“I must be careful not to call him du,” Betsy warned herself, repeating her speech with care.
When she finished he too bowed. He turned upon the two young men with rapid words; she thought he was calling them donkeys. Then he said in careful English, “Gracious young lady, it makes us very happy that you wish to see our dolls. Have the goodness to let these two young men accompany you!”
So the two young men took her through the factory. It made dolls’ heads, she found. These were sent to the homes.
“In baskets!” Betsy cried.
“Ja, in baskets, covered with clean white cloths!” In the homes the eyes were put in, the hair was pasted on, bodies were attached; the dolls acquired dresses, hats, and shoes.
“Do the children help?”
“Ja, natürlich! Whole families.”
“And do the children…still like dolls?” It would be too sad, she thought, if they didn’t; if that was the reason she had not seen any little girls playing with dolls!
But the young men were baffled by this question and hurried her off to the showroom. Here she saw finished products, samples of dolls that would come out next Christmas. There was a dazzling array! Blond dolls and brunette dolls, large dolls and small dolls, dolls of every kind, type, and costume.
“Oh, what a beauty!” Betsy cried, reaching for a large, yellow-haired charmer. It was dressed in pale blue and wore a straw hat with a high pink plume, pink gloves, and pink shoes and stockings!
“Tacy and I would certainly have bonied this one,” Betsy thought.
When she and Tacy were children they had loved to look at the dolls in the Christmas shop windows, pressing their noses against the plate glass while snow fell and sleighbells tinkled all up and down Front Street.
“I bony this one!”
“I bony that one!”
“So do I.”
Betsy stood with the big doll in her arms thinking about Tacy. At last she put it down. “I really must go now. Thank you for showing me the factory.” The two young men glanced at each other, and the slender one began to twirl his invisible mustache into fascinating spirals.
“And this evening?” the florid one asked softly. “Would the Fräulein enjoy a ride?”
“Or a little walk?” suggested his companion.
“A glass of beer, perhaps?”
Betsy shrugged as though she did not understand. “Ich verstehe nicht,” she said brightly. “Good-by. Thank you again.”
The children had disappeared. Were they making dolls? she wondered, walking back to the hotel. She hoped Gretel had a doll. There was still no mail, and after dinner, during which she happily impressed the buyers with her aloof sophistication, Betsy went to the Historical City Museum.
She saw the dolls that over past years had won prizes for the Sonneberg makers. A life-sized Gulliver covered with tiny Lilliputians. A miniature Kirmess, complete with merry-go-round, fortuneteller, dancing girl, clowns, fruit vendor, crowds of people, even dogs.
There was a display of period dolls beginning with rude figures cut from wood. Each successive generation was dressed like the children who had played with them, and Betsy saw dolls in costumes of the Civil War era who looked like Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy. She saw dolls in accordian-pleated skirts, in long-waisted dresses that looked like herself, or Tib, or Tacy.
She and Tacy had been funny about dolls, Betsy reflected. The most important thing to see on Christmas morning, poking out of a stocking, or sitting under a tree, was a big curly-haired fancily dressed doll. But after Christmas they used to put these dolls away. They preferred paper dolls cut from magazines. And Tacy, of course, preferred real babies.
Tacy had always been crazy about babies. She used to help Betsy take care of Margaret, and Tib take care of her little brother Hobbie. She even used to ask the neighborhood mothers to let her take their babies out riding in their carriages—just for fun!
“Why am I thinking about Tacy all the time, for goodness’ sake!” cried Betsy, and went out into the sunshine. She wished to get a peek, if she could, of the doll-making in the homes, and in the old part of town the streets were so narrow that you couldn’t avoid looking in the windows.
She made her way to those ancient houses with dormer windows sticking through the roofs. The streets were clean and cheerful. Ducks waddled along the cobblestones. There were pink and white fruit trees at every turning and multitudes of children.
The children made a rush for her. Gretel put her hand into Betsy’s as a matter of course, smiling elfishly through pale wisps of hair. Betsy took snapshots of them all and asked an older boy to write down their names and addresses so that she could send them pictures.
