THE HOUSE, 1869

DURING KARLSBAD SUMMERS, THERE WAS AN ITINERANT daguerreotypist who carried his equipment from house to house. It was a good place for him to practice his trade because, during the season, the town was full of ladies with the time and the funds and perhaps the morbid nature to think this visit might be their last. Eva remembered how the daguerreotypist posed Mother in the garden, with her face alarmingly close to an orange blossom buzzing with one fat bee. Unlike Heinrich’s portraits (painted just a few years later) these daguerreotypes were done for the purpose of a carte-de-visite, a surprise gift from Father, who obviously hoped that—armed with an appropriate visiting card—Mother might be more inclined to leave the baths and join city life more frequently. He obviously longed for her to call on someone in Berlin other than her piano teacher, to visit homes at which she might have use for something so novel and elegant.

Eva remembered watching her mother’s pale face as she’d posed (subtly turning left and then right, offering her regal profile) and being aware—although she’d firmly believed that no one’s pale skin or dark eyes could be more deserving of a daguerreotype—that her mother did not enjoy the prospect of having her image captured. Eva hadn’t understood why her mother looked so uncomfortable in front of the camera, why she had been so curt with the jovial photographer, but now, on this very happy occasion of Abraham finally delivering on his promise, as she was finally standing on the hardwood floors of this, her house (even if the carpenter was currently hammering away at the beginnings of a banister for the staircase), Eva stood in the best possible afternoon light in the most spacious of all American parlors, and while she tried to be more outwardly agreeable than her mother had been years ago, while she smiled between turning left and right and tried to follow instructions, she realized, reluctantly, that she carried a similar air of reticence.

“Mrs. Shein, if you would, please ignore the hammering and face toward me.” This photographer was young and from Swedish farm people. He’d left his family in Minnesota to pursue his dream of making photographs and hoped to eventually have his own atelier in California. In what she had come to recognize as an American characteristic, he’d been very forthcoming about all of his dreams within the first half hour of making Eva’s acquaintance. He also had the easy manner of a salesman, which she supposed was an attribute because, in the end, he had to sell people on themselves and the idea that someone’s image—no matter how ordinary—was worth capturing and preserving.

She faced out the window and looked over the photographer’s shoulder at the flurry of activity that still surrounded the house, despite the fact that they’d officially changed residence over a week ago. After a few frigid days, during which nothing much could be done, the weather had suddenly turned mild and now she was reassured to see Bishop Lagrande planting the sapling of an unfamiliar tree with his own gnarled hands. He had promised he would make this thoughtful gesture and here he was, making good on his word even though it was cold enough that she could still see the bishop’s breath gathering on the air. She was always a little uncomfortable around the good man, always felt as if he could not only read her mind but that—after that night when she’d rode to his garden—his presence carried an air of chastisement, as if she ought to know better than she evidently did. She was thrilled to see Tranquilo approach the house with his signature sense of purpose, transporting another buggy full of recently imported items that Abraham must have sent from the store. Going back and forth from the buggy to the front door, braving the makeshift platform from the low dirt lot to the high front door, he brought crates into the kitchen and up the stairs but he stayed away from the parlor, no matter how often she called out “Gracias, Tranquilo!” It occurred to her that Tranquilo could dislike her, even loathe her, and she would never know. She shifted her weight and shifted her thoughts, wondering what had come in this shipment, and hoped against all hopes that it was the bronze wall sconces. She went over the import list (long since memorized) that Abraham had provided for her. In offering the list he had effectively issued an apology for so many nights he’d gone missing. If such a list didn’t erase such sleepless nights, it was true he had spared no expense. Already the parlor boasted a silk-upholstered wedding sofa in pine with birch veneer, and a walnut tilt-top table with a matching corner cabinet. The first time they’d slept in this house, she had stayed up all night, wandering through the rooms before finally unpacking the perfectly starched and silk-embroidered tablecloths from her trousseau. They were still in their German packing crate, and she unwrapped the layers of thinnest tissue, making sure to store them as they were meant to be stored—in a cabinet, protected.

“Mrs. Shein,” said the bland-faced photographer, “think of something pleasant, please.”

“I am thinking of something pleasant.”

“Well,” he said unimpressed, “think of something else.”

The circumstances were lurid: that their child was conceived in a bathtub amid dirty water and leaves; that it happened outside in the middle of the night when Abraham behaved so unlike himself—someone with humility as well as strength, someone she wished she knew. But still, there was a baby, another impossible promise growing yet again inside of her. And she was living in a house now, a house that would be perfect when it was painted and papered, when the front steps were added on.

