The American Lady (The Glassblower Trilogy Book 2) Page 13

  It didn’t take long to find her.

  Pandora was leaning against the wall, trembling. She had a hand up to her chest as though her heart were giving her trouble. She had been crying, and her makeup had run so that there were dark splotches around her eyes. When she saw Wanda coming toward her she turned abruptly away.

  “Pandora . . .” Wanda put a hand on her friend’s shoulder, at a loss. “I’m sorry if people didn’t . . . react the way your audiences usually do. My parents’ friends are a little—”

  “How could you expose me to treatment like that!” Pandora snarled at her. “You threw me to the lions! It was torture out there!”

  Wanda ducked her head low. Then she saw Marie coming down the hall. If her aunt began to call her names as well . . .

  “Well that didn’t go down too well!” Marie groaned when she reached them. “Ruth is so angry she’s ready to burst, and some of the guests still look as though they’d seen a pink elephant.” She giggled.

  Wanda breathed a sigh of relief. At least Marie wasn’t going to rake her over the coals.

  “Thank you for the comparison!” Pandora said, sniffing.

  Marie nudged her in the side. “You know very well that’s not what I meant. I just wanted to say that you’ve shocked pretty nearly everybody! If it’s any comfort, though, I liked your dance a great deal.”

  “Some comfort! I felt like a Coney Island sideshow out there! The two-headed lady! The human snake! Throw a nickel in the bucket and take a look! These people don’t realize that I am one with my art, that when I dance I let them into my life. They think it’s all just something to gawk at!” She wiped the tears from her face. The black splotches were stripes down her cheeks now. “Fifth Avenue—I should have known! I’ll tell you something: from now on I’ll only dance for an audience I’ve chosen for myself, even if that means I’ll never earn a red cent!” And with that, she hurried off, her head held high.

  Taken aback, Marie and Wanda watched Pandora leave while waiters scurried by with more drinks for the guests and a waltz struck up in the ballroom.

  By now Harold had joined them. He cleared his throat, embarrassed.

  “Don’t fret, Wanda! Pandora will calm down soon enough. As for her dance, I thought it was wonderful!”

  “I noticed how much you were enjoying it, thank you very much!” Wanda spat back. But a moment later she slumped like a deflated balloon. “Oh hang it all! Now it’s going to be all my fault again. Why does everything I try my hand at have to go wrong?”

  Marie sighed. “Don’t talk such nonsense, my dear. You don’t want to hear this, I know, but I could have told you right away that your mother never would have liked anything Pandora did. But what’s the point of standing here talking about it? I’ll go back in and tell Ruth that I enjoyed the performance a great deal. That will calm her down.”

  “No, wait!” Wanda caught hold of Marie’s sleeve, then took a deep breath. “I really don’t want to go back into the lion’s den. Why don’t we just go down to the bar on the corner before I’m eaten alive? Come on, I’ll buy you both a drink!”

  She forced a smile and then linked arms with Marie and Harold, so that they had no choice but to go with her.

  Harold squeezed her hand. “I warn you, my darling, if you order a glass of that dreadful aniseed muck you like so much, I’ll give you the telling off you’re hoping to avoid from your mother!”

  “Don’t worry, I’d much rather have a whiskey!” Wanda replied. In fact her throat was so dry that she wanted nothing more than a tall glass of water.

  “A whiskey—listen to the girl!” Marie said. “We’ll all end up drunk, and I shudder to think what your mother will have to say about that.”

  Wanda shrugged tersely. “Some things are easier to bear when you’ve had a stiff drink.”

  Marie giggled. “Now you sound just like your father. That’s what he used to say when he and Ruth had squabbled.”

  “Father? What do you mean?” Wanda turned to look at her, frowning. “He never touches spirits . . .”

  13

  “I . . . I only meant that . . .” Marie looked down the hallway. She was horrified to see that Ruth was headed straight for them with a thunderous look on her face.

  “The lion has ventured from its den,” Wanda muttered. She let go of Marie’s arm. “So, what did you mean just now?”

