"Preparatory Academy, Mrs. Richter? Preparatory Academy! Don't you think that's maybe a little pretentious?"
Grandma's answer was blank incomprehension of the last word.
"I mean it's too fancy. You're just being a show-off, calling a day care center a preparatory academy. What do you think you are doing?"
"Herr Higgins found it for me—the name. It is right."
"Listen to me."
"No. You listen. You can let the children in your class not learn. You know that whether they learn or not, they will still go to Mrs. Barnes in the first grade and then they will learn what you did not teach them. Or the year after. Or the year after that, perhaps. For American children, there will always be another year, it seems. You are all rich, so rich. My children have no such promise that they will have another chance."
"Mrs. Richter, the best modern theories of early childhood learning indicate—"
"Akademies we have in Germany. Or the Gymnasium, if you call it that, but it is the whole school and not where the young people play sports. Only through an Akademie can a boy of ordinary family advance, to become a member of the learned professions, to became an official in the chancery of a ruler. There are few scholarships, so few can advance. Most of the places are only for the children of the nobles, or the great families—the Geschlechter—the bankers and the wholesale merchants in the Imperial cities. And all of them boys, boys, boys, boys, boys. Immer die Jungen. Immer die Knaben."
"Well, naturally, I don't have any objections to coeducation."
"I learned well in the town school. Could I go to an Akademie when I was ten? No. Could I become ein Beamter? No. Ein Gelehrter? No. I loved my schooling; I loved my reading. My parents wasted the money on my brother, wasted it. Hopeless, he was; spoiled, lazy too. All of his opportunities he frittered away. He came to no good end!"
"Mrs. Richter, just what do you think that you are doing?"
"I am making a Preparatory Academy. I am preparing children for Akademies, and to do it I must use my ways, not yours. Boy children. Girl children. Poor children, of peasants and artisans. All of them! I shall take them when they are so little, the tiny ones. I shall teach them. They shall have no choice but to learn, to be ready when they are ten. The Akademies shall drown in children. It will be like the play-yard down by the creek that no one can build upon because the powerful water comes down from the mountains and would push all the buildings off their foundations. I shall flood them. They will take my children when the time comes, all of my children. Or they will be washed away."
9
"Well, no, Henry. I wouldn't mind being married by your and Mike's Calvinist preacher. I was baptized a Calvinist, after all."
"You were what? Ronnie, you had a saint painted on the door of the day care center."
"I was born the year before the old Calvinist prince died. Then his son inherited. He was Lutheran, like his mother—so I grew up a Lutheran, like the king of Sweden. Lutheran is how I learned the catechism. Lutheran is how I was confirmed and married to Stephan."
"Umm-hmm."
"But then he died, and the heir was Calvinist. But it took quite some time to decide and there were many fights between the Calvinist regent and the Lutheran Adel—the nobles. Finally, the ruler won. That wasn't so long ago. Maybe twenty years, or not quite that."
"I see."
"But when we were taken away from the king of Bohemia after the Battle of the White Mountain, the Emperor gave us to Bavaria, so we all became Catholics a few years later. Gretchen and Hans remember a little bit about being Calvinist, but Annalise isn't old enough."
"So Calvinist is okay for the wedding."
"Yes. I was Lutheran longer than anything else, but Calvinist is fine. The American freedom of religion is much simpler, really. Sometimes it was quite hard to remember what answers a new pastor wanted to hear, from one year to the next."
10
It was bad, that Croat raid, but she lost no more of her children. Not even—Gott sei Dank!—Gretchen's foolish young Jeff, wounded though he may have been as a consequence of his stupid bravery. Dashing right out to get yourself shot at does not lead to having many descendants, no, not at all. But he was defending the children, so perhaps it was not so stupid after all.
As for her, she had seen nothing of it. After all, what could one old woman do to fight in a raid? With her little tiny ones, who had been dropped off early by working parents, already safe inside, protected by the stores in front and by the intercession of Saint Veronica, she had simply locked up and placed tables as barricades. The day care center had proceeded with its accustomed daily schedule throughout the gunfire.