After You've Gone Page 3

  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.

  Sex is out; in a sexual way she is not drawn to him in the least. But so often men are slow to perceive that overtures of any sort are not necessarily sexual in nature. Lauren ponders this sad and trouble-causing human fact as she also thinks, Well, hell, I’d really like an hour or so of conversation. Coffee. Damn his book.

  And then, as she stares (he is so entirely unaware of her that she is able to stare with impunity), a small flash goes off within the deep recesses of her mind, so that she is able, with great confidence, and a smile that she knows is appealing, slightly crooked and not too self-assured, to tap his elbow and to say, “Excuse me, but aren’t you Egon Heller?”

  Perfectly calm, as though used to being thus accosted (possibly he is somewhat famous too, used to being recognized? or a professor, with old students sometimes showing up? or both?), Egon lowers his book very patiently, and very politely he tells her that yes, that is his name. And then, with the very slightest English-German accent, he asks her, “But have we met?”

  “Yes, but terribly long ago. At the Gerhardts’. In Madison, Wisconsin.”

  Now Egon does look quite startled, and confused, so much so that he drops his book as he stands and extends a smooth cool strong hand to Lauren. “At the Gerhardts’! Extraordinary.”

  “Yes, in the fall of 1940. You’d just got there, I think, and I had just moved to Madison. But do sit down. Coffee?”

  “Yes, thank you.” He does sit down, now smiling warmly, attractively.

  Lauren asks him, right off, “Do you ever go back to Madison? I always wonder what happened to Julie Gerhardt. My favorite friend.”

  At this, quite startlingly Egon begins to laugh, in a choking, ratchety way that reddens his face, and it is some minutes before he is able to say, “Well, one of the things that happened to her is that she married me, in 1947. And another thing, or five other, is our children. We have five, the last one thank God just out of graduate school. And another—I know I should have said this first—she has her doctorate in math. From the University of Chicago. Very hard on her, doing all that at once.” Egon smiles with such sympathy, such unambivalent admiration that Lauren is more than a little envious (neither of her husbands had much use for her work). As well as touched.

  She says, “Well, I love that news, that’s wonderful. And it’s so amazing that I ran into you. By the way, I’m Lauren Whitfield, I just lived in Madison that one year.”

  Obviously not remembering her (if he noticed her at all, he must have thought her just another blond, boy-crazy American girl, which Lauren will now concede that she was), Egon politely says, “Oh, of course,” and proceeds to tell her more Gerhardt news.

  Amy has been married three times but seems at last to have settled down with a man whom Egon describes as a really nice fellow (Lauren has the sense, though, that Egon, so visibly nice himself, has said that about all the husbands). Baby—and now Egon’s face lengthens and saddens—Baby died in the early sixties. Drugs.

  Lauren: “Oh dear. So in a way Baby was always Baby.” She has been unable not to say that.

  “Quite.” Egon frowns, and then his face brightens as he asks, “You remember Caroline, the mother?”

  “Of course, she was wonderful. I always wanted to know her more.”

  Caroline, still very much alive at eighty-something, is even more wonderful now, Egon tells Lauren. She still writes letters to papers, to congressmen and senators, and she goes to demonstrations, still: for disarmament, against military involvement, anywhere. She has been honored by national peace organizations; he names several. “Most of the time she feels quite well,” Egon says. “A little trouble with her back, some other small problems, but she is for the most part all right.”

  Arne died a long time ago, in the fifties.

  Digesting all this news, which has mostly made her smile with pleasure, Lauren is quiet for a while, stirring and drinking her coffee very slowly, before she asks him, “Tell me, do you happen to know anything about someone named Tommy Russell?”

  “No, I don’t think so. But the name, something comes. A football star, in high school?”

  “Basketball. He was very thin. Blond.”

  Egon frowns. “No. Now nothing comes.”

  Surprised at the depth of her disappointment, and afraid that it will show, Lauren tells him, “I, uh, went steady with him for a while that year. And then one night he got really drunk, and I was really scared, and I couldn’t tell anyone. And my parents—”

  She sees that she has completely lost his interest. A polite glaze has replaced the animation with which Egon described the new-old Caroline and the accomplishments of Julie. And Lauren senses that actually they do not have a great deal more to say to each other. “Such ancient history!” she comments.

  “But you must come to see us,” Egon next (somewhat surprisingly) says to her. “Julie would be so pleased, I know, and Caroline. Did I say that we are all still there in that same house on the bluff? The house you remember?”

  “No, you didn’t but that’s really great. I will come, what a wonderful idea.”

