Journal of a "Novel"-Entry 32

Teaser: Chapter 3, "A Secret Revealed, Letter from Texas"

What follows is an excerpt from Chapter 3 of the novel, in draft, unrevised format. Hope the reader enjoys!

Greta rose at six o’clock exactly, the alarm jarring her from a fitful sleep swollen with incoherent dreams, dark forms, unspoken fears. She glanced over at the rumpled bedclothes where her husband of five months had slept, rising at 5:15 or so and taking consideration not to wake her. Greta had heard him when he first pulled himself out of bed and hunted around for his things in the dark, but quickly fell back asleep. Having grown up in the house in relatively close quarters, she was accustomed to blotting out its noises until it was actually time for her day to begin.
The first thing she heard after the alarm’s bells saved her from her dreams’ fogginess – only to replace it with a physical fatigue – was the low growl of her father’s gravelly voice already expressing indignation over something to her mother. A sigh escaped from Greta’s lips. How many of her days had started out in a similar fashion? What would it take to make her father into a happy, satisfied person? She’d been asking herself this question for a long time, so there was no reason to think there might be an answer forthcoming. The only question to which there might be an answer was that of what he was railing about on this particular morning. It could have been any number of things – the financial status of his two businesses, The Golden Room and the new auto service station, for example. Or the election results from earlier in the week, which certainly troubled everyone in the house, with the possible exception of her younger sisters. But something about the tone of his voice even as it came up through the stairway and the framework of the house told her right away it was even more serious – serious enough to make those other considerations seem trivial.
She rose then, quickly, and without bothering to turn on the lamp on the bedside table – the eastern sky was lightening from black to a bruised gray, and Greta always preferred the use of whatever natural light was available. She pulled some clothing out from their dresser and a tiny closet, and padded into the bathroom. She washed her face, showered, and brushed her teeth with a firm sense of purpose, preparing herself ardently for a day she knew would require little of her. This was one of the numerous things in her new life that it was taking time to get used to: she was back in her parents’ home, and they ran it. Her mother, of course, had the maintenance of the daily routine firmly in hand. Greta was no longer supporting herself, she had no job, there were no children yet – in fact, she had no particular or specific function in terms of the domestic operation in which she found herself. Yet Greta Brogan was not one to lay around and remain idle. She began every day early, at 6 a.m., as though there was much to be done – she would make herself useful one way or another.
So this was how each day always began in the Heinricks household – her father ranting, holding court in his business suit with his coffee and sometimes his King James Bible as a prop if the matter was of a moral nature and he needed visual reinforcement. Her mother at work already, cooking, grinding coffee beans, washing dishes, clothes, meat, vegetables, anything. Things had almost always been like this – but not quite. Greta could remember a time – was haunted by it, in fact – before her family lived in this house, maybe even before her sisters were born, when they lived in the tiny, ramshackle farmhouse she was born in, and the tone of mornings was different. This would have been in 1906, 1907. She would wake up in her own room in her own bed, frequently shivering in the poorly-heated home and her threadbare blankets, but her ears would be met with a masculine voice accompanied by music. Her parents would be talking and laughing with one another most mornings, her mother preparing a breakfast, her father reading the newspaper, while in the background melodies by Liszt or Beethoven would drift throughout the house warmly from that old Victrola that Heinricks had bought one year for Ilse for Christmas. Greta would come down wrapped in her blanket to sit by the fire in that miniscule living room while her parents spoke to one another and her mother served biscuits with fresh preserves she had made herself …. they had so much less then, Greta seemed to recall, but seemed much more contented than they ever had been later, as her father’s business endeavors became more successful, demanding more and more of his time …. it was an ironic truth that Greta always held inside of herself afterwards.
Now Greta descended the creaking stairs to the kitchen as she heard the water pipes in the house creaking and moaning, indicating that her twin sisters were also beginning to rise. They were still in their last year at the high school, and had to be off by 7:30 at the latest. Greta walked in to find her mother and father both seated at the table with their hands touching cups of coffee, her father gazing out the window at some fixed location in the backyard, her mother looking at the floor. A familiar tension hovered in the room, lingering like a scent. Greta recognized this immediately: a matter of shared concern, but disparate opinions over how it should best be handled. On the table in front of her father was an envelope. She knew who it was from without being able to see the writing on it. Now she understood the tone in her father’s ranting voice earlier that had assaulted her ears as she rose to meet the morning.
‘Good morning,’ Greta said to her parents politely, attempting to partially temper the mood with conviviality and good manners.
