The Beasts: A Winter's Tale

The Family

There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy.

-Friedrich Nietzsche

“Are you sure you want me here?” Joyce said.

“Yes,” Peter and Marabeth almost shouted from where they sat at Marabeth’s dining room table.

Then Peter said, “But you don’t have to stay.”

“It’s just that you don’t have to go,” Marabeth said.

Peter turned around and said, “I fully acknowledge that you have a life with other things to do than sit here and watch us is what I’m saying.”

“Well, then I need to acknowledge that too,” Joyce said, getting off the couch. “I’m going to make a run to the store and then I need to lay in my own bed.”

She said to Marabeth, “Do you need me to pick you up anything?’

Before Marabeth could answer, Peter said, “That’s the very definition of not acknowledging you have other things to do than be around us.”

“He is right,” Marabeth admitted reluctantly.

“Well, okay.”

Joyce stood up, put her purse over her shoulder and kissed Marabeth, hugging her. She looked at Peter and he said, “Is it awkward if I get a kiss too?”

“Considering the fact that the two of you have been sleeping together it would be awkward if you didn’t,” Marabeth said.

Peter and Joyce’s hug and kiss was awkward though, and Marabeth said, “I guess that’s my fault for being in the room.”

“I got the kids tonight,” Peter said.

“And you don’t want to shock them with this new floosy.”

“That’s not it at all,” Peter said. “It’s more like I don’t want to try to make you think I’m looking for a step mom. So, I understand if you don’t want to—”

“If you’d like me to come over, I will.”

“I would, actually,” Peter said. “But I’d never dream of—”

“Why don’t you call me when the two of you are done,” Joyce said, tapped him on the shoulder, and walked out of the apartment.

“Wow,” Peter said.

“Yeah,” Marabeth said.

“I haven’t met anyone like her.”

“”That’s what I say all the time.”

But Marabeth was used to Joyce and now she said, “So you’ve got the whole family right down here.”

“I’ve got to,” Peter said. “All of our cousins, all of the descendants of Friederich Strauss. Like, Mary only had a daughter, and she’s a Keller like me, but now her last name is Anderson. If she has a boy he’ll be an Anderson, but I need to know if and when he makes the Change. We can’t lose sight of our family, of the Gene, or whatever it is, no matter how many generations pass or what the last name is. Great Aunt Claire only had two kids because her husband died so young, and she never married again. Just twins, Fred and Katherine. Katherine only had daughters, so all of her descendants have different last names, but when a boy pops up, we have to know.”

“Dan and Andy,” Marabeth murmured.

“Tina’s kids.”

“I don’t really know them that well,” Marabeth said, “but they’re teenagers. I mean, Andy’s going to college, right?”

“Right.”

“And they’ve both got a little star on their names.”

“They never went through the Change,” Peter said.

“Oh?”

Then Marabeth said, “Uh!”

“What?”

“Derek didn’t either. Their first cousin. None of the men in Claire’s… No, that’s not true, none of the men in Claire’s daughter’s line,went through the Change. Let me see something.”

Peter waited, watching Marabeth look over their family tree, the tip of her tongue darting from between her lips.

“Either there’s something very special about Claire,” Marabeth said, “Or very special about Cousin Katherine, or….”

“Yeah?”

“The Change or the… Gene or… whatever you want to call it, doesn’t pass through two successive female generations.”

“That’s what I thought,” Peter said. “I mean, that’s what it looks like. That branch of the family is the only one descended from Friederich’s daughter, and through a granddaughter.”

“Either it passes out,” Marabeth said. “Or it becomes what it was. Something that has to be awakened, something more controllable.”

“Right,” Peter said. “Which, if I didn’t have boys would be a bit of a relief. At least, it seems, we can drop our guard on that branch of the family.”

“But none of this is science,” Marabeth said. “It’s all guesswork. The idea that if I had a daughter, then my grandson would be… not normal, but…”

“Latent,” Peter said. “I call it latent.”

“That’s a good word.”

Peter grinned, “And it’s still all speculation.”

“Yeah,” Marabeth half agreed, “but not that much speculation. And after all, if this thing was that uncontrollable, if there were that many werewolves walking around, then what about Friederich’s brothers and sisters, or his cousins. You realize we don’t know anything about other Strausses, anything about where he came from?”

“You’ve got a point. Say, if it’s not too much trouble, could you bring the journal by and I could copy some of it?”

