oven gazing at his empty coffee cup and the crumbs on his plate. He had recalled her at seventeen; he had recalled her as she once was. Reflectively, she began to move across the rough wide floorboards of her kitchen where she had cooked so many hundreds of meals. Though she was now middle-aged, with graying hair hidden under her cap, she felt her old beauty and opportunities as if they pressed inside her, wanting to grow again. Even when she turned to a bit of broken mirror on a shelf by the pots, she saw herself as she had been, seventeen years old and leaning dreamily from a window in a chemise threaded with pink ribbon, all her future stretched out before her. It was but a shadow, and when she looked closer, it was gone. Tears filled her eyes. “Come back,” she whispered, but time did not come back.
Still, there was a way.
She could live her youth through her daughters; as difficult as it might be, she could have through them all she had lost. They would meld with the girl she had been so many years ago when she looked from the window of her father’s house in Zell, and felt all the world’s possibilities in the soft, wet air. For if Aloysia could marry well, would not the rest follow?
Standing by the hearth with a large pewter spoon in her hand, she could see her daughters some few years from now living in gracious houses with maids and serving men at the call of a bell. Upon rising each morning, they would slip on dressing gowns trimmed with Venetian lace. The hairdresser would arrive, gossiping shrilly in French. Then, when the morning was half done and the rooms smelled of lavender hair powder, Maria Caecilia would come to call. Each girl would float toward her, kiss her warmly, and welcome her to hot chocolate drunk from porcelain cups painted with flowers.
Yes, this had been her secret dream for a long time, the one that most comforted her as she trudged along the slush of streets with her heavy market basket. Even as she had written the names of more ordinary men in the past few years, her pen hesitated as she remembered her real hopes. Now they might begin to come true.
She wiped her hands on her apron. She had forgotten where she had hidden the book of suitors and, after some minutes of searching on her knees, located it on the lowest cupboard shelf under the clean sheets. Impatiently she skimmed the pages of household budgets and home herbal remedies until she came to the one she sought. Strange, it looked as if it had been ripped and mended. That puzzled her, but she was too taken with the words written there to dwell on it, with the almost holy feeling that filled her. There was the name of the Swedish Baron. Taking a pen and the ink bottle, she pushed aside her baking and carefully added the new information she had learned: forty years of age, widower, loves music, has house of forty rooms in Gothenburg; pack very warm clothes for Aloysia. A muff, she must have a fur muff. Warm petticoats; it was by the sea after all. Weekly letters to her, yearly extended visits. To marry her beautiful child well, and then the others. Maria Caecilia felt calmer now.
But she heard her own sisters’ voices on the stair, the panting and complaining as they ascended. As she slipped the book under the clean sheets again, her memory flew back in time to twenty or more years earlier in Zell at the guild hall dance. There was her younger sister Gretchen, fresh as spring with yellow braids tumbling down her back and much sought after by the officers, and Elizabeth, as lovely as a Madonna, modest, tall, devout, dipping her knees to the music, turning to smile at Caecilia over the sound of the wind band. Then the three of them were going home laughing, arms linked. Now as she opened the door she saw only two ungainly, shapeless women straggling up the stairs in their crushed, lopsided hats, dragging several baskets from which dangled pairs of wool hose. A slipper tumbled out from one basket, and the neighboring boy who helped them muttered, “Jesus Christus!” as he fled to retrieve it. Maria Caecilia felt her smile stiffen on her lips. What had happened to them all? Youth must not be wasted; it