‘Good morning, dear,’ said her mother, because that’s how one responded to such things. Her father turned his eyes towards his eldest, saying nothing. Greta saw the heat in them, knew what was coming, but she was ready for it. If one allowed him to, her father could scowl a morning into a fetal position in the corner before it ever got the chance to decide if it was going to be a pleasant day or not. God knew Greta had seen so many days in their house begin this way when she was younger, by virtue of the simple fact that her father was frustrated or angry about something. The trick was not to allow him to sabotage the mood of a day so completely and so early. The way to do it was to take his indignation – whatever the cause – in stride, casually, calmly. This helped put whatever was bothering him into some sort of perspective, and often he would react accordingly, whether he was conscious of it or not, by calming down. As a girl and a young teenager, Greta could not accomplish this herself, but after so many years of watching her mother do it, she learned the same skill, and by her early adulthood, much to her father’s annoyance, she had it down. It was useful enough, sometimes, with her own husband as well. It was one of the numerous ways a wise wife could rescue a whole day from the clutches of a husband’s nervousness or despair, simply by refusing to let a morning be derailed. And yet it was always the women whom the men called hysterical and emotionally unbalanced.
She met her father’s gaze momentarily, but for long enough to show him that she was prepared for whatever it was he might throw at her. She did not know if he was upset about the letter or if the very presence of it had brought him back to a subject that caused him embarrassment and pain. Greta glanced over at her mother again, who had her own eyes now fixated on her husband, waiting to hear whatever he was going to say.
No one said anything more, however, so Greta moved over to the counter and pulled down a white ceramic coffee mug from the cabinet. She picked up the carafe of coffee that her mother set out daily for them all and, moving towards her parents, offered to fill their cups first. Both refused silently: her father with a flash of his withered hand, her mother with a simple shake of the head. Greta returned to the counter and poured into her own cup, leaving some for her younger sisters. Everyone in their household loved coffee, especially the way Ilse made it.
Suddenly Heinricks broke the silence.
‘It’s for you.’
Greta turned and saw that he was holding out the envelope in her direction. It was sealed. She reached up after a moment and took it from him, and put it on the counter next to her.
‘You didn’t open it this time,’ she said evenly. The previous letter to arrive for her from Peter had reached her with its contents already scrutinized, several weeks before. It had led to extended arguments between father and daughter, with occasional intervention by Ilse to dampen the intensity of certain exchanges concerning the moral validity of someone – a father or not – reading someone else’s mail.
‘You can thank your husband for that,’ Heinricks answered, with no small degree of bitterness.
‘He told you not to?’ Greta asked him, surprised.
Heinricks drained his cup and stood, his eyes not moving from his daughter’s, the grooves in the aging skin around them seeing to deepen more from one moment to the next. Standing in front of one another, their eyes nearly met. Ilse watched them from her chair, marveling once again over the fact that her daughter had grown to more or less match her father’s height, rather than her own more diminished stance. Yet it was the way their respective wills, their passions, aligned – and therefore constantly collided – that was far more mysterious and, on certain occasions, jarring to Ilse Heinricks.
‘He found a way to express his point of view,’ he said. He stood before Greta for another moment, and his expression was something close to an accusation. Greta resented this: that he seemed to be ‘blaming’ her for the fact that Walter had expressed a point of view – and she doubted he had done so in a direct, offensive manner – that didn’t suit him. Furthermore, she thought, is he had tried to point out to her father that he shouldn’t open up the letter himself, not only was he not out of line, he was right. She said this much to her father.
After this she watched the familiar blaze flare up one again in the blue eyes that aligned so closely with her own.
‘I don’t much take to people who try to tell me how to run my family life in my own house,’ Heinricks intoned steadily, his tone its own warrant – not loud, only clear and cold. ‘Just as I don’t take to a son of mine not having the guts to tell me himself exactly what the devil he is doing with his life. I much prefer to confront problems directly. But you can damn well be sure that if my own son lacks the courage to keep me informed of his intentions, but can confide in his sister, I am going to find them out any way I can. I have a right to know.’
Greta listened to this, watching him, feeling the pressure of his indignation almost physically, like something or someone pushing on her shoulders. It was a familiar sensation. She thought for a moment, gripping the coffee cup with her slender hands, feeling its warmth.
Then she said, ‘Since you feel that way, why didn’t you open it?’
There was a long silence. Then her father simply said to her, ‘Just tell me what he is doing, if he has told you. Can you manage that?’ And with that, he strode out of the room. Within moments Greta and Ilse heard the front door open and slam shut.
The kitchen was now filled with the ashen light of the dreary morning, and the air seemed to have grown colder. Then twin voices of Greta’s younger sisters, prattling about something relevant only to seventeen-year-olds still in school, carried into the room from above. At any moment one or both of them would burst into the room in all of their quaint ignorance.
‘Heaven save us, but one of you is someday going to strangle the other.’
This was Ilse’s comment, sitting compactly in her chair, looking at her daughter as if she were someone she didn’t know.
Greta chuckled wryly. Some of the tension she had been feeling without realizing it seemed to ease slightly upon hearing her mother speak. But she still felt weight, pressure. Her father was a difficult man to make happy, and a difficult man to go up against in anything. She knew.
‘Walter was right, and he knows it.’
Ilse paused for a moment, and took one more glance out the back window. Greta saw the deep furrows around her eyes and forehead watched her rough, unfeminine hands grip one another on the surface of the table. They did not fidget. They simply lay in wait for whatever job the day would require of them next.
‘Of course he does,’ her mother said. Then she stood up and went to the counter next to her eldest child. Without speaking again she pulled a large iron skillet from one of the lower cabinets and placed it on the range. She turned the dial for the gas, lit the flame with a wooden match, and withdrew a side of bacon from the refrigerator while the iron surface gradually conducted the heat from the blue fire.