Loitering along with her bodyguard, she saw men and women sitting in the windows, and they were making dolls. One flaxen-haired woman was gluing on a flaxen wig. Another was seated at a table covered with doll hats. A man wearing an apron was wiring eyes into rows of china heads.
Betsy turned to the children. “Do you have dolls?” she asked. “Puppen?” She rocked one in her arms.
They stared at her for a moment. Then the little girls turned and ran. Gretel ran into the house where the woman was gluing on wigs. They all returned with shining faces, and each one was holding a banged and battered doll.
“Look, gnädiges Fräulein!” Gretel’s vivid eyes were snapping as she exhibited a headless treasure. “Meine Puppe. She is called Victoria.”
So! That was settled. It was all right. But returning to the hotel in the late afternoon Betsy admitted a craving that had been growing all day. She wanted a doll! She wanted one even though she was twenty-two years old. Moreover, she knew the very doll she wanted. The yellow-haired charmer with the pink plume on her hat.
It wasn’t easy to buy it, although she found her two cavaliers without difficulty. They were delighted to see her, thinking at first that she had reconsidered about the drive, the walk, the glass of beer. But when she explained her real reason for returning, the florid one frowned and the slender one tugged sternly at his mustache.
“Please! Bitte!” Betsy waved her purse. “I can’t leave Sonneberg without a doll. The gentleman who spoke to me this morning…maybe he would sell me a doll.” She hoped they would remember that he had called them donkeys.
She won, and marched out triumphantly with the pink and blue beauty. “She looks just like Lillian Russell,” Betsy thought. But before she reached the hotel she began to feel a little foolish. A doll did look strange on the arm of a girl in a picture hat with long rustling skirts.
“Crazy Amerikanisches Fräulein!” she could imagine people saying.
“Of course,” she told herself, trying to find a sensible motive, “of course I bought her for someone. My little sister…?” But Margaret, in high school now, was more interested in boys than dolls.
“Who could she be for?” Betsy wondered. She couldn’t seem to remember a single child of doll-playing age.
What made it worse, the buyers were in the lobby smoking and reading their newspapers. They all looked up and some of them grinned. It was hard to saunter by like a lady author with your arms full of pink and blue doll. Betsy blushed crimson and thought she would never reach the desk.
Once there she forgot her chagrin. She forgot the doll, everything! For there was an enormous stack of mail—from her parents…Julia…Margaret…Cab…Tib…Tacy…
“I’m going to open Tacy’s first,” Betsy planned. “I’ve been thinking about her all day.”
Up in her summer-warm room, she put the big doll against the pillows of her bed and established herself blissfully in an armchair by the window. Smiling in anticipation, she opened Tacy’s letter and started to read. But in a moment she put it down on the bed. She clasped her hands in her lap and tears came into her eyes.
Tacy was going to have a baby!
Tacy! Betsy could hardly take it in. Why, she could remember Tacy at her own fifth birthday party, bringing a gift of a little glass pitcher, so shy that she held her head down
and her long red ringlets fell over her face! But it was wonderful. It was just right. Tacy had always loved babies. Betsy had been remembering that all day.
“Only, I wish I could be there! I wish I didn’t have to be so far away!” said Betsy, and she leaned her head on the bed and her tears flowed over Tacy’s letter, making it quite soggy. Betsy sat up when she realized that, for she hadn’t finished reading it yet, and her gaze fell on the big doll with its pale blue dress and coat, and its hat with the pink plume, the pink gloves, and the pink shoes and stockings.
Betsy caught it into her arms.
“That’s why I bought you!” she cried, and her tears came faster and faster, but they were happy now. “That’s why I bought you! I knew you were a very special doll.”
A very special doll, for a very special baby! Tacy’s baby! Maybe she would have red curls like Tacy’s?
Betsy had an awful thought.
“But what if it isn’t a girl?”
“Well! It had better be!” cried Betsy.
15
A Short Stay in Heaven
TILDA WAS WAITING at the Oberammergau station. She and Betsy flew into each other’s arms.
