“That’s what we want to know, dear.” I looked at Diana Lefcourt, who had driven the motorized chariot. “Where’s the rescue squad?”
“I didn’t call 911 after all.”
“What?”
“I knew you’d be all right, Magdalena. You already had a doctor with you. Besides, you Yoders have heads of stone.”
I ignored the compliment. “Concert pianist indeed!” I said to Samantha. “I should have known you were a fake. Look at those itty-bitty hands—even a possum has a wider span. And a real concert pianist would have been begging me for a key to Beachy Grove Mennonite Church. We may not have a Steinway, but it’s good enough for Lodema Schrock.”
“Ach, Lodema!” Old Irma shook her head. “That woman couldn’t play a radio properly if you gave her a month of lessons.”
“Lodema is not the point,” I snapped. “The point is your Nazi’s wife.”
“Johanne is married?”
“To her!” I pointed at the pianist imposter.
Samantha turned to Diana. “Is Miss Yoder—you know…?”
“She’s a few spokes shy of a chariot wheel.”
“Potiphar’s calling the kettle black!” I wailed. “And you, Mrs. Burk—or is it Burkholder?—have a lot of explaining to do. The C.I.A. indeed! Your husband was a spy all right, but for the Nazis!”
Samantha had a disgustingly pert mouth, which she arranged into a mocking smile. “Has anyone bothered to tell Miss Yoder here that the war is over?”
Old Irma stepped forward with the help of her cane. “Leave the child alone. She’s not crazy, she’s merely flighty—you know, empty in the head. But in this case Magdalena knows what she’s talking about.”
Samantha gasped. “But that’s impossible! My John was born and raised in Minnesota.”
“No. If I recall right, it was Stuttgart.”
“I’ve seen his birth certificate. It says quite clearly, New Bedford, Minnesota.”
A bell rang in my head. As there was plenty of room in there, it came as no surprise.
“Aha! I remember now! Scott Montgomery, who is a true Minnesotan, says there is no such place as New Bedford.”
“Well—uh, I’m sure he’s mistaken. Minnesota is a large state.”
“Not if you drained it, dear. Anyway, have you been to New Bedford?”
“No.”
“And did you know your husband before the war? World War II, I mean?”
“No.”
Old Irma nudged me aside with a paw as cold as a Minneapolis winter. “Well, / knew your husband during the war. He was a shy young thing at first—until you got him singing. Let me tell you, Johanne could sing those beer-hall songs along with the best of them.”
“My John sang? He never sings for me. Claims he can’t carry a tune.”
“I didn’t he say sang on key. I said he sang with the best of them. Franz and Horst were the best. Sure, Horst had a smoother voice, but Franz had better diction.” “Stop it, both of you! We don’t have time to yap about some drunken Nazis serenading the Fatherland. We need to notify the F.B.I.”
“Ach,” Old Irma said, covering me with spittle, “it’s not the F.B.I. we should call, but the Department of Immigration.”
Samantha blanched. “What for?”
“Because Johanne Burkholder is undoubtedly here illegally.”
“And he was a Nazi,” I hissed. “Who knows what heinous crimes he committed?”
“But that’s just it. Neither of you has any proof that my husband committed any war crimes. And even if he did, he may have just been following orders.”
I nudged Old Irma aside with a paw as hot as Hernia in the summer. “I don’t buy that ‘just following orders’ line, sister. We all need to draw our own lines long before it gets to that point.”
“Hear, hear,” Gabriel said, his face grim. “If decent people had bothered to draw the line at decency, my Bubbe and Zayde might still be alive.”
I nodded vigorously, despite my headache. “Millions of children—not just Jewish, either—would have survived to be alive today. The world might well have been a better place. Who knows, maybe we would already have a cure for AIDS. So you see, dear, following orders is not an excuse. And neither is ignorance. ‘I saw nothing’ is a phrase even the Swiss can’t claim these days, and believe me, that hurts, because I’m one hundred percent Swiss. What’s more, you don’t seem terribly surprised to learn that your hubby was one of Hitler’s henchmen.”
“I am—I mean, I’m not sure he even was. Anyway, you can’t prove a thing. And even if you can, well—I told you I suspected he was up to something. I wouldn’t have brought that up if I had anything to hide.”
“You have a point,” I said grudgingly. “It would have been stupid of you to mention your husband’s weird behavior.”
“Or very smart.”
We all turned to stare at Old Irma. The woman might have been Mennonite by birth, but singing in a Parisian cabaret had drained every drop of humility from her veins. Clearly, she still basked in the limelight.
“I did the same thing, you know—when I was a spy. I joked about being an American operative, just to throw people off my trail.”
