coming home. I was not to worry because, as she had written, ‘We are a family now.’ Can you imagine that? This man with a trusting wife and a young son and a successful business threw it all away to go off and play house with his mistress and their love child.”
“Believe it or not,” Marta added softly, “one of those young men who came here was Burke Bauer’s own son. He had no idea what was in the letter, of course, nor that his father had taken off with Giselle. He was just doing as Daddy had requested, delivering a horse and buggy to a local Amish family.”
For some reason, the pain of that thought shone clearly in Marta’s eyes. I agreed that what Bauer had done was awful, using his son as a pawn in his scheme, but I didn’t understand the depth of her emotion.
“How long were they gone?” Ada asked, impatient now to hear about the circumstances of her own birth.
“More than a year, maybe thirteen, fourteen months. By the time they came back, Alexandra had really grown. She was a toddler. And Giselle was a different person. More mature. Almost repentant. Dedicated to caring for Alexandra. She never spoke much of the time she had been away, but the relationship must have run its course because eventually I realized that it was truly over. I also realized that, once again, she had managed to get herself pregnant.”
“Bauer’s son was just a year younger than I was, and he and I had become friends by then,” Marta interjected, “so I was able to find out more of the inside scoop from his point of view. Giselle didn’t want us to know any of it, but Mammi and I were both glad to hear that Bauer was trying to put his real family back together again. We were especially relieved when his wife finally forgave him. As for the son, he tried to give his dad a chance too, but he was quite emotionally fragile, and the wound of his father’s betrayal ran deep. We never talked about my sister’s new pregnancy. That would have just made things a thousand times worse.”
I sat back, realizing that was a period of my life that I would never really know about. Given that I had been in the care of both mother and father, at least for a short time, I supposed I had been kept safe and warm. On the other hand, the sudden appearance and disappearance of my birth father from my life could only have served as the first chink in my many abandonment issues.
“So Giselle came back pregnant with me,” Ada said, clearly impatient for Mammi to get on with the rest of the story.
“Yes. She was also depressed and overwhelmed and very afraid of being a single mother of two children. She and her sister eventually found a sort of peace, and by the time Giselle was in her ninth month Klara offered to take the baby and raise it as her own. If she and Alexander could not conceive a child, which was becoming more and more apparent, well, then at least it seemed God was providing another way. When the baby was born, we all knew it was the right choice.”
“Lexie, I already told you that you were with me when Ada was born,” Marta said. “I was the one who snipped the lock of your mother’s hair and then your sister’s. I tried to cut a lock of yours too, but you wouldn’t let me.” She smiled. “I tied the strands with black ribbon and gave them both to Mammi. Then Klara came and took the baby.”
We all turned and looked at Klara then. She was tightly gripping her husband’s hand, her face flushed and eyes still fixed firmly on the floor.
“What was the condition?” I asked suddenly, my voice sounding pinched and foreign to me. When no one replied, I added, “The condition, Klara. You said earlier that when Giselle got pregnant the second time, you agreed to take the child, on one condition.”
Finally, Klara met my eyes with her own.
“I was still afraid that Alexander had fathered you,” she said, the desperation clear in her voice.
“Of course you were,” I retorted sharply. “But, given the timing, there was no way he could be the father of this new one. So you decided to take it and raise it as your own. What was your condition? Go ahead. We all