The American Lady (The Glassblower Trilogy Book 2) Read online

  Ruth looked at Marie skeptically. “Be that as it may, I hope Harold proposes to Wanda soon. Steven says that he has to get ahead in his career first. But the way I see it, she couldn’t hope to find a better man.”

  “Ruth!” Marie said, outraged. “You sound as though you can hardly wait to get rid of your daughter. Wanda is only eighteen—isn’t that rather young to marry?”

  “What should she be waiting for?” Ruth replied. “To meet the wrong man and then make the same mistake I did? Or to find some job that takes up all her time and energy, and then become a bitter old maid? Just imagine, in the spring she even came up with the idea of becoming a nurse! I thought my ears were deceiving me. My Wanda, in a bloodsmeared surgical gown? Thank heavens a friend of mine found her a job in a gallery not long after that.” She shook her head, appalled. “A nurse—as though any man would ever be interested in marrying her after she’d seen such things and worked herself half to death!”

  “But if she wants to help people, shouldn’t you be happy about that? Once she’s spent some time emptying bedpans and changing soiled bandages, I daresay the work would lose a little of its charm. The way you keep forbidding Wanda from pursuing her dreams just makes her all the more determined.”

  “What nonsense! Nobody wants to stop her from helping the needy. I go to the hospital once a week myself and read to the patients. I’ve asked her often enough whether she wants to come with me. But that hardly means that she should make a career of it.”

  “If your daughter has even the slightest trace of your own stubbornness, you’ll have a hard time making her into the compliant little miss you seem to want,” Marie said. She gave Ruth a gentle dig in the ribs. “And now it’s time for you to test me on yesterday’s vocabulary. I want to have a go at the next chapter in my English textbook later this evening.”

  Ruth groaned. “Not again! Can’t we skip class just for once? You already speak wonderful English.”

  “But I want to understand as well. I still have trouble with that,” Marie answered stoically as she opened her phrase book.

  She had been pounding the pavement all day. There was a secretarial opening not far from Harold’s bank—and Wanda fondly imagined how they would meet for lunch each day. And another job at the Municipal School Board, where she would be in charge of handing out free textbooks to needy children. And a position as receptionist at the Waldorf Astoria hotel. All her efforts were in vain. The men in gray suits who interviewed her needed only a moment to spot the link between her name and Miles Enterprises and then suddenly decided that she was too young for the post. Or it was already taken. Only the man at the Waldorf Astoria had told her straight out that they had been disappointed already by “young ladies of your background” who spent most of their time flirting with the guests rather than getting to work. Wanda hadn’t bothered to reply that she would take her work very seriously if only somebody would give her a job!

  It had been a long and frustrating day, and now her ankles were swollen, her legs ached, and a dull anger gnawed at her belly. She wanted nothing more than to creep into her room for the rest of the evening. On the other hand, given the way her mother monopolized Marie’s every waking moment, she had hardly gotten to see her aunt. And she was hungry too. So despite her bad mood, she sat down for dinner with her parents and Aunt Marie. Lou-Ann’s eyes shone with pride as she dished up a potato gratin that Marie had specifically requested. Her mother eyed the crispy cheese crust suspiciously and held her hand over her plate to stop Lou-Ann from serving her more than a mere spoonful, but Wanda asked for a double helping. It was time to see what kind of food her country cousins in Thuringia ate.

  “Look what I bought myself today. A New York guidebook! In English!” Marie took the book proudly from her pants pocket and passed it to Steven.

  Wanda was still amazed that Marie had managed to ignore Ruth’s attempts to dress her respectably. But she’d done it somehow, and at least here at home she wore pants and a selection of tight-waisted blouses that were cut like men’s shirts, with ruffles down the front and at the cuffs. Marie looked so daring in her getup that Wanda found herself thinking of the Three Musketeers. She would like to try it herself sometime . . . but Mother would never allow that.

