Authors: Lynn Austin
“Actually, I did too. But if that really was the truth—if Karl Bauer really did love you more than life itself—then everything else she’s told you about him was a lie.”
“I know. That’s why I’ve been in such a muddle the past few days. It’s very unsettling to have holes suddenly poked in the fabric of your life. I wish I could mend them, but how? Sue, the truth couldn’t possibly be worse than this terrible uncertainty, could it?” When Suzanne simply shrugged, Grace turned to the back of the album where there were several blank pages. She removed a folded piece of gray writing paper and handed it to her. “Read this. I found it stuck in the back of this scrapbook.”
Suzanne unfolded it and read the handwritten words aloud:
“‘To my beloved Emma,
When you are old and gray and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.’”
“Wow . . .” Suzanne breathed.
“I don’t recognize the handwriting,” Grace said, swallowing.
“I could be wrong, but I think this is a poem by Yeats. I’ll look in one of my anthologies when I get home.”
“I know that my mother bought this photo album when we lived on King Street, but for the life of me, I can’t imagine who would give her a love poem.”
Suzanne refolded the page and handed it to Grace. “If I were you, I’d
search out the facts and deal with the past head on. Have you ever gone back to the town where Grandma came from and talked to her
family—your
family?”
“I didn’t think it was a good idea to rake up the past.”
“Closure, Mom. Don’t you ever wonder what really happened between her and your father?”
“Of course I do. I’ve wondered about it all my life. When I was a child the other girls would hound me about him. Who was he? Where was he? Why didn’t he live with us? Was he in jail? Divorce was a rare and scandalous event back then.”
“Did you ever confront Grandma and ask her to tell you more about him?”
“It didn’t occur to me to question her until I became a teenager. Then when she refused to answer my questions, I decided to run away and find Karl Bauer myself. I even bought a bus ticket to Bremenville, but the man who ran the bus depot knew my mother, and while I was waiting for the bus to arrive, he sent for her. She and I had a terrible fight. The more I insisted on going, the more upset she became until finally, for the first time, she told me that my father didn’t want me—that he had tried to make her abort me. By the time she finished the gruesome story, she had me convinced that if I went anywhere near him he’d want to kill me all over again. That was also the first time I learned what he did for a living—that he owned a drugstore in Bremenville.”
“You’re an adult, not a teenager. Surely you’re mature enough to handle your father’s problem for what it was—Aw problem, not yours.”
“It took a huge toll on my mother to have to tell me the truth that day. And there was something else. A sense of . . . I don’t know . . . a sense that I was hurting her by wanting more love than she could give me. She always insisted that she and I were a family, complete in ourselves. I think it would still hurt her if she found out I was looking for my family somewhere else.”
“Then don’t tell her. Besides, I’d like to know more too. He is my grandfather. We have a right to know the truth.”
“We went to Bremenville once to find him. Do you remember?”
“No, when was that?”
“We had driven up to the state park for a picnic one Saturday, all four of us. You and your brother were in grade school at the time. On the way home I saw the signs for Bremenville, only twenty miles or so off the main road, and I asked your father, please . . . couldn’t we at least just see the town? It was summertime and beastly hot riding in a car without air conditioning, so I was amazed when he agreed to stop. You know how your father hates to change his plans.”
Suzanne made a stern face. “‘Let’s stick to the plans, here,’” she said, in an uncanny imitation of Stephen. “‘No need to change well-laid plans.’”
“That’s him,” Grace said, smiling. “Anyhow, Bremenville turned out to be a quaint little town, nestled in a valley in the mountains. I imagine it’s a tourist trap by now, with the lake and all, but back in the ’50s it was relatively undiscovered. You could tell it was settled by Germans because the village looked as if it had been plucked right out of the old country and transplanted to America. Even the names on the stores and the mailboxes were German. The Squaw River divides the town in half, and although it looked peacefull enough when we were there, I couldn’t help remembering Grandma’s story about the big flood when she was a child. Especially when it started to rain as soon as we pulled into town.”
Suzanne twirled her hand impatiently. “And the point is . . .”