“Betsy!” Tilda whispered ecstatically. “Here is Heaven!”
Betsy breathed deep of the mountain air. She looked around at the houses—white-plastered, green-shuttered, red-roofed—and up at the rolling hills that were buttressed by pine-covered slopes. On a rocky height overlooking the village stood the famous Cross of Oberammergau.
“So it’s Heaven!” Betsy replied. “Well, I’ve certainly been climbing to reach it!”
She had come by way of Munich, and her train had started climbing soon after the towers of the Frauenkirche melted into the blue. It had wound around mountainsides, past shining lakes and waterfalls, higher and higher, until the skyline wore royal crowns of snow. Far below, the valleys were dotted with villages, each one a cluster of red roofs about a spire. Oberammergau was swung like the others in a green hammock of valley.
Betsy had heard of it all her life. She knew that almost three hundred years before, when the Black Death was ravaging the Bavarian highlands, these villagers had promised that if God would spare them they would perform every ten years the drama of Jesus’ Death and Passion. No man, woman, or child had fallen to the plague after the vow was made, and it had been faithfully kept by succeeding generations. Given at first in the churchyard, the play now required a huge auditorium. Every tenth year, from May to September, throngs of people from all over the world poured into the village—and then went away, leaving it to the peaceful isolation which Tilda and Betsy now disturbed.
The girls had engaged rooms with Herr and Frau Baumgarten. They were already, Betsy found, Uncle and Aunt to Tilda who had arrived the day before. Tante Else was a spindling old lady with a smile almost as broad as her white cotton umbrella. Onkel Max was tall, too, and knobbily thin.
“And that’s Hedwig!” Tilda smiled at an apple-cheeked servant girl who was bundling Betsy’s belongings into a handcart.
Accustomed to the geometric arrangement of an American middle-western town, Betsy was charmed by Oberammergau’s streets. They ran without rhyme or reason under flowering fruit trees, pink and white. There were no sidewalks.
On many of the whitewashed houses Biblical scenes were frescoed in bright colors. Shrines looked down from almost every door. Crosses spread benignant arms above rooftops, in gardens, at street corners. The people looked Biblical, too. Many men wore their hair long, and beards were everywhere—black, brown, yellow, gray.
“Natürlich!” Tante Else said. “In the Passion Play, the actors would not wear wigs or false beards, any more than they would powder and paint.”
“And Betsy!” Tilda said. “They call each other often by their names from the Passion Play…Judas, Pilate, even Christ.”
“Ach, ja!” said Onkel Max. “Christus Lang. You must meet him this afternoon.”
Even more suggestive of holiness than the Biblical scenes, and beards and names, were the smiles that welcomed Betsy and Tilda. “Grüss Gott!” everyone said.
“God bless you!” What a wonderful greeting!
Children ran out to take their hands and curtsy. There was a pervading air of friendliness, of love.
“Maybe there’s one place in the world where people really live up to their religion,” Betsy thought, looking around.
“Wait until you see our Haüschen,” Tilda kept saying. At last she cried, “There it is!” And Betsy let out a joyful cry.
The lawn was smartly green. White stones edged the graveled paths, and peach trees in radiant bloom stood out against the lath and plaster walls. A balcony ran around the second story, and a smaller one stretched across the front, up under the eaves.
“Oh, that sweet balcony! The little one!”
“It’s outside your room,” said Tilda. “I remembered you liked balconies.”
Onkel Max and Tante Else smiled proudly.
Up two flights of stairs they clattered, followed by Hedwig with the suit cases. They went through Tilda’s room and into Betsy’s, which had a puffy white bed and a Herr Gott worked in brightly colored yarns on the white-washed wall. They pushed out to the little balcony.
“Nice! Nicht?” asked Tilda.
“Darling!” Betsy looked down in delight.
Sunlight danced on the clear River Ammer winding through the village. Out in the fields oxen were dragging ploughs and old women with white scarves on their heads bent to their work. Beyond the fields, blossoming meadows climbed to dark masses of pines, and in the distance the skyline was topped with a white meringue. The balcony faced the towering cross.
