THE MAGNIFYING
GLASS
561
An
airplane swooped low over the stable. Like a noisy, dazzling
intruder, its throb scattered, for an instant, all thoughts of the past.
I followed it out of sight and then turned away into the obscure con–
fines of the stable. Some of the stalls were still up, but boards were
missing and the iron bars were thick with rust.
It
was here, that
my father and
his
brother and sister and cousins came after school
to watch the unharnessing of the horses- next door, there used to
be the fascinating blacksmith's shop, the wheelwright, the cooper- a
whole industrious cozy world, as lusty and alive as the paintings of
Breughel.
Each season is a separate picture: on an autumn morning, my
grandmother, an alert, bright-eyed wren-like woman, pauses for a
minute behind the correct lace curtains of her parlor window, to
watch her husband and children cross the street to office and school.
My great-grandfather, though transplanted, had remained obdurately
German and had instituted a school in the brewery building for the
benefit of his grandchildren and neighboring German-American
middle-class families. The master, complete with black suit and
starched collar, the rod and the ponderous tome, was imported from
the "old country." It was his habit to guzzle quarts of beer from
a pitcher, while he instructed his class.
In the afternoon, the Kupermann children (fourteen cousins)
would run back home. The old houses were then in full glory and
the linden trees in leaf. My grandmother, always a perfectionist, had
grown a wealth of wisteria on the walls of her house. It fell in a
thick cascade and, in the spring, it blossomed in purple clusters, like
grapes. Two urns of stiff geraniums guarded her door. Except for
these trimmings, the houses were identical, shutter for shutter, stoop
for stoop. At the top, running across all three, there was inscribed in
ornate gold and black German script: H. Kupermann, Sons-like
the Gothic decorations on the
fa~ade
of each house in a Bavarian
town.
In the winter, snow blanketed the brewery yard and the cousins
played in a sleigh drawn by two white goats. At Christmas time, in
each house, the tree was decorated behind closed doors, thrown open
to the excited children on Christmas Eve. The ceremony never varied.
The flickering candles revealed each year the same ornaments (bright,
sticky-looking balls, birds, stars and cherubs, brought from Germany
and preserved in tissue paper in the attic, from one holiday season