Samantha’s tiny hands were rolled into fists the size of Freni’s meatballs. “Well, I wasn’t joking, and I’m not lying now. If my John was a Nazi, and if he was involved in any sort of horrible behavior, above and beyond that of any other soldier, I had no idea. I am innocent. I’m a professional—a concert pianist—I’m not in the business of hiding Nazi war criminals.”
“Yeah, right,” I growled. “If you’re really a concert pianist then I’m a monkey’s uncle.”
“I am!”
“So prove it.”
“How?”
“Play something for me.”
“What? Where? Okay, I get it. I’ll play at your church if that’s what it takes.”
“Forget the church, dear. I want you to play at my sister’s wedding. You do know Handel’s wedding march, don’t you?”
Old Irma waved her arm like a schoolgirl—albeit a very slow school girl. “Can I sing ‘O Promise Me’?”
“Yes, dear. In the shower whenever you please.” I didn’t mean to be cruel—honest I didn’t—but who needs a one hundred-and-three-year-old ex-hussy warbling at her only sister’s wedding?
Gabriel put a guiding hand gently on my shoulder. “Okay,” I wailed, “warble away!”
“I was about to say we have more company.”
Indeed, there was second car barreling its way toward us in a spray of gravel.
“Freni, what are you doing here?”
“Ach! Like I told you, Magdalena, I rode with that couple—the ones with the funny accents.”
“Yes, I know, the Montgomerys. That’s how you got here. But what were you doing at the inn when they returned for a short potty break and found Diana’s note?” The day had warmed considerably and the grass was as dry as my cheeks the day before my Pooky Bear ripped the heart out of my scrawny chest and did jumping jacks on it. Therefore, my elderly cousin—cum ex-cook— and I had elected to walk back. As for my oldest cousin, well, that gorgeous Gabriel had insisted on driving her home, from whence he would personally call the United States Immigration Service. But fear not, I had extracted a promise that he would attend my sister’s party that night, and even the wedding itself the following day. As for the Nazi’s wife, she had taken a shine to the faux pharaoh and was planning to stay with her until the business with Johanne was sorted out.
“Ach, Magdalena, why make such a federal box out of it?”
“If you’re going to use Susannah’s phrases, then at least get them right, dear. Now out with it.”
“I came to ask for something.”
“What’s mine is yours,” I said foolishly.
“Barbara doesn’t want me in the house.”
“What do you mean she doesn’t want you there? It’s your house.”
“Yah, but she thinks I get under her foot.”
I looked down at Freni. Barbara, like me, is vertically enhanced. Freni, on the other hand, is vertically challenged. But Freni is a heavy woman with an enormous bosom. She quite makes up for her lack of vertical visibility with her horizontal presence. It was unlikely Barbara literally stepped on her.
“So, you feel you are in the way in your own house? Is that it?”
“Yah, I make a simple comment, and this is the thanks I get.”
“What comment was that, dear?”
“Nothing.”
“Out with it!”
“Ach, it was not such a big thing. I just told her that now—since she is in the family way—there was no reason for her and my son Jonathan to be—well, you know.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Ach, so dense, Magdalena. They were—you know.” Freni rolled her eyes.
“That? How do you know?”
“I have ears, Magdalena.”
“You could hear them?”
Freni shook her head miserably. “Every day—sometimes more than once.”
I clapped my hands over my ears. This was not a proper conversation to be having with someone Freni’s age. With anyone of any age, for that matter.
“So what is it you want? Do you and Mose want to move in with me? Don’t think I wouldn’t like to help you, but this is where you need to put your own little foot down. It’s your house, after all.”
We walked in silence for few minutes. There is nothing quite as pleasant as a pieless pasture on a sunny spring day. My once-broken but now-healed heart wanted to soar with the chicken hawks, to sing with the starlings.
Leave it to Freni to intrude on my joy. “Ach, Magdalena, it’s more than you-know-what.”
“What is, dear?”
“My problem.”
“Ah, that. Well, Sam sells the solution in a little tube. It will shrink those suckers in a New York minute.”
“Ach!”
“Trust me. They’ll practically disappear overnight.” Freni wrapped her stubby arms as best she could around her chest. “You always were jealous, Magdalena, but this is going too far. I’m happy the way God made me. I certainly don’t want to look like you—flat as an ironing board.”
“Hemorrhoids! I thought you were talking about hemorrhoids!”
“Yah, sure you were.”
“But I was. And I’m not jealous. I wouldn’t want— never mind. What’s the favor?”
“My job.” Flies landing on pudding are louder than that. “You want your job back?”
“Are you deaf, Magdalena?”
I tossed my head. “Give me one good reason I should take you back.”
“Ach, and this from the child I practically raised?”
I bided my time before responding. “I tell you what. I’ll give you your job back, if you come clean with me.”
“Such riddles, Magdalena. Of course I’ll clean with you. Don’t I always wash the dishes?”
