After You've Gone (3 page)

Over thick chocolate malteds and English muffins, Julie told Lauren everything she wanted to know, or nearly, including the story of Julie's own sister, Amy the beautiful, with whom boys quite regularly fell in love. “She was just having a good time, her sophomore year, really getting around. But the phone calls! Arne threatened to have the phone cut off, he has a pretty short temper. And then during spring vacation she met Nelson Manning, he was home from Dartmouth, much too old for her, about nineteen. But they fell madly in love, flowers all the time, and after he went back to school those letters. And more flowers, and phone calls! Poor Amy spent that whole spring fighting with Caroline and Arne. But she sort of won, I think mostly just wearing them down. So that when Nelson came home in June she got to see him. Under certain conditions. Well, she sneaked out and saw him a lot more than they ever knew about. Nelson was entirely insane over Amy, he wanted to quit school and get married right away. But of course Amy wasn't about to do that, and so in the fall he went back to Dartmouth and she moped around and then suddenly no more letters. No flowers. Another girl back there, probably someone at Vassar or one of those places, we're
sure it must have been. Caro and I were truly worried about her. Moping all day, not eating. But gradually she began to go out a little, and then over Christmas she got sort of serious about Jeff, and they started going steady in February. Full-moon time. But there are still certain songs she can't hear without crying. ‘All the Things You Are' is one. She's not
really
over Nelson.”

Nothing like that had ever gone on in Enid, not that Lauren had ever heard about.

And then, “I think Tommy Russell is really interested in you,” Julie told Lauren.

So much for the intellectual friendship that Caroline Gerhardt had envisioned between her brilliant middle daughter and Lauren Whitfield, the bright new girl in town. But even had she been aware of the content of those endless conversations Caroline would really not have cared, so entirely absorbed was she in her own despair: her desperation over what was going on, still, in Germany.

Even the Midwestern press had by now conceded that Roosevelt would win the election, and would get the country into that European war—wasteful, unnecessary. But Caroline often felt that it would be too late, too late for murdered Jews, for devastated Poland. Holland. Fallen France.

She continued her impassioned but well-reasoned letters to the press, along with occasional gay (she hoped for gaiety) small notes to Arne, in response to his occasional cards from California.

Caroline Coffin, from Vermont, and Arne Gerhardt, from northern Wisconsin, Door County, met at Oberlin College in
the early twenties, and both at that time were filled with, inspired by, the large-spirited ideals of that institution. Big, dark, clumsy (but very brilliant, Caroline thought) Arne, enthusiastic about the new League of Nations, and smaller, fairer Caroline, who was then, as now, dedicated to peace, the abolition of war. Young and passionately in love, together they read Emma Goldman, Bertrand Russell—and moved into an apartment together. Caroline became pregnant, and a week before the birth of Amy they yielded to their parents and got married.

“Lauren Whitfield is going steady with Tommy Russell,” Julie reported to her mother at breakfast on Saturday morning. They were both feeding Baby, alternating spoonfuls of cereal with scrambled eggs, which was Baby's preferred method. Amy slept upstairs, on into the day.

“Isn't that rather sudden?” Caroline was a little surprised at the censoriousness with which she herself spoke.

“Oh yes, everyone thinks it's terribly romantic. He asked her on their first date.”

Impossible for Caroline to gauge the content of irony in her daughter's voice. “I somehow thought she was more—” Caroline then could not finish her own sentence, and she realized that she had to a considerable degree already lost interest in this conversation, a thing that seemed to happen to her far too often.

“You thought she was more intelligent?” Knowing her mother well, Julie supplied the missing bias. “Actually she's extremely smart, but she's sort of, uh, dizzy. Young. Her parents are breaking up, that's why she's here with her grandparents. They drink a lot, her parents.”

“Poor girl.”

“Yes. Well, anyway, she's bright but she's not all intellectual. Yet.”

…

Julie herself did not go out a lot with boys that year. But she seemed both busy and contented. She studied hard and read a lot, at home she helped Caroline with Baby. She also functioned as a sort of occasional secretary for her mother, opening mail and often shielding Caroline from extreme isolationist vituperation.

