Sophia Hannah Breitsprecher Harkiss

Sophia Hannah Breitsprecher Harkiss, the youngest child of Dieter Breitsprecher, presses for a place in Breitsprecher-Duke at a time when the company is declining and its younger generation has little interest in its plywood business. Initially denied an operational position, she turns her father’s legacy and the company’s neglected records into a distinct professional role: researching its history. That archival work uncovers a report about the living blood descendants of Charles Duquet and brings the family’s hidden inheritance question back into circulation.

Identity and Company Context

Sophia grows up hearing about Dieter’s first wife, Lavinia Duke, who had controlled the lumber business from a young age. Sophia takes Lavinia’s career as a precedent for her own ambitions, although her understanding of the company’s condition is limited. The old timber enterprise has shifted toward plywood and fiberboard; its Brite-Ply product uses culls and forest-fire salvage, but competition from larger companies supplied with cheaper Canadian wood has weakened the business. To Sophia, however, the company still seems to offer a place where she might establish a career.

She sees herself as the family intellectual. She takes books from the Book-of-the-Month Club, often reading at least their opening chapters, and enjoys history. The company’s cultural history also gives her a personal point of access: Dieter served on the Chicago Public Library’s board after the Great Fire, when donations of books helped establish a new library, and continued contributing money to it. Sophia remembers this civic commitment as part of her father’s character and imagines that, if he were alive, he would grant her the position she wants.

Seeking a Position

Sophia challenges her husband, Andrew Harkiss, and her brother, James Bardawulf Breitsprecher, for excluding her from the company’s work. She points out that it is the 1960s and says that being a director and sitting on the board is not enough: she wants an office and the responsibility attached to a position. Andrew counters that she already has influence as a board member and that her comments are considered. Sophia continues to insist on a defined job for more than a year, though she cannot initially describe what the job should be.

When James Bardawulf asks her to write out the position she wants, Sophia does not immediately produce a practical job specification. Instead, she travels to New York and shops at Bonwit Teller, Saks, Bergdorf’s, and Henri Bendel. She buys two Norell silk shirtwaist dresses and, after trying on other suits, chooses two expensive Coco Chanel suits. The clothes help her picture the professional identity she is trying to claim: she imagines not just a title, but the office and business rituals that would make the role visible.

Her idea takes shape on the flight home. Thinking of her father’s interest in the Chicago Public Library and of the company’s long history, she spends the return flight writing a job description. When a neighboring passenger assumes she is a busy career woman returning from business in Florida, Sophia plays along, saying she has been to Boca Raton. The brief exchange reflects the professional image she is constructing even before she has secured the job.

The Company Historian

Sophia’s proposal is to become the company historian, not to enter its business deals. Andrew tells James Bardawulf that her letter asks to write a history of Breitsprecher-Duke and to consult the old journals, letters, telegrams, and other surviving papers. He is willing to give her a door bearing her name and the designation “Archival Research.” James Bardawulf is surprised that she did not discuss the proposal with him directly, but the arrangement gives Sophia the office and responsibility she had demanded.

The office becomes a working archive. Sophia hires Debra Strong, a secretary whose previous job was at a women’s magazine, to sort the papers into rough periods and place them in labeled folders. Sophia initially hopes to tell a celebratory story of a pioneer enterprise that achieved success through hard work and became one of the nation’s oldest logging companies. The material resists that clean account. Much of it is difficult to read; French obscures parts of the record, handwriting and spelling vary, and the company papers contain unfamiliar names and uncertain connections.

She wonders whether Charles Duke and Charles Duquet are the same person. A promissory note involving Benton Dred-Peacock is signed with an X, but Sophia cannot tell whether the mark indicates that Duquet was illiterate or that Dred-Peacock was. Later correspondence bears the signature Charles Duke, encouraging her to treat Dred-Peacock as the illiterate party. She hires a student to translate difficult French passages, but finds old transactions and accounts tedious and sets them aside. Her developing company history therefore reflects both the archive’s uneven survival and her own choices about which records seem relevant.

After a year, Sophia has assembled a story of Charles Duke as a poor French boy who left a harsh farm life for North America, worked his way up, bought timberland, and opened a sawmill. She skims the letters to his sons, finding their repeated advice and commands dull, and describes James Duke as uninteresting. Lavinia’s extensive correspondence and notes on the lumber industry are also difficult for her to interpret: Sophia does not understand most of the descriptions of inventions, meetings, timber quantities, and shipments. She reduces Lavinia’s contribution to that of a respected businesswoman, overlooking much of the material that might have explained the company’s operations in detail.

The Heirs Report

A folder marked “Genealogy?” disrupts Sophia’s emerging company narrative. Inside are torn, yellowed pages and a letter from R. R. Tetrazinni, the investigator who had reported to Lavinia Duke. The letter says his investigation had reached the point set out in his report and invites Lavinia to commission further research into the heirs’ names and addresses. Sophia does not understand who the heirs are or what they might have inherited, so she calls James Bardawulf and asks him to examine the document. He dismisses it as possibly fraudulent, but Sophia prefers that he come to her office and look at it in person.

The question in the report concerns more than a missing branch in the company’s family history. Tetrazinni had told Lavinia that Charles Duquet adopted Nicolaus and Jan from an Amsterdam orphanage and Bernard from the streets of La Rochelle; the adopted sons were treated as sons and received equal shares of his property. Lavinia’s line descended from Nicolaus. The report also traced Duquet’s biological line through his later children, Outger and Doortje, and through Outger’s daughter Beatrix, who married Kuntaw Sel. Their sons, Josime Sel and Francis-Outger Sel, were the identified route to the only living blood descendants of Charles Duquet. The report distinguished these descendants from the lines descended from Duquet’s adopted sons, raising the question of whether blood relationship or adoption should determine a claim to the family fortune.

Nearly two weeks after Sophia first raised the report, she finds a memo from James Bardawulf saying, “Call me.” She telephones him and learns that the investigation has moved forward. When she discusses informing others, James Bardawulf urges her to tell Conrad Breitsprecher, who had been upset at an earlier point in the affair. He then suggests that Conrad might already know. Sophia presses him to explain, but the exchange ends on her unresolved demand for an answer. The scene leaves the report’s consequences unfolding beyond Sophia’s office: her archival discovery has reopened a question the family had not settled, and she is trying to determine who else knows what it contains.

Narrative Role

Sophia’s ambition first appears as a dispute over access and status, but it becomes the means by which a buried family history is found. She wants the trappings and responsibility of professional work; the company gives her a historical rather than operational remit. Yet that remit places her among records that resist the polished origin story she initially hopes to write. Her selective reading leaves much of Lavinia’s business record aside, while the genealogical folder she does not understand proves consequential precisely because it points beyond the company’s preferred line of descent.

Her work thus links two forms of inheritance: the corporate legacy that Sophia wants to narrate and the biological descent that may challenge the legitimacy of the established family’s claim. The archive does not simply confirm a continuous business history. Its torn pages and uncertain identities expose how that history was shaped by adoption, migration, record keeping, and choices about which documents to preserve or pursue. Sophia’s discovery matters because the historian’s office she fought to obtain becomes the place where the company’s account of its own past is unsettled.