The Glassblower(146)

Marie looked at her sister, speechless. Just that morning, they had been quarreling and now she was acting as though they had never argued at all.

“If you think we’re going to start again from the beginning for your sake, you’re wrong,” Johanna replied icily. She turned the notepad over so that Ruth couldn’t even see what was written there.

“Well pardon me! I daresay I’ll find out soon enough.”

Ruth cut a few thin slices of cheese and popped them into Wanda’s mouth bit by bit. Her movements were flustered.

“I ran into Thomas.”

The others looked at each other. So that was why Ruth was so jittery.

“And? Did he make trouble again?” Peter asked, frowning.

Ruth shook her head.

While they all listened to Ruth describe her encounter, Peter reached for Johanna’s notepad and pulled it toward him unobtrusively. He hesitated for a moment, then turned it over as though it were the card upon which his whole game depended.

Marie peered over his shoulder as he read, and she wanted to whoop with joy.

Peter put down the notepad and grinned.

“Not quite what I’d imagined, but it’s a start,” he whispered to Johanna.

Ruth looked from one to the other, exasperated.

“Is anybody even listening to me? What do you have there anyway?” Before Peter could stop her, she had snatched the pad from his hand.

“Steinmann and Maienbaum, glassblowers.” She looked up, baffled. “What’s that supposed to mean?”





30

Life was never the same again in the Steinmann house, and the three sisters were once more the talk of the whole village.

Marie and Griseldis gave notice the same day. Wilhelm Heimer stood there openmouthed and had to watch his best painter and his best silver-mixer walk out of the workshop without looking back.

Hammers swung, and the wall between the Steinmanns’ house and Peter’s was broken down and replaced by new support timbers. Though the space was still not as big as the Heimer workshop, it was much larger than the two little rooms it replaced. Furniture was moved around, and the men from the gasworks came to extend the gas pipes by another couple of yards.

Peter and Magnus hung a sign that read “Steinmann-Maienbaum, Glassblowers” between the two houses, and everyone who walked past stopped to wonder at it; Marie had painted the letters as pine-tree branches and created a frame of red and dark-blue Christmas baubles all around them. The effect was astonishing and eye-catching. As well as the artistry involved, the sign’s message also stirred great interest; Peter and the Steinmann sisters were joining forces when he wasn’t even married to one of them. Surely that was just another sign of how things could go wrong when women ruled the roost.

While Johanna and Marie went down to the foundry to order new stock, Ruth went to Sonneberg with Wanda to send confirmation to Woolworth that they were accepting his order. She sent another letter that same day, with trembling fingers and pounding heart.



It was not yet mid-January when production began in the new workshop. Although they had never worked together like this before, their daily routine soon became that of a close-knit team. In the mornings Peter and Marie sat at the lamp and blew glass. The finished baubles went on to Ruth and Griseldis at the next table, who silvered them. Thanks to Griseldis’s special recipe, the baubles had exactly the right silvery gleam, with no gray streaks or dull spots. Johanna congratulated herself more than once on her decision to take on Griseldis, and she cheerfully forgot that it was actually Peter who first made the suggestion.

Johanna spent most of her mornings doing paperwork; she worked out a system for numbering all the items and then wrote them out on labels and cardboard boxes in the afternoons. When she was done with that, she wanted to prepare a catalog; she had to think of the future after all.

Around midday, Magnus sat down at Marie’s lamp and practiced blowing the globes. Either Peter or Marie watched over his shoulder as he worked, giving advice or correcting his posture. Although he didn’t become a talented glassblower overnight, he managed to blow simple globes—even if they all varied somewhat in size.

While the silvered globes were drying on a bed of nails, they all sat down around the table and ate the lunch that Griseldis made early each morning. She had insisted from the start on taking on the task.

“If you’re going to employ an old woman like me, then I want to make myself useful. Otherwise you might just as well have taken on one of the young village girls!” she had told Johanna as she kneaded the potato dough with wet hands to make dumplings. Neither Johanna nor Ruth was sorry to be rid of the hard work of cooking, and they enjoyed the luxury of sitting down to lunch at a table that was properly set. They set great store by the fact that there were enough plates for everyone.