The Baker's Daughter

Chapter Forty-five

SCHMIDT BÄCKEREI

56 LUDWIGSTRASSE

GARMISCH, GERMANY

DECEMBER 23, 1955

Lillian sat reading The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien. A British pilot on winter holiday had given it to her. He’d read it twice and was looking to free up space in his pack before returning home to London. Lillian was a perpetual bookworm and wanted the novel desperately as an early Christmas present. Her opa agreed to the gift for educational purposes only—so Lillian could improve her English. She was the lone family member who could properly communicate with the American and English patrons shuttling in and out the bäckerei door.

“Lillian, put that book down and help Opa finish up,” instructed her oma. “Strong, young hands like yours might be exactly what he needs.”

Lillian sighed and shut the book. Frodo and his friends had just set off to Rivendell. She was heavyhearted to leave the grand adventure and return to her mundane world of rising yeast dough and day-old bread.

Oma covered marzipan sugarplums with dainty strips of parchment so they wouldn’t be peppered with dead fruit flies by morning. In the kitchen, Opa still worked by dusky candle; some of the wax had splashed against the glass luminary, further marginalizing its light. She slid her fingers to the electric wall switch for the overhead bulb but then thought better and let it be.

She watched him from the shadows as he rolled the molasses dough into a smooth, thick skin across the baking board. He took up a giant heart-shaped cookie cutter, positioned it precisely, and pressed down.

For the last-minute Christmas customers, they already had over a dozen lebkuchen, iced with frilly edges and piped with Christmas greetings. But the ones he made now were not for anybody with a deutsche mark to spare. These were special hearts—the gingerbread Opa made each Christmas with their names embroidered in icing.

Opa hummed “Silent Night” as he cut and laid the cookies on the baking sheet. The names of her family: Max, Luana, Julius, Lillian, Hazel, Peter, Elsie, and Albert. He always made eight, though the last four stayed high up on the tree, uneaten and growing hard as slate.

Her parents, Hazel and Peter, had died during the war, or so her Oma told her. But children talk as children do, especially in small towns like Garmisch. When she was still in bloomers, the truth of her paternity was already being whispered about on the playground. It was her schoolmate Richelle Spreckels, the daughter of Trudi Abend Spreckels, who finally broke the news in a rage after being tagged out in a high-stakes game of Fangen.

“It’s not fair!” Richelle cried. “You’re not supposed to be here! Nobody even knows who your papa is!”

The group of children had hushed around Lillian. The game of chase abruptly ended.

“My papa is Peter and my mother is Hazel!” Lillian defended.

“Your mother may be Hazel Schmidt, but my mamma says Peter Abend is not your papa! She knows. She is his sister!” And with that, Richelle had scooped up a wad of soft mud and flung it, streaking Lillian’s smocked, pink dress. A handful of surrounding children had tittered.

She walked home muddy and shamed, and while Oma cleaned the dress as best she could, the stains remained.

“Who did this to you and why?” Oma had asked, but Lillian refused to tell, not wanting to call Oma a liar and afraid to hear the truth come from her mouth. It pricked her deep within, the way the truth does, and she didn’t want to believe until she had facts to back it up.

But from that day forward, Richelle’s accusation remained in the back of her mind—“You’re not supposed to be here.” This became her quest: to find out exactly who she was and where she was supposed to be. Lillian made few friends in school, preferring the company of her oma and opa, the friendly customers of the bakery, the faraway characters in her storybooks, and her tante Elsie’s letters.

Elsie and Albert lived in the United States, a place called Texas where cowboys rode white stallions and Indians made colorful shawls dyed with berry juices. Those were the stories from Elsie’s letters. They were full of adventure and word pictures: the desert sun oozing into the horizon like a giant fried egg; lizards with iridescent green scales lounging in the shade of porcupine cacti; the Rio Grande River snaking through the sand dunes, alive with reptiles and water fowl come to quench their thirsts in the only basin for miles. When she was very young, Lillian begged Oma to read from the letters at bedtime. Under the whispered spell of storytime, she dreamed of Elsie and wondered how the small vanillekipferl moon hanging over her Zugspitze could possibly be the same great spotlight in the Texan sky.

Everything Elsie described sounded bigger and more wondrous than anything she’d ever seen in Germany. Sometimes Lillian could barely contain her excitement when Elsie wrote about galloping on horseback across the plains, a dust storm at her back and thunder clapping above. She’d squealed aloud under her eiderdown, and Oma would shush her not to wake Opa. Early on, Oma warned Lillian not to mention the letters to anyone. “Some things are secrets,” she explained and Lillian agreed. She treasured this confidence between them.