“The point . . .?”
“Did you find your family or not!”
Her impatience irritated Grace. “You’re your father’s daughter, Suzanne. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. And I
am
getting to the point. We stopped for gas on the outskirts of town and it seemed to take forever for a fill-up, especially since I’d been waiting all my life to find my father. So when Stephen rolled down the window to pay for the gas, I asked the attendant if there was a drugstore in town. ‘Sure,’ he says. ‘Bauer’s drugstore, straight down Main Street about four blocks. Can’t miss it.’
“There’s no way to describe how it felt to be so close—thrilling and terrifying at the same time. I was in Bremenville, four blocks from my father’s drugstore! Stephen asked the attendant if the Bauers still owned it, and I was afraid I’d never be able to hear his answer above the drumming of the rain on the roof and the hammering of my heart.
“‘Yes, sir,” he said.‘Karl Bauer has run that store for as far back as I can recall.’
“We pulled out of the gas station, but only drove about a block down the street when all of a sudden the sky opened up in a tremendous cloudburst. The rain just poured down. I’d never seen anything like it before—or since. Stephen had to pull over and stop because we absolutely could not see a thing.”
“I remember now!” Suzanne said. “That was unbelievable! I thought for sure the car was going to fill up with water and we were all going to drown.”
Grace took a sip of coffee. “I was getting worried too. The rain went on and on—probably for a good ten minutes. When it finally let up, we started
inching our way down the street again, but about a block later the entire intersection was flooded. Stephen didn’t dare drive through it, so he took a detour around the block, and by the time we dodged all the flooding on the side streets we ended up lost.”
“So you never found his store?”
“Oh, we eventually found it. Stephen was a man on a mission, you know. The store looked like something out of a bygone era . . . striped awning out front, ornate soda fountain with those little wire chairs, a row of old-fashioned glass medicine bottles with stoppers. But Bauer’s drugstore was closed.”
“No!”
“It was ten minutes past six by then, and the store had closed at six o’clock. Evidently on Saturday night, the entire town closed up at six o’clock. By the time we got back to the gas station, that was closed too. There wasn’t a soul we could ask for directions to Karl Bauer’s house—not that I would have dared go to his house! Getting up the nerve to go into his store was one thing, but going to his house? No, it just wasn’t meant to be.”
Suzanne rolled her eyes. “You know, I really hate it when you start all that ‘Divine Destiny’ stuff. Name one good reason why God wouldn’t want you to meet your father? Aren’t you curious about him? Don’t you
want
to know more?”
“Aside from curiosity, what would be the point? Besides, he was several years older than my mother, so he must be long dead by now.”
“What about Grandma’s family . . . whatever happened to her sisters?”
Grace paged through the scrapbook to find the old-fashioned studio portrait of four little girls in starched white dresses and high-button shoes. “That’s her older sister, Sophie, who was born in Germany; that’s Mother; that’s Eva; and that’s the baby, Vera. As far as I know, when my mother left Karl, she never saw her parents or her sisters again.”
“Doesn’t that strike you as terribly strange, Mom? Avoiding Karl is one thing, but turning her back on her own family? It doesn’t make sense.”
“I know. Grandma would never even talk about them. I was very surprised when she told us her mother’s story last week.”
“I’ll go to Bremenville with you if you want to play detective. This time we’ll check the weather report first,” Suzanne added with a grin.
Grace slowly closed the photo album. “No, let’s just leave things the way they are, Suzanne.”
Long after her daughter left, Grace remained at the kitchen table, too weary to move. At last she opened the scrapbook again to the only picture she’d ever
seen of Karl Bauer. He stood behind her mother on their wedding day, only slightly taller than Emma, but his vast shoulders and thick-set build seemed to dwarf her slender frame. His hair and full beard were dark, his flowing mustache hid all but a sliver of his mouth from view. His broad face was dramatically handsome with high, well-defined cheekbones and dark, curving eyebrows. Grace stared longest of all at his eyes, studying them for a glint of cruelty that might have forewarned Emma of her future. But no matter how long she gazed, Grace couldn’t read any emotion in them at all.