“You can take it,” Marabeth pushed it toward him. “I mean, I want it back, but print what you need.”

“You’d trust me with it?”

“Yeah,” Marabeth shrugged. “But you have to go. I need to get in the shower and find something to wear, not necessarily in that order.”

“You got a hot date tonight?”

“As a matter of fact,” Marabeth answered, “I do.”

The Book of Pamela Strauss

IN THE DAY I am reading, and in the night I am reading, though through the day I go with Ada to help her with childbirths. Then we see only horse carts and the men to shovel their shit from the street. We take a carriage up the cobbles of Kaiser Wilhelm Street, and then around the corner to Dimlerstrasse. There, the beer factories a backdrop to them, are a line of proud houses. Rounding the corner we pass a sizable plot of land with a little chapel and a small school on it.

“That is where the Negroes are building their church,” Ada says. “They are going to put a school up as well. I have heard some say it will rival Saint Ursula. I cannot say.”

All the way down Dimler, dwarving the houses, is the steeple of a great church, white stone, with high steps going up the porch. This is the German Catholic church, Saint Ursula, and down the road is the German Lutheran Church, Saint Paul the Apostle. But right now we stop in front of one of the tall elegant townhouses. We come up the flight of steps and Ava knocks on the door. It is a fine house, and the door has a cut glass border all around it. A maid in black white lace apron opens the door. She is Irish I am told later, and she says, “Mistress has been waiting for you.”

I take in the high ceilings, the high stair that goes up to the next level where the lady of the house, Mrs. Dashbach, far too old to have a child, is struggling in labor.

“I told her when she first came to me,” Ada said, “that I could make it as if the child never were. God forgives all, I said.”

In the great bedroom that overlooks the street, in a great canopied bed, Mrs. Dashbach struggles in labor. Only her daughter is present, for it is not fit for men to be present in labor.

“You do not have to be here, Child,” Ada says.

“I will not leave my mother,” says Katherine.

She is tall, but very slender, blond, pale. Her accent is utterly American. Ada nods and says, “Good girl. Go fetch water then, would you?”

It is a bloody labor, a labor of hands rolled up and arms covered in blood. In the end, a baby is delivered, small and weak, and given to his weak mother.

“Pamela, you go downstairs and take tea with Miss Dashbach,” she says, nodding to Katherine, and we both depart. Downtairs, in the kitchen, the servants make tea and we drink it in the parlor with Katherine’s father. We are not through half the cup when Ada comes into the parlor, her face drawn, and she says to Mr. Dashbach, “Victor, you must see your wife. You son has died.”

Katherine goes up with her father, and Ada says to me, “I knew when I saw it that the baby would not live.”

“What do we do?’

“I can call on the Steiglers, but I will do it after we leave. We must…” Ada is choosing her words carefully, “stay here a while longer. I am going up. If you would, ask the servants to bring cold water.”

We stay until Mrs. Dashbach is flush, until she hallucinates, and her face goes from pale to white to green, until her heart seizes, and she dies in the bed. As Ada closes her eyes and sings to the dead mother, I understand that this is what she was waiting for. I stay with Katherine while Ada cleans up. On the old telephone, Katherine rings her relations and as it darkens, we climb into the handsome cab and ride down the road, first to Steigler and Steiglers to tell them of the mother and child they must pick up, and then to Saint Ursula’s to light candles. I am filled with sorrow for the death of the woman and her baby, but—and a little ashamed of this—filled with wonder at the beauty of their house and the entirely different beauty of this church in the early evening, with it’s marble floors and high pillars and stain glass windows. How are those black people, those colored people with their little school house of a church ever to surpass this wonder? I light candles at the exquisite feet of the Mother of God, her eyes lifted up, her hands outspread. Up until now I have barely been in churches. Now the Mother is something cosmic, ancient, and infinitely sad. Sad she seems, sad enough and wonderful enough for all that I have experienced this night.

But there is more sorrow to follow, much more than that private grief of the Dashbachs. No sooner are they buried, then, as the summer comes to an end, rumors that have shaken Germantown come true, and Germany goes to war with Britain. For a time things with us are mildly safe, but it is when America enters the war that people who have, until now, been respectful and apparently envious of us, come through our streets, throw rocks through our windows, dare to come up to houses and deface them. Some of us do not want to antagonize. Others, proud as ever, come out with their guns. The life we knew becomes impossible. The Morning Star, our German newspaper, is fast going out of business. Parents pull their children out of the schools, even out of Saint Ursula’s. The Schlaudeckers German Shepherd is shot and someone kicks the Freidbach’s dachshund to death. Ah, but I knew people were evil. This has never been far from my mind. Then, suddenly, where there was violence on our street, the Americans, the Anglos, the whoever is after Germans, are leaving us as alone.