Opa never spoke of Elsie, and before her brother Julius went off to boarding school, he told Lillian that he doubted Elsie would ever set foot in Germany again. A stern young man, she’d always been afraid of crossing him. He rarely came home from Munich anymore, and though she’d never say it aloud, Lillian didn’t miss him. She did miss Elsie, though. An aunt she’d never met in the flesh. She confessed to Oma that one of her nightly prayers was for Elsie to walk in the bäckerei door. Oma said she prayed the same thing.

Whenever an unknown woman entered the shop, Lillian’s heart would pitter-patter so that she could barely take the order; inevitably, the customer would smile at her flightiness, pay, and leave. Lillian wished she knew what the adult Elsie looked like so she could avoid such crescendos of hope. There was only one photograph of her mother and aunt in the house—a picture Oma kept of the girls sitting beneath the branches of a cherry tree. Lillian had studied the image so thoroughly that she knew the exact count of freckles on her mother’s cheek, the exact number of teeth in Elsie’s smile. For the rest, she relied on the letters.

In them, Elsie was kind, loving, and fearless; and she knew more stories about her mother than anyone in the world. She wrote about the cherry tree photograph, sharing Hazel’s secret wishes and how they came to be; of Hazel’s love of music and beautiful dresses; how she was the most graceful woman in Garmisch and the most faithful sister. It made Lillian long for a sister of her own, and she often pretended the Toni doll Elsie sent from America was her younger sibling. Oma told her to be grateful for her brother Julius, and she would’ve found that easy to do if he had shown an ounce of sibling affection. So she clung to what she knew for certain: half of her was unquestionably Schmidt.

Opa put cheesecloth over the cutouts and set the tray aside. Though he never spoke their names, Elsie and Albert appeared on the tree branches every year, reminding Lillian and everyone else that despite it all, they were family.

Opa turned. “Ach, Lillian! You surprised me.”

“I’m sorry, Opa. Oma told me to help you.”

“Doch!” He clapped his hands together. “As you can see, I’m finished. We just have to put away these scraps.” He began to pull the remnants of the gingerbread into a ball. “Come, help me.”

Lillian went to his side. He smelled of cinnamon, ginger, and cardamom, and she leaned close to his side; he smelled like Christmas.

“Here, have a taste.” He pinched a piece of dough and popped it in her mouth.

Molasses sweet and spicy. Lillian let it dissolve on her tongue and slip down her throat. “It’s good.”

He kissed her forehead. “Don’t tell Oma. She’ll be cross with me for giving you treats before bed.”

She smiled. She was good at keeping secrets.

That night, Oma sat up in Lillian’s room darning her wool school stockings. Lillian’s feet were cold beneath her bed covers, and she wanted to hear a story.

“Would you lie with me a little, Oma? I can’t sleep yet,” pleaded Lillian. She knew she was too old for bedtime stories, but hoped Oma would relent.

Oma sighed, set down her needle and thread, and slipped beneath the covers.

Lillian laced her feet between hers.

“You’re freezing, child!” Oma fluffed the blankets around them.

“Are you excited for Christmas?” asked Lillian.

“Ja,” said Oma. “Are you?”

Lillian tucked the covers under her chin and nodded. “Do you think we’ll get a letter from Tante Elsie?”

Oma pulled Lillian into the crook of her arm. “She always writes on Christmas.”

Lillian knew that to be true but wanted Oma’s reassurance.

“I bought the carp today. Fat as a giant pinecone. Did you see?”

Lillian shook her head. “But I did see Opa making our lebkuchen hearts.” She giggled and buried her face against Oma.

“Did you now.” Oma took a deep breath, her body rising and falling heavily.

“Do you think Julius will mind if I have his, since he’s staying at school this year?”

“You’ll have to ask Opa,” replied Oma. “Now, all warm. It is time for sleeping.” She leaned forward to stand, but Lillian stopped her.

“Don’t go yet, please. Would you read to me—the letter about the day Tante Elsie helped Onkel Albert at the hospital? The one where she gave a candy stripe to the boy with a broken arm.”

“Candy striper. In America, they are like nurses, but their job is to comfort the sick,” explained Oma. She reached beneath the mattress for where they kept the wad of letters. “What was the date?”

“It was summer,” said Lillian. “Because she said they had their first summer storm that cracked flaming icicles across the sky.” Her heart sped up reciting Elsie’s words. “The boy had been so scared, he fell off his chair and broke his arm.”

“Ack ja,” said Oma. “It was August, I believe.” She flipped through the envelopes until she found the one. “August 3.” The pages crinkled against her fingers. “Dear Mutti and Lillian,” she began.

Lillian closed her eyes, snuggled down close, and let her imagination drift across the ocean.