hurried back to Josefa. They held each other amid the long low table of books containing the letters of the alphabet, small drawings of animals or flowers illustrating each one.
Then they sat down on two low chairs, knee to knee, hands clasped.
Sophie said, “You’re trembling and you’re crying.”
“I’ve had such words with Mother....” Josefa began to tell the story. She kept looking away, as if trying to find a way to escape the truth.
“Oh Josy, how terrible,” murmured Sophie. Her lips parted, and she grew so pale that her freckles seemed to darken. “Oh, my love.”
“It means that nothing is real anymore,” Josefa said hoarsely. “Nothing’s real. Whatever I did, right or wrong, I could return to that one thing: I was Papa’s girl. My father taught me singing, I tell people. My father always stood up for me, rode me on his shoulders; now he’s not my father at all. A stranger was my father. I can’t bear that loss; I can’t. I don’t know where in the world to go with a loss like this.”
Sophie began to kiss Josefa’s fingers one by one. “Come, don’t cry,” she whispered. “I’m crying, too, and I can’t even give you a handkerchief because I always lose mine. Wait, wait! I think I can make something of it. Now I’ll explain it to you. Yes, it’s clear to me.”
She wiped her nose on her apron and said in the clear voice in which she always made her proclamations, only now the words stumbled a little, “The soldier doesn’t matter at all.”
“How could he not matter? What are you saying?”
Sophie took several deep breaths. “He doesn’t matter one bit. You were Papa’s most precious girl; you were his own Josefa. He chose you; he could have put you in a basket and delivered you to an orphanage like a heap of old clothes, but he didn’t. Well, did he?”
“I can never forgive Mama.”
“Oh ... Mama!” Sophie took a few more breaths, and laid her hand flat on her knees to steady them. “Why she is the way she is ... this is part of it, of course, but there’s another bit. Remember when we first looked at that book of suitors in secret in Mannheim, and I noticed the first pages were cut away? I eventually found them under the paper lining in the drawer where Mama keeps her hose. Listen, I’m telling you to distract you.”
Sophie leapt up and began to rush about picking up fallen toys, stammering a little, glancing back at her sister. “Are you listening, Josy love? Mama bought the book when she was young and began to plan for her own sisters’ marriages. Someone fantastical, of course. Those pages were full of the names of pashas and princes and sons of the city fathers. Only poor Aunt Gretchen believed her and refused every other offer, and so she never married at all. Mama has always felt bad about that, but she couldn’t stop herself She had to keep planning fantastical lives for all of us to make up for it, and to make up for her own fall. She couldn’t see the happiness she had all along. She saw it only sometimes. And after Papa died, she knew.”
“She should have known before!” came Josefa’s savage cry.
“I think she did sometimes. Josy, people do just bumble along. We have to forgive one another. What else can we do? I tell you this now because it’s all part of the piece, you see, of understanding why Mama is the way she is.”
“I don’t want to understand her!” Josefa yelled, clenching her fists. “I don’t want to understand anything about her; I hope never to see her again! I will never, never get over this.” She wrapped her arms about her chest and rocked back and forth.
Sophie dropped to her knees before Josefa, the rag dolls she had just gathered up spilling back onto the floor, their little button eyes staring up at the two sisters. “But Papa loved you best! I was always a little jealous; we all were. You had a part of him that no one else did, not even Mama. And she misses him so.”
Josefa twisted her head away. “I hate it when I cry!” she gasped. “I’ve just been holding it in for so long.” After several minutes, she managed to calm down a little. “Well,” she said with a bit of grim laughter as she picked up one of the rag dolls, “perhaps with what