  “What a good idea! In fact you should have had a city guide all along,” her father said, looking fondly at his wife. “Ruth knows all there is to know about the best shoe stores and boutiques. But if you ask her what year a building dates from or who the architect was, my dear wife is usually stumped for an answer, aren’t you, my love?”

  Ruth shrugged indifferently. Wanda knew her mother didn’t care about that sort of thing.

  “Well, I think that the authors just copy off one another. Most of them have never set foot in the city,” Wanda said. But she felt a twinge of annoyance that she hadn’t thought to give her aunt a guidebook herself. Perhaps the two of them could have taken one of the walking tours described in its pages.

  Marie looked at her curiously. “Do you think so? I find it very informative. Especially the section about New York’s bridges—that was the first thing I read, right through! Look, I’ll show you something.”

  Everyone around the table smiled—Marie’s fascination with New York’s bridges was well-known by now.

  “Look, this is how they built the Brooklyn Bridge,” Marie said, pointing to a photograph of a dozen workers grinning as they struck poses in a nest of steel cables. “It says here that they used fourteen thousand miles of steel cable. By the time it was done, it had cost three times as much as they expected.”

  “Does the book say how many workers died building the bridge?” Wanda asked with a hint of concern in her voice as she bent over the page. “Or that thousands of poor immigrants worked on the site for decades, sweating their guts out for two dollars a day?”

  “Wanda!” Ruth chided her.

  “What do you mean, Wanda? Aren’t you the one who always says there are two sides to every question? Light and shade, remember. Where there’s wealth, there’s poverty too. And that’s especially true of New York. You only show Marie the side of the city you think she should see. How is she supposed to form her own impression?”

  “Oh heavens, there you go again with your views on the social question. I hardly think Marie came all this way so that she could go visit the slums,” Ruth said icily.

  “That’s not what I’m talking about,” Wanda shot back. “Aunt Marie is an artist. That means she wants to see more than Broadway and the temples of commerce. Or the grand events at Madison Square Garden. That’s not where art really happens these days—true art moved on long ago. Pandora says—”

  “Kindly spare us your dance teacher’s opinions in such matters. The woman’s mad,” Steven interrupted gruffly. Then he turned back to Marie.

  “Wanda’s right about one thing, though,” he said, glancing over at his daughter with a frown. “New York is a work of art in its own right. There are no new worlds to discover in this day and age, but this world-class city is the work of human hands. A work in progress. And each and every one of us should feel grateful to be a part of it.”

  “I never knew you could be such a poet,” Marie said, giving Steven a gentle dig in the ribs. “Go on, it’s fun hearing you talk like this.”

  Why couldn’t her aunt talk to her, just once in a while? Wanda turned back to her food in a huff. The potatoes tasted very good, even if they looked like mush.

  Steven pointed out the window. “Out there the buildings are so tall that some streets don’t get to see the moon and stars at all. It’s like living in a canyon, but each canyon offers thousands of opportunities every day. Win or lose—everyone holds their future in their own hands. That’s the real beauty of this city, for me.”

  “Opportunities!” Wanda spat out, before Marie’s face could cloud over again with that dreamy look of hers. “You mustn’t believe everything that Father says.
If you happen to be young, and a woman, there are next to no opportunities. All you ever hear is what you’re not allowed to do.”

  Marie looked at her, baffled. “Whatever do you mean?”

  “She probably means she’s looking for another job,” Steven said, then turned to his daughter. “Must you really bore our guest with all that?” he asked her in a much sharper tone than usual.

  Ruth couldn’t help but add, “Just how often does your father have to offer you a job at Miles Enterprises? It’s getting a little tiresome how muleheaded you can be.”

  “And just how often do I have to tell you that I don’t want to let Daddy give me a job in the family firm?” Wanda asked right back, imitating her mother’s tone. Switching back to her normal voice, she added, “After all, when Father was my age he went to work for Mr. Woolworth. He didn’t ask his own father for a job.”

  “Harold isn’t altogether happy about your wild ideas either,” Ruth announced as though Wanda had never spoken. “He’s already complaining that he hardly gets to see you.”