  Wanda had always thought that attack was the best form of defense, and right now she seized on Marie’s odd remark as a welcome distraction. She hoped that if she spent a little longer digging around here, perhaps the lion would forget to roar. “I can’t remember my father ever taking a drink because he’d squabbled with Mother. The two of you agree on everything, isn’t that right, Mother?”

  “Would anybody like to tell me what is going on here?” Ruth asked. There was a tiny tremor beneath her right eye—a first sign that a migraine was coming on.

  “Nothing at all,” Marie reassured her desperately. “Would you like to come back inside with me? I’m dying for a glass of champagne and—”

  “Now really, Aunt Marie! You can’t call my father a drunkard and then just leave it at that!” Wanda looked the very picture of innocence. “Or is there perhaps something that I ought to know about my father?” She put an accusing note into the question.

  “Marie?” Ruth’s eyelids were fluttering now. She was clearly disconcerted, and her rouged cheeks had turned pale. “What . . . what have you told her?”

  That was odd—Mother’s voice sounded so thin and strange! She also seemed to have forgotten entirely that she was supposed to be angry at Wanda. A strange feeling knotted at the pit of Wanda’s stomach.

  Harold cleared his throat. “Wanda, my dear, I suggest we bring this conversation to a close. Shall we dance?” He offered her his arm gallantly. Please don’t make any more trouble, his eyes pleaded.

  Wanda glared at him. “Well really! I hope that I may expect an answer to a simple question. I’m becoming quite tired of your treating me like a fool. I may be young, but I’m not stupid!”

  “Perhaps not, but you seem not to realize that one simply does not pry into one’s parents’ past indiscretions,” Harold replied.

  He had a cheerful grin on his face, which just irritated Wanda all the more. Don’t cause a fuss; don’t make trouble—that was so typical of Harold! He could take her side once in a while, just for a change. If not, she would just have to speak up for herself!

  “Past indiscretions . . .” she said, trying out how the phrase sounded on her lips.

  “Nonsense!” Marie laughed shrilly. “We had no time for indiscretions back in Lauscha; we had to grow up fast. Faster than we wanted to . . . isn’t that right, Ruth?”

  Wanda was horrified to see the look her mother shot Aunt Marie.

  Leave it. Take Marie’s arm and act as though she never said anything, said a voice inside her.

  Why? asked another voice simultaneously. If you act as though nothing has happened, you will be just like Mother!

  Wanda looked from her aunt to her mother. She felt as though she were watching a play onstage but also acting in the scene at the same time. And the drama was about to reach its climax. All the actors were in place and waiting for the next cue. Was it her line? Suddenly every word she spoke, every move, seemed fraught with huge significance.

  Why did her mother look as though she’d been caught breaking into a safe?

  Why did Aunt Marie look as though she wished the ground would swallow her up?

  She had only wanted to distract their attention from the debacle of the failed dance recital . . .

  Father, a drunkard? Never. There was something wrong here. Very wrong.

  “. . . we had to grow up fast. Faster than we wanted to.”

  Wanda turned to face Marie slowly, excruciatingly slowly. She was as stiff as a marionette on strings. It was as tho
ugh she wanted to put off the next moment as long as she could.

  “Marie . . . perhaps you weren’t actually talking about . . . Steven Miles?” Her voice failed her.

  Nobody said anything.

  Wanda felt her throat tighten. Her mouth was so dry that her tongue was stuck fast to the roof.

  “Why . . . why are you behaving so strangely? Mother? Marie? What is it?”

  Ruth’s eyes were fixed somewhere far off in the distance, and Marie had frozen like a statue. Neither of them could say a word nor move a muscle.

  Wanda felt dizzy. Why was it that all of a sudden she could read their thoughts so clearly?

  “Steven isn’t . . . my father? Mother, tell me that’s not true!”

  “It’s the heat, Signor de Lucca! The heat . . .” The man pointed outside as if accusing the summer air.

  Franco was pacing up and down the length of the wooden shack that served as an office. Five paces from the desk to the shelves, five paces back.

  “I can see for myself that it’s hot!” he said, stopping abruptly. “Why didn’t you call me? We could have begun unloading earlier!”

