Elsie did not see how finding the fraulein at this point would solve anything, but she didn’t want to add to his distress. What difference would it make if they found her? She was a perfect stranger to Anna. And even if Fraulein Klinkhammer really had been acting on some sort of maternal feeling by trying to find a better life for her and eventually her child, which was unlikely—even the usually generous Elsie allowed herself to admit—she was probably not any closer to being able to provide for Anna than she had been when she originally fled Germany after Heinrich.
“Is that why she’s here with you now? Because she can’t go back to the orphanage?”
“No, it is because . . . because sometimes I bring her back. For a visit. I thought maybe it would help her, but all it does is confuse her more, I am thinking.”
“Why does she call you ‘Papa’?” Elsie asked tentatively.
Gunther sighed. “I do not know. When she was very little, just learning to talk, I called myself Onkle to her, but it did not stick. It was probably one of the lodgers who thought it is amusing to teach her to call me ‘Papa.’ Anyway, she just does. And now I do not have heart to tell her. Constantly, she asks for my mother, her Oma. She does not understand she is dead,” he said hoarsely, so much so that Elsie thought her own heart might break.
Carefully, she pulled out one of her hands, nearly numb, from under Anna and reached out across the table to take Gunther’s hand in hers.
He looked up at her, surprised.
“Gunther, I will help you,” she said steadily. “We’ll find a way.”
“No,” he said, sitting up straight and pulling his hand free. “It is not for you to worry about. And I would not take you from your studies. You have much worries of your own. I know this, Elsie.” He paused. “But I thank you.”
“I would like to help you,” Elsie insisted, her face warm from the fact that he had pulled away his hand. “I have very few to . . . to care for. I can study and help you to find this Fraulein Klinkhammer.”
“But how? You have not much time between your class and your family. Aunt Agatha and all of these. Lloyd Aston,” he said with a sad grin.
“I’ll think of something. I’m . . . I’m very resourceful, you know.”
“I do know.”
They stared at each other for several moments, during which time Elsie was tempted to say aloud the words she believed he already knew—but she just couldn’t. She opened her mouth to speak, but the words died in her throat. It was not the time for it, or to be thinking of herself, she reasoned.
“Besides this habitual or sanctifying grace there is also actual grace,” Sr. Raphael was reading aloud. “Actual grace is that grace which empowers us to perform actions and operations proportionate to our ultimate end, the vision of God in his proper essence. By its means we build up within us the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity, the cardinal virtues of prudence—justice, fortitude, and temperance—and the moral virtues. Since all of these are the fruit of grace, they are called infused virtues.”
Sr. Raphael stopped reading from the book she held in front of her, her spectacles nearly at the end of her nose, and perused the class. “I think that’s all the time we have, girls,” she said, glancing at the brown wall clock. “You’ll have to read the rest of Reverend Lapierre’s chapter on Aquinas’s interpretation of grace on your own. I had hoped to have time to discuss, but never mind. Instead, I want you to write a paper for Thursday on one of the cardinal virtues.”
Elsie gave a small internal groan. She hadn’t been listening. Again. Since visiting Gunther in his hut, she had become nearly obsessed with helping him. At one point, she ventured to ask her roommate, Melody, if she had ever heard of a Liesel Klinkhammer. Disappointedly, she had not—which was significant considering Melody claimed to know almost everyone at Mundelein and “loads” of girls, not to mention boys, at the neighboring Loyola as well. Melody had of course begged to know who this Liesel was, but Elsie put her off by telling her it was “the daughter of a friend of her mother’s who had maybe worked here at one point.”
“Criminy! Why didn’t you say!” Melody had laughed. “I don’t know all the staff! Pops would not approve of me fraternizing with ‘the help,’ as he calls them. He’s terribly bourgeois, you know, though he doesn’t even realize it. For God’s sake, his father was a miner! It’s perfectly obnoxious. Anyway, why don’t you ask Gunther? He’s German, too, I think. Maybe he’s heard of her.”
At this suggestion, Elsie had merely bit back a smile and said that she would.
Since their conversation, Gunther, she knew, had taken Anna back to the orphanage, where the girl so far had not experienced any more fits, at least that Elsie knew of. But it was only a matter of time, Elsie felt sure, as did Gunther, before another one might occur. Elsie also ventured over to Loyola’s library, something she had not previously worked up the courage to do, and unearthed several books on the subject of mental diseases, just as Gunther had done back at the university in Heidelberg. It made for slow, painful reading in the evenings, but she had been rewarded with a couple of nuggets of information—the saddest being that there really was apparently no known cure for epilepsy, corroborating what Gunther’s colleague in Germany had told him. She had hoped that maybe American doctors had perhaps devised some sort of new, innovative treatment, but no.
Despite her initial opinion that finding Liesel Klinkhammer would not help much with the bigger problem of what to do about Anna, Elsie had since given in to Gunther’s insistence that they continue the search for her, perhaps because there seemed precious few other options. Maybe something could be resolved by finding her, Elsie convinced herself. If nothing else, it was at least a place to start. More than once though, she had wondered if Anna should at least be taken to a doctor in town and examined. She had suggested this to Gunther, but he had no money to pay for a doctor, he said, and refused—no, was offended—when she had offered even to loan him the money, much less give it to him. So they resorted to finding the fraulein. Sr. Bernard had not been of any help, and it did not seem a matter for the police. But how to find a missing person? Or worse yet, a person who maybe did not want to be found? Elsie wondered.
As she gathered up her things from Sr. Raphael’s class, Elsie, again thinking about how they could find Fraulein Klinkhammer, bemoaned the fact that her mental abilities were not of a more practical, common-sense nature. Like Henrietta’s, she thought glumly. As she pondered this, a stray thought suddenly occurred to her—one which she couldn’t believe she hadn’t thought of before! It was obvious what they should do.
She was interrupted in this new exciting thought, however, by the tap of a pencil on her arm. Startled, she looked over to see Melody, happily in this same theology class, pointing with her pencil in a very superior type of way, with raised eyebrows, at the hearts Elsie had unconsciously drawn in the margin of her paper.
Melody gave her an exaggerated wink and whispered loudly, “I knew it! I knew you had a secret love! Oh, do tell!” she urged. “Honestly, Elsie, it’s horribly unfair if you don’t. Haven’t I waited long enough? Surely I’ve earned your trust by now!”