  “You and Harold are all cut from the same cloth, it seems!”

  The argument went on, back and forth across the table. Sometimes the tone grew harsh, sometimes a little less so. Then all of a sudden, after a particularly bitter exchange, Ruth burst into tears.

  “Ruth, my darling, don’t cry!” Steven reached out tenderly and brushed the tears from his wife’s cheeks.

  She raised her face toward him.

  “What did we do wrong? She’s always had everything she ever needs, hasn’t she?” she whispered, her voice thick with tears.

  Wanda swallowed hard. They were talking as though she weren’t there—again! Even Aunt Marie was ignoring her.

  “That’s how young people are at that age. At least nowadays. I’m quite sure that Wanda will apologize, as she knows she should, and . . .” Steven spoke to his wife in soothing tones.

  All at once Marie pushed her chair back and stood up.

  “That’s enough! I am sure you will excuse me if I leave the table. Nobody can put up with this kind of palaver.”

  “Marie, please stay!” Ruth said, jumping to her feet. “I can’t let Wanda drive you away too.”

  “What do you mean, Wanda? You two are the ones who are acting as though she were the first woman who ever wanted to work!” Marie stood in the door for a moment, shaking her head. “I just don’t know what your problem is,” she told Steven. “First you tell me that New York is the city of a thousand opportunities, but as soon as your daughter tries to seize one of them, you both scream blue murder! Good gracious—she isn’t planning to steal the moon from the sky! All she wants is to go to work somewhere nearby.”

  Wanda stared at her, astonished—she had never heard her German aunt talk this way!

  Ruth frowned. “It’s not as simple as all that. There are certain conventions we have to . . .”

  Marie laughed out loud. “Conventions! Oh, and didn’t we care about those when we were Wanda’s age?” she asked, her voice dripping with sarcasm. “You’ve obviously forgotten that we were young once too . . .”

  Shaking her head, she walked out of the room.

  7

  “Stop, stop, that’s enough, girls. We’re taking a break!” Pandora Wilkens clapped her hands and shooed her dance class over to a corner where a table stood with a carafe of water.

  “You have to drink!” she called out. “Water is the elixir of life. Water and air, air and water, never forget that!”

  Marie held her sides. “I can’t go on, I’ve got the most dreadful stitch,” she gasped. Exhausted, she lay down on the parquet floor, which had been worn smooth by the tread of countless dancing feet. Wanda passed her a glass of water and she took it, her hands trembling, and put it beside her.

  When Wanda had asked her that morning whether she wanted to come to her weekly dance class, she hadn’t wanted to pour cold water on the idea. It was the first time that her niece had come to her with any such suggestion. So the two of them had set out together to walk to the southernmost point of Manhattan Island. Marie had been a little surprised when Wanda stopped in front of a shabby-looking brownstone building with three steep iron staircases zigzagging across the front.

  A dance class? Here? How on earth did they squeeze a ballet studio in here? Would there be wall-length mirrors? Velvet ropes and gilded pillars? Then they went into the dressing room, which was no bigger than a broom cupboard, and Marie realized that Pandora Wilkens’s dance classes would be nothing like what she had imagined. She had been expecting a genteel pastime for young ladies.

  Now she wiped the sweat from her brow with the back of her hand.

  “This is the first time we’ve gone out together—why did you pick something that’s such hard work?” she groaned as she tried to get back to her feet.

  Wanda laughed. “You’re breathing wrong, that’s the problem.”

