The American Lady(112)

“Damn it all, what is this? Can’t anybody hear me?”

Nothing happened.

Marie was a prisoner.





18

“Great God in Heaven, Wanda! I’m a glassblower, not a factory worker! You and your ideas!” Thomas Heimer’s fist crashed down on the kitchen table. He shook his head, enraged. “When you said you wanted to help in the workshop, I thought you were talking about the dusting, or doing the spring cleaning when the time comes. You never mentioned that you wanted to turn the whole place upside down!”

Wanda was speechless for a moment. She pressed her lips together angrily.

“I certainly never said anything about dusting! Do you think Mother would ever have agreed if she knew that I were just here as your cleaning woman?” she said once she recovered a little.

Only two days before, a letter had arrived from New York, five pages long, in which Ruth had expressed in no uncertain terms her disapproval of Wanda’s sudden wish to help her father. Wanda had been racking her brain over the best way to phrase a reply that would calm her mother down—although so far she had come up with nothing.

“Oh yes, the young lady’s much too good to do the dirty work! Just like her dear mama, back then!” Eva spat from where she stood by the stove.

“Don’t you think I’d have switched over to technical glass long ago if I had seen any point in it?” Heimer answered with forced patience. He lifted his beer glass and signaled to Eva that he wanted more.

“Reaction flasks and test tubes—what’s any of that got to do with the glassblower’s art?” Eva asked, slamming a new bottle of beer down on the table in front of Thomas. Then she went back to the stove and gave one of her nameless soups a stir. “Quite apart from which there are already plenty of glassblowers who earn their living that way.”

“All I ever hear about is your art! But the fact is that however artistic your work may be, it doesn’t put food on the table. Isn’t that right? So what’s the logical next step? Look for something that does earn you a crust of bread! That’s all I’m trying to do, and I’d be grateful if the two of you could at least try to make an effort instead of knocking down every idea I come up with. And please, Eva, if you’re not going to put a lid on that pot, then at least open the window! The steam’s making me quite queasy,” Wanda snapped. This whole undertaking was just getting to be too much for her!

She had quickly noticed that nobody in the Heimer household treated anyone else with kid gloves. Nobody took much trouble to be polite or consider anyone’s feelings or speak a kind word. Everybody said exactly what was going through their minds—Wanda included—and said it plain. All the same she still felt a pang of frustration every time Thomas knocked down yet another of her suggestions—one or two of which were quite good ideas! Of course she was no expert on how to run a business, but she was nonetheless astonished at just how much she had learned about Lauscha and the glass industry in the last few weeks. Once she had even sat down at the lamp and tried her hand at blowing a glass, under Thomas’s guidance. She hadn’t done very well, however, and she remembered how much she had hated craft lessons back in New York.

Eva slammed a lid onto the pot and then slammed the door behind her. A moment later, she stuck her head back into the kitchen.

“Nobody invited you here, don’t you forget that! You come here and you imagine we’ve just been sitting waiting for you and your daft ideas! If Wilhelm could hear you, he’d be a lot less pleased to have you in the house!”

Then the door slammed again.

Silence filled the room.

Thomas Heimer was the first to speak. “Technical glassware, glass buttons, spun glass—we can’t just switch production over from one day to the next; there are specialists in all those areas. And that wild idea of yours of putting a display case on the front of the house . . . None of this is as easy as you imagine, Wanda.” He spoke gently, as though ashamed of his earlier outburst.

“I never said that it would be easy, did I?” Wanda said. “But even you have to see that something must be done.”

“Perhaps. Perhaps not. Good times give way to bad times and then the other way around. You have to be able to sit it out without turning the whole workshop upside down in the meantime. That’s just a law of nature; it’s always been that way.” Heimer sighed. “But what does a city girl like you know about these things?”

“You and your laws of nature! I’d be interested to know why these laws don’t affect all the glassblowers equally but only the ones who refuse to move with the times. Fashions don’t come back around again all that soon once they’re passed, because people have simply had enough of looking at them. I’m a city girl; I know what I’m talking about when it comes to trends! Isn’t most Lauscha glassware sold in towns? People want something new! Modern products that make life that little bit easier. Pretty new things to decorate their homes. And all those factories that are stealing work from under your nose, they’re not going to disappear either!” Wanda leaned back in her chair, worn out. How many times did she have to explain it all to him? She was beginning to feel like one of her mother’s phonograph records, skipping over a crack and repeating the same thing over and over again.