Authors: Lynn Austin
I would hide in the parlor during Sophie’s lessons, listening to every word the teacher said about whole notes and quarter notes and arching my wrists, then I’d play all my favorite songs later, by ear. I caught on quickly—unlike Sophie, who took so long to find each note that it was like waiting for stalactites to form in a cave, one slow drip at a time.
One afternoon Papa heard me playing a hymn and decided—to everyone’s great relief—that I was the one who should take lessons. I can’t say who was more thrilled, me or Sophie. I practiced for hours on end, progressing all the way through Book Three in no time. Mama would have to come into the parlor and tell me to stop practicing and go outside to play.
I was content playing hymns and practice exercises until the world-famous Redpath Chautauqua came to Bremenville when I was twelve. I had walked into town with Eva, who was ten, on an errand for Mama one sunny June day, to discover posters in all the shop windows announcing the great event. More posters had been nailed to all the tree trunks, banners draped from Main Street’s lampposts, and a Redpath hawker stood in Lincoln Park urging the crowd to purchase advance tickets to be sure of a seat—even though the show itself wouldn’t arrive for several weeks.
Bursting with excitement, Eva and I ran all the way home to ask Papa if we could buy tickets too. We knew what the Chautauqua was, of course. A girl in my class at school named Hilda Lang had seen one in the city last summer and told us all about the week-long event with live music and magical
wonders and famous orators. But I had never dreamt that the “inspirational tent show” would come to Bremenville.
Eva and I raced up the porch steps, all out of breath, and slammed into the front hallway—only to find Papa’s study door firmly closed. That meant he was writing a sermon and couldn’t be disturbed. Panting and gasping, we sank down on the floor to wait, leaning our backs against his door.
“Do you think there will really be a Red Indian at the show, like the one on the poster?” Eva whispered.
“Oh yes,” I whispered back. “Hilda said she saw Indians with feathers and war paint and everything.”
“Was she scared? I’d be terrified!”
“Don’t worry, I’m sure they’re all friendly Indians. They wouldn’t dare send any other kind.”
“What else did Hilda see?”
“A real Hawaiian crooner with a ukelele, and a magician who made stuff disappear, and a yodeler . . . and she said it was the most magnificent music she’d ever heard in her life! And Hilda said—”
Suddenly Papa opened the door and we fell backward at his feet. “What in the world is all this running and panting and whispering about? Did some great tragedy just occur that I should know about?” He had his vest unbuttoned and his shirt sleeves rolled up as if he had been working very hard. He planted his hands on his hips and frowned, but I wasn’t fooled. Gentle, patient Papa had never laid a hand on any of us, unlike the Bauers’ papa who took his belt to them sometimes. I scrambled to my feet to hug Papa’s waist.
“It’s not a tragedy at all. It’s the most wonderful news I ever heard! The Redpath Chautauqua is coming to town on July seventh, and we have to hurry and buy tickets or the man said they’d all be sold out and we’ll miss the chance of a lifetime to hear the brass band and the opera singers and a real live orchestra and—”
“And Red Indians!” Eva added.
“Can we go, Papa? Please,
please
, can we go?”
Papa stared at me as if he hadn’t understood a word I’d said. I thought I would have to repeat the whole explanation in German, and I was trying to translate it in my mind when Mama hurried out from the kitchen, drying her hands on her apron.
“What’s wrong? What happened?”
“Well, Louise, it seems that the Chautauqua is coming to town,” Papa said with a wry grin.
“Oh, is that all?” Mama said. “Where’s the sugar and baking powder I asked you girls to buy?”
Eva and I stared at each other in horror. We would have to walk a whole mile back into town! When Mama saw that we had forgotten them, she threw up her hands and disappeared into the kitchen, mumbling beneath her breath in German. Papa covered his mouth, and I knew he was trying not to laugh. I decided to take advantage of his good humor. “Hey, Papa! Since we have to walk back into town anyway, could you give us some money for the Chautauqua so we could buy the tickets now . . . while they last?”
“Hay is for horses,” he said, “not proper young ladies. And I can’t promise that we’ll go until I look into it and see if it’s a respectable show. I won’t allow my daughters to watch a bunch of show girls or anything else that’s indecent.”