Those who antagonized us are being found dead, with their throats ripped out by wolves. I go on the patrol as well. Suddenly money, either for gratitude or in hopes of protection, comes into the pockets of Friederich and it no longer makes since for us to live in the Keller house. We get a little house on Decker Strausse which is now called Decker Street. Kaiser Wilhelm is now Williams Street and Suddenly Dimlerstrasse, Dimler Avenue. A part of me is enraged at how quickly we gave up ourselves to prove to these lesser men that we are just as American as they. By now, the war Frau Inga had predicted was full blown, and in the middle of 1917. a letter came from Wurzburg with the familiar script of Hans, Frau Inga’s caretaker. It said that Frau Inga, at a good age, had died in her sleep, and Ada counted back the days to when Hans wrote it had happened and said, “All that night I was troubled for Mama, All that night.”

Ada did not speak for three weeks.

Though I was far from being a little girl, I needed some comfort in those days. The papers told us that the world was falling apart, and the papers that I loved, our German papers were no longer in business. We could scarcely leave Germantown for the hatred thrown on us, and we were not entirely safe in our own houses. This was when I learned that hate was the way of the world, and people would hate whatever they could for whatever reason.

In that time, oddly enough, the people who faired well enough were the Blacks. Ada told me how, long ago, even before the Germans and then alongside them, the Blacks had settled along the river in land that touched what was Germantown now, and land that was on the otherside of Buren Boulevard. She had not believed they would be able to build a splendid church. I had seen in New York, lovely Black churches, but they were Protestant ones. The number of Black Catholics usually did not warrant or afford a large church, but suddenly, in the midst of the war, on the barren plot they’d bought, the foundation was dug, and up from it, a church began to grow. The foundation was dug not only by the Blacks, but by the Irish who lived in Rockriver, and the plans were done by the Herr Hans Bueller, infamous for the tower house he lived in, and his Black mistress, a Creole woman called Etienne. He did not work on it alone, but with Alphonse Lacreaux. We all knew the name, for he lived in a brick house near downtown where few colored people lived, and in those days of the war the colored Catholics were—entertaining was not the word, but—mystifying.

We talked of them over dinner and left them in peace, but took them in curiosity and awe. Once, one of the Schlaudecker boys had walked past the emerging church, shouting something about niggers, but, and this is a surprising time given the age we lived in when even white people did not like each other, it simply would not be borne. It was as if the residents of Germantown had seen enough hatred in their direction and would not see it in another. And no matter what tales of meek blackness have come down through the years, the residents of Saint Agatha parish did not take such insults lying down.

Most of them had come from Louisiana, New Orleans and thereabouts. Later I would learn that some had come from that mysterious Caribbean island, Haiti. First there had been the Blacks, and then had come the Sisters of Providence to teach them. The little church had been theirs, the little house their convent. The school had gone up next, and once taught, children were baptized. Then had come the folks from New Orleans, and once or twice the bishop had sent a priest to the parish, but the nuns and congregation had politely sent him back, requesting a Black one. They did this again and again until they got one and now they had five.

When I had first come to Germantown, only the small school, the convent, and the little church were taking up a sizeable plot of land. Now the new church rose in lovely pink brick and white concrete arches. Now, jewel like, came the stain glass windows, the delicate dragonly patters of the rafters, the spire rising high. The nuns in their black, rosaries at their sides, were an unreadable and silent flock of sober caramel faces. One would have had to be sober to undertake the life of a Negro nun.

And then, in the midst of the worst of things, when our houses were being defaced by the people who called themselves true Americans, there appeared the members of Saint Agatha’s, with guns, walking the streets.

“What in the world are they doing?” Ada’s daughter, who was pregnant with her first wondered. “Do you think they will attack?”

“You do not understand the lay of things,” Ada said, shaking her head. “It is only the other white people who have bothered us. They are not attacking. The Negroes are protecting.”

“They are staking their claim,” Friederich understood. “By protecting Germantown they are saying that no one can attack us, their neighbors. But they are wolves like us. By protecting Germantown, they are letting every white man, including ourselves, know that it is theirs. All,” Friederich marveled, “without saying a word.”