&nbs
p; And, sitting there among the fake South Sea Island masks and the real but derelict, neglected tropical plants, Lauren tries to reimagine that house in Madison. How the lake looked at night.

  THE END OF THE WORLD

  Zelda Hoskins, a pretty, light-haired young woman from Toronto, is seated on the balcony of her hotel room, far south, in the Mexican tropics. At the moment, she is contemplating the small quick black butterflies in the shrubbery next to her terrace: an occasional monarch, and a couple of large, very fluttery pure white ones. She watches as a tiny green-black hummingbird zooms from nowhere to the bush of red flowers, ignoring the amber-yellow bougainvillea that Zelda especially admires. She has thought of that particular color in Canada. Would it be there still? During all the heavy-ended, frozen Canadian months that preceded this trip she has imagined the yellow bougainvillea, and butterflies, hummingbirds.

  And even now that she is here, those long leaden cold days are very much in Zelda’s mind. A Toronto winter. She sees herself there, dreaming of Mexico, of here. Dreams of flowers and warmth and the glittery sea.

  Or perhaps this is still the dream? Perhaps actually she is now in Toronto, only dreaming of Mexico? In the unreal warmth she shivers. She finds such speculations interesting, though slightly scaring. And dangerous, really. She knows that she should simply savor being here. She should concentrate on these given moments, even try to slow their passage. After all, they will only be here for a week.

  But it is very hard to accept the fact of being where you have dreamed of; Zelda begins to see that. Like the troubles of love, the difficulty of actually being with the longed-for person, when you have spent so many hours imagining how it will be.

  Yes, that is exactly what it is like. Like love, an extremity of love. Zelda sighs, and yields to thoughts of her lover, a young man whom Zelda loves extremely. Who is now in Toronto, or maybe he is back in New York, where he lives. In any case, not with her.

  Inside their room Abe Hoskins is almost ready to go to breakfast, to which he very much looks forward: the piles of fresh fruit, and the Mexican rolls, bolillos, that he especially likes.

  Abe in fact relishes the whole episode of breakfast, the walk from their room on the narrow pathway, with the view of the beach and the ocean, sometimes boats. And the other view, to their right, of banks of flowers. And then the look of the dining room itself, the sea seen through heavy waving palms, and the waiting white beach below.

  He even enjoys bargaining for newspapers with the small, wiry brown Mexican newsboys, one especially—Gabino, an appealing, very quick-witted kid with an odd, twisted, reluctant smile. Last winter, with considerable trouble, Abe mailed the pair of tennis shoes (high, white) that Gabino had made it clear he very much wanted (with pictures and sign language: the Hoskinses do not speak Spanish). Abe drew all around Gabino’s foot on some writing paper, and took the drawing to the store in Toronto. Bought, packaged, mailed, and he never heard from Gabino. He wonders if Gabino will show up this year, and if he ever got the package.

  “It’s really clouded over,” Zelda and Abe say to each other as together they emerge from their room and begin the walk toward breakfast.

  “Look,” Zelda says next.

  She means the rising, arching plants that now line their pathway. Feathery greenery, against what had been a bare embankment. An archway of green, making a ceremony of their progress that first day.

  But above them the sky is hung with clouds, pale, cottony, in a sky that is always simply clear and blue.

  “It never rains?” says Zelda.

  “It could. But more likely a fantastic sunset,” Abe assures her.

  Evelyn Fisk, from Washington, D.C., also comes to this hotel for a week each winter, and although her weeks often overlap with those of the Hoskinses, they have so far exchanged only the most tentative looks of recognition. Evelyn, Mrs. Fisk, is a large middle-aged woman, her face broad and pleasant, her short white hair shaped smoothly to her head. She is always alone on these trips, but something about her prohibits the sort of overtures that such “single” people can invite, a look of self-sufficiency, perhaps, or of sheer absorption in private concerns—of which she has in fact a great many: a large and demanding family, and more recently an involvement with the sanctuary movement.

  This annual trip to Mexico is actually a sort of present she has awarded to herself for years of service: thirty-odd years of marriage to Grantly Fisk, a Midwestern senator prominent in Washington. A busy liberal: Evelyn supports his views, although very much disliking the public life that his work requires. Grantly refers to these trips as Evelyn’s “time off for good behavior,” by which she is only half amused. She no longer gives much thought to her actual feelings about her husband. At this point, as she sees it, what could possibly be gained by such a dissection?

  In Washington she usually manages to avoid the press, which by this time is not very much interested in her.

  Already seated in the dining room, she is looking down to the beach, where she sees a few runners near the edge of the waves, and a bunch of dogs, of various colors and sizes, that have gathered there at a small outcropping of rocks, as though deciding something. A conference of dogs.