  “But Signor de Lucca! You gave the order yourself that we were not to start unloading until the right men were on duty at customs . . .”

  Franco began to pace again. Damn it all, the man was right!

  “Everything worked out in the end, this time at least,” he snarled. But it had been a close call, closer than last time. One of the boys was in poor shape. And as for the grandfather—he might not even last the night . . .

  The other man cleared his throat. “Now that the cargo is taken care of . . . will there be anything else? Does the count have any particular wish?” He pushed aside the hair that hung down over his forehead and looked toward the door, waiting for his chance to get away.

  Franco waved a hand impatiently and sent the man scurrying off. Enough talk. It was no good blaming the wrong man. They had made a mistake back in Genoa; there was no doubt about it. Too many barrels. If they had loaded ten or twenty fewer, there would have been more air for the men. They could have opened the hatches earlier as well; it was the height of summer after all!

  Once the man had gone Franco locked up the warehouse. He was dead tired, but he knew that he wouldn’t sleep easily tonight. Perhaps after a few glasses of wine . . .

  But instead of setting off toward Mulberry Street, he sat down on one of the empty steel drums that his workers used as table and chair during their breaks, and he stared out at the water. A fishing fleet was just setting out to the open sea, the lights from the boats dancing gently on the waves.

  Genoa to New York. It was a long way, especially if you spent the crossing below deck, crammed in between hundreds of barrels of wine, hardly able to catch a breath of air, with no water to wash in and just the bare minimum to eat and drink. This was why they had begun by taking only strong young men in their prime. If one of those young fellows had run into trouble with the law, who cared about that? The de Luccas certainly didn’t, as long as he had money to pay for his crossing. Soon, though, they realized that there were many other men who wanted to cross the ocean this way, men who were not so young and not in such good health—men who would never have passed the official health checks at immigration. Though Franco had pleaded with his father to take more care choosing who to send, there were a few older men on board each time.

  He lit a cigarette and sucked greedily at the smoke.

  What if the old man had died during the crossing? Would the others have sat there quietly and waited? That was exactly what they had been told to do, of course, with bloodcurdling threats. But perhaps they would have forgotten all that with a dead man in their midst. Perhaps they would have drummed on the side of the wooden crate and made such a din that one of the crew noticed them. And then? What would the ship’s officers say if they found a dozen stowaways hiding in the huge crates used for de Lucca wine? The risk was simply too great—though his father turned a deaf ear to all his protests. Franco felt a pang of bitterness at the thought. Why did the old man insist on weekly telephone reports if he wasn’t going to pay any attention to his recommendations?

  He flicked the cigarette, and it arced through the air, landing in a puddle.

  At first he had believed what his father told him, believed that they were doing a good deed by making it possible for young Italians to enter America even if they had been refused their papers for whatever reason. Franco hadn’t seen anything wrong with the fact that their families had to beggar themselves to pay for the crossing, or that the men themselves had to spend a year working for certain handpicked restaurant owners—all customers for de Lucca wine—until the rest of the cost was paid off. After all, his family had to be paid for the risk. He even thought it was rather heroic to help a few poor souls toward a better future by smuggling them in among the crates of red wine. Perhaps he might still think so today if his father hadn’t sent him to New York with a few hundred dollars to make sure that the customs agents turned a blind eye at the right moment. For the first time he saw with his own eyes what it was like when the crates were unloaded, when the men crawled out on all fours, weak with thirst. And then his romantic ideas died, never to return. Franco realized that there was nothing heroic in buying and selling human beings.

  For this was what it was.

  He, Franco, was a slave trader.

  14

  It took some time for Ruth to wake up from her faint. She lay on the chaise longue, surrounded by her Art Nouveau treasures, pale and exhausted, with a damp cloth on her brow. As soon as she opened her eyes she called out, “Wanda . . . ? Where is my daughter? I have to go to her, I have to explain everything. I . . .” She sat up, swaying.

  Marie held her tight by the arm. “Wanda has run off. She doesn’t want to see anyone.”