It took a long time to walk into town and back. And it took longer still for Papa to investigate the Chautauqua and learn that the women who traveled with the show weren’t racy show girls at all, but wholesome college students. And that the climax of each show was an inspirational lecture on such beneficial topics as the glories of hard work or achieving personal success. A week before the big day, Papa bought tickets for our whole family. I hugged him so hard he claimed I’d nearly broken his ribs.
When the Chautauqua arrived in Bremenville on a special train, the entire town came out to watch. Sophie, Eva, Vera, and I finished our chores quickly so we could walk into town and see the huge canvas tent go up. A brass band, dressed in white uniforms with gold braid, marched in a parade from the train station to the tent grounds. I could scarcely get to sleep that night.
The show was everything I had dreamed of and more. We sat in the same row as the Bauers, who had somehow managed to scrape together enough money for tickets. Markus Bauer planted himself in the seat beside me, but I refused to let his oily presence spoil my rapture.
“Who’d you steal your ticket from?” I whispered during intermission. Markus stuck out his tongue at me.
That night, the Chautauqua changed my life. Eva said it changed hers too, but that was only because she had nightmares about Indians chasing her for months afterward. But my life was
really
changed because for the first time I realized what a huge, exciting world existed beyond Bremenville, a world filled with exotic people and dazzling music—a world where large-bosomed opera divas sang magnificent arias in Italian; where orchestras played soaring overtures; where magicians in black silk tuxedos performed for queens and kings; where the sound of yodeling echoed through the mountains; and where Hawaiians
with broad, honey-colored faces strummed ukeleles beneath palm trees.
I fell in love with all kinds of music that night when I was twelve years old. The four-part hymns I used to coax from my Sears Roebuck piano seemed like dull noise in comparison. I bought my first piece of real sheet music after that—a popular tune called “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” composed by a man named Irving Berlin—and I practiced it over and over whenever Papa left the house.
“Come and play dolls with me under the apple tree,” Eva would beg.
“You’ll have to play with Vera. I’m practicing.”
“How come all you ever want to do is
practice
?”
“Because I’m going to see the whole world, Eva. And this piano is my ticket out of Bremenville.”
“That’s stupid!” Eva exclaimed. “You can’t carry a ticket as big as a piano!”
I saw what she had imagined and smiled. “No, silly. What I mean is, I’m going to join the Chautauqua someday. And then I’m going to travel all over the world.”
“Did Papa say you could go?”
It was the one flaw in my plan. How could I explain to Papa that I wanted to play something besides hymns? Or that I wanted to play music in a concert hall, not a church?
I spent the next two years trying to figure out a way.
FOURTEEN
A month after I celebrated my fourteenth birthday, Archduke Francis Ferdinand was assassinated and war broke out in Europe. The news devastated Papa. The sound of his warm laughter no longer filled the parsonage as it used to, but a cloud of gloom fell over all of us, as thick as the cloud of smoke that would soon blanket Europe. Papa paced the floor of his study late into the night.
“God showed me it was coming, Louise,” he moaned as he read the newspaper, “but I never imagined it would be this bad.” He gazed solemnly across the dinner table at his wife and four daughters and murmured about how thankful he was that he’d left Germany when he did. Each time a letter arrived from Germany he would get angry, raging on and on about how he wished his relatives had listened to him and moved to America too. He favored neutrality for the United States and preached sermon after sermon about peace and about Jesus, the Prince of Peace. I prayed for the war to end too—so I would have my old papa back.
Mama had always been high-strung, but now her nerves seemed about to snap from the constant worry about her family back in Germany. Five of her nephews fought on the western front—three of Uncle Kurt’s sons, one of Aunt Runa’s, and one of Aunt Ada’s. As the war spread, disrupting and eventually halting the telegraph and mail services, Mama’s fear for their safety escalated.
Mama had always been high-strung, but now her nerves seemed about to snap from the constant worry about her family back in Germany. Five of her nephews fought on the western front—three of Uncle Kurt’s sons, one of Aunt Runa’s, and one of Aunt Ada’s. As the war spread, disrupting and eventually halting the telegraph and mail services, Mama’s fear for their safety escalated.