“Isn’t this a lovely house?” she asked the photographer and he nodded with appropriate enthusiasm before sticking his head beneath the camera’s black fabric. “I don’t mean to boast; it’s only that I am proud of my husband, his fortitude.”

“As you should be.”

There were no doors in any doorways yet, and she’d strung up sheets in their place so that at times—especially in the dark—the house looked haunted; when those pale sheets billowed between the rooms it was a strangely beckoning sight. And because there was no banister on the inside staircase, ascending and descending the unsanded stairs was a task that required true concentration, especially in her state. “I know I have asked you this many times but you are only capturing my face, aren’t you? Nothing so much as below my collar?”

“Of course, Mrs. Shein. What kind of amateur do you take me for?”

“I apologize for asking so frequently. I am simply embarrassed. It was upon my husband’s insistence that I agreed to be photographed in this condition. He was rather anxious to mark the occasion of our move, you see.”

The photographer stood up straight and took an audible breath. He looked around the parlor and nodded. “This is a mighty fine house, Mrs. Shein. Mighty fine indeed. And though this is our first meeting, Mrs. Shein, and I have no comparison, I would hasten to say—and I hope you don’t mind my saying so—that your eyes are, I am quite sure, lovely as they ever were. Your eyes sure don’t look pregnant. Those eyes are meant to be painted by a great artist.”

Eva felt herself flush and, without thinking, she sat down on the window seat. “I apologize. I’m afraid I am being foolish.”

“And I’m afraid I’m no great artist, but since I’m the only fella up to the task—why not relax and look directly at me?”

“I’m sorry,” she said, “but I don’t think I’d like my portrait made after all.”

The photographer looked puzzled but not insulted. He shrugged and took his leave as she’d requested.

When he was gone, she was hardly alone, as the carpenter continued to work, and she sat still and listened to the hammering, somewhere between irritated at the noise and relieved that the banister was being built at all. It was certainly possible to imagine Abraham trying to convince her how people don’t really need such trappings as a banister; she could picture years going by with nothing to hold on to. Abraham, as it happened, had already fallen down the stairs once, jolting her awake in the middle of the night. He still disappeared regularly after dinner; in fact he did so now with more frequency, as if by finally moving them into an actual house, he had stronger license to behave like a profligate. She’d heard him lumber up those stairs frequently enough in such a short span of time that it had already become part of her dream life. She dreamed of great storms, approaching beasts coming in from the rain.

She listened to the hammering until the bishop—standing before her with soil on his clothes and hands—interrupted her thoughts.

“The Eastern mail has been making excellent time these days, especially in light of the inclement weather,” he said, and he held out an envelope. “I accepted it on your behalf.”

“It’s for me?”

He nodded, handing it over. “It is. Oh I can tell this letter brings you joy. For that I am lucky to be the messenger. One never knows.”

“One never does. This is from my Uncle Alfred—I mentioned him previously; he lives in Paris.” She gripped the letter loosely so as not to smudge the ink with her hands, which perspired more than usual these days. “I will try not to rip it open this very second.” She laughed.

“To prolong this feeling of joy, no?”

“And to maintain manners,” she admitted. “After all, you are an important guest. Speaking of which, would you like some tea?”

“I am here to plant your tree, my dear,” he said. “And look”—he pointed to the window—“I have done it.”

The sapling leaned to one side as the wind blew; it looked vulnerable and thin. “It is completely beautiful,” she said, taking his hands in a burst of gratitude.

“We’ll have tea some other time. Please,” he said, backing out of the room, “read your letter. It has journeyed a long road to find you.”

She remembered the letters scattered like entrails on the Santa Fe Trail, all those letters lost on the way. She almost told him the story but by the time she found the words to begin, the bishop was already gone. And when he was, she sliced the envelope open—not, as she previously had, in the perpetual near-darkness of the Burro Alley rooms, but under substantial windows in a space which—with the additions of rugs and settees, proper sconces and soft light—would be a perfect place to entertain. Never mind how she had little desire to actually see anyone; she imagined such a desire might come, now that the room existed.

