first time in their lives, they had almost enough money to live on, and the two older sisters began to sing here and there to some success.
Letters came regularly from their friends in Mannheim, and every week or more, a thick one from France, which Aloysia took away to the girls’ communal bedroom, giving orders that no one was allowed to enter for some time. From behind the closed door they could just hear the scratch of her pen as she wrote her reply; when finished, she walked directly to Father’s desk, sealing her response with white melted wax and his crest of a lyre. Do not come near, do not ask, her pursed mouth seemed to say.
In spite of the move, the family members shortly became themselves again: their quarrels, their secrets, their gregarious love of company, their father’s weariness, their mother’s desires to have her girls well settled. The book with the tooled-leather cover and the list of potential suitors written carefully within had indeed moved with them; it was hidden now in some new spot, which no one could find, though Sophie had looked for an hour, until her skirt was dusty. Their mother had been quiet concerning it for some months after the move, and for a time they all thought she might have forgotten about it.
She had not. In the heat of summer, as they sat about the new parlor (which looked just like the old one except the floor slanted a little and they had to stuff a wad of paper under one of the clavier legs to stabilize it), the Weber sisters heard their mother huffing slowly up the stairs. “Girls,” she said, reaching up to unpin her hat, for she never went down to the street, even to buy matches or cooked fish, without it. “My girls, my little fleas, I have plans.”
“Ah, not plans,” murmured Josefa. She had an intense look in her eyes; she had been reading Hamlet in German for the fourth time, and had just come again to the appearance of the ghost.
“And what good mother doesn’t have them? Listen!” Maria Caecilia laid her hat carefully down on the table. “I met Elisa Hoffman in the thread shop; you’ll recall, my doves, she went to school with me. She asked if you were all betrothed or married yet, and I said no, indeed, though my eldest is already twenty.” Maria Caecilia sighed and continued, “Then my kind former schoolmate replied, ‘Dear Maria Caecilia, don’t be concerned! I have a prospect. I know a man here but briefly who has plantations in the West Indies, a widower of thirty with two children.’ ”
Maria Caecilia sat down, breathless and triumphant, and fanned herself with a thin news journal that she had brought for her husband.
“Which one of us will be bid for?” Josefa said, shifting on the sofa as she prepared to return to her book. “When does the auction begin, or do we each share as we always do, getting a quarter apiece of the young man? Is that by polygamy or dissection? Please count me out. The West Indies are hot and too far. Thirty’s old. Money doesn’t make one happy.”
“That’s true, Mama,” Sophie cried. “The saintliest people are poor.” She blinked behind her spectacles. “We can’t dissect him, or we’ll be hanged for murder to the beat of a soldier’s drum, and we can’t share him whole. Some savages have ten wives, and Arabian pashas have sixty, but we wouldn’t like that. Constanze wants to marry for love, and I’m only twelve years old and want a life of good works. Aloysia is pledged to Mozart, and Josefa is going to join the gypsies or run off with a theater troupe if she can’t be an entrepreneur and have her music shop. She told us. So the idea is utterly impractical.”
“What I want,” said Constanze, “is to keep us all together. So if he’s not willing to have us all working in his fields, perhaps he could live here and help bring down the chamber pots.”
“Ah, what am I to do with you all?” their mother cried, sailing into the kitchen while the three younger girls followed. From her basket, Maria Caecilia pulled forth a great lettuce, the dirt still clinging to the drooping green leaves. “What do you know of life, with what words can I tell you?” She peeled back the wrapping from a large, yellow, creamy slab of butter, biting her full lip. “It’s