The brains behind the whole operation belonged not to Uncle Peter but to Johanna, who was called “the boss” by one and all. She was everywhere, saw and heard everything, at all times. When she made a suggestion, she did so in a quiet, friendly tone of voice, yet there was rarely any disagreement. In fact, everyone—even her husband—seemed happy to leave all the decisions to her. It was also Johanna who received the clients and negotiated contracts. While all the other workshops in the village sold their wares through the wholesalers in Sonneberg, the Steinmann-Maienbaum workshop dealt with their retail clients directly. This meant that the family got all the profits rather than having to hand a cut to the middlemen. Wanda didn’t doubt for a moment that it was her aunt’s impeccable business sense that had made the arrangement possible.
But she also found her aunt rather intimidating for just that reason. She would never have thought that a woman could drive just as hard a bargain as any man, but Johanna was a real businesswoman. Strange though it seemed, she made Wanda feel like a country bumpkin by comparison. She came from New York, the capital of the world, but she only knew women like her mother and Ruth’s friends, none of whom ran anything larger than their own households. Or women like Marie and Pandora, who had their own responsibilities and made their own decisions, but unlike Aunt Johanna had only themselves to look after. There must be businesswomen like Johanna somewhere in New York—perhaps on the Lower East Side, where countless garment factories jostled for space—but Wanda had never met them.
She was very impressed by Johanna, and by the end of her first afternoon in the workshop had realized that her aunt, far from being thrown into a panic by Marie’s desertion, was making the best of the new circumstances. She didn’t even bat an eyelid at the news that Marie wouldn’t be sending as many designs for the new catalog as she had promised. She simply called a quick staff meeting and told everybody in the workshop, in brief, clipped sentences, what Marie had written in her letter.
“Nothing will change for us in the grand scheme of things; we’ll still be sending the catalog to press in February,” she declared, then cast a sympathetic glance at Magnus, who was staring down at his bench, his shoulders hunched. Then she turned to Anna. “From now on, you’ll have more say in the new designs—Marie writes that you’ve been ready for a while now. Now you can show us what you’re made of.”
And for the first time Wanda saw her cousin Anna beam with happiness.
“Did you see how Ursula Flein was giggling and gossiping with Kurt yesterday?” Anna asked as she turned the tap on the silvering flask and dripped solution into a globe. “All while her Siegfried is off on his journeyman travels in the Rhineland.”
“That was perfectly harmless,” her brother retorted. “If the two of them were going to get up to any mischief, we’d have seen it weeks ago at the Harvest Festival.”
Wanda looked from brother to sister. The twins had gone out together the night before, as they did every Wednesday. Johannes had told her how the young people in the village met in an empty warehouse that had once belonged to the glass foundry. There was talk and laughter and jokes. Wanda decided that these meetings were probably much like she had seen back in New York at the various patriotic societies. Now that she had the chance to take part in German customs in their country of origin, she was confined to the house. But not for much longer, she swore to herself, doing her best to follow her cousins’ conversation. It wasn’t easy. To her dismay she had found that the people in Lauscha didn’t speak anything like standard German but had their own peculiar dialect.
“Anyway, Siegfried and Ursula aren’t married yet—they’re not even engaged,” Johannes added once he had finished blowing another globe.
“What’s that got to do with it? Either she’s serious about him or she’s not! I know that I would be in a right old rage if Richard were to flirt with someone else behind my back.”
Richard? Who was Richard? Wanda pricked up her ears. Could it be that someone was courting her cousin, who always looked as stiff as if she had swallowed a broom?
“Not all the girls have your virtues,” Johanna put in, without even looking up from her paperwork. “Ursula will learn what’s important soon enough, once her reputation’s ruined and no man wants anything more to do with her.”
Anna looked at her brother triumphantly.
“And by the way”—Johanna looked up from her lists—“I ran into Fritz on the main road this morning. He says our new labels have arrived, which means that someone will have to go and collect them tomorrow morning.”