by Alice Adams
Downstairs was better, but outside was better yet. Once we had the pool, that was where most of the parties were. People were always invited to “come by for a dip,” drinks were brought down, and then the guests were probably encouraged to stay on for supper. At one end of the pool, a privet hedge shielded us from the road, and it flowered, intensely sweet.
Still, it is strange to me that I am so fixed, so literally rooted in a house of which my memories are not of a very positive nature on the whole, and standard psychological explanations of fixation by trauma seem both simplistic and uninteresting. Last summer, as I have said, I went to see the house, “my house,” which I had not seen for twenty-five years, not since my father died and my stepmother, who had inherited it outright, put it up for sale (a serious trauma, that: it was made clear that indeed I had never owned the house, nor had my mother, who might as well have been a guest). And what is curious is that I cannot now, six months later, recall just how it looked. It had been repainted a new color. But was it gray? Pale yellow? I have no idea. (I recently saw my former husband in a local bank, and for one fleeting instant I did not know who he was, but I know very clearly how he looked thirty years ago.) Across the road from the house, though, I am sure that there was a total obstruction to the view. Huge trees, I think.
But that freshly painted, viewless house is non-existent in my mind; it is not where I live. I live in a huge, mad house with the loveliest view. With everything in bloom.
1940: Fall
“Hasn’t anyone noticed those clouds? They’re incredibly beautiful.” These words were spoken with some despair, for indeed no one had noticed, by a woman named Caroline Gerhardt, on a late evening in September, 1940. Caroline Coffin Gerhardt, actually, or so she signed the many letters that she wrote to newspapers, both local and further afield: the Capitol Times, right there in Madison, Wisconsin, and Colonel McCormick’s infamous (Caroline’s word) Chicago Tribune.
The ponderously shifting, immense white clouds contemplated by Caroline were moving across an enormous black sky, above one of Madison’s smaller lakes. This house, Caroline’s, was perched up on a fairly high bluff, yielding views of the dark water in which the reflected clouds were exaggerated, distorted by the tiny flicker of the waves. There was also a large full moon, but full moons—at least to Caroline—seemed much less remarkable than those clouds.
No one else in the room noticed anything remarkable, because almost all of them, all much younger than Caroline, were dancing slowly, slowly, body to body, to some slow, very sexy recorded music. The “children,” as Caroline thought of these steamy adolescents, especially her own two girls, have only taken romantic notice of the moon. Beautiful raven-haired Amy Gerhardt, who resembles her absent father rather than smaller, pale, and somewhat wispy Caroline—Amy’s perfectly painted lips have just grazed her partner’s ear as she whispered, “You see? Another full moon. That makes seven since February.” The boy pressed her more tightly into his own body. All those tall boys and smooth-haired, gardenia-smelling girls danced too closely, Caroline had observed, with pain. Hardly dancing at all. Six or eight couples, two or three stags, in the big, low-ceilinged, pine-paneled room—the game room. Dancing, their eyes half closed, not looking out to the lake, to the moon and sky.
Caroline’s letters to the papers had to do with the coming war, with what Caroline saw as its clear necessity: Hitler must be stopped. The urgency of it possessed her, what Hitler was doing to the Jews, the horror of it always in her mind. And the smaller countries, systematically devastated. There in the isolationist Midwest she was excoriated as a warmonger (small, gentle, peaceable Caroline). Or worse: more than once—dirty toilet paper in the mail.
She also received from quite other sources pictures that were just beginning to be smuggled out of the camps. Buchenwald, Dachau.
She was actively involved in trying to help the refugees who had begun to arrive in Madison, with housing, jobs, sometimes at the university.
There was in fact a refugee boy at the party in Caroline’s game room that night. Egon Heller, the son of an anti-Nazi editor, now dead in Auschwitz. Egon and his mother had arrived from England. Hearing of them, going over to see them, and liking the mother (able actually to help her with a translator job), Caroline impulsively invited the boy. “If you’re not busy tonight, there’s a little party at my house. My daughters—about your age. They’re both at Wisconsin High. Oh, you too? Oh, good.”
Egon seemed more English than German. “The years of formation,” his mother explained. Tall and shy, long-nosed and prominent of tooth, he seemed much younger than he was—younger, that is, than American boys his age. Not adolescent, more childlike. One of the three young people not dancing just then, Egon stood near the record player, in the proximity of Caroline’s younger daughter, Julie—plump and brilliant and not yet discovered by boys (Caroline’s idea being that she surely would be, and soon)—although Julie was extremely “well liked,” as the phrase then went, in high school. By boys and girls, and teachers.
Caroline’s secret conviction about her daughter was that within Julie’s flesh were embedded her own genes, her sensuality. The intense dark impulses that had enmeshed her with Arne Gerhardt and landed her with three children—the youngest, now upstairs asleep, born embarrassingly only a year ago, when Caroline was already over forty.
Caroline felt with Julie a sensual kinship and consequent cause for alarm far more than with more overtly sexy Amy, the oldest. Caroline too had once been plump and brilliant and shy.
Maybe this Egon will be the one, romantic Caroline thought, looking toward the corner to Egon and Julie, who so far seemed to have in common only the fact of not dancing. He’s so tall and thin and toothy, Julie now so unsmiling, so matter-of-fact. Still, it would be very nice, thought Caroline. English-Jewish-New England-Swedish grandchildren—she would like that very much.