And Julie and Egon Heller, the German-English refugee boy, did become friends, of sorts, if not in the romantic way that Caroline had hoped. Their friendship was in fact remarked upon, so unusual was it in those days of rigidly coded adolescent behavior. Simply, they spent a lot of time together, Egon and Julie. They could be seen whispering over their books in study hall, though very possibly about assignments. Never holding hands, no touching, nothing like that. Sometimes they went to the movies together, but usually on a Saturday afternoon, sometimes with Baby along. Not at night, not a date.

Very odd, was what most people observing them thought. But then exceptionally bright children were often odd; psychologists said so.

Caroline heard from Arne in a somewhat longer than usual postcard that he would not, after all, be coming home to Madison for Christmas, for a number of reasons; money, time, and work were cited. Nothing very original by way of an excuse.

But Caroline, who had painful premonitions of just this announcement, reacted with a large sense of relief. To her own great surprise. Oh,
good
, is what she thought. I won't have to
make a lot of Christmas fuss—or not Arne's kind of fuss. No big parties, and I won't have to try to look wonderful all the time. And worry that he's drinking too much and making passes at undergraduate girls. I can just do the things I like, that he thinks are dumb. I can bake cookies, maybe run up a new formal for Amy. (Caroline had a curious dramatic flair for making certain clothes. Highly successful with evening things, she had never done well with the small flannel nightgowns, for example, that other women did in no time.) I can read a lot, she thought. And I'll go for a lot of walks in the snow.

The snows had come somewhat earlier than usual to Madison that year. Soon after the first of November (just after the election), serious snowfalls began, blanketing the steeply sloped university campus, causing traffic trouble in the streets—and making life far more wonderful for all children, including those in high school.

Couples on dates went tobogganing on the vast golf course of the Black Hawk Country Club, an endless hill, just dangerous enough to provide a long intensely satisfying thrill. And couples who had parked on other hills to neck, in the marvelous privacy of deep snowbanks, could emerge to observe a curious pink light on all the surrounding miles of white, reflected in all the lakes.

Lauren Whitfield and Tommy Russell spent considerable time in his car, in that way. They marveled both at each other (so much in love) and at the loveliness of snow, which Lauren had never really seen before.

…

Caroline's kitchen was hung with rows of copper pots, enthusiastically bought in Paris, in the flea market, on Arne and Caroline's honeymoon (with baby Amy in tow). Never polished, they were now all dark and dull, black-grimed. The blue Mexican tile around the sink, from an attempted second honeymoon, this time without Amy but on which Julie was conceived—the tile had fared somewhat better; though cracked, it retained a bright brave color.

On the afternoon that Caroline had chosen for Christmas-cookie baking, by the time the children arrived from school there were already smells of burned sugar, and spilled flour on the floor into which Baby continually crawled. Julie had brought both Lauren Whitfield and Egon Heller.

“Egon, and Lauren! How very nice to see you. These days I hardly ever.” Floury, flustered Caroline made effusive welcoming gestures, to which Egon responded with one of his curious stiff bows (he actually bowed), and a smile.

Julie took over the problem of keeping Baby out of the general mess, and Caroline divided her attention between the cookies, which she judged still salvageable, and an intense old argument with Egon, about Roosevelt.

“But he's always—”

“But what you fail to grasp—”

“People of his social class—”

Lauren seemed quiet, preoccupied and sad, Caroline observed, with a certain impatience. Adolescents are simply very, very self-absorbed, she thought.

To Egon she said, positively, “Roosevelt will soon declare war on Germany, and he will be able to win it very quickly. And I know a man who's in a position to know things who tells me that the Nazi-Soviet pact can't last, not possibly. The Russians will come in on our side. Our strongest allies.”

…

“Lauren and Tommy Russell have broken up,” Julie told her mother one night in February as together they did the supper dishes, Baby being asleep and Amy out.

