The American Lady (20 page)

“You needn’t waste your time on this old rubbish. Throw it all away, and I’ll order you the rods you need from Murano,” he had said one evening when she had gone into the workshop again after supper and was sorting the shards of glass into boxes by color. He put his arms around her belly from behind and nestled close.

“You handle each little piece as though it were a precious stone!”

In bed that night, Franco’s remark stuck in Marie’s mind and wouldn’t let her sleep. She had been too distracted to enjoy Franco’s caresses to the full.

Precious stones?

Precious stones belonged in a setting.

Which mean
t . . .

The next morning Marie had asked Franco to find her a soldering torch and wire. The idea was simple; she would cut the panes of glass into the shapes she wanted with the tongs, then edge each piece with lead and solder them together. She hoped that the end result would be a kind of mosaic in glass, and her hopes were answered. She laughed when she had finished her first picture, two red hearts against a blue background with a light border around the whole thing. It was wonderful! How colorful, and how intense! Why had she never thought of it before? It was probably because the villagers back in Lauscha were not especially pious, for surely she would otherwise have noticed that churches and cathedrals were always built with stained-glass windows showing Biblical scenes to edify the congregation. But glass could be used for far more than the Virgin Mary with the Christ child in her arms. It could be used for any design an artist cared to create—and this idea was all her own!

Franco had been speechless when she showed him her work that evening. “Is that really your first attempt? It’s nothing less than perfection! Flaming hearts—
mia cara
, it’s the very image of love, captured for all time! It’s beautiful. And you are even more beautiful,” he said.

Marie did not make any more practice pieces, but instead started on her series of the four elements the very next day.

When she put down the picture of fire around noon, her fingertips were itching with excitement. She wanted to do more. She had so many ideas! Ruth’s jewelry from Lalique and Gallé, all those dragonflies, butterflies, and lily flowers—couldn’t she use her new technique for just such designs?

She had already picked up a pane of violet-colored glass and was holding it next to another one in pale, watery green, when she put both of them down with a sigh.

Drat it all! She was supposed to finish the designs for the new Christmas baubles today—Johanna was waiting for them and she must be in a fever of anticipation.

Unwillingly Marie hauled out her sketchpad with the first drafts of the designs. Every fiber of her being bristled at the idea of going back to old work when there were so many new possibilities to be discovered.

At first she had been very pleased with her idea of making Christmas baubles in the shape of good-luck charms. She was quite sure that people would like hanging shooting stars, horseshoes, or four-leaf clovers on their Christmas tree to bring good luck for the new year. But when she looked at the design for the shooting star now, she felt a twinge of skepticism—would old Strupp even be able to make a mold for such a complex design? And would Peter and the others be able to blow into it? Given the way Magnus moaned on whenever he had to blow one of the Santa Claus designs, she thought not.

Magnu
s . . .
she wondered how he was doing. Marie still felt guilty whenever she thought of him. But she couldn’t turn around and go back to him for that reason alone.

Lost in thought, Marie stroked her belly. If she was counting right, she was now in her third month, so the baby would be born sometime in May. She was going to have a child. It was a strange idea.

She still hadn’t told her family back home about the pregnancy. She sensed that she mustn’t overburden Johanna and the others with too much news at once. And after all, what was there to tell? She didn’t feel ill and she wasn’t suffering from mood swings the way some women did. She was perhaps a little more quarrelsome than usual, but otherwise, she had never felt so healthy in her life. Indeed she even suspected that the pregnancy was to thank for the boundless creativity that simply seemed to gush out of her these days.

No, her sisters could hear about the baby early next year, she decided.

Marie snapped her sketchpad shut.

Perhaps she should take a little time to think about the new designs in peace and quiet. A few days’ delay wouldn’t make much difference in the long run. The molds for the charm series would never be ready in time for the new catalog in February either way.

But she had no sooner sat down to her colored shards once more than she had another attack of guilt.

Even if she couldn’t send Johanna some decent designs, she should write her a letter. A letter to her, and one to Wanda. And perhaps one to Magnus as well.