As she read her uncle’s letter, she appreciated how the afternoon light cast shadows on the wood floors and how her uncle’s voice remained at age twenty in her mind, even as Alfred deliberated (as he did with each letter) moving his family from France, where life had an unquestionable ease, back to Germany, now that the amnesty laws were secure. The Alfred in her mind was a full-bearded fellow—brown laced with russet patches—with endless ways to talk about freedom. The young voice she imagined was particularly jarring when, at the end of his letter, he included advice for his niece. He insisted that his wife Auguste took daily walks during each of her pregnancies and that this was why they’d been blessed with such robust children. Walk, he wrote, in his hasty hand. Walk until you have some color in your cheeks. And if you are foolish enough to be wearing a corset, for G-d’s sake take it off! Alfred never mentioned Henriette in his letters. Even if Eva wrote a remembrance, Uncle Alfred ignored the opportunity to respond. It was as if he’d decided the only way they could begin a correspondence was choosing never to dwell on the past.

They were both—in a fashion—exiled, and there was plenty to relay about their respective outposts, which could not differ more. Alfred also never inquired why, if she was truly unhappy, she simply didn’t go home. She would have liked to imagine he refrained from asking because he thought America exciting and the only place to truly live out his own visions of freedom and democracy, but she knew it was because he feared Father and Mother’s reaction if she returned after all this time. With Eva gone, both girls were out of sight and, if certainly not out of mind, then at least in a place of gilded memory, where their parents could eventually select remembrances during their final years. Her father wrote to her on behalf of both Mother and himself, but his letters were brief and unexpressive, dulled by what she expected was a deadly combination of sorrow and formality. He described the weather in great detail. Henriette was never mentioned.

Eva had not lived with her uncle since she was a baby and was aware that she’d inflated his erratic letters (some of which were frankly tediously written, obsessive in their political detail) with emotional significance. But when she saw his pointy script it was like walking into her childhood home without the mess that followed her childhood. She relished the fact that her feelings for Alfred were uncomplicated; she loved him for taking the time to write to her, and she never thought to question his authority. And so although she’d been afraid to do more than walk up and down her new stairs (the fear of losing another baby, after all, far outweighed the fear of crushing boredom), she decided to take her uncle’s advice and, wearing her loosest bodice and a fox fur, set out to face the day.

The sky was vacant, a chalky expanse that matched the remnants of old, stubborn snow on the uneven roofs. She looked from the government quarters to the church across the way, the expanse of the plaza divided by a dirty and faded American flag, its colors issuing respectability, if not brightness, against the pallid clouds. She nodded politely when men doffed sombreros and bowlers, and when she saw a handsome buggy led by two white ponies that clearly belonged to a government official, she imagined it was the very same official who granted Shein Brothers’ the Fort Marcy contract, and it was all she could do not to stop the buggy and thank the gentleman personally.

There was enough of a true chill that the plaza wasn’t crowded, and for a moment she was struck with panic that Alfred was wrong, that he’d gone mad with French liberalism and that, if she wanted to give birth to a healthy baby, she should be doing as little as possible. She’d read every article in every ladies’ journal she could get from the storeroom; the letters in these journals made her frantic with worry but still she could not stop from reading. She’d heard tale of simple taboos before—salt and eggs are good luck, a baby should be carried upstairs before being carried down—but seeing others in print brought her nothing but the need to read more, as if one day she would find the definitive answer that she, in her more intelligent hours, knew would never come.

There were letters written from homesteaders, ladies blessed with far less society than she, poor girls cooped up on the terrible plains, often left by their no-good husbands. Dear Friends, one letter stated, I am pregnant six months now and I have a constant longing for plums. I think of them before rising, and I think of them while I’m dressing, and one day I was very tired and I wiped the corners of my eyes with my fingers and I thought, Well I don’t suppose it matters, but then I asked my neighbor and she told me I was sure to have marked the baby, that if you have an appetite for something and you don’t eat that something, and if you put your hand on your face or anywhere, or if you so much as scratch an itch, you’ll mark the baby sure; your innocent lamb will be marked by your selfish longings. But I don’t sleep for all the things I think of eating. And what are you supposed to do if you can’t stop thinking of mush melon and it is well out of season? Or chocolate creams? I can’t get those things now! Can these thoughts harm my baby? Oh please tell me what to do!

Eva pitied this woman and knew such a fear was baseless, yet in spite of her reasoning, she found herself avoiding touching her face and feeling panic at the onset of her daily craving for Brot—the rich but sour taste of grain so conspicuously missing from this land. The more desperate and ill-informed the letters, the more she began to have serious doubts that she really knew anything at all. Beatrice Spiegelman had all kinds of theories—that with enough purpose (and with a little help from the Almighty) one could determine the child’s gender: Conceiving two days after menstruation would produce a boy; indulging in intercourse as late as the eighth month of pregnancy at the moon’s waning would produce a girl. And for discerning the baby’s gender during pregnancy: Girls steal your beauty, Beatrice solemnly explained; if your hips and your nose spread far and wide, you can bet a daughter is on the way.

