yet cowering faces of John Nissenbaum’s daughters, who sat in the family pew, directly in front of the pulpit in the fifth row, between their rigid-backed father in his clothes somber as mourning and their Grandmother Nissenbaum also in clothes somber as mourning though badly round-shouldered, with a perceptible hump, this cheerless dutiful grandmother who had come to live with them now that their mother was gone.
(Their other grandparents, the Hausers, who lived in Chautauqua Falls and whom they’d loved, the sisters would never see again. It was forbidden even to speak of these people, Gretel’s people. The Hausers were to blame somehow for Gretel’s desertion. Though they claimed, would always claim, they knew nothing of what she’d done and in fact feared something had happened to her. But the Hausers were a forbidden subject. Only after Constance and Cornelia were grown, no longer living in their father’s house, did they see their Hauser cousins; but still, as Cornelia confessed, she felt guilty about it. Father would have been so hurt and furious if he’d known. Consorting with the enemy he would deem it. Betrayal)
In Sunday school, Mrs. Dieckman took special pains with little Constance and little Cornelia. They were regarded with misty-eyed pity, like child-lepers. Fattish little Constance prone to fits of giggling, and hollow-eyed little Cornelia prone to sniffles, melancholy. Both girls had chafed, reddened faces and hands because their Grandmother Nissenbaum scrubbed them so, with strong gray soap, never less than twice a day. Cornelia’s dun-colored hair was strangely thin. When the other children trooped out of the Sunday school room, Mrs. Dieckman kept the sisters behind, to pray with them. She was very concerned about them, she said. She and Reverent Dieckman prayed for them constantly. Had their mother contacted them, since leaving? Had there been any… hint of what their mother was planning to do? Any strangers visiting the farm? Any… unusual incidents? The sisters stared blankly at Mrs. Dieckman. She frowned at their ignorance, or its semblance. Dabbed at her watery eyes and sighed as if the world’s weight had settled on her shoulders. She said half-chiding, “You should know, children, it’s for a reason that your mother left you. It’s God’s will. God’s plan. He is testing you, children. You are special in His eyes. Many of us have been special in His eyes and have emerged stronger for it, and not weaker.” There was a breathy pause. The sisters were invited to contemplate how Mrs. Dieckman with her soft-wattled face, her stout-corseted body and fattish legs encased in opaque support hose, was a stronger and not a weaker person, by God’s special plan. “You will learn to be stronger than girls with mothers, Constance and Cornelia—” (these words girls with mothers enunciated oddly, contemptuously). “You are already learning: feel God’s strength coursing through you!” Mrs. Dieckman seized the girls’ hands, squeezing so quick and hard that Connie burst into frightened giggles and Nelia shrieked as if she’d been burnt, and almost wet her panties.
Nelia acquired pride, then. Instead of being ashamed, publicly humiliated (at the one-room country schoolhouse, for instance: where certain of the other children were ruthless), she could be proud, like her father. God had a special feeling for me. God cared about me. Jesus Christ, His only son, was cruelly tested, too. And exalted. You can bear any hurt and degradation. Thistles and thorns. The flaming sword, the cherubims guarding the garden.
Mere girls with mothers, how could they know?
4
Of course, Connie and Nelia had heard their parents quarreling. In the weeks, months before their mother disappeared. In fact, all their lives. Had they been queried, had they had the language, they might have said This is what is done, a man, a woman — isn’t it?
Connie, who was three years older than Nelia, knew much that Nelia would not ever know. Not words exactly, these quarrels, and of a tone different from their father shouting out instructions to his farm hands. Not words but an eruption of voices. Ringing through the floorboards if the quarrel came from downstairs. Reverberating in the windowpanes where wind thinly whistled. In bed, Connie would hug Nelia tight, pretending Nelia was Momma. Or Connie was herself Momma. If you shut your eyes tight enough. If you shut your ears. Always after the voices there came silence. If you wait. Once, crouched at the foot of the stairs it was Connie? — or Nelia? — gazing upward astonished as Momma descended the stairs swaying like a drunk woman, her left hand groping against the railing, face dead-white and a bright crimson rosebud in the corner of her mouth glistening as she wiped, wiped furiously at it. And quick-walking in that way of his that made the house vibrate, heavy-heeled behind her, descending from the top of the stairs a man whose face she could not see. Fiery, and blinding. God in the burning bush. God in thunder. Bitch! Get back up here! If I have to come get you, if you won’t be a woman, a wife!
It was a fact the sisters learned, young: if you wait long enough, run away and hide your eyes, shut your ears, there comes a silence vast and rolling and empty as the sky.
There was the mystery of the letters my mother and Aunt Connie would speak of, though never exactly discuss in my presence, into the last year of my mother’s life.
Which of them first noticed, they couldn’t agree. Or when it began, exactly — no earlier than the fall, 1923. It would happen that Pappa went to fetch the mail, which he rarely did, and then only on Saturdays; and, returning, along the quarter-mile lane, he would be observed (by accident? the girls weren’t spying) with an opened letter in his hand, reading; or was it a postcard; walking with uncharacteristic slowness, this man whose step was invariably brisk and impatient. Connie recalled he’d sometimes slip into the stable to continue reading, Pappa had a liking for the stable which was for him a private place where he’d chew tobacco, spit into the hay, run his callused hands along a horse’s flanks, think his own thoughts. Other times, carrying whatever it was, letter, postcard, the rarity of an item of personal mail, he’d return to the kitchen and his place at the table. There the girls would find him (by accident, they were not spying) drinking coffee laced with top-milk and sugar, rolling one of his clumsy cigarettes. And Connie would be the one to inquire, “Was there any mail, Pappa?” keeping her voice low, unexcited. And Pappa would shrug and say, “Nothing.” On the table where he’d dropped them indifferently might be a few bills, advertising flyers, the Chautauqua Valley Weekly Gazette. Nelia never inquired about the mail at such times because she would not have trusted her voice. But, young as ten, Connie could be pushy, reckless. “Isn’t there a letter, Pappa? What is that, Pappa, in your pocket?”