8

I’m finally here in Genoa. Dear Wanda, you can’t imagine what a shock this city was for me. I thought I would find a romantic little fishing village, and then dear Franco led me through streets that were no less lively than New York! The harbor alone is enormous—Franco says it’s the biggest in all Italy—and it lies in a cove surrounded by cliffs on all sides. Then the city climbs up the cliffs above it. The count’s palazzo is halfway up, and when I sit up in bed in the morning, I can look out my window and see the sea. Can you imagine? The first time I went for a walk through Genoa I felt I was wandering through a museum of Renaissance art—there are marble palaces everywhere, and then churches, public fountains, and monasteries! I wouldn’t be surprised if the art of sculpture had been invented here. The Italians call this city La Superba—Genoa the Proud. Franco says that art and life go hand in hand in Genoa—so I’ve ended up in just the right place, haven’t I? I miss you all dreadfully, of course, but I figure there are worse places to wash up on the wilder shores of lov
e . . .

I found it very hard to leave Monte Verità, though by now I’m glad that I have a little more calm and order in my life. Yesterday when we walked across the square at Piazza Banchi, I was quite light-headed from the magnificence all around us, and I wished that Pandora or Sherlain could be here—especially Pandora. I can just imagine how she would go dancing through the streets like a Renaissance angel. Oh, I miss her too! Her, and the other women from Monte Verità. Their laughter and their lust for life. Just as I miss your laugh.

As expected, Franco’s parents are not exactly thrilled to have a complete stranger as a daughter-in-law. Patrizia especially is most put out that Franco went and found a wife all by himself—she strikes me as a woman who likes to have the final say in matters. But I try to live my own life despite her.

As he promised, Franco has set me up with a workshop where I work away quite happily—much to my mother-in-law’s disapproval. But we’ll get used to one another in time so to be honest, I try not to think about it too much. Even though we live together under one roof, we don’t have much to do with one another; I sit in my workshop all day (with a view of orange trees, believe it or not!), and Franco and his father sit in their dusty old office where they have dozens of visitors every day. I would never have thought that so many people were involved in the wine trade. You really ought to see how respectfully they approach Franco and the old count! It seems that a noble title really means something here.

At the moment I’m busy blazing new trails in glasswork. I’ll write you more about that some other time. Unfortunately that means that I still haven’t gotten very far with my designs for the next Steinmann-Maienbaum catalog. But I fully intend to return to them in the next few days.

I hope you had a pleasant journey and that you have found your feet in Lauscha by now. If I know you, you’re fizzing over with new ideas and you have the whole village in a state of excitement. I’m looking forward so much to hearing whether you find the place just as I had described it to you. I know how much this visit means to you, and my thoughts will be with you when you walk up the main street for the first time to visit your father’s house. Or have you already done that by now?

Dearest Wanda, whatever you are doing now, I am sure that you are blazing new trails just as I am.

Your Aunt Marie

PS: If you happen to go to Sonneberg, please be so good as to visit Mr. Sawatzky and give him my very best regards. Tell him that I finally managed to break my shackles—he will know exactly what that means.

Blazing new trail
s . . .

“So much for that,” Wanda said with a sob, which led straight into another coughing fit. A fine spray of spittle landed on the unfamiliar coat of arms at the top of the sheet of creamy writing paper.

She had been confined to her bed since the end of October. What had started out as a cold had turned into raging bronchitis within just a few days. At night she was wracked by coughing fits for hours on end and nothing seemed to help, neither the sage tea that Johanna brewed for her nor the bitter dark-brown herbal concoction the doctor gave her as a cough syrup when he looked in on her every few days. All she had seen of Lauscha so far was the doctor’s face with his bushy eyebrows and surprisingly sensuous, almost womanly lips. He had muttered to Johanna as he left that her niece needed to rest undisturbed and that he feared the worst if she tried to leave her bed. Even without this warning, though, Wanda hardly felt like going out to see the village, given that she could barely make it as far as the outhouse. She spent her days in a sort of haze, only dimly aware of what else was going on in the house. The front doorbell seemed to ring all day long, and there were always visitors coming and going—she could hear their footsteps in the hallway. Once Wanda thought she could hear snatches of English conversation. She decided to ask her aunt whether she had heard right, but by the time Johanna next looked in on her she had already forgotten the question.