Eva had suspicions that Bea Spiegelman was also in the family way, although she knew Bea would be awfully good at keeping it secret until the appropriate time. When Eva had told Bea that she was with child again, she couldn’t help but notice a certain disapproval that Eva had mentioned it before she’d felt any “quickening.” It was bad luck (she knew it was!) to speak of it, but she had allowed herself one admission, her reasoning being that wretched luck had courted her four times before even though she hadn’t said a word to anyone. Besides, she’d been unable to stop the words from coming from her mouth, so shocked was she to realize she was wrong, that pregnancy could happen again, even if—while she was ecstatic about it happening—she was petrified and felt as if it was the last thing she wanted because she knew that, realistically, she was also preparing to die.

She didn’t necessarily believe in a heaven, but she didn’t imagine she would be going there anyway, and so there wasn’t even the comfort of joining Henriette, who was surely in heaven if it existed. Henriette died in a sophisticated city, where midwives suffered through considerable training; what chances did she stand here, where there was so little in the way of medicine? She’d heard tale of Indian remedies, steeped roots and brewed syrups, but the truth of the matter was that this was a country made for neither the sick nor the delicate; there was very little room here for that tenuous place between life and death. It was always shocking when someone was sick and actually recovered, which made his survival—Mr. Levi Ehrenberg’s—ever the more stunning.

         

SHE BEGAN WALKING EACH AFTERNOON, THE SAME WALK EACH DAY, and though she hadn’t seen him since summer, when she’d offered him the strawberries (strawberries, she’d since learned—to her intense embarrassment—that were not meant to be savored by the nuns but rather sold in order to support the orphanage), she always expected to see him here in the plaza, no matter what the weather, sitting under a low-hanging tree with that worn leather Bible in hand. She had in fact returned to the sickroom days later, but the nuns had told her how, against their strictest advice, he’d walked out of the convent, leaving no word of where he was going.

But she knew where he was now. She’d heard news of his recovery. She knew that he would always have a limp and that after a mysterious disappearance (there was speculation he’d gone to Taos and Las Cruces and was somehow working for the railroad) he was in fact back in Santa Fe. And, more incredibly, he was now evidently employed by Shein Brothers’. When Abraham mentioned they had hired the “gimp German,” she’d continued with her embroidery as if he’d made mention of a minor sale, offering an appropriate smile. “Where is the boy living?” she asked, and when Abraham told her that he was on the other side of the river, where she had never been, she nodded again until Abraham said, “Well don’t look like that! What do you want me to do—invite him to live here?” She’d bit down on her lip to avoid asking another question about it, and she was also cautious about when she went into the Shein store. She only went when she was desperate for something that Abraham forgot to bring home, which, unfortunately, was not such a rare occurrence. She assured herself that she had not done anything improper with regards to Mr. Ehrenberg, but if she’d learned anything since she was a girl, it was this: One could never be too careful, especially if one’s name was Eva Frank, and that would always be her name, even if no one knew it, not for thousands of miles. She had yet to see Levi Ehrenberg limping about, not even from her window, but she often thought that if and when she did see him, he would seem like a stranger, that whatever friendship had passed between them in that sickroom was undoubtedly a product of his illness and its accompanying delirium, which was, she was convinced, contagious.

         

AND YET, WHEN SHE SAW HIM—EVEN THOUGH IT WAS FROM AFAR, even though she was staring into the sun and he was nothing but a shadow—she knew him right away.

All day long it had been mellow light, more pink than yellow, more opal than gold, but now, as if challenging evening’s approach, the sun turned on the full force of its authority, as if it wasn’t quite done for the day. As Eva Shein hurried home after her daily walk around the plaza, her thoughts were preoccupied with instructions not to rush, even as she tripped on a rock and nearly took a fall. She stopped short in the middle of the street and briefly closed her eyes; there was no need to race, she realized, there was nothing to fear from the weather, the sun was still shining brightly. All around her men were finishing up for the day—bidding each other good evening, tying up their burros, hauling logs of piñon—while poor dark women shrouded in colorless wool offered their last hoarse bits of stories as she stood dumbly before them, wishing she had something to put in their parched hands, even if she couldn’t decipher a word of their plights. She felt useless (she hadn’t a single coin in her purse, only a calling card and two embroidered handkerchiefs which she briefly considered offering) and she felt foolish under their desperate gaze, knowing that sometimes she grew panicky over nothing but getting home on time; she wondered how she managed to leave her house at all.