  There used to be a lot of cats wandering about the dining room at mealtimes—though careful to keep out of the way of the quick-footed young maids and especially of Oscar, an unpleasant Russian, the manager of the hotel. Evelyn Fisk used to like giving the cats bits of bacon at breakfast, and pieces of meat, or fish, whatever, at night. She was in fact extremely fond of those cats.

  Observing that Oscar has just come into the room on some errand, she frowns to herself, and hopes that he won’t come over to speak to her.

  It must have been Oscar who in some way got rid of the cats.

  Oscar, of White Russian parents, is in his own view an aristocrat. No one much likes him. He is erroneously described as a Communist by certain guests; educated in Germany, he is labeled “that Nazi” by another sort of guest. He is very thin and sun-withered, inattentive except for occasional fits of concentrated and usually inappropriate emotion, often rage. He gives an impression of disliking all of Mexico, including the hotel and its guests.

  For several years there was a Polish woman of a certain age, named Marya, always there with Oscar and assumed to be his wife. A lean, faded blonde, who simply seems to be no longer around, and no one has asked about her.

  Oscar himself does not appear to know who is there from one year to the next, and he has been known to greet an already tanned mid-stay guest as though that person were a new arrival. Today he speaks to no one but a certain maid, who has done some wrong. Oscar scolds her at length, very sharply. He shakes one long finger much too close to her face, so that the girl shrinks and cowers.

  “Oh, there’s the woman who used to feed the cats,” Zelda says to Abe as they settle into their stiff, uncomfortable chairs and look about the room.

  “She must miss them.” Abe and Zelda have two dogs at home, whom Abe secretly misses very much. He would like to have children, but Zelda postpones even discussions of this possibility with vague remarks about how young they are (how young she is), plenty of time.

  “She doesn’t look to me as though she missed anyone, or anything,” Zelda tells him. “Do you suppose she’s married, or what?”

  “If she were married, she wouldn’t always come here alone, would she?” Logical Abe is often wrong.

  “Oh, she might.” Zelda does not take trips alone, although she has thought that she would like to, especially now, with the presence of a lover in her life. In Toronto for the last few years she has managed a travel agency—no reason for her not to travel now. “I miss the cats a lot,” she says to Abe. “And there’s horrible Oscar. I wonder whatever happened to Marya?”

  No newsboys come into the dining room that morning. Possibly they will be down on the beach later on.

  Now, in midwinter, and because this bay is surrounded by high mountains, a range extending almost to Mexico City, the su
n comes up late and slowly above the eastern ridge, a yellow haze, shafts of light that at last reach the sea.

  By midmorning, though, beachtime, the sunlight is well established: heavy, powerful, almost overwhelming. The hotel guests sit beneath their thatched palapas, shielded and sun-blocked, emerging occasionally to walk toward or run into the sea. To move through waves, in the warm-cool caressing water.

  On this particular day the waves are higher than usual, the undertow strong. Good swimmers, like Abe Hoskins, treat the water with some respect, gauging the sizes of waves, waiting before diving through. Deciding not to bodysurf that day.

  Abe thinks he read about an odd, unusual conjunction of planets taking place just now, along with a full moon. All that would surely affect the tides?

  Looking at the sky, at the unfamiliar thickening gray banks of clouds, Abe thinks that indeed it could rain. Even if it never does.

  Zelda is up in their room putting the final touches to their unpacking. Or maybe talking to the room maid, by now an old friend.

  Abe wishes he had a Mexico City News, the only available English-language paper.

  And he wonders about Gabino.

  Evelyn Fisk, several palapas away from that of Abe Hoskins, also wishes for a newspaper, but her wish is mild, and she manages to content herself for the moment with her thick paperback, a new Iris Murdoch.

  On this first day, though, her attention wanders. In particular, her eye is caught by the vendors who trudge slowly up and down, barefoot, on the hot white sand. Selling their awful wares. It seems to Evelyn that this year their faces are longer and sadder than usual, which could well be the case, the Mexican economy being what it is: splendid for tourists, over two thousand pesos to the almighty dollar—and dreadful, punitive for Mexicans, especially of course for the poor.

  Evelyn notices—or, rather, she thinks of something new today, which is that the women’s wares are generally much better than the men’s, and she ponders this fact: vending is women’s work, finally? (This might be something to include in a letter to Grantly; on the other hand, perhaps not. Grantly’s “liberalism,” of a somewhat old-fashioned sort, does not seem to extend itself to feminist issues.)