Faithless: Tales of Transgression Read online

  Mother nodded slowly, frowning. These conversations with my aunt seemed always to give her pain, an actual ache behind the eyes, yet she could no more resist them than Aunt Connie. She said, wiping at her eyes, “Papa was a man of pride. After she left us as much as before.”

  “Hmmm!” Aunt Connie made her high humming nasal sound that meant she had something crucial to add, but did not want to appear pushy. “Well—maybe more, Nelia. More pride. After.” She spoke insinuatingly, with a smile and a glance toward me.

  Like an actress who has strayed from her lines, Mother quickly amended, “Yes of course. Because a weaker man would have succumbed to—shame and despair—”

  Aunt Connie nodded briskly. “—might have cursed God—”

  “—turned to drink—”

  “—so many of ’em did, back there—”

  “—but not Papa. He had the gift of faith.”

  Aunt Connie nodded sagely. Yet still with that strange almost-teasing smile.

  “Oh, indeed Papa did. That was his gift to us, Nelia, wasn’t it?—his faith.”

  Mother was smiling her tight-lipped smile, her gaze lowered. I knew that, when Aunt Connie left, she would go upstairs to lie down, she would take two aspirins and draw the blinds and put a damp cold cloth over her eyes and lie down and try to sleep. In her softening middle-aged face, the hue of putty, a young girl’s face shone rapt with fear. “Oh yes! His faith.”

  Aunt Connie laughed heartily. Laugh, laugh. Dimples nicking her cheeks and a wink in my direction.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  YEARS LATER, numbly sorting through Mother’s belongings after her death, I would discover, in a lavender-scented envelope in a bureau drawer, a single strand of dry, ash-colored hair. On the envelope, in faded purple ink Beloved Father John Allard Nissenbaum 1872 – 1957.

  BY HIS OWN ACCOUNT, John Nissenbaum, the wronged husband, had not had the slightest suspicion that his strong-willed young wife had been discontent, restless. Certainly not that she’d had a secret lover! So many local women would have dearly wished to change places with her, he’d been given to know when he was courting her, his male vanity, and his Nissenbaum vanity, and what you might call common sense suggested otherwise.

  For the Nissenbaums were a well-regarded family in the Chautauqua Valley. Among the lot of them they must have owned thousands of acres of prime farmland.

  In the weeks, months, and eventually years that followed the scandalous departure, John Nissenbaum, who was by nature, like most of the male Nissenbaums, reticent to the point of arrogance, and fiercely private, came to make his story—his side of it—known. As the sisters themselves gathered (for their father never spoke of their mother to them after the first several days following the shock), this was not a single coherent history but one that had to be pieced together like a giant quilt made of a myriad of fabric-scraps.

  He did allow that Gretel had been missing her family, an older sister with whom she’d been especially close, and cousins and girlfriends she’d gone to high school with in Chautauqua Falls; he understood that the two-hundred-acre farm was a lonely place for her, their next-door neighbors miles away, and the village of Ransomville seven miles. (Trips beyond Ransomville were rare.) He knew, or supposed he knew, that his wife had harbored what his mother and sisters called wild imaginings, even after nine years of marriage, farm life, and children: she had asked several times to be allowed to play the organ at church, but had been refused; she reminisced often wistfully and perhaps reproachfully of long-ago visits to Port Oriskany, Buffalo, and Chicago, before she’d gotten married at the age of eighteen to a man fourteen years her senior… . In Chicago she’d seen stage plays and musicals, the sensational dancers Irene and Vernon Castle in Irving Berlin’s Watch Your Step. It wasn’t just Gretel wanting to take over the organ at Sunday services (and replacing the elderly male organist whose playing, she said, sounded like a cat in heat), it was her general attitude toward Reverend Dieckman and his wife. She resented having to invite them to an elaborate Sunday dinner every few weeks, as the Nissenbaums insisted; she allowed her eyes to roam the congregation during Dieckman’s sermons, and stifled yawns behind her gloved hand; she woke in the middle of the night, she said, wanting to argue about damnation, hell, the very concept of grace. To the minister’s astonished face she declared herself “not able to fully accept the teachings of the Lutheran Church.”

  If there was another more intimate issue between Gretel and John Nissenbaum, or another factor in Gretel’s emotional life, of course no one spoke of it at the time.

  Though it was hinted—possibly more than hinted?—that John Nissenbaum was disappointed with only daughters. Naturally he wanted sons, to help him with the ceaseless work of the farm; sons to whom he could leave the considerable property, just as his married brothers had sons.

