Blue Glass

Ilse

"I don't understand." My mother's voice quavers uncharacteristically as she turns her head to one side to look at me, her face ashen, her eyes bloodshot from crying. "How could he do this to me? To us?"
I shake my head in an outward attempt to sympathize. "I don't know, Mama. I don't know."
How did this happen?
My mother shuts her eyes as fresh ribbons of tears snake down the ridges and valleys of her wrinkled cheeks. I could count the number of times I had seen my mother shed tears on the fingers of one hand, and even then it hadn't been this bad. She was sobbing now, having pulled the thick blanket I had covered her with up to her chin, her tears disappearing into the edge of the material.
It broke my heart.
"I'll find him, Mama," I said quickly. "I'll telegram him and make him come home and explain himself to you. There must be something we don't know here, something that he will be able to tell us that will smooth this over."
When she didn't say anything, I laid a hand on her shoulder. "Manfred is engaged, Mama. He wouldn't do something rash like sleep around with working class wine sellers. He'll come home and explain himself and make everything right, I promise!"
A feeble nod was all I got in return, but it was enough. I turned tail and literally ran out of the room, down the hall to my brother's room.

I knew what I would do before I even opened the door, as if with each step I had to take to get from my mother's room to his room a piece of my plan of action came together in my head. The doorknob bounced off the wall behind it from how hard I shoved the door open, resulting in a thunderous bang that echoed up and down the hallway. I cringed as I gently closed it behind me and leaned against the polished wood, drawing one breath after another.
I took a long look around my brother's room—at his trophy cups, at the spoils of his aerial conquests littering the walls, at his perfectly made bed. It's only when my gaze lands on his writing desk does rage flood my senses: slow burning, venomous rage, not towards my brother but at the Austrian bitch who has him wrapped around her index finger. Everything that's happening to my mother now is her fault. If she hadn't thrown herself at Manfred and employed all the tricks working class women had up their sleeves when it came to men, he would have stayed faithful to Adele and his image as his mother's heir would have remained unblemished.
What will I say to Adele? What will my mother say to her? To her parents?
I stormed over to the writing desk and began to sweep papers and pens off of the wooden surface. They made a sharp rustling sound as they hit the carpeted floor one after another, falling in a flurry of white. I gathered them all in a stack and dropped to my knees next to the three small drawers beneath the desk.
The first drawer was just extra blank sheets of paper and spare inkwells and fountain pen nibs that I removed and placed on the floor for no apparent reason. I didn't want him to be able to write a single letter to the Austrian anymore.
The second drawer held draft upon draft of his book, Der Rote Kampfflieger. I remembered how day after day him, my mother, and I would all sit in the living room and write chapter after chapter, page after page. My mother would knit and watch the two of us do the writing, and listen thoughtfully as we read aloud what we had come up with so far, offering corrections every now and then. Every evening, we would collect our day's work and give it to the pretty blonde stenographer from Berlin for her to send to the publishers there. Her presence had caused quite a stir in our town, especially after she had been seen with Manfred. I hadn't been there to personally witness it, but my mother had told me about one time when, as Manfred walked her up to the garden gate, two women wrongly assumed they were formally engaged or at least courting. Manfred had, in full view of my mother, threaded his arm through the stenographer's and introduced her as "my fiancée." Him and my mother had recounted the story to me in the evening when I returned from my nursing duties, and we all had had a good laugh over it.
We were only laughing at the absurdity of the situation, I thought as I whipped open the third and last drawer. Manfred would never have even considered marriage to a commoner. My mother had grand plans for him and his future, and he knew that.
The third drawer was empty save for an suspicious looking pile of letters secured to each other with a length of wire. I uncoiled the strip of thin metal and riffled through the stack of envelopes. They were all from the same sender: Lea. Lea Schwarz.
I would have spat on her name if it hadn't been inculcated in me from a young age that spitting in general was an act reserved for men, and that women should employ more gentler techniques to vent their anger, ways that were appropriate to their gender. Better yet, they should refrain from getting angry at all, for it was a masculine characteristic as well. Although I knew it would only enrage me further, I tore open the first envelope and unfurled the yellowed paper inside, squinting at the wobbly handwriting.