Delphine tries to stop Tante from taking the boys back to Germany

Delphine tries to stop Tante from taking the younger Waldvogel boys back to Germany by turning a planned family departure into a direct argument about their care, their ties to America, and the danger of surrendering them to a relative who had helped make Eva suffer. The confrontation occurs in Chicago, during passport proceedings, when the children’s future is still being treated as a practical arrangement. Delphine insists it is instead a question of who has the right and ability to raise them.

Background and the planned departure

The proposed separation grows out of a household under strain. Tante has persuaded Fidelis Waldvogel to let her take the boys, except Franz, who is nearly finished with school, to Germany. She offers to raise them with their lonely grandmother and presents the arrangement as temporary: a year, perhaps two, after which Fidelis could bring them back. She also argues that without the burden of caring for the boys, the shop would flourish and the children would be old enough to help when they returned.

The plan carries practical force because Fidelis has struggled to provide for his sons. The family has outgrown its clothes, Markus is angry at still wearing short pants, and Fidelis cannot afford everything they need. Their recent dangers add to the case for sending them away: Markus has been buried in the collapsing hill fort, Emil has been struck by a neighbor boy’s BB gun, Erich has fallen from a roof and lain unconscious, and the boys once rode a raft of scrap lumber miles down the spring river. The decision is not attributed to one cause alone; money, exhaustion, injury, and the hope of family support all weigh on it.

The departure has been organized in detail. Everyone is to drive in the DeSoto to Chicago, with Fidelis, Tante, and Delphine in front and the boys in back. Franz will mind the shop for three days. After the overnight drive, Tante and the boys are to complete passport formalities, travel by train to New York City, and board a ship the following day. Their reservation is one cabin with an extra floor pallet and a tiny window, described by the booking agent as luxurious while still a bargain. The itinerary makes the threatened separation immediate: the family is already at the administrative threshold of carrying it out.

Delphine intervenes in Chicago

On the day before the journey, Delphine eats Traumfeuer, the household’s preserving-jar mixture of fruit, sugar, and brandy. She knows she is using it to blot out the next day’s plan. The alcohol leaves her flushed, heavy, and ringing in the temples, but she joins the family at the great stone building where their papers are processed. In its tall central space, people wait along the corridors for passport photographs; Tante, tired but upright in her stiff suit, says the boys need to eat.

Delphine seizes that ordinary request as a chance to get Fidelis away from the others. She proposes sandwiches, and Tante immediately refuses, saying they are not hungry. Delphine answers that the boys have eaten nothing, then presses the point again when Tante offers them candy, arguing that it will rot their teeth and that they need nourishment. She appeals directly to Fidelis, who follows her outside toward a delicatessen they have noticed. Rather than enter, Delphine keeps him walking around the block so she can say what she came to say.

Her case is blunt: Tante does not know how to care for boys, and allowing her to take them is wrong. Fidelis replies that his mother will care for them once they are settled. He also defends Germany as a place where people learn the proper way to do things. Delphine counters that the boys may not want to return to America afterward, and Tante may not let them come back. The apparently temporary arrangement, she argues, could permanently redirect their loyalties and their future.

The argument over care, home, and risk

Delphine strengthens her warning with news she has read in a newspaper: the new German government is said to be keeping Germans who visit. It is only a rumor at the time, but she uses it to make the possibility of closed borders vivid. She reminds Fidelis that he knows what war is like and asks him to imagine the boys trapped by circumstances beyond the family’s control.

Fidelis rejects the prospect of another war as impossible. He believes Hitler is strengthening Germany for peace and interprets the family’s support and money for the boys as evidence that the plan is sound. Delphine’s answer shifts the argument from national hopes and financial provision to the children’s particular history: they are the sons he had with Eva. Her invocation of their mother changes the stakes from whether Germany can provide for them to whether Fidelis can entrust them to Tante.

She then reveals the accusation she has been holding back: Tante stole the morphine and helped make Eva suffer. Delphine asks how Fidelis can send his sons with the woman responsible, and proposes that at least Markus remain in America, in her care. This is both an objection to Tante’s fitness and an offer to assume responsibility herself. Delphine has already cared for the boys beyond the limits of her paid work; now she makes that care the basis of a claim about where one child should live.

Fidelis’s response and the scene’s turn

The two stop at the same time in the windy street. Fidelis is grim and ashen; Delphine faces him with narrowed, watchful eyes. He recognizes that she is right about Tante’s limitations with Markus, but he also sees reasons for the younger boys to go: family in Ludwigsruhe, and an escape from the dangerous exploits of digging into hills and floating down rivers. His hesitation is not simple indifference. He is pulled between the children’s safety in the immediate household and the security he imagines their German relatives can provide.

Fidelis admits that he cannot watch the boys enough. He also says he can no longer pay Delphine for her work. She replies that the money does not matter, and begins to say what she wants, but both fall silent before the words can be completed. The pause exposes what the practical dispute cannot contain: Delphine’s attachment to the children and the emotional weight of asking Fidelis to trust her with Markus. Fidelis reaches toward her and touches the green feather on her hat. The gesture interrupts the argument without resolving it in words, making their unspoken closeness part of the scene’s pressure.

Significance and aftermath in the wider plot

Delphine’s intervention turns caregiving into a form of advocacy. Her argument is not that the boys face no danger in America: she knows about the hill collapse, the injuries, and the family’s poverty. Instead, she challenges the assumption that the German household is automatically safer, pointing to Tante’s treatment of Eva and to the possibility that a temporary trip could cut the boys off from their father and their American home.

The dispute also gathers together the material pressures that shape family choices throughout the story. Fidelis’s ability to keep his household together has depended on work, thrift, and the success of the butcher shop; Delphine has helped make that business more resilient through careful trading and an increasingly varied stock. Yet economic necessity now appears to make separation attractive. Against that calculation, Delphine offers unpaid care and insists that the boys’ relationship to Eva and to their father cannot be replaced by money or a promise of eventual return.

The Chicago confrontation does not erase Fidelis’s reasons for considering the journey, nor does it make the risks of keeping the boys in America disappear. Its decisive change is that Delphine states plainly what the departure would cost and what she is willing to do in response. By asking that Markus be left with her, she turns her established place in the family from an informal, laboring role into a direct claim for responsibility, while forcing Fidelis to face the difference between sending children to relatives and surrendering the everyday bonds that hold them to home.