“I know.” He kissed her mouth and drew her close. “But I will pray every day that you do.”
27
“Have you gone quite mad? How could you say yes to the American without asking me first?”
Marie took the contract for the Valentine gifts and shoved it back into Ruth’s hand. Then she began leafing deliberately through one of her new books, as though Ruth’s concerns had nothing to do with her.
“Now you’re insulting me; that’s just like you!” Ruth replied. “You’re the one who’s always going on about your skills as a glassblower. But instead of thanking me for getting you another order, you stab me in the back. This order is our big chance, don’t you understand?” She waved the sheet of paper in Marie’s face.
“Our chance for what? For us to end up looking like fools?” Marie retorted without looking up from her book.
Johanna stepped between her sisters.
“Now calm down, both of you. Whatever we have to say to one another, there’s no need to shout, is there?”
“That’s easy for you to say,” Marie said mockingly. “You’re not the one being asked to blow one thousand glass hearts in the next seven weeks.”
She slammed her book shut and thumped it down on the tabletop.
“There’s no way to make a heart by free-blowing. Which means I’ll have to make a mold for it first. And not just one—I’ll need at least a dozen to blow a thousand hearts because my plaster forms don’t last as long as Strupp’s.” She looked accusingly from Johanna to Ruth. “Unless either of you has a special recipe?”
The only answer was an uncomfortable silence.
“If we had a mold from Strupp, then things would be different. But he can’t make us one at such short notice,” Marie threw in.
Not even Johanna knew what to do. She felt utterly overwhelmed by the new development. She and Marie had been awake half the night, worrying about Ruth and fearing the worst. When their sister finally came home, she offered not a word of explanation but simply handed them this sheet of paper. This was the last thing Johanna had expected.
She had been preparing for Ruth to return lovesick and distraught in floods of tears, so she had been racking her brains as to how best to comfort her sister. But by the look of it, Ruth didn’t need a word of comfort. She looked calm and collected and seemed not to feel the slightest pang of guilt for having stayed away all night. She didn’t say a word about Steven or what it had been like to see him again.
“I have to admit I never thought that the mold might be a problem. When I saw the heart, I thought it looked a lot simpler than your more elaborate baubles,” Ruth said. “We could at least ask Emanuel Strupp whether he’d make us a form. The worst he can do is say no.” Ruth turned to Johanna and gave her a nudge. “Are you even listening? You’re not usually one to hold back from giving advice. This is about how we earn our living after all!”
Johanna looked up.
“It’s strange. We never wanted anything more than to be able to stand on our own feet. To depend on nobody. Not on Wilhelm Heimer, and not on Thomas. And not on the wholesalers in Sonneberg either,” she said, looking first at Ruth, then at Marie. “But now that it looks as though we could really do it, we’re suddenly afraid. Instead of thinking how best to fill the order, we’re squabbling. Maybe the others are right when they say that women can’t rule their own roost?”
The other two looked stubbornly at the kitchen table and at the object that lay in the middle of it—the subject of the whole argument—the heart of glass.
Reluctantly, Marie reached out and picked it up. She turned it this way and that in her hands.
“Who says that women can’t run a business?” she asked.
Johanna shrugged.
“I don’t know. But supposedly there are people who say that sort of thing.”
“They’re wrong,” Marie said, her face stern. “Even if I have to cast a dozen forms, we’re filling the order. We Steinmann girls will show the world what we’re made of!”
She put the heart down and reached her hands out to Johanna and Ruth.
But instead of joining hands with her sisters as they always had in the past to show their common purpose, Ruth jumped up and ran from the room.
Frowning, Marie watched her go.
“What’s wrong with her? Why is she crying when everything’s all right again?”
The weeks that followed passed in the same rhythm as those that had gone before; Marie went to work for Heimer by day, then sat down at the lamp in the evening—often without even stopping to eat supper. Johanna and Ruth did the packing, eight glass hearts to a box. Although she was blowing into a mold, the same shape over and over again, the work made great demands on Marie, and when at last she would turn off the gas tap just before midnight, she was trembling with exhaustion.