  What was generally known was: John woke in the pitch-dark an hour before dawn of that April day, to discover that Gretel was gone from their bed. Gone from the house? He searched for her, called her name, with growing alarm, disbelief. “Gretel? Gret-el!” He looked in all the upstairs rooms of the house including the bedroom where his sleep-dazed, frightened daughters were huddled together in their bed; he looked in all the downstairs rooms, even the damp, dirt-floor cellar into which he descended with a lantern. “Gretel? Where are you?” Dawn came dull, porous, and damp, and with a coat yanked on in haste over his nightclothes, and his bare feet jammed into rubber boots, he began a frantic yet methodical search of the farm’s outbuildings—the privy, the cow barn and the adjoining stable, the hay barn and the corncrib where rats rustled at his approach. In none of these save perhaps the privy was it likely that Gretel might be found; still John continued his search with growing panic, not knowing what else to do. From the house his now terrified daughters observed him moving from building to building, a tall rigid jerkily moving figure with hands cupped to his mouth shouting, “Gretel! Gret-el! Do you hear me! Where are you! Gret-el!” The man’s deep raw voice pulsing like a metronome, ringing clear, profound, and, to his daughters’ ears, as terrible as if the very sky had cracked open and God Himself was shouting.

  (What did such little girls, eight and five, know of God?—in fact, as Aunt Connie would afterward recount, quite a bit. There was Reverend Dieckman’s baritone impersonation of the God of the Old Testament, the expulsion from the Garden, the devastating retort to Job, the spectacular burning bush where fire itself cried HERE I AM!—such had already been imprinted irrevocably upon their imaginations.)

  Only later that morning—but this was a confused, anguished account—did John discover that Gretel’s suitcase was missing from the closet. And there were garments conspicuously missing from the clothes rack. And Gretel’s bureau drawers had been hastily ransacked—underwear, stockings were gone. And her favorite pieces of jewelry, of which she was childishly vain, were gone from her cedarwood box; gone too, her heirloom, faded-cameo hairbrush, comb, and mirror set. And her Bible.

  What a joke, how people would chuckle over it—Gretel Nissenbaum taking her Bible with her!

  Wherever in hell the woman went.

  And was there no farewell note, after nine years of marriage?—John Nissenbaum claimed he’d looked everywhere, and found nothing. Not a word of explanation, not a word of regret even to her little girls. For that alone we expelled her from our hearts.

  During this confused time while their father was searching and calling their mother’s name, the sisters hugged each other in a state of numbness beyond shock, terror. Their father seemed at times to be rushing toward them with the eye-bulging blindness of a runaway horse—they hurried out of his path. He did not see them except to order them out of his way, not to trouble him now. From the rear entry door they watched as he hitched his team of horses to his buggy and set out shuddering for Ransomville along the winter-rutted Post Road, leaving the girls behind, erasing them from his mind. As he would tell afterward, in rueful self-disgust, with the air of an enlightened sinner, he’d actually belie
ved he would overtake Gretel on the road—convinced she’d be there, hiking on the grassy shoulder, carrying her suitcase. Gretel was a wiry-nervous woman, stronger than she appeared, with no fear of physical exertion. A woman capable of anything!

  John Nissenbaum had the idea that Gretel had set out for Ransomville, seven miles away, there to catch the midmorning train to Chautauqua Falls, another sixty miles south. It was his confused belief that they must have had a disagreement, else Gretel would not have left; he did not recall any disagreement in fact, but Gretel was after all an emotional woman, a high-strung woman; she’d insisted upon visiting the Hausers, her family, despite his wishes, was that it?—she was lonely for them, or lonely for something. She was angry they hadn’t visited Chautauqua Falls for Easter, hadn’t seen her family since Christmas. Was that it? We were never enough for her. Why were we never enough for her?

  But in Ransomville, in the cinder-block Chautauqua & Buffalo depot, there was no sign of Gretel, nor had the lone clerk seen her.

  “This woman would be about my height,” John Nissenbaum said, in his formal, slightly haughty way. “She’d be carrying a suitcase, her feet would maybe be muddy. Her boots.”

  The clerk shook his head slowly. “No sir, nobody looking like that.”

  “A woman by herself. A—” a hesitation, a look of pain, “—good-looking woman, young. A kind of a, a way about her—a way of—” another pause, “—making herself known.”

  “Sorry,” the clerk said. “The 8:20 just came through, and no woman bought a ticket.”