She remembered her youthful determination to go to Bremenville and find him, how she had studied the bus schedule, traced the route on a map, counted her rumpled dollar bills and loose change. Then she recalled the chill that had frozen her heart when she’d learned that her father didn’t want her, that he’d conspired to abort her. Why would he do that if he “loved her more than life itself”? She tried to read the mystery behind his silent face, but it seemed obscured by a driving sheet of rain and a row of glass bottles in the window of a closed store.
The following Saturday afternoon, Grace knocked on the door to her mother’s new suite, then turned the knob. “Anybody home?” she called as she and Suzanne stepped inside. No answer. “We probably should have phoned and warned her we were coming.”
“Wow! What a spectacular mess!” Suzanne exclaimed as she followed Grace through the door. “If Grandma is in here, we’ll never find her!”
“It’s just as I thought . . . Mother hasn’t unpacked a thing.” The cardboard boxes were no longer stacked neatly against the walls where the movers would have left them, though, but haphazardly torn open, their contents partly strewn on the floor or piled on the chairs, the table, the sofa, and every other available space. The weariness Grace had been battling struck with renewed force. “Why don’t you get started, Sue. You’ve got a gift for organization. I’ll go track Mother down.”
Leaving the door to the suite open, Grace walked down the hall to the activity lounge in the center of the complex. As she drew nearer, she heard the unmistakable sound of singing and laughter. When she recognized a rollicking piano rendition of “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” she knew she had found her mother.
A dozen senior citizens were gathered around the baby grand piano, clapping and singing as if it were party night at the campus fraternity house. Emma
sat in the middle of it all, pounding away on the keyboard, the life of the party. Her cheeks were nearly as bright as her crimson sweat shirt, and she wore her silver hair tied back with a shocking pink scarf. How could she possibly be eighty years old when she looked as alive and youthful as a sorority girl?
Suddenly Emma spotted her. “Why, here’s Gracie!” she cried, and her face lit with love, just as it always did. Grace had never doubted for a single day in her life that her mother loved her utterly, yet Emma’s love had never been smothering or possessive.
“Hey, everybody, I’d like you to meet my daughter, Grace Bradford.”
Grace was instantly engulfed by well-wishers introducing themselves and pumping her hand.
“I’m Lester Stanley. You have no idea how much we enjoy your mother.”
“Oh, I can well imagine,” Grace murmured.
“She’s more fun than an open fire hydrant on the Fourth of July,” a tiny sparrow of a woman added.
“I tell you, honey,” drawled a woman in a wheelchair, “I just don’t know what we did for laughs around here before your mama came.”
Still seated at the piano, Emma smiled up at Grace. “What brings you here today, dear?”
“Must be something special,” Lester said. “She’s all dressed up like Sunday-go-to-meetin’ day.”
Grace glanced down in dismay at what she’d thought was a casual outfit—gray linen slacks, a peach blazer, and matching sweater, a silk scarf knotted around her neck.
“No, Gracie always dresses up like that,” Emma said with a wave of her hand.
“I came to see if you needed some help settling in.”
“Settling in!” Lester shouted. “Why, Emma is already a permanent fixture!”
Emma rested her hand on his arm. “Thank you, dear, you’re very sweet to say so, but I think she means my suite. You didn’t happen to peek in, did you, Gracie?”
“I did.”
“Oh dear. I’m in trouble now.” She played a few bars of a funeral dirge on the piano, then stood. “Sorry, folks, but I guess I’m grounded until I clean my room.” When everyone hooted with laughter Grace felt old and prudish.
“Honestly, Mother.”
“Hey, do you need help, Emma? We can all pitch in.” There was a chorus of assents.
“No, it’s kind of you to offer, Lester, but I’m afraid you’d never get through my door. It is a mess, isn’t it, dear?”
“Well . . . yes. . . .” Grace smiled weakly.
“Don’t worry, everybody,” Emma said cheerfully. “I’ll dig my way out in time for the canasta championships.”