compressed, her eyes vague and watery from weeping. Tears would stop and start; then her face became hard and determined. She stared at the grief expressed by her sisters and mother as if it were something she could not quite understand. First was the requiem, and then the procession, following the coffin as it rocked in the black carriage, to the graveyard.
Wake up, Papa, Josefa thought. It will soon be Thursday again.
They rode back from the graveyard in a hired carriage because they did not have the strength to walk. Maria Caecilia could not stop weeping. “How could you sing when you found him? How could you, Josefa Weber?” she repeated again and again. “You have no heart. Tell me.”
Sophie said, “She was right to sing; what else could she do? He gave us music; she gave it back. He was her papa, and she loved him.”
Maria Caecilia leaned forward, her face a cross between tenderness and fury. “She hasn’t got a right to mourn like this; he’s not her papa,” she cried over the sound of the carriage wheels. “He never was.” Then she sat back with her hand covering her mouth and her eyes closed. Josefa stared at her. She had gone so pale that Sophie thought she would fall off the seat in a faint.
“What do you mean?” Josefa whispered. “What are you saying?” she said, her voice rising in all its richness. Aloysia and Sophie put their hands over their ears, and Josefa suddenly leaned forward as if she would slap her mother, or close her large hands about her throat.
Constanze shouted, “Josy, don’t! And you, Mama, do you hear me, stop it! We’ve all got to stay together now, we have to!”
Their mother looked up, her face wet with tears, and reached out to touch her oldest daughter’s knee. “I didn’t mean that,” she croaked. Words failed her, and she broke down in harsh sobbing. “I don’t know what I’m saying. You don’t know all that was between him and me. He’d call me his little cabbage. Fat as I am, I was his little cabbage. He made me a better woman. His soul was golden; he was all the world. I was never, never worthy of him, and now he’s gone.”
The winter wind blew across Europe as it would, driving icy rivers before it, circling mountains, beckoning the frost. In the Munich parlor the dark leaves that were draped around the portrait of Fridolin Weber had dried in the few months since his death. Near it, one late afternoon, Sophie Weber was at the desk writing a letter to her mother’s sisters, bending close over the paper and biting her lip.
Dearest Aunts Elizabeth and Gretchen,
I pray God that this finds you well and happy. It seems a very long year since my last birthday when you sent me new slippers and my family was in Mannheim.
Mother has asked me to write to say how we are doing. As she would not wish me to conceal the difficulties of our circumstances to you, I shall be honest.
Sophie chewed on the pen’s edge for a moment to think straight ... those words: I shall be honest. What was honest anyway? Who told the utter truth, and, besides that, what was truth? She sat upright, recalling once more her mother’s words to Josefa as they all rode back from the funeral. It had taken months of soothing to lay those words to rest, apologies, late-night kitchen conversations, tears.
But now, to tell the truth to her aunts. Was not the reality too bitter to put into ink? Dare she write that their hearts and lives were in disarray, that they each struggled to discover the path that would lead them back to their former life, but they found that the way had been washed out, much like on that woodlands walk they had all taken years before. Though her father had remembered the way, and they had set out on their adventure, they soon found the bridge across the stream was gone. Such was now the truth of their lives.
Mother could do so little these days. And the others wouldn’t write, or endlessly put it off:
Father did not leave money, and his brother sent some, which has gone for firewood and food. Constanze is copying music, and Aloysia and Josefa are singing in churches and private concerts, wherever they can. Our uncle Thorwart, who has moved to Vienna, is trying to procure a small pension for Mother from