  It happened then that John Nissenbaum was observed, stark-eyed, stiff-springy black hair in tufts like quills, for the better part of that morning, April 12, 1923, wandering up one side of Ransomville’s single main street, and down the other. Hatless, in farm overalls and boots but wearing a suit coat—somber, gunmetal-gray, of “good” wool—buttoned crooked across his narrow muscular torso. Disheveled and ravaged with the grief of a betrayed husband too raw at this time for manly pride to intervene, pathetic some said as a kicked dog, yet eager too, eager as a puppy he made inquiries at Meldron’s Dry Goods, at Elkin & Sons Grocers, at the First Niagara Trust, at the law office of Rowe & Nissenbaum (this Nissenbaum, a young cousin of John’s), even in the five and dime where the salesgirls would giggle in his wake. He wandered at last into the Ransomville Hotel, into the gloomy public room where the proprietor’s wife was sweeping sawdust-strewn floorboards. “Sorry, sir, we don’t open till noon,” the woman said, thinking he was a drunk, dazed and swaying-like on his feet, then she looked more closely at him: not knowing his first name (for John Nissenbaum was not one to patronize local taverns) but recognizing his features. For it was said the male Nissenbaums were either born looking alike, or came in time to look alike. “Mr. Nissenbaum? Is something wrong?” In a beat of stymied silence Nissenbaum blinked at her, trying to smile, groping for a hat to remove but finding none, murmuring, “No ma’am, I’m sure not. It’s a misunderstanding, I believe. I’m supposed to meet Mrs. Nissenbaum somewhere here. My wife.”

  SHORTLY AFTER Gretel Nissenbaum’s disappearance there emerged, from numerous sources, from all points of the compass, certain tales of the woman. How rude she’d been, more than once, to the Dieckmans!—to many in the Lutheran congregation! A bad wife. Unnatural mother. It was said she’d left her husband and children in the past, running back to her family in Chautauqua Falls, or was it Port Oriskany; and poor John Nissenbaum having to fetch her home again. (This was untrue, though in time, even to Constance and Cornelia, it would come to seem true. As an elderly woman Cornelia would swear she remembered “both times” her mother ran off.) A shameless hussy, a tramp who had an eye for men. Had the hots for men. Anything in pants. Or was she stuck-up, snobby. Marrying into the Nissenbaum family, a man almost old enough to be her father, no mystery there! Worse yet she could be sharp-tongued, profane. Heard to utter such words as damn, goddamn, hell. Yes and horseballs, bullshit. Standing with her hands on her hips fixing her eyes on you; that loud laugh. And showing her teeth that were too big for her mouth. She was too smart for her own good, that’s for sure. She was scheming, faithless. Everybody knew she flirted with her husband’s hired hands, she did a hell of a lot more than flirt with them, ask around. Sure she had a boyfriend, a lover. Sure she was an adulteress. Hadn’t she run off with a man? She’d run off and where was she to go, where was a woman to go, except run off with a man? Whoever he was.

  In fact, he’d been sighted: a tower operator for the Chautauqua & Buffalo railroad, big red-headed guy living in Shaheen, twelve miles away. Or was he a carpet sweeper salesman, squirrely little guy with a mustache and a smooth way of talking, who passed through the Valley every few months but, after April 12, 1923, was never seen there again?

  Another, more attractive rumor was that Gretel Nissenbaum’s lover was a thirty-year-old navy officer stationed at Port Oriskany. He’d been transferred to a base in North Carolina, or was it Pensacola, Florida, and Gretel had no choice but to run away with him, she loved him so. And three months pregnant with his child.

  There could have been no romance in the terrible possibility that Gretel Nissenbaum had fled on foot, alone, not to her family but simply to escape from her life; in what exigency of need, what despondency of spirit, no name might be given it by any who have not experienced it.

  But, in any case, where had she gone?

  Where? Disappeared. Over the edge of the world. To Chicago, maybe. Or that army base in North Carolina, or Florida.

  We forgave, we forgot. We didn’t miss her.

  THE THINGS Gretel Nissenbaum left behind in the haste of her departure.

  Several dresses, hats. A shabby cloth coat. Rubberized “galoshes” and boots. Undergarments, mended stockings. Knitted gloves. In the parlor of John Nissenbaum’s house, in cut-glass vases, bright yellow daffodils she’d made from crepe paper; hand-painted fans, teacups; books she’d brought with her from home—A Golden Treasury of Verse, Mark Twain’s Joan of Arc, Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise missing its jacket. Tattered programs for musical shows, stacks of popular piano music from the days Gretel had played in her childhood home. (There was no piano in Nissenbaum’s house, Nissenbaum had no interest in music.)

  These meager items, and some others, Nissenbaum unceremoniously dumped into cardboard boxes fifteen days after Gretel disappeared, taking them to the Lutheran church, for the “needy fund,” without inquiring if the Hausers might have wanted anything, or whether his daughters might have wished to be given some mementos of their mother.

