“Why not start by blowing the globes that will take the most time to paint up?” she suggested to Marie. “Then while Ruth and I are painting those, you can get on with the rest of the order.”
Most of the time, Ruth and Marie let Johanna give the orders; they liked having the old Johanna back again, rather than a sister who just lay in bed like an invalid. They only ever objected if they felt she was pushing them around too much. And when they did, Johanna actually managed to hold her tongue for a while and let the two of them work in peace.
It didn’t take long for the rest of Lauscha to notice that something was going on at the Steinmann sisters’ house. The lights were on until late at night and their neighbors wondered whether the women ever slept. And wasn’t that the telltale flicker of a gas lamp through the windows, the kind that a glassblower used at his bench? The neighbors soon began stopping by and trying to get into the house under all sorts of pretexts: one woman came to borrow a cup of flour and another to ask for Ruth’s help in sewing a winter jacket; one man came to ask whether he could take a look at Joost’s old tools and perhaps buy one or two that he might need. When they saw what was really going on in Joost’s workshop, some of them could hardly believe their eyes.
Marie, the youngest of the Steinmann girls, sitting at the lamp?
Reactions ranged from incredulity to downright disapproval. Many spoke of dark doings, and some even said it was the devil’s work. Marie’s conviction that she could do a man’s job provided weeks of conversation, both in the village houses and down at the Black Eagle as well. When Peter came to tell them what was being said at the tavern, the sisters didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Thomas Heimer had the most to say. He told whoever would listen that he had known right from the start that there was something not quite right about the three of them. They were all stubborn, self-righteous little minxes, pampered and insolent and with their heads in the clouds. When somebody asked him why he had married one of them, and everyone else at the table burst out laughing, Thomas lunged.
“I’ll not be made a fool of! Not by you, not by a woman, not by anyone!” he yelled, and shook the man until he almost fainted. After that nobody quite dared ask why Thomas’s father saw fit to have one of these minxes still working for him—despite her devilry.
From then on, Thomas kept coming to their house at night. When the Black Eagle closed at ten o’clock, he stumbled through the streets, always drunk, and the whole neighborhood could hear him shouting for Ruth. Sometimes he grabbed hold of their gate and shook it, threatening all kinds of vengeance. The first few times, Ruth tried to calm him down, but no sooner had she leaned out the window than he became even more abusive. He called them witches, whores, and thieves. Deeply shaken, Ruth flushed and put her hands over her ears. On one occasion, when Thomas was being particularly nasty, the other two sat down at the kitchen table with her. Johanna reached over and prized Ruth’s fingers apart as she wrung her hands.
“Let him shout! Nobody will think the worse of us because he’s making a laughingstock of himself.”
From then on, the sisters tried to ignore him when he turned up drunk at their door, and Peter usually managed to send Thomas away with threats.
As if it weren’t enough to have the glassblowers heaping scorn upon them, Marie and her sisters also found that many of the local women spurned their company; conversation came to a stop or went on in hushed tones whenever Ruth or Johanna went into the village store. Some of the village women condemned the Steinmann sisters out of envy, others out of sheer incomprehension, but most of them did so out of fear. After all, if men saw them taking charge, they might get it into their heads that women could be the breadwinners of the family.
The only one who took Ruth aside when there were no eyes upon them was Mrs. Flein, the wife of Swiss Karl. She whispered in Ruth’s ear.
“Back forty years ago, when my father had pneumonia, I sat down at his lamp, and I blew beads in secret.” Mrs. Flein’s cheeks flushed as though she were still proud of what she had done. “We didn’t have the gasworks back then, and the flame wasn’t as hot as it is today, but I made those beads all the same. If I hadn’t, we’d all have starved. You tell your Marie that there’s nothing wrong with what she’s doing.” She patted Ruth on the shoulder, then scurried away as though she didn’t want to be seen with her.
But there were other reluctant admirers too, among them Wilhelm Heimer.
“Don’t think for a moment that I approve of women getting up to that sort of mischief!” he boomed, so loudly that everyone in the workshop looked over at him and Marie. “But you’ve got the gift for it, and I’ve known that for a long time now!” Then he winked and dropped his voice so that only those standing nearby heard him say, “As long as your work here doesn’t suffer, I’ll turn a blind eye to whatever else you choose to do.”