The worst thing about getting sick wasn’t that her chest felt like a bubbling volcano spitting gouts of lava as it burned her up from the inside, or the fever that had her sweating one moment and shivering the next. The worst thing was Anna’s reaction. Wanda was staying in Anna’s room, and Anna sighed in quiet exasperation when Wanda’s coughing kept her awake at night. She cast glances of furious, silent recrimination at Wanda when she had to hobble downstairs to the workshop in the morning while Wanda stayed in bed and often slept through the morning without coughing once. Wanda offered again and again to sleep somewhere else—for all she cared they could make her up a bed in the attic—but Johanna wouldn’t hear of it. Quite the opposite: she thought it was a good thing Anna was with Wanda at night in case her fever suddenly spiked or there was some other emergency.

Wanda remembered what a fool she had made of herself about the room when she first arrived, and she still blushed at the thought.

“And this is Anna’s room,” her aunt had said, opening the door with a flourish and putting one of Wanda’s suitcases in the middle of the floor. Wanda had been a little surprised to see a second bed there, of course. But she had assumed it must have been left over from childhood days—perhaps the bed where the dolls had sat lined up in a row. So she had asked, “It’s very nice, but where’s my room?” Johanna had looked at her wide-eyed and probably thought the question was a joke.

Mother and daughter had spent weeks taking turns making poultices for Wanda’s throat, boiling up onions with rock candy, which tasted horrible but soothed her cough for a while at least, and bringing her bowl after bowl of hot chicken soup. Wanda let them do whatever they liked. Her charm had quite collapsed in the face of the fever. She couldn’t even manage a joke or a cheerful remark to draw the sting from the situation. Everything she had lived for in the weeks leading up to her journey had fallen apart. She had yearned to help her family and instead was nothing but a burden. Wanda wished she could just make herself invisible. Since she couldn’t do that, she settled for keeping as quiet as she could.

Her cousin Johannes and her uncle Peter looked in on her twice a day—after lunch and at the end of the workday—and Magnus came by every few days. The men mostly shifted awkwardly from foot to foot for a few minutes and then left. What could they say to Wanda, really, to cheer her up? She was a complete stranger who had just happened to turn up in their house and then fall ill. They hadn’t even had the chance to get to know one another. All the presents that Wanda had brought with her were still in the luggage, and she hadn’t had the strength to do anything more than unpack the photographs and letters that her mother had given her for Johanna. She had expected that her aunt would look through them and then sit down on her bed for a chat about Ruth, New York, and Marie—but she hoped in vain. Johanna seemed to have time for many things but not for a conversation with her.

“The last few months of the year are always our busiest time. All our clients suddenly realize that they haven’t ordered enough Christmas decorations,” she had explained to Wanda once, when her niece hesitantly asked whether she could keep her company for a little while. “We have to cope with all these last-minute orders somehow and get everything produced and delivered!” Wanda had asked whether other workshops had the same trouble—maybe that was why her father still hadn’t given any sign of knowing she was there. There had been no letter or even a message, never mind a visit. Johanna had looked at her rather oddly and explained that the workshops that dealt in Christmas wares were the ones most flooded with work; everyone else would be having an easier time of it. Wanda had tried to fight back her disappointment.

Her only contact with the outside world in all these weeks had been two letters from New York, in which Ruth ordered her to fit in and not to upset things.

And now there was this letter from Marie. It had arrived that morning, along with a letter for Johanna and a few more documents, in a thick envelope from Genoa.

Tears ran down Wanda’s cheeks as she read Marie’s words from Genoa, where “art and life go hand in hand” and she was “busy blazing new trails in glasswork.” Why did other people have all the luck?