She looked away from the women into the setting winter sun, immediately bringing her hand to her forehead. When her eyes landed on the figure only steps away, she realized, belatedly, that she was standing in shadow and that, unlike her perspective, which allowed for merely his inky outline against the blinding light, he must have been able to see her quite clearly.

“Mrs. Shein,” he said in an unfamiliar, even tone, as he stepped forward to greet her.

His trousers were snug, reaching only above the ankle, his shirt was hardly boiled; his overcoat was oversized so that, with his clean-shaven face, he looked like a particularly dignified urchin. If she had seen him in Berlin, he might have passed for a student, but they were not in Berlin and if she had not known him she might have thought that he too—along with the wizened señoras—was begging for alms in order to endure the winter. “Mr. Ehrenberg”—she smiled, tensely at first, but eventually easing into something not only genuine but irrepressible—“you’re looking very well.” It wasn’t a lie. There was color in his cheeks but his skin was no longer sunburnt. He leaned on a rough-hewn cane but made a somehow vital impression as he nodded and kept nodding—at a loss, it seemed, as to what else to do. “I hear you are working for my husband?”

Again he nodded, but this time, she realized he was staring at her in a different way than she recalled in those heady, strange sick days; now he was staring at her rounded middle, which suddenly felt like nothing more than evidence of her carnal desires. She pulled her coat closer and waited for him to speak. If she had felt self-conscious a moment ago, trapped by the true poverty of others, by poor wrinkled crones and their curses, she was suddenly unaware of anything else but this strange yet expected encounter.

“I went away,” he said, rather dumbly. “To Taos.”

“Yes,” she said, “I heard. I must admit I was surprised that you were working for my husband. As I recall, you were not very fond of him.”

She saw him grip the top of his cane. “I am working for Shein Brothers’,” he said, his voice low. “It was Meyer Shein who hired me.”

“Even so.”

“I tried to find work in Taos; I swear I did what I could. There was nothing for me up north, which, of course, was the original attraction. Because here,” he said meaningfully, “there seemed to be too much.” He looked at the ground as she drew her coat so close and so tightly, she was afraid she might strain her arms. “There was no opportunity,” he finally said. “A man needs opportunity.”

“Of course.”

“I returned out of necessity; you should know that.”

“And you had no other choice than to work for Shein Brothers’?” She had vowed to refrain from pressing him—from asking anything at all—and she was startled at how upset she’d allowed herself to sound. “Please,” she said, blushing, although she didn’t suppose he could guess; her cheeks were already flushed from the fresh cold air. “Please, you needn’t explain. Things are as they should be.”

“Are they?”

She too found herself staring at the cold, cracked ground, fixed on the earth’s many fissures. “It was wise of you to return, to take advantage of your opportunities.”

He looked openly offended. Why did her voice seem so bitter?

“When last we met,” he said, lowering his voice, “what I mean is that—what I said that day—”

“Please,” she said, sounding more fraught than she’d have thought possible; her life was set and there were no more choices: This was something from which she’d taken previous comfort. But she looked, for the first time, straight into his eyes, which she remembered only as dark eyes, and yet now here they were looking straight into hers, appearing to be not black or brown but the steeliest of blues, like the very hottest part of a flame. And she imagined his father and brothers, feeding ore into a fiery furnace, shouting to be heard. She saw a scalded factory outside of the city, a room full of Ehrenbergs, one more dogged than the next. “Please don’t,” she said definitively.

“I only hope you’re not angry.”

“I’m sorry?”

“I hope you are not angry with me.”

“Why would I be angry?”

“And,” he said, “that you aren’t disappointed.”

“I disappointed myself,” she said without thinking, even though she didn’t know quite what he meant. “But it was long ago.”

He retreated little by little, his cane backing up before him. Before he turned away completely, he broke into English; it was the first time she’d heard him use it. “You look funny,” he said, shockingly, nodding to her rounded belly. He couldn’t have described it better; it was just how she felt when she saw her reflection, when she looked down on any given day, but nobody ever said as much—so shrouded in seriousness was motherhood and all of its rumored glory. Such an observation was entirely improper, and yet, she couldn’t help but agree.