Karel wasn’t likely to follow through on a promise. And he was likely wrong that the neighborhood school would cure Anna’s deficiencies. At any rate, the state inspector would leave them alone if Anna were to enroll, if it wasn’t too late for that.
Anna was sure the state inspector was scaring Karel away. He hadn’t come home in weeks. Nobody in the house knew where he was. There’d been little word about him at all. Snippets from neighbors about how they’d seen Karel on such-and-such street the day before, or cruising around with the Braun boy in Jobbers Canyon. Of course, Karel was playing baseball. It was summer. Five afternoons a week he had a game at Rourke Park with a junior team sponsored by the Omaha Printing Company. Besides that there was practice with the Southside team. Karel Miihlstein wasn’t all that hard to find those days, if they’d dared to go down to the field and grab him. The rougher business would have been pulling him off a ballfield without raising Cain.
None of that mattered much to Anna. She wasn’t going to take a streetcar to Rourke Park. From what she’d heard (and what she saw her one trip there) South Omaha wasn’t all that pleasant. Anna didn’t care to subject herself to the mean spirits of its environs. No. Karel was afraid of coming home because he thought the state inspector could be a welfare cop there to send incorrigible boys to reformatory school. It could have been true anyway. Anna worried about that. The inspector hadn’t mentioned Karel after that first time, but maybe it was a cover. Maybe Karel had done something bad and the authorities were going to send him away. Anna considered this a distinct possibility, even though she hadn’t heard that Karel was mixed up in any trouble besides drinking alcohol (which there was plenty of going on in the house already, between Herr, Maria, and Jake). Other than that the only concern was what Karel did with those ballplayers. Which was play baseball, by all appearances. He got a blackened thumbnail from an inside pitch that hit his hand where he gripped the bat. Grass stains on his pants. Nothing the inspector could charge Karel with. The realization set in after a while. The inspector truly was there for Anna.
She held her hands in the light from the window, up in the attic, to look at her fingers stretching. She felt bad about how she’d told Karel those things about their mother, the actor their mother had a thing for, how she’d been stabbed and bled to death, and Karel’s bawling. She was sorry for the way she told him. She’d felt sad about it every day since. And Karel wasn’t there for her to apologize.
It wouldn’t be all that awful if she wasn’t around. If she wasn’t buried up to her neck in all that junk in the cellar. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if the state inspector took her away.
Whenever Maria left the house, from then on, she took Anna along. The inspector might snatch Anna from the house when Maria was out. She wasn’t going to let that happen. Anna followed her around the house in the morning after breakfast, as Maria washed dishes and then shrunk into a wooden chair out front to roll a cigarette and catch her breath before heading to the market. The Eigler house sidled up to the big buildings of downtown—Anna could see them from the porch—so it wasn’t far to the market. They walked slow down the steep hill of Clandish, the brick walkway full of chucks and gaps. If they hurried, one of them was liable to trip. Maria was in no hurry anyway. She gabbered to Anna. Told who lived in the houses down the block. Stefan the furrier. A merchant named Rudolph who lived at home and cared for his parents. The McPhees, who were Irish. Maria talked about families who used to live in the houses they passed. Krugs and Fischers and Kountzes. She told about a garden party on Constitution Day in 1892. Anna gibbered back with questions. What clothes were in fashion then? Was it only adults at the party, or kids too? How late were kids allowed to stay up that night? Cars rumbled by on Clandish as they talked. Every once in a while Anna peeked around a house and saw a woman hang laundry.
In the market Anna trailed behind as Maria browsed the stalls. A cabbage plucked out from a stand of them, some fruit. She felt a little better going out on errands with Maria. It had been over a year since she’d done this regularly. Those days, new to Omaha, Anna, Frau, and Karel stepping out for fruit and veggies, whatever else was needed and could be gotten in season. Anna had forgotten how nice it was to get out. Exhilarating as well as aggravating. Her muscles sore. Once she was out in the market stalls, the shouts of callers, the purchasers, a buzzing feeling overcame her objections. She had to stand tall and straighten her back or else she’d be trampled. She liked being out in the sun, in the market, where women complimented her on how smart a white straw hat looked on her, and how cute she was. Some neighborhood boys saw her and could hardly believe their eyes. Yes, it’s Anna, she wanted to say to them. Out for a walk. With necessities to buy at market. So she went to fruit stalls and Hiller’s Grocery. The proprietor behind the counter, silent, near a glass case filled with tobacco, pens, and other sundries. His four daughters in a back office with a phonograph and a record that told fairy tales. Anna sneaked over to hear what came from the horn. Baba Yaga and her house on chicken legs.
She carried packages for Maria. Fruit, strawberries, veal cutlets folded in a newspaper. She waited as Maria chatted up merchants, as Maria chatted up women her age, friends, or anyone. Maria liked to talk, so long as she looked busy in the process, a cloth bag snagged on her elbow, her pocketbook unclasped but clutched to her breast, how she made the person behind her in line wait as she fished for coins and counted pennies. Somehow surprised to find she had enough money to pay after all. But always chatting. Asking for news, sharing news. That’s too bad. But she’s okay? You never know. A woman like her. Too proud to ask for help. Maria would help anyone so long as they asked and the solution wasn’t money. There were pies that could be made, fresh bread, time-tested remedies. She could sit in a room with someone who was ailing.
One day out on the street, in fact, a man grabbed Maria by the elbow and requested help. A sick woman was dying—an elderly woman with no family, the man said. A woman in the tenement building where he lived. Could Maria go sit with the woman? Until the pastor arrived? The woman was seventy-something years old with pneumonia. There was nothing else to do.
A crowd was at the top of the stairs, men familiar with each other, in the way they whispered, hands gently on each other’s shoulders. They cleared the narrow doorway to let Maria and Anna through. None of them wanted in, not really.