Maria Theresa Waldvogel

Maria Theresa Waldvogel, generally called Tante, is Fidelis Waldvogel’s sister and a forceful presence in the household he builds in Argus. Proud, exacting, and accustomed to claiming what she believes her family owes her, she becomes Delphine’s chief domestic antagonist. Yet her story does not remain a simple contest for authority: after hardship pushes her to seek work, she learns to operate a sewing machine, keeps track of the boys’ sizes, and helps arrange their return to Germany. Her pride can wound and divide, but it is also the armor with which she tries to preserve her standing and care for her family.

Identity and Family Position

Tante is the name the people around her use for Fidelis’s sister. She insists on her baptismal name, Maria Theresa, a preference that others treat as evidence of her self-importance: they avoid granting her the grand title she seems to desire. Delphine, when she begins working at the meat shop, pointedly refuses to address her at all. That silence establishes their antagonism before either woman openly challenges the other.

Tante’s manner is presented through a revealing contrast between her severe presence and her meticulous concern with appearance. Her features resemble Fidelis’s in their forceful lines and cold, commanding bearing, while her long, narrow feet and expensive Italian leather shoes express a vanity she maintains even in difficult circumstances. Her clothes are more than decoration. Later, when she struggles to find work, a tough, shiny suit becomes a kind of shield, stiffening her resolve after refusals and allowing her to enter her brother’s home as though the food she takes is her due.

Her authority rests partly on a history of family obligation. She once gave Fidelis five hundred dollars from money left by their grandmother to buy equipment. Although he repaid her, Tante continues to understand her generosity as a debt that can be collected in kind. This explains why she takes food from the shop without asking: she does not see herself as stealing from her brother, but as receiving what she considers owed. Her self-understanding, however, does not prevent her conduct from humiliating those who depend on her or from provoking Delphine’s resentment.

Conflict with Delphine and the Household

On Delphine’s first day at the shop, Tante enters without deference, opens the sausage case herself, and slips a ring of baloney into her purse. She leaves with bread and milk as well, without asking permission. Delphine writes down what she has taken, treating the small inventory as a refusal to let Tante’s actions pass unremarked. The record is more than bookkeeping: it marks the beginning of a struggle over who may define the household’s rules and who is entitled to its resources.

Tante’s dismissive question about who Delphine is leaves the younger woman turning the insult over as a judgment on her whole life: her origins, her father, her past, and whether she belongs in Fidelis’s house. Delphine resents Tante for putting those doubts into her mind, and imagines eventually winning a victory from which the older woman will not recover. Her hostility is sharpened by seeing Tante try to lord it over Eva, whom Delphine loves and loyally protects. Their conflict is therefore not only a clash of temperaments; it concerns belonging, authority, and the care of the people around them.

The boys also dislike Tante, particularly Markus and Franz. Delphine notices their feeling even though children are unfamiliar to her, and her interest in them grows because they are Eva’s children. Tante’s position in the family is consequently strained from more than one direction: she expects respect, while Delphine sees her as someone who takes without permission and tries to rule people she does not understand. At the same time, Tante remains Fidelis’s sister, and her claims draw force from the family history and obligations that Delphine cannot simply dismiss.

Work, Pride, and the Sewing Machine

After hardship makes her usual authority less secure, Tante goes looking for employment. She repeatedly visits the bank and considers asking for cleaning work at the pool hall, but recoils from its smells and from the prospect of the refuse she might have to scrub. Even as she fails to find work, her suit holds up: its strong weave does not fray, and she draws resolve from wearing it. When she returns to Fidelis’s house, she straightens her back and takes food with the grand insistence that she must claim it without humility. The scene shows pride working both as a defense against poverty and as an instrument of dependence on the family she resents and relies upon.