Four weeks to the day after she had arrived in Lauscha, the doctor finally declared that Wanda could leave her bed for a couple of hours every day. Johanna suggested that she spend the time sitting on the kitchen bench watching Lugiana cook, but Wanda said that she wanted to help in the workshop. Johanna was already immersed in lists and account books and wasn’t even listening, while Anna rolled her eyes as if to say,
More fuss and bother for our American visitor.
Uncle Peter gently suggested that the chemical fumes wouldn’t be good for Wanda in her current state of health. It was Johannes who asked his father, “Why don’t we put Wanda at the packing table with the hired hands? They could use the help!”

Wanda shot her cousin a look of gratitude.

And so she spent the first afternoon folding cardboard boxes into shape and then packing them with Santa Claus figures and spires for the top of Christmas trees, all neatly wrapped in crepe paper. She was so worried that she would drop something or crack it by handling it too roughly that she moved no faster than a snail. While the other packers at the long table piled up their boxes in towering stacks, her side of the table was painfully empty, which Wanda felt was at least as bad as if she had rushed through the work and broken something. But by four o’clock, when the others stopped for a coffee break, she had hit her stride. She didn’t want coffee or a slice of bread and jam, so she kept on working through the break. She even plucked up the confidence to look up from her work from time to time and glance around the workshop.

Everything was just as Marie had described it: the glassblowers’ workbenches with the gas flame burning brightly, the hiss of the lamps, the silver bath hanging in its bottles on the wall—Anna could apply the silver to the inside of the globes despite her swollen ankle—then the decorations bench with its dozens of paint pots and jars of glitter and spools of gold and silver wire. Three more hired hands—young girls from the village—sat there. When Wanda came into the workshop at midday, they had stared across at her curiously, but none of them had spoken to her yet. Along with the women at the packing table, that made five hired hands in the workshop. Wanda soon learned that her aunt had many more people on her payroll; every Tuesday and Friday Paul Marzen came by with his horse cart to fetch dozens of boxes full of silvered globes, which he took all around the village to pieceworkers, who painted them at home.

Everybody in the workshop had a specific task, and Wanda saw that the whole production line was so perfectly planned that there were never any bottlenecks or idle moments. At the end of her first day in the workshop Wanda stared in disbelief at the number of cardboard boxes that had piled up, all full. Johanna smiled as she explained that the day’s output had been relatively low, since the spires for the top of the trees were delicate work and took longer to make.

The brains behind the whole operation belonged not to Uncle Peter but to Johanna, who was called “the boss” by one and all. She was everywhere, saw and heard everything, at all times. When she made a suggestion, she did so in a quiet, friendly tone of voice, yet there was rarely any disagreement. In fact, everyone—even her husband—seemed happy to leave all the decisions to her. It was also Johanna who received the clients and negotiated contracts. While all the other workshops in the village sold their wares through the wholesalers in Sonneberg, the Steinmann-Maienbaum workshop dealt with their retail clients directly. This meant that the family got all the profits rather than having to hand a cut to the middlemen. Wanda didn’t doubt for a moment that it was her aunt’s impeccable business sense that had made the arrangement possible.

But she also found her aunt rather intimidating for just that reason. She would never have thought that a woman could drive just as hard a bargain as any man, but Johanna was a real businesswoman. Strange though it seemed, she made Wanda feel like a country bumpkin by comparison. She came from New York, the capital of the world, but she only knew women like her mother and Ruth’s friends, none of whom ran anything larger than their own households. Or women like Marie and Pandora, who had their own responsibilities and made their own decisions, but unlike Aunt Johanna had only themselves to look after. There must be businesswomen like Johanna somewhere in New York—perhaps on the Lower East Side, where countless garment factories jostled for space—but Wanda had never met them.

She was very impressed by Johanna, and by the end of her first afternoon in the workshop had realized that her aunt, far from being thrown into a panic by Marie’s desertion, was making the best of the new circumstances. She didn’t even bat an eyelid at the news that Marie wouldn’t be sending as many designs for the new catalog as she had promised. She simply called a quick staff meeting and told everybody in the workshop, in brief, clipped sentences, what Marie had written in her letter.