  “Run off?” Ruth began to cry, putting her hands in front of her face like a child. “What have you done? I . . . I don’t want to lose her.”

  Marie was struggling with tears as well. The good cheer from earlier in the evening had long since evaporated. She forgot about Pandora, about Franco, about how she had wanted to make him laugh by turning the dance fiasco into a humorous anecdote.

  “I’m so sorry, so dreadfully sorry! It was a chance remark . . . I don’t know myself how it happened. I promise you I’ll make everything right!” She would have promised Ruth anything just then, but her sister’s face remained buried in her hands.

  “There are some things that cannot be made right,” she muttered without looking at Marie.

  After Steven had come to Ruth’s side to take over for Marie, she left the apartment with Harold to look for Wanda again. While he walked along Fifth Avenue calling her name, Marie went to the small bar on the corner of Sixth Avenue. She paid no attention to the customers’ high spirits on this Saturday evening, any more than she let the oppressive heat on the streets put her off.

  “She’s not in the apartment, and we’ve looked everywhere we can nearby. Where else shall we try?” Marie’s voice was low and troubled when Harold met her at the bar. “She won’t have gone to Pandora, will she?”

  “I shouldn’t think so.” Harold seemed distracted. “There’s somewhere we haven’t tried, though. She told me once that she likes to go out on the roof. Because it brings her closer to the stars.”

  “My father was a glassblower in Lauscha . . .” Wanda was leaning against the chimney. Her face was gray, and her eyes were glazed. The wind was tugging at the thin fabric of her ball gown and her right foot was planted firmly in a slick puddle, but she seemed not to notice.

  Marie looked around, distraught. Was this really Wanda’s favorite hideaway? This horrible place? How lonely she must be if this was where she felt safe!

  When they had found Wanda, Marie sent Harold away. She wanted to talk to her niece alone.

  Wanda looked up. “My father was a viole
nt man—is that really true?” Tears ran down her face.

  Marie felt panic rise inside her. I can’t do this, a voice inside her cried.

  “I think everybody has their own different truth,” she said. How hollow that sounded! Shuddering, she remembered how Ruth and Wanda’s argument had ended.

  “You want to know why I never told you anything about the man you call your father?” Ruth had asked, grabbing her daughter by the arms so that their faces were only inches apart. Hysteria and despair battled in Ruth’s face, twisting her fine features. “I’ll tell you why: because when you were just a babe in arms, he would have beaten you to death if I hadn’t sheltered you with my own body! That’s the truth about your father.”

  At that, Wanda had doubled over as though punched in the gut.

  “I don’t believe you. You’re a liar!” she whispered, then ran away, her hands clasped over her ears.

  “Ruth and Thomas were young. They were too young to know that they weren’t really suited for one another,” Marie began.

  Wanda laughed. She sounded tired. “For eighteen years now I’ve been calling a man Father who isn’t really my father at all—that’s the truth!” She began to cry. “This can’t be true! I . . .”

  Marie was afraid that Wanda would shove her away as soon as she put her arm around her niece’s shoulders, but Wanda simply nestled into her embrace.

  “I just don’t know what to do . . . Marie, help me!”

  And so Marie told her about Lauscha. Wanda’s head lay on her breast and her gown was wet with tears. She stumbled over the words at first, for the memories were rusty, but with every sentence she spoke the past came more vividly to life.

  She told her about the three Steinmann sisters, about how they had lost their parents at such a young age. They had been left with nothing, knew nothing of how hard life could be, had nothing but their dreams. Johanna had dreamt of the big wide world. And so she had been the one to go to Sonneberg and work for one of the wholesalers. Marie hesitated again as she told her niece how the man had brutally raped her sister. Wanda straightened up and was just about to ask a question, but Marie put a finger to her lips. Times had been hard for three orphan girls. Then she told her about Ruth, about how she had been so in love with Thomas Heimer, the son of one of the richest glassblowers in the whole village. At the time the three sisters had been hired hands in Wilhelm Heimer’s busy glass workshop, which is where Ruth had met Thomas. They had been truly happy together, at least at first, and the wedding had been a grand occasion.