“Wasn't that rather quick? You just told me, I thought …” Caroline heard her own voice trail off into vagueness.

“Quick and strange. She can't quite say what happened, or she won't. She just cries a lot. Like when Amy and Nelson broke up.”

“That's too bad,” Caroline began to say, and then did not, as she recognized that in truth she had almost no sympathy for the broken hearts of the very young. “That girl seems to be rushing through her life at quite a rate” was her more sincere comment.

“I think she'll be okay eventually. It may just take a while.” Judicious Julie.

“When I think of Tito's brave Partisans,” wrote Caroline to the
Capitol Times
(Madison), with copies to the Chicago
Tribune
, the Des Moines
Register
, and the Moline
Dispatch
. She thought of the San Francisco
Chronicle
or even the Palo Alto
Times
(where Arne was) but she censored that impulse as frivolous. Also, they would probably not print letters from an unknown woman in Wisconsin. And anyway, California went for Roosevelt.

Actually, Caroline was managing considerable detachment from Arne these days, this early and acutely beautiful spring.

Long walks were a reliable cure for her troubled sleep, she found, and so every afternoon for an hour or so she walked around the lake, noting pussywillows at the muddy edges of
the water, where small gentle waves lapped, very slowly. And sudden secret wildflowers in what had been a small neglected meadow. And at the bottom of her garden (also neglected) early iris, wild and bright.

She began to sleep better. Or if she should wake up she could read. One of the joys of singleness, she told herself; you don't have to worry about the other person's sleep, along with your own.

June 22, 1941, was the day on which Hitler's troops attacked Soviet Russia. No more Nazi-Soviet pact. The Russians were now our valiant allies. (It was also Lauren Whitfield's last day in Madison. Back to Enid, Oklahoma.)

Possibly more than anyone else in Madison, Caroline Coffin Gerhardt was moved to celebrate this clear beginning of the end of Hitler. She wanted a party, but from the beginning nothing worked out in terms of this festive impulse. No one even remotely appropriate was available. Vacations had begun, varieties of other plans. Even her children failed her: Amy was off dancing with her beau, and Julie was to have an early farewell supper with Lauren and her grandparents.

Caroline's happy day was further marred by news from Arne: a postcard (so typical) announcing his imminent arrival. “I've missed all my girls.” Well, I'll bet he has, was Caroline's sour reaction. Who else would put up with such a selfish bastard?

We will have to work out a much more independent life from each other, Caroline thought, over the small steak that she had bought for her solitary celebration (
not
black market: her month's ration), as she sipped from the split of Beaujolais, an even greater treat.

I should not have Arne so continually in my mind, she told
herself. That's what the children do, they think only of themselves and their impassioned sexual lives.

The important fact is that the end of Hitler's evil has now begun.

Epilogue: San Diego, California. The middle eighties.

The man at the next table at this almost empty semi-Polynesian restaurant is not even slightly interested in her, thinks Lauren Whitfield, now a tall, gray-blond, very well dressed woman, a psychologist, well known for several books.

She is in fact on a tour for her latest book, having to do with alcoholic co-dependency. She reached San Diego a day early, hoping for a rest. On her way to her room, across a series of tropically planted lawns she observed an Olympic pool, and she thought, Oh, very good. And seated next to the pool, though fully dressed, she saw this same tall man, whom she had also seen at the reservation desk. Coming into the dining room just now, he smiled very politely, if coldly, acknowledging these small accidental encounters.

Lauren is quite used to book tours, by now. Living alone in New York after the lengthy demise of her second marriage, she rather likes the adventure of trips, the novelty of unfamiliar scenery, new faces. She quite often falls into conversation with other single travelers, such encounters providing at the worst only a few bored hours. More frequently she has felt warm stirrings of interest, of possible friendship. On far rarer occasions, sex.

But this tall, too thin, nearsighted, and not well dressed European intellectual keeps his large nose pushed clearly into his book. Lauren has observed him with some care, over all of their small encounters, and is quite sure that they could find
areas of common interest, some shared opinions. Their political views, she would bet, would be similar.