But how could she say yes? She was bound by her own lack of imagination. Fr?ulein Brebel and the other girls would be looking for her. It was Heimatabend, and they were to go directly to Olga Meisner’s parlor for a piano concert following the mayor’s speech.
“I can’t,” Benita said formally and with genuine sorrow, “but thank you for the invitation.”
“Why not?” he pressed. “You must get back to that bore?”
“No.” Benita blushed. “To my group.”
“Your group—aha!” He narrowed his eyes and gave her an assessing look. “Aren’t you too old for Hitler Youth?”
“Oh, it isn’t that—it’s Bund Deutscher M?del,” she said, surprised at his mistake.
The man shrugged. “Any of these—groups.” He said the word with obvious disdain, and she blushed more deeply, feeling the full depth of the divide between them.
“Good-bye,” she managed.
“Wait—have I upset you?” he said. “I meant no offense—it’s just my own—well, never mind.” He bowed theatrically and doffed an imaginary hat. “It was lovely to have met you, fair maiden.”
That night, Benita tossed and turned as she lay in the dingy bedroom she shared with her two brothers under the eaves of the moldering thatched roof of Gruber cottage, replaying her missed opportunity and the tantalizing possibility the man had presented. How had she let Fr?ulein Brebel’s Heimatabend hold her back? This had been her moment, the chance fate had offered, and she had said no! In the face of this dreadful awareness, her family’s cottage seemed particularly moldy and damp, the blankets on the bed disgustingly pilly, and the snores of her brothers as low and dumb as the grunts of sleeping swine.
For the next few days Benita sulked, spending hours on the weedy patch of grass behind the cottage, staring at the sky instead of helping her mother with the wash she took in.
Even by Frühlinghausen standards the Grubers were poor. Benita’s father, long dead, had been a mason like his father and his father before him, primarily employed by the town’s mental hospital—a dank, rambling establishment housed in a building that had once been a monastery and was in constant need of ramification. Their home was one of seven that lined the north wall of its grounds like a row of grubby barnacles. On quiet summer nights the Grubers fell asleep to the moans and cries of the disturbed inmates.
Of the three children still at home, Benita was the only one not gainfully employed. Her two brothers had found work in road construction through Hitler’s Four-Year Plan, and they were always quick to point out that Benita could find work through it as well. There was work for women. But Benita chose to assist her mother with the mending and washing instead. She did not want to commit to anything that might bind her to Frühlinghausen. Because for her real life, her real future, she would go to Berlin and find work as a typist or some such, she was sure of it, though she had never even handled a typewriter.
And Frau Gruber indulged Benita’s dream, much to her other children’s irritation. Benita was her mother’s favorite—the fifth of six and the prettiest of the girls by far. Among her siblings she was famously incompetent and lazy. Faulpelz was what her oldest sister, Lotte, called her, meaning “lazybones,” and it was not intended fondly.
The older children had each been sent to work at the age of fourteen and raised on spotty potatoes and dandelion-weed soup. Those were the desperate days, during and after the war. They begrudged Benita’s privileged status as a member of Hitler’s generation, a cohort filled with pride and idealism and, most of all, with excitement about the future.
Benita had little interest in politics, but she had absorbed the sense of possibility the new regime offered. And Frau Gruber, after so many years of hard and unemotive realism, seemed to have found in Benita’s daydreams her own trampled capacity for yearning. She tolerated in her youngest daughter all the impractical nonsense she would have beaten out of her older children.
So it was fitting, in a sense, that Frau Gruber herself played a role in Benita’s second encounter with Connie Fledermann. It was Saturday, market day, and Benita rose from bed with a grumbling commitment to help her mother buy and carry home their food for the week. Still in a sulk, she put on an old gray skirt and blouse and barely combed her hair. Who would she see, anyway? Ulrich Heschel? Mannfred Becker? In the wake of her meeting with Connie Fledermann, the voice in her head had taken on a sarcastic ring. She trudged along beside her mother, whose stoic German peasant silence seemed to Benita a hallmark of everything dull and cold and lacking in her life.
At the market, Benita dawdled, mooning over Frau Mullman’s flowers and the artist’s stall, until Frau Gruber returned, pulled at her sleeve, and reminded her that she was there to carry the wursts and flour and side of Salzfleisch.
So when, rounding the corner of the cheese maker’s stall, Benita was suddenly confronted with the sight of Connie Fledermann, this time in full, handsome military garb, she was mortified rather than delighted. The horror of being seen so—in these awful clothes, carrying a bulging sack of smoked meats, and followed by her fruit-pinching, sniffing, hunchbacked mother!
He, however, broke into a wide smile. “Fr?ulein of the Anschluss!” he said loudly, causing a few of the passersby to turn and stare. Benita’s face went from cool and white to purple. “I wondered if I would see you again.”
Then he turned with an air of great respect and formality to Frau Gruber. “May I introduce myself? Staff Officer Martin Constantine Fledermann. I met your daughter here the other day and we discussed the recent event of the Anschluss.”
Frau Gruber bobbed her head repeatedly, like a deaf-mute.
Benita, still distracted by the bulging sack in her arms and the particularly ugly shape of her blouse, slowly registered the presence of two other men, both of whom appeared small and dull beside Staff Officer Martin Constantine Fledermann. In the focused light of his attention, all else seemed obscured in shadow. But she thought she caught them rolling their eyes.
“This evening perhaps? Can I take you to dinner?”
Benita stared.
“No?” His eyes twinkled.
“Yes,” Benita said.
“Yes?” he said, turning to Frau Gruber.
“Yah, sicher. Yes, of course,” Frau Gruber said when she finally found her tongue, and her response was so unquestioning—so utterly lacking in parental restraint—that something in Benita snapped to. From that moment on, a subtle but profound shift occurred in her relationship with this man who was to become her husband. In the face of her mother’s mute, girlish awe, Benita realized she would have to act as her own parental figure—creating the barriers and slips that made the game of courtship alluring. It was something she had never even thought of with the various boys of Frühlinghausen who had made their interest known: there had been no game with them, no need for a game, she had taken none of them seriously, had no interest in more than the affirmation their interest provided.