The other young person not dancing in the early part of that evening was a new girl in town, from Julie’s class, invited by Julie (who would later be strongly maternal, Caroline knew). A strange-looking girl from Oklahoma, with an odd accent and a funny name: Lauren. Most striking of all about Lauren, right off, was her hair—very pale, more white than blond, it stood out all over her head in tiny fine soft ringlets.
She looked younger than the rest of the girls, perhaps partly because she did not wear lipstick. Her mouth was long and finely drawn, and pale, in that roomful of girls. Even Julie had dark blood-red lips. A very tall, very thin girl, her neck was long and she moved her head about uncertainly, watching the dancers. Her smile was slightly crooked, off.
Someone should ask her to dance, thought Caroline. How rude these children are, how entirely selfish. Perhaps Egon will, that would be very nice, two strangers finding each other. But maybe he is too polite to ask Lauren with Julie standing there; he doesn’t know that Julie wouldn’t mind in the least being left alone. She will probably be going up soon to see about Baby.
Seeing no way out of this social dilemma, but fated always to feel responsible, Caroline herself began to move in Lauren’s direction—not easy, as the music had become more lively, people hopping about and arms and legs thrust out. Slowly making her way, Caroline tried to think of social-welcoming-maternal conversation.
“So you and Julie are taking Latin together?” Reaching Lauren at last, this breathless, silly remark was all she had been able to summon up finally.
“Yes. Cicero. There’s only five of us in the class.” Lauren laughed apologetically, as though abashed at the small size of the Latin class. But then, her huge eyes on Caroline, she said earnestly, “This is the most beautiful room I’ve ever seen. The view—”
Unprepared for intensity, Caroline was flustered. “Well, it’s a funny old house. Not exactly practical. But it is nice, being here on the lake.”
“I love it in Madison.” Lauren’s voice was rapt, those huge pale eyes burned. Caroline sensed that the girl had not said this before, to anyone. It was not a remark to be made t
o contemporaries, other children.
“Well, yes, it is a very nice town,” Caroline agreed. “Especially the lakes, and the university.” Some flicker of intelligent response across Lauren’s face made her add, “A very conservative place, though, on the whole.”
“Try Enid, Oklahoma,” Lauren laughed quickly. “More backward than conservative. But I know what you mean. The whole Midwest. Especially now.”
Was the girl simply parroting remarks overheard at home, or were those ideas of her own? Impossible to tell, but in any case Caroline found herself liking this Lauren, wanting to talk to her.
However, just at the moment of Caroline wanting to speak, forming sentences in her mind, the two of them were interrupted by a tall, fair, thin boy—Caroline knew him, knew his parents, but could not for the moment recall his name. Thick light hair, distinctively heavy eyebrows above deepset dark blue eyes. To Lauren he said, “Care to dance this one?” And then, somewhat perfunctorily (still, he did say it), “Okay with you, Mrs. Gerhardt?” He was staring at Lauren.
And they were gone, off and out into the room, lost among other couples, Lauren and Tommy Russell (his name had just come to Caroline, of course). And before she could collect herself or even could turn to watch them, from far upstairs she heard Baby’s urgent cry. Bottle time. Glancing toward Julie, observing that she and Egon had at last begun to talk, Caroline signaled to her daughter that she would go up. “I want to get to bed early anyway,” Caroline mouthed above the music, smiling, as she headed for the kitchen. For milk, a clean bottle, a heating saucepan.
Good Baby, the easiest child of the three, subsided as soon as she heard her mother’s footsteps on the stairs. Smiling up from her crib, she grasped the proffered bottle, clamped it into her mouth as Caroline settled into the adjacent battered easy chair.
From here, upstairs, she had an even better view of the lake, and the moon and the marvelous white clouds, and Caroline then felt an unaccustomed peace possess her. She thought, It is easier with Arne away (a fact hitherto not quite acknowledged). Generally his absences were only troubling: would he come back? That year he had a visiting professorship at Stanford, two years before at Virginia.
Now, as she peacefully crooned to the milk-smelling, half-asleep fair child, she thought that this time even if Arne decided to take off for good, she would really be all right, she and her three girls, who themselves were more than all right—they were going to be great women, all three. She could cope with the house, the good big lakefront place bought so cheaply ten years back. They would all be perfectly okay, Amy with her heady romances and her disappointing grades, Julie with her perfect grades, and perhaps a new beau in this nice English-German boy, this Egon. And maybe a nice new friend in this Lauren Whitfield, from Enid, Oklahoma. And Baby will always be fine, thought Caroline, sleepily.
And Roosevelt will win the election and declare war on Germany within the year, and we will win that war in a matter of months. Hitler defeated. Dead. Maybe tortured in a concentration camp.
Caroline thought all that, still crooning to Baby, and smiling secretly, somnolently to herself.
Lauren Whitfield, the new girl with the funny hair, and Julie Gerhardt did indeed become friends, though not quite of the sort that Caroline had envisioned. They began going to lunch at the Rennebohm’s drugstore across from the school, and Julie, sensing Lauren’s extreme interest in what was to her a glamorous new place, became a sort of balladeer, a chronicler of high-school love affairs, past and present. Disastrous breakups, the occasional betrayal. Along with a detailed rundown on the current situation, who was going with whom as this new season began, this warm and golden fall.
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 th
at 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.