The winter wind blew across Europe
as it would, driving icy rivers before it, circling mountains,
beckoning the frost. In the Munich parlor the dark leaves that were
draped around the portrait of Fridolin Weber had dried in the few
months since his death. Near it, one late afternoon, Sophie Weber
was at the desk writing a letter to her mother’s sisters, bending
close over the paper and biting her lip.
Dearest Aunts Elizabeth and Gretchen,
I pray God that this finds you well and happy. It
seems a very long year since my last birthday when you sent me new
slippers and my family was in Mannheim.
Mother has asked me to write to say how we are
doing. As she would not wish me to conceal the difficulties of our
circumstances to you, I shall be honest.
Sophie chewed on the pen’s edge for a moment to
think straight ... those words: I shall be honest. What was
honest anyway? Who told the utter truth, and, besides that, what
was truth? She sat upright, recalling once more her mother’s words
to Josefa as they all rode back from the funeral. It had taken
months of soothing to lay those words to rest, apologies,
late-night kitchen conversations, tears.
But now, to tell the truth to her aunts. Was not
the reality too bitter to put into ink? Dare she write that their
hearts and lives were in disarray, that they each struggled to
discover the path that would lead them back to their former life,
but they found that the way had been washed out, much like on that
woodlands walk they had all taken years before. Though her father
had remembered the way, and they had set out on their adventure,
they soon found the bridge across the stream was gone. Such was now
the truth of their lives.
Mother could do so little these days. And the
others wouldn’t write, or endlessly put it off:
Father did not leave money, and his brother sent
some, which has gone for firewood and food. Constanze is copying
music, and Aloysia and Josefa are singing in churches and private
concerts, wherever they can. Our uncle Thorwart, who has moved to
Vienna, is trying to procure a small pension for Mother from the
court because of Papa’s service for so many years as musician under
Elector Carl Theodor. By law we women must have a male guardian,
and Thorwart has been appointed, though he interferes rather a lot.
I can’t like him as much as I did, though I must pretend it.
Constanze says he brushes against her breasts all the time, and
then says, “Pardon, pardon!” We have not yet told Mother.
Sophie studied the last few sentences, then
carefully inked them out (certain truths must be withheld for a
time for prudency), blinked back her tears, and continued:
We go bravely forward as Papa would have wished. I
am certain that God will see us through.
She put aside the paper then, because she was
crying and didn’t want her tears to splotch her words, and because,
to her horror, for the first time in her life she was not at all
certain that God would help them through.