  Spite? Not John Nissenbaum. He was a proud man even in his public humiliation. It was the Lord’s work he was thinking of. Not mere human vanity, at all.

  THAT SPRING and summer Reverend Dieckman gave a series of grim, threatening, passionate sermons from the pulpit of the First Lutheran Church of Ransomville. It was obvious why, what the subject of the sermons was. The congregation was thrilled.

  Reverend Dieckman, whom Connie and Nelia feared, as much for his fierce smiles as his stern, glowering expression, was a short bulky man with a dull-gleaming dome of a head, eyes like ice water. Years later when they saw a photograph of him, inches shorter than his wife, they laughed in nervous astonishment—was that the man who’d intimidated them so? Before whom even John Nissenbaum stood grave and downgazing?

  Yet: that ringing vibrating voice of the God of Moses, the God of the Old Testament, you could not shut out of consciousness even hours, days later. Years later. Pressing your hands against your ears and shutting your eyes tight, tight.

  “ ‘Unto the woman He said, I will GREATLY MULTIPLY thy sorrow and thy conception; IN SORROW shalt thou bring forth children: and thy desire shall be to THY HUSBAND, and he shall RULE OVER THEE. And unto Adam He said, Because thou hast harkened unto the voice of THY WIFE, and hast eaten of THE TREE, of which I commanded thee, saying, THOU SHALT NOT EAT OF IT: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shall thou eat of it all the days of thy life: THORNS ALSO AND THISTLES shall it
bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field; in the SWEAT OF THY FACE shalt thou eat bread, till thou return to the ground; for out of it thou wast taken: for DUST THOU ART, and UNTO DUST SHALT THOU RETURN.’ ” Reverend Dieckman paused to catch breath like a man running uphill. Greasy patches gleamed on his solid face like coins. Slowly his ice-eyes searched the rows of worshipers until as if by chance they came to rest on the upturned yet cowering faces of John Nissenbaum’s daughters, who sat in the family pew, directly in front of the pulpit in the fifth row, between their rigid-backed father in his clothes somber as mourning and their Grandmother Nissenbaum also in clothes somber as mourning though badly round-shouldered, with a perceptible hump, this cheerless dutiful grandmother who had come to live with them now that their mother was gone.

  (Their other grandparents, the Hausers, who lived in Chautauqua Falls and whom they’d loved, the sisters would never see again. It was forbidden even to speak of these people, Gretel’s people. The Hausers were to blame somehow for Gretel’s desertion. Though they claimed, would always claim, they knew nothing of what she’d done and in fact feared something had happened to her. But the Hausers were a forbidden subject. Only after Constance and Cornelia were grown, no longer living in their father’s house, did they see their Hauser cousins; but still, as Cornelia confessed, she felt guilty about it. Father would have been so hurt and furious if he’d known. Consorting with the enemy he would deem it. Betrayal.)

  In Sunday school, Mrs. Dieckman took special pains with little Constance and little Cornelia. They were regarded with misty-eyed pity, like child-lepers. Fattish little Constance prone to fits of giggling, and hollow-eyed little Cornelia prone to sniffles, melancholy. Both girls had chafed, reddened faces and hands because their grandmother Nissenbaum scrubbed them so, with strong gray soap, never less than twice a day. Cornelia’s dun-colored hair was strangely thin. When the other children trooped out of the Sunday school room Mrs. Dieckman kept the sisters behind, to pray with them. She was very concerned about them, she said. She and Reverend Dieckman prayed for them constantly. Had their mother contacted them, since leaving? Had there been any … hint of what their mother was planning to do? Any strangers visiting the farm? Any … unusual incidents? The sisters stared blankly at Mrs. Dieckman. She frowned at their ignorance, or its semblance. Dabbed at her watery eyes and sighed as if the world’s weight had settled on her shoulders. She said half-chiding, “You should know, children, it’s for a reason, that your mother left you. It’s God’s will. God’s plan. He is testing you, children. You are special in His eyes. Many of us have been special in His eyes and have emerged stronger for it, and not weaker.” There was a breathy pause. The sisters were invited to contemplate how Mrs. Dieckman, with her soft-wattled face, her stout corseted body, her fattish legs encased in opaque support hose, was a stronger and not a weaker person, by God’s special plan. “You will learn to be stronger than girls with mothers, Constance and Cornelia—” (these words girls with mothers enunciated oddly, contemptuously) “—you are already learning: feel God’s strength coursing through you!” Mrs. Dieckman seized the girls’ hands squeezing so quick and hard that Connie burst into frightened giggles and Nelia shrieked as if she’d been burnt, and almost wet her panties.