The man in the camel hair coat was Conrad Mueller, the chief executive of the lighting company, and he held the letter of Gary between two fingers as if it were something that had crawled out of a drain. He did not raise his voice. He said it was dated the week before Thanksgiving, on paper with my name at the top, and it offered the company a signed release of all rights to the technique of Ilse for one million dollars, payable to an account in the name of Gary. In the letter, Gary had called himself my legal representative. He had even signed my name at the bottom, in a shaky copy.
“The problem, Mr. Brandt,” the chief executive said, turning to me, “is that we already own the patent. You sold it to us in August. Your son did not know, because you told no one. Our lawyers saw the letter and understood at once what it was. A man had tried to sell us what was already ours, in the name of a father he was robbing.” The woman with the briefcase opened it and laid on my coffee table a bundle of pawn tickets, the pearls, the brooch, the Hummels, each with a paid stamp. They had gone to the pawn shops in Saginaw on Tuesday, she said, and redeemed every piece.
Gary stood in the middle of my living room with a brandy glass in pieces at his feet. His girlfriend and her brother had stopped drinking and were looking at the carpet. Pastor Lindemann crossed the room, put a hand on my shoulder, and said quietly, “Walter, I told you the vodka was a mask.” Mr. Mueller turned to the tree, to the old glass ornaments of Ilse hanging in their hundreds on the branches, ringing faintly as the furnace turned on. “We came,” he said, “because we wanted to see the thing for ourselves. Mrs. Brandt made something we have spent twenty years failing to copy.”
A letter written to a company gave one father the evening to bring his son back to the family tree in Frankenmuth.
I gave my terms from beside the tree, with the bifocals of Ilse in my shirt pocket. “Gary, tonight is Christmas Eve, and I will not have you arrested on the night my wife loved best. But I will not have you in this house another day. Tomorrow after church you will go to the treatment center in Grand Rapids, the same one as before, and Mr. Mueller has kindly offered to pay for it. You will stay until they release you. You will write to me every week. And the day you come home sober, the glass is waiting. Now sit down and eat something. You smell like a bar.”
Gary lowered himself onto the arm of the sofa and put his face in his big machinist hands. “Dad,” he said, “I have been trying not to look at Mom since she passed. I could not walk past her workshop. When I broke those ornaments, I think I was trying to break the sound of them, the way they rang. It reminded me that she was gone.” He looked up, and his eyes were red and clear. “I wrote that letter at four in the morning, drunk, and I signed your name, and I cannot believe I did it. I am so sorry. I am so sorry, Dad.”
Then his panic got ahead of his shame. Gary snatched the letter from the hand of Mr. Mueller, spun toward the fireplace, and tried to throw it into the flames. He had not counted on Dennis Kowal, my lawyer from Saginaw, who had been standing behind the Christmas tree all this time with a plate of cookies. Dennis is six feet five and a former tackle for Saginaw Valley. He stepped into the path of Gary with the plate held high, and Gary ran into him like a man running into a wall. The letter fluttered to the carpet. Dennis put his foot on it, politely.
After a long moment, Gary began to laugh, a broken, hiccuping laugh, and then to cry again. I crossed the carpet in my slippers and wrapped my arms around my son, who was a head taller than I was, and he bent down and laid his stubbled cheek against my gray hair. Pastor Lindemann started to hum Silent Night. By the second verse, everyone in the room was singing, even the girlfriend and her brother, and the ornaments of Ilse on the tree seemed to hum along with a thin, glassy sound.
The money consequences were generous. The company paid for the treatment of Gary in Grand Rapids and for a year of aftercare, and they asked for nothing, because Mr. Mueller said that Ilse had made them a fortune. The five million, two hundred thousand dollars stayed in the bank under my name. The ornaments that Gary had broken were gathered up the next morning by the grandson of Mrs. Kessler, and a glassblower in Lauscha, from the family of Ilse, wrote to say she would remake all forty from the shards, as a tribute.
In the name of Ilse, who passed in 2022, I started the Ilse Brandt Fund. It pays for glassblowing apprenticeships and treatment help for young workers in Saginaw, Bay and Tuscola counties. In the first year we placed fourteen apprentices with working glass studios. A boy of nineteen from Bay City, who had lost his job at a closed plant and his way in the bottle, blew his first hollow ornament in my workshop. When he tapped it with his fingernail and it rang, he stood very still, and then he said it sounded like a church.
Gary came home from Grand Rapids in the spring, sober for the first time in four years, and moved into the workshop behind the house. In November, he asked me to teach him what Ilse had taught me, and we spent the cold evenings blowing glass at her old bench. His first ornaments came out lopsided and thick. His fortieth rang like a bell. On Christmas Eve we hung all forty on the tree in the front window, and Mrs. Kessler stopped her car in the street and came up the walk to look.