Her eventual employment comes unexpectedly through Step-and-a-Half, whom Tante has previously treated with condescension when she came to the shop for scraps. At a store filled with fabric and salvaged goods, Step-and-a-Half asks whether Tante can sell and whether she knows anything about the wares. Tante answers that she knows much, but the question of whether she must wear her suit makes clear that her old presentation does not govern this new workplace. Step-and-a-Half points instead to a black enamel Singer sewing machine with gold flower trim and an optional wooden cabinet: if Tante can work it, she can sell it.

The machine briefly focuses Tante’s attention so completely that the humiliation of working for Step-and-a-Half has not yet registered. She studies its polished form, touches the cool curve where the cloth rests, and runs her hand over the carved oak cabinet. Then she sits down, accepts instruction, and learns to thread the needle. Her promise that she will learn to operate it turns the machine into a practical opening: a means of employment that does not require her to surrender all of her pride before she has found a way to earn her own living.

The Boys, Germany, and Family Care

Tante’s concern about the boys becomes more urgent after Markus is nearly buried when the hill collapses. She argues that Fidelis’s sons are in danger, points out that they are adventurous and difficult to supervise, and warns that even with Delphine helping for part of the day their father cannot keep close enough watch. She also invokes the family’s poverty, observing that the boys’ worn boots show newspaper linings. Her argument is not disinterested—she uses Fidelis’s fear over Markus’s near-burial to strengthen her case—but it gives recognizable circumstances for her insistence that the children are unsafe and inadequately provided for.

After the accident, Fidelis becomes more sympathetic to the idea of sending the boys to Germany to be raised there. Tante argues that the danger could recur, and presses the practical and emotional case for returning them to their grandmother, who is lonely. In her plan, Tante herself will help raise them. She presents the move as temporary: a year, perhaps two, until Fidelis can come and bring them back. The arrangement also promises relief for the struggling shop and time for the boys to grow more responsible. The text leaves the final cause of Fidelis’s agreement uncertain. Bills, the cost of supporting the children, their injuries and near-accidents, the danger of the hill, and his inability to pay Delphine for her work all contribute to the pressure.

Care appears in less argumentative forms as well. The Christmas crate from Germany contains leather boots that fit because Tante has kept her mother informed of the boys’ sizes in her letters. There are clothes and toys for the children, books, and vast regiments of toy soldiers for the twins; Tante herself receives an embroidered shawl, which she pretends is a scarf because she considers a shawl an old person’s gift. Her attention to the boys’ measurements is an unshowy counterpoint to her speeches about their future: however difficult her manner, she has been keeping track of what they need.

The planned journey makes the tension between family care and exclusion tangible. The family is to drive from Argus to Chicago, where passports and consular formalities will be handled, and then Tante and the boys are to travel onward to New York City to board a ship for Germany. In the car, Tante secures the middle seat beside Fidelis, has her sewing machine carefully packed in its travel case, and brings a valise, her large purse, and five boiled eggs. It does not occur to her to bring one for Delphine. That omission exposes how the journey’s arrangements make room for Tante as sister and prospective guardian while leaving Delphine, who has helped care for the boys, outside the family unit being transported.

Delphine’s Appeal and Tante’s Narrative Role

Delphine directly challenges the plan in Chicago, telling Fidelis that he cannot let Maria Theresa take the boys to Germany and arguing that Tante does not know how to care for them. Her protest arises from the attachment she has built with the children and her conviction that their removal is wrong, not simply from her rivalry with Tante. The contrast between the two women’s claims makes the family’s decision more than a question of geography: it forces Fidelis to weigh his sister’s promise of help and their mother’s presence in Germany against the care Delphine has already given his sons.

Tante’s characterization is built around that unresolved mixture of entitlement and responsibility. She takes food as something due, resists the humiliation of poverty, and tries to turn Fidelis’s guilt into support for her plan. But she also seeks work, accepts instruction, remembers the boys’ sizes, and prepares to care for them abroad. Her pride does not disappear; it changes function. The suit carries her through refusals, the sewing machine opens a way into paid work, and the family plan gives her a role that extends beyond taking what she believes she is owed. She remains a source of conflict for Delphine, but the story gives her care concrete forms that complicate the simple image of an imperious aunt.