been that day at the menagerie so long ago to prove it forever?
The tiger, behind the slats of its wood, wheeled cage, was old and lethargic. Josefa and Aloysia had approached the cage hand in hand, each drawn by the other’s courage to go forward. Were they six and nearly three? Aloysia wore a little crushed bonnet, and the few feet to the heavy wood cage seemed very long as they pulled each other closer. Then the beast roared. He rose, glaring at them, and swiped one paw through the bars. Aloysia stood petrified, some inches away from the great curving claws; someone was shouting, but before the large keeper could reach them, Josefa yanked her baby sister’s limp arm and pulled her away so fast that Aloysia tumbled in the dust. Josefa was shaking so hard she had to lean against the wall. Still trembling, she picked up her sobbing sister and dusted her off. Was it minutes, hours, before their parents found them? “Why didn’t you protect your little sister?” her mother had cried later. “You know you have to take care of her; how could you let her go so close?” Her father’s voice had replied angrily, “It’s not the girl’s fault, Caecilia; she saved her.” Josefa still recalled the sensation of his mustache against her cheek as he knelt and held her close.
Now, years later, she sat on the landing outside her family’s apartment, trying to keep her tears within. She could hear that the trio was done, that now someone accompanied a violin. Then everyone called for a duet, and the cry went up, “But where’s Josefa? Where’s our Josefa?” That was her father’s voice calling, “Where’s my girl?”
The door creaked open, and Sophie emerged, blinking, onto the landing. “Josy?” she murmured.
From the shadows the eldest sister held her breath. The love in the smallest sister’s voice sounded again. Josefa could not bear to hear Sophie’s questioning plea and leapt to her feet. “I was too warm inside,” she said. “That’s why I left.”
Inside she crossed, smiling, to Aloysia. The sisters each wound an arm about the other’s waist and, lifting their faces, sang purely and truly as if nothing had occurred at all: as if one had not been fondled in a dark hall under the small dour portraits of their ancestors, and the other had not fled to the stairs to confront her unhappiness. Their voices rose in thirds to the top notes, glistening off the low flames of the candles and echoing about the empty wine bottles. Then another magical evening came to a close, and the guests reluctantly began to depart.
The parlor was empty, the music of Mozart’s song lay on top of a pile of other musical scores, and the four sisters gathered close on the two iron bedsteads. Wooly, worn nightgowns pulled down over their drawn-up knees, their faces scrubbed free of rouge, the girls climbed bare-legged from bed to bed and shared a cup of cold coffee while Sophie foraged through the remaining one and a half layers of chocolates in the painted wood box. She had just finished a marzipan enclosed in dark bitter chocolate and flavored with a hint of strawberry.
“Don’t eat them all.”
“I only had six.”
“Oh, how can you all be such pigs!” Aloysia said. “You’ll be fat and won’t have fashionable figures, no matter how tightly you lace your corsets!”
Laughter burst out, quickly followed by a sharp admonition from their mother in the next room. Father had a headache; Mother was taking care of him. Then Constanze turned to her smaller sister and whispered, “They’re almost asleep; don’t wake them. Sophie, did you manage to steal it?”
Wiping her fingers on the quilt, Sophie reached under the bed and, with a crooked smile, drew out from under her pile of clothes the leather-tooled book of suitors.
Aloysia sat straight up in horror. “You shouldn’t have taken that,” she whispered sharply. “You know Mother doesn’t want us to touch it.” She put the coffee cup carefully on the dresser and reached for the book, but Sophie rolled away.
Constanze said, “Why shouldn’t she touch it? You did the other night. I saw you.”
“It was the first time she said I could enter possibilities, and I looked at only the one page. Where did you find it tonight? She moved it; I looked. Well, I did look.”
“Why, to enter that horn blower’s name?” whispered Josefa. “Sophie found it under the flour barrel.”