Chapter 20

Frau Brandt arrived on the second of October, six days ahead of the wedding, her health having proven equal to the crossing after all, and Anna wept openly at the train station when the old woman stepped down onto the platform, thinner than Anna remembered and leaning more heavily on her cane than she once had, but unmistakably, gloriously herself, already scolding the porter about the careless handling of her single battered suitcase before Anna had even finished closing the distance between them.

“Did you think an ocean would keep me from this?” Frau Brandt demanded, folding Anna into an embrace that belied her frailty entirely. “I have crossed worse distances than that for less worthy occasions. Now — where is that child? I have brought her something from the garden she will not soon forget, and I did not carry it across an entire ocean to have it sit forgotten in my luggage.”

Heidi, spotting her from across the platform, abandoned all pretense of composure and ran the length of it shrieking her delight, and the reunion that followed — Frau Brandt kneeling with considerable effort to gather the child properly into her arms, Heidi chattering at a volume that drew smiles from every stranger within earshot — struck Anna as one more small proof of everything this past year had taught her about the durability of love that had never required blood to make itself real.

The gift, when Frau Brandt finally produced it from her luggage that evening, proved to be a small clay pot containing a cutting from her own garden — a hardy rosemary bush that had, Frau Brandt explained, grown along the low stone wall where Larry had first kissed Anna, carefully wrapped and tended through the whole of the crossing with the same stubborn devotion the widow brought to most things she’d decided mattered. “Plant it somewhere it will get sun,” she instructed Anna. “It will not thank you for shade, and neither, I think, will the memory it’s meant to carry with it. I could not bring you the garden itself. I thought a piece of it might serve, regardless.”

Larry, meeting Frau Brandt properly for the first time since the wedding at the registrar’s office, found himself on the receiving end of the same frank assessment she’d once given him on a station platform in Erding, though this time, watching her study him, he seemed entirely unbothered by the scrutiny, having long since proven himself to whatever standard the old woman intended to hold him against.

“You have kept your word,” Frau Brandt said, after a long moment’s study. “I can see it plainly enough, in how she looks at you, and in how the child runs to you without a second’s hesitation. I did not doubt you would. But an old woman likes to confirm such things with her own eyes, rather than trust entirely to letters.”

“Wouldn’t have it any other way, ma’am,” Larry said. “Glad you made the crossing to check for yourself.”

Ilse had written, in the weeks before the wedding, with genuine regret that her own health and the length of the journey made the crossing impossible for her, but she had sent, by careful post, a small parcel that arrived only two days before the ceremony — a handkerchief, delicately embroidered, that had belonged, her letter explained, to Rolf’s own grandmother, passed down through three generations of Hoffman women and now, Ilse insisted, rightfully Anna’s to carry on her wedding day. Something borrowed and something old, both at once, the letter read, though I understand from Larry’s own letters that you Americans are fussy about such traditions being kept separately. Forgive an old woman’s economy. I could not bear to send two things when one would carry the whole of what I meant by it.

Anna carried the handkerchief tucked into her sleeve on the morning of the wedding, a small, private thread connecting the ceremony to everything that had come before it — Rolf, and Ilse’s blessing, and the whole long road that had carried her from a forest in Bavaria to a farmhouse bedroom in Ohio, where Dorothy now fussed over the final arrangement of her veil with hands not quite steady from her own gathering emotion.