The Ragged Edge of Night(7)

Elisabeth needs his help. These children need his help—Albert and Paul and little Maria. Anton has never turned his back on a child in need, except when the guns of the Schutzstaffel forced him to do it. Except when the Schutzstaffel goaded him into unforgivable cowardice.

“Their father,” Anton says gently. “Was it the war… ?”

Elisabeth’s face goes blank as a wiped slate. She sits up straighter, shoulders square, hands precisely folded on the tabletop. “No, not the war. It was blood poisoning that took him.”

“I’m sorry to hear it.” He waits, inviting her to say more, but she only watches him, silent and firm. It’s clear she will not speak another word on the subject of Herr Herter, the first husband. Anton must be content with her silence.

“Do you have any questions for me?”

“Yes,” Elisabeth says. Now that they have broached the uncomfortable fact of her widowhood, she lifts the teacup again. This time she drinks, a long, thirsty draft; the tea has gone cool enough to take it in all at once. “In your letter, you said you were a brother of the Franciscans.”

“I was.”

“And you left the order because… ?”

He smiles. “It was not my choice to leave.”

“Of course.” She blushes, and the coloring of her cheeks seems to strip away years and hardship, revealing a bright yet delicate portrait of the girl she once was. She is like the soft white core of wood exposed by a carver’s knife—hard outer layers stripped away, scars and weather-beaten crags gone for the moment. Inside, a tenderness, yielding and sweet. She says, “I am sorry, mein Herr. I should have been more thoughtful.”

He laughs lightly. The sound lifts her brows, and perhaps her spirit. “You are no trouble to me, Elisabeth. If we are to be married, we must get comfortable with one another. We must speak freely.”

“If. Yes.” She picks up the paper, opens it to the advertisement section. Anton watches as she reads the notice she placed three weeks ago. It’s a plea for mercy and relief, sent out in a moment of surpassing desperation to a world too tortured to care. She blushes again, as if for the first time she sees her plight through another person’s eyes—Anton’s, and those of all the other men who chanced to read her notice but were not moved to respond.

As for Anton, he has read Elisabeth’s advertisement so many times, he can recite it like holy scripture.

Good churchgoing woman, widowed, mother of three. In need of a humble, patient man, willing to be a father to my children. Interest in legitimate marriage only. I have no money, so those who think to profit need not reply. Must be willing to relocate to Unterboihingen, Württemberg, as health will not permit us to move elsewhere.

She sets the paper down and looks at him—stares at him, assessing his fitness for the role, guessing at his motives. The moment stretches, silent but for a sudden clash of pans from somewhere inside the bakery and in the distance the low, repetitive clucks of a yard full of hens. Elisabeth is perfectly still, clear-eyed and considering. She is asking herself every question she can think to pose; Anton can all but hear her thoughts. Have I done something foolish? Have I set in motion something I can never stop? He is a stranger to me; what kind of mother trusts the lives of her children to unknown hands? But Mother Mary, I am left with little choice.

When she speaks, she asks a question Anton did not anticipate. “Will I be condemned for this, I wonder?”

“Condemned? I don’t understand.”

She lowers her eyes and turns the teacup on its saucer. “This is a kind of whoredom, wouldn’t you say?”

Startled, he finds he can barely hold back a laugh. “Certainly, I would not say it. Your advertisement specified that you sought a legitimate marriage. God does not consider marriage a sin, meine Dame.”

“He might consider this marriage a sin.”

Her voice is so low, Anton hardly catches the words. He thinks perhaps he was not intended to hear them. Gently, he says, “What do you mean?”

Resolute, Elisabeth straightens. She lifts her face and meets Anton’s eye with a frank, unwavering stare. “I made no secret that I am only seeking a husband for his money.”

“Times are hard, Elisabeth. We all must do what we must do.”

“But this? Does it not go too far, to offer… what a wife has to give… for money’s sake? And anyhow, I still—” She breaks off and casts her eyes down again, but Anton can see the sudden shimmer of dampness on her lashes.

“You still love your first husband,” he guesses.

Elisabeth doesn’t shrink from his words. She only nods, calm and stoic. “Yes. So I wonder, is it a sin—is it harlotry—to marry under false pretense?”

Anton smiles, relieved or amused—or both. He sees at once how to set her mind at ease, and it’s only now, in finding the solution to Elisabeth’s turmoil, that he can identify the vague, formless fear that has clung to him from his first correspondence with the widow. Hitler may have torn away the friar’s robes, but Brother Nazarius still lives in Anton’s heart. From age eighteen, he has lived under a vow of chastity. Perhaps if he had left the order of his own accord, he might find it easier to imagine doing what husbands and wives do. He might picture himself leading any number of women into every conceivable variety of harlotry and whoredom. But this was never his choice, and he is not so eager to abandon his old Franciscan ways.