“How it glitters!” Betsy exclaimed.
“It is covered with zinc,” Tante Else explained. “It catches every ray of light. We can see it before dawn and after sunset, even. But now you must have second breakfast. Here on your balcony.”
She and Onkel Max retreated. Hedwig of the apple cheeks brought hot water in a thin-necked pitcher. And while Betsy washed, and drank coffee and ate Pfannkuchen, and finally unpacked, she and Tilda talked, talked, talked.
“Whatever are you doing with that doll?” asked Tilda when Betsy lifted the radiant creature out of its box.
Betsy told the great news of Tacy’s baby.
“And me unmarried at the ripe old age of twenty-two!”
“You had your birthday all alone!”
“I felt very philosophical. I planned out my future all the way to when I’m an old lady. I’m going to wear a cap and sit by the fire.”
“We’ll fatten you up for it,” said Tilda. “Here we eat all day. And never did you taste such cooking!”
Running downstairs and outdoors, they crossed a rustic bridge to those slanting meadows strewn with daisies, forget-me-nots, violets, and buttercups. They sang “Peg o’ My Heart.” They raced through the grass like children.
“This air goes to my head,” said Betsy, smoothing her hair as they walked back, more sedately, to dinner. It was such a meal as she remembered from the Mullers, rich, heavy, and delicious. Tante Else loved to work in her kitchen as her husband loved to pull weeds from his velvety lawn and whitewash the stones along his graveled paths.
After dinner they all went over to the Langs’.
Anton Lang lived in a rambling house, plastered in white like its neighbors and bearing above the door a shrine and the scrolled name of its master. He was a potter and his workshop was attached.
In the yard, which was full of fruit trees, children, and confusion, they met Frau Lang, a small plump woman with rolled-up sleeves who greeted them in English. She had bright black eyes, ready dimples, and a chuckly voice.
Cheeriness seemed to be the keynote for the family. There was Anna, Anton’s sister, tall, energetic, and overflowing with fun. She was one of the Three Weeping Women in the Passion Play.
“But I can’t imagine her weeping,” Betsy whispered.
There was Matilde’s father, a one-time directo
r of the Passion Play chorus, and little Martha, the baby and pet of the family. The white-haired old man and the toddler were as jolly as the others.
Anna said, “Come on in and see Tony!” And they all trooped into a workshop filled with the tile stoves, plates, jugs, and vases that Anton Lang made. There were several men in the shop, but Betsy recognized the Christus before he put down his tools and turned to greet them.
Back home, the pictures of this large bearded man had aroused in her a slight unreasonable resentment. It had seemed presumptuous in any human being to appear in the role of Jesus. This feeling melted before his warm unaffected smile.
He was slightly stooped, and wore work clothes, dusty from his craft. He had flowing light brown hair and beard, and a strong face with keen, humorous, light-blue eyes. His stoop was humble but his whole manner expressed a simple natural dignity. Like his wife, he spoke in English.
“What a happy family!” Betsy commented as she and Tilda and the Baumgartens walked home.
“Tony is a good man,” Onkel Max said. “No man is chosen for the Christ unless his life is blameless.”
“In Passion Play summers,” Tante Else added, “he goes into another world. It is very hard, the part…so full of strain. Imagine the fatigue of hanging for twenty minutes to the cross! And the self-control he must exercise when he is taken down for dead, and the blood comes rushing painfully back into his arms.”
“There are other times when he must show self-control,” Onkel Max broke in. “The adoration of the crowds would spoil some men. People besiege him; often he hides out in one of the mountain grottos to escape them and Anna brings him his meals.”
They spoke in German, but Tilda quickly translated the words Betsy did not know. For both of them, the Passion Play had come out of books into life.
Tante Else went on to say that Herr Lang had refused huge sums to play his role elsewhere. Once, an American manager came all the way to Oberammergau to ask him to star in a play, “The Servant in the House.”
“Tony would not think of it, of course. And the manager was astonished. He thought every man had his price.”