“I want you to be honest with me about something. I’m going to ask you a question, and I want the truth, no matter how much it hurts.”
Freni’s beady eyes darted nervously from side to side behind her thick lenses. “So ask, already.”
“The day Mama and Papa died in the tunnel—”
“Ach, a terrible day!”
“Yes, but whose fault was it?”
“The Lord numbers our days, Magdalena. You know that.”
“Even so, we have free will, right? Did Papa do something foolish? Was he driving recklessly?”
Freni was as mum as Diana’s mummy.
“He was driving recklessly, wasn’t he?” Dim memories drifted back of Papa flying down the road, of Susannah and me huddled in the backseat as mailboxes fell like dominoes.
“Yah.”
“Why didn’t you ever say anything?”
“Ach—what was there to say? That your papa drove like a maniac? Everyone knew that, Magdalena.”
“Yes, but I didn’t.”
Freni stared at me. The thick lenses needed a good scrubbing.
“You were a grown woman when your parents were killed—not a little girl. How was I to know you didn’t remember? Or maybe didn’t want to remember?”
I shrugged, tears filling my own beady blue eyes. “I guess, you wouldn’t. I guess I liked to think of Papa as somehow perfect, and Mama as—well, you know, Mama.” Freni nodded. “Yah, your mama—she was something.”
I smiled bravely and put my arm around her well- padded shoulders. “Well, you’ve been like a mother to me ever since.”
I waited expectantly for her to tell me that I had been the daughter she had never had, and of course, wished she had. That it was I who put the bead in her eyes.
Nothing. Nada. Zip. My portly cousin plodded along as merrily as you please, but her lips were sealed tighter than a clam at low tide.
“So, Freni?”
“So, does that mean I get my job back?”
I sighed. “You really know how to hurt a girl—but okay, you can have your job back. A word of warning, however.”
“Yah?”
“You get to quit only fifty-two more times, and you have to tell Strubbly Sam that I’m giving him the old heave-ho.”
“Ach! And you not even married!”
“I’m letting him go, dear. I’m firing him. Surely that’s a word you understand.”
Freni slipped out of my awkward embrace. “Yah, but I won’t have to.”
“What do you mean?”
“I fired him already.”
“What? You fired him? You can’t be doing that! You’re not his boss—I am! Well, now, this changes everything.”
I tried to grab Freni by an apron strap, but she stepped deftly out of my reach. “I’ve been like a mama to you, remember?”
“Yes, like Mama.” I gritted my teeth. I might have lunged for Freni and wrestled her to the ground had it not been for the glove that caught my eyes.
We were only yards from the pond now, and in one of the bushes that ringed the shore was a man’s leather glove that had not been there earlier that morning. I don’t have a mind like a steel trap—aluminum sieve is more like it—but the glove looked familiar.
I trotted over to retrieve the glove. Despite her age, Freni had no trouble keeping up.
“Ach, Magdalena, what are you doing?”
“I’m recovering what may be a valuable clue.”
“An old glove?”
“A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, dear, but a hand in the bush—now that beats everything.”
“Ach, riddles again. Must you always talk in riddles, Magdalena?”
I reached the glove. I was wrong—it had been there a long time. It certainly didn’t belong to Johanne Burkholder. It may even have belonged to Aaron Jr. I plucked it from the grasp of two stubborn twigs and turned it over. Sure enough, there was the rip in the palm from the time Aaron held a barbed wire down, so I could step over a fence. We’d been—well, never you mind.
“Life’s a riddle, dear. There’s got to be more to it than this.”
Freni sniffed. “Ach, there’s grandbabies.”
“But I’ll never have any,” I wailed. “I’m thinking of selling the inn and becoming a missionary. To Africa, maybe.”
Freni poked me in the ribs with a plump finger. “Yah, and if they still have cannibals, at least no one will eat you.”
“Very funny, dear.”
Freni sighed. “Ach, no sense of humor, this one. Well, I tell you, Magdalena, becoming a missionary would be a big mistake.”
“Why? Don’t you think I have a serving nature?”
“Service, schmervice, you won’t be going anywhere.” I stamped one of my size elevens. Thank the good Lord there were no patties to watch for.
“Says who?”
“Says me,” Freni said smugly. “I saw the way you looked at the English doctor back there.”
“Wrong!”
But she was right. I know this is going to sound strange to you—maybe even worthy of Diana Lefcourt—but I could feel it in my bones. Dr. Rosen and I were destined for each other. Never mind that we had nothing in common. God works in mysterious ways, and sending a Jewish doctor to my faux-husband’s former house was just one of many miracles. Sure, there would be obstacles to overcome, but—I shivered as a single puffy white cloud blocked the sun—there was nothing two people in love couldn’t overcome.
Fortunately, I was blissfully unaware of an obstacle that lay right around life’s next corner.