I looked for any excuse to escape the suffocating atmosphere at our house. Eva and I fled to the movies to watch Fatty Arbuckle in
The Keystone Kops
every chance we got. Papa had always been very mindful of where his daughters went and what they did, but the war so distracted him that he didn’t notice how much time we spent at the movies. I saw this as a good sign as far as my plan to join the Chautauqua was concerned.
It was a welcome diversion from all the doom and gloom when Mama and Papa decided it was time to find a husband for Sophie, who would turn nineteen in August. Everyone always said how pretty Sophie was, with her round
face and blue eyes and fair hair the color of Papa’s. She had a nice round figure too—the kind that drew idiotic attention from all the boys—with a narrow waist and a matronly bosom like Mama’s. I was still such a scrawny sack of knees and elbows that I despaired of ever having proportions like Sophie’s.
My sister was all for the idea of marriage—but then, she didn’t have ā future on stage to look forward to like I did. Sophie actually liked to cook and sew and things like that, so Papa had no trouble at all arranging a match between her and Otto Mueller, who was twenty-two and helped his father run the feed store. Otto was okay to look at, I suppose—a lot cleaner and better dressed than any of the Bauer boys Mama was always raving about. Otto was going to fix up a couple of rooms in the back of the store for them to live in. I didn’t know how Sophie could stomach the idea of living with a boy, much less living behind the feed store. The smell of feed always made me sneeze, and the idea of sharing a double bed with any of the boys I knew from school didn’t bear thinking about.
Sophie’s wedding plans rolled forward like a carriage without a hand brake—slowly at first, then gathering speed and momentum until we were all running in a hundred directions at once and the whole affair was out of control. I vowed to die a spinster before I would get carried away with such nonsense. By the time the day of the wedding arrived, I think we all felt as though we’d been run over roughshod by a team of horses.
“What a beautiful bride you are, Sophie!” Mama exclaimed on the big day. “If only my oma could see you! You were named after her, you know.”
Yes, Mama. You’ve told us a hundred times
, I thought, rolling my eyes. I didn’t dare say it out loud. Mama carried on like that all day, and her eyes leaked so many tears I thought I was going to have to put some punch in the crying cup to make her stop. Magda Bauer said they were tears of joy, but I wasn’t so sure. Sophie helped Mama around the house a lot more than Eva and I did—without even complaining—so I figured Mama had to be a little upset about losing her best helper.
Sophie did make a beautiful bride, though. Eva and I spent the afternoon before the wedding gathering huge bunches of wild flowers and roses from parishioners’ gardens all over town to decorate Papa’s church and all the food tables. Everything looked beautiful, and smelled beautiful, too, as the scent of roses filled the air. The reception on the church lawn turned out to be so lovely that I even heard Papa laughing like he used to do. His sorrow ebbed for a little while as his joy overflowed, just as the sampler in Mama’s parlor said it would.
“Did you see how pink Sophie’s cheeks got when Papa said, ‘You may kiss the bride’?” I asked Eva. We were supposed to be making sure the guests had plenty of punch, but we were giggling behind the hydrangea bushes instead.
“She looked like a scalded pig!” Eva said, laughing. “Do you suppose that was the first time Otto ever kissed her?”
“No, I saw him sneak a kiss once in our parlor. She turned red then too.”
“Why?” Eva asked. “She never turns red when Mama and Papa kiss her.”
“That’s because when a boy kisses you it’s disgusting and embarrassing!” I shuddered at the thought.
“How do you know it’s disgusting?” a deep voice behind me asked. “Have you ever been kissed, Katze?” I whirled around to face Markus Bauer. I didn’t know what made me angriest—the smirk on his face, the fact that he’d been eavesdropping, or his outrageous question. I tackled his question first.
“It’s none of your business if I’ve been kissed or not, Markus Bauer!”
“That must mean you haven’t been,” he said, laughing. He moved a step closer and fastened his dark eyes on mine. “Want to try it?”
For the space of a heartbeat I forgot that he was disgusting Markus Bauer and noticed instead how long his lashes were and what a rich shade of chocolate brown his eyes were. He had beautifully shaped lips, too, even if they were always curled in a sneer, and I wondered what they tasted like. Everyone always commented on how handsome his father, Gus Bauer, was, but for the first time I noticed that Gus’s seventeen-year-old son was just as good-looking. Then I came to my senses and realized that it was only Markus.