  “How can I be breathing wrong?” Marie panted. “I’m just glad I’m still breathing at all!” What am I doing here? she wondered as she sipped at the stale, flat water. She felt horribly out of place. The “girls,” as Pandora called her dance students, were all at least ten years younger than Marie. And none of them were wheezing like an old woman. She felt that she was on her last legs. And speaking of legs—everyone in the room was bare-legged. Wanda’s teacher had insisted that everyone take off their stockings and their corsets as well. She clearly had her own ideas of what to wear for dancing. Marie glanced over at her. She was nothing much to look at—short and almost plump—but beneath that unprepossessing exterior lay a real artistic temperament. With her doll-like face and curling blonde locks, Pandora Wilkens looked as though she would never dance anything more strenuous than a sedate minuet. So much for first impressions. Right at the beginning of class she had shown them all what she was made of—she told the girls to stand around in a circle and then kneel down. Then she smiled graciously, walked to the center of the circle, and gave a sign to the piano player in the corner of the room, a Russian man named Ivo.

  “I call this dance Escapade,” Pandora had announced, and then she and Ivo had hurled themselves into a frenzy of wild sound and astonishing movement. Marie had never even known that the human body could make such shapes. The poses she struck were so shockingly strange they were almost indecent. Marie had sat there without daring to move a muscle, watching as Pandora danced and danced and finally flung herself full-length to the floor as though struck down by an arrow.

  Wanda raised her glass of water to her lips and drank it down.

  “You really should pay more attention to how you breathe,” she told Marie, and then held her empty glass up as though it were a trophy. “What we did just now was only a warm-up. After the break Pandora will tell us the theme for today’s class.”

  Marie heaved a sigh. “I’m beginning to think your father was not far wrong when he said your dance teacher was mad.”

  “Imagine it’s the depths of winter,” Pandora told the class once they were back in a circle. “You’re freezing cold, perhaps you’re hungry too and you have nowhere to go to get warm. How does that make you feel? I want to see these feelings as you dance. Now, shut your eyes and freeze!”

  The girls groaned.

  “Why does it have to be winter?” one of them asked.

  Pandora looked over at her scornfully. “I would hardly need you to use your imaginations if I asked you to sweat, now, would I?” she said, wiping the sweat from her own brow with a dramatic gesture.

  Marie laughed like all the others, but it didn’t feel right. The whole thing was just so embarrassing.

  But when Ivo struck up a sad, slow tune, the winter did not seem so far away after all. As Ivo played a melody that conjured up Russia and the cold wind blowing across the endless steppe, a shiver ran down Marie’s spine. But she couldn’t move for the life of her.

  “Shut
your eyes,” Pandora whispered as she went past.

  When she closed her eyes, suddenly Marie could see. Frost flowers, showing their fine fronds as if through a microscope. A windowpane with a weathered wooden frame, fingers tracing lines on the cold glass. Marie lifted her right hand almost without knowing she did so, and then her left. Then she leaned forward a little.

  Snowflakes!

  Each one more beautiful than the last. Each a tiny world that fell apart when she touched it.

  As if in a trance, Marie began to bend this way and that.

  If only she could catch hold of one, just one!

  Her fingers grasped the air, seeking, questing.

  Faster, she had to move faster than the snow could fall, she had to turn, turn . . .

  Suddenly the music stopped and Pandora was clapping her hands.

  “Very good, girls! Now breathe deeply and swing your arms,” she ordered.

  Startled, Marie opened her eyes.

  Pandora asked one of the girls what she had seen.

  “I imagined I was walking through town with my mother on a January day and I’d forgotten my coat. Brrr, that was cold!”

  The others laughed.

  Pandora nodded to the next in line.

  “I thought of the polar bears in the city zoo. And how they always have to have cold water around them.”

  “And what did our visitor see?” the teacher asked, turning abruptly to Marie.

  “I . . .” She was confused, and took a step backward.

  “Don’t worry, this is what we always do,” Wanda whispered.

  Marie hesitated for a moment longer. Well, why not?

  “I remembered something that I haven’t thought of for a long time. And I felt wonderful!” She shook her head, still bewildered. “It was just before Christmas, and I was racking my brain over what I could give my sisters, something really special. I couldn’t think of anything—we were poor, we didn’t have money for presents,” she added. “Then one night I was standing by the windows, they were frozen over, and as I was looking out I saw the frost flowers that had formed on the pane. They were shining, so cold and so beautiful!”