The Drifters by James A. Michener
‘Of course it’s a conspiracy,’ Cole said evenly. ‘I’ve seen Randolph Pepperdine’s notebook and he took down Woiczinsky’s name and number. You don’t make up things like that.’
Gretchen was stunned by this conclusion. In consternation she pointed to the depositions lying on the table, and cried, ‘I suppose you believe them, too?’
Mr. Cole placed his arm about his daughter and said, ‘I think I know what happened at the motel. Do you think your mother and I would believe depositions like that?’
Gretchen looked at the lawyers, at her red-eyed mother, at the obdurate detective. In her frustration she bowed to the latter and said, ‘The people of Brookline should feel secure with you protecting them.’ Then she fled from the room, and when she was gone her mother dropped her head on the table and muttered, ‘Thank God, it’s not to go any further.’
The balance of 1968 was a trying period for the Coles. Gretchen, after the session with the detective and the quashing of her lawsuit, continued living at home but found it impossible to speak with her parents. Mrs. Cole attempted a conciliation, with assurances such as: ‘We are on your side, dear, no matter what you did in Chicago.’ Gretchen dismissed her as a fool, which she was not.
Mr. Cole did his best to understand the torments his daughter was suffering; at one point he wrote to me in Geneva:
You told me when I saw you in London that you were helping an Englishman in Vwarda get his daughter back on an even keel. I wish to God you could do the same for me. That adorable child you saw with pigtails and a guitar has suffered a shattering experience which has left her bedazed, and I find myself standing helplessly by. I have tried repeatedly to assure her of my understanding and sympathy, but to no avail. I went to great pains and some manipulation to prevent her from engaging in a lawsuit against venal public officials, intending only to help her, but my efforts have blown up in my face. You said once you had a son. Is raising a boy any easier?
He made many overtures to his daughter, admitting that he was misguided in persuading her to drop her charges against the police, but he was powerless to regain her respect, and they lived as enemies in the house where she had learned to sing.
Her fellow students, aware of what was happening, asked her how she could bear to stay in the same house, and she explained, ‘I’m not twenty-one till January. But with the first income from my inheritance … goodbye to Brookline forever.’
By late October it was apparent that she could not concentrate on her graduate work at Radcliffe, nor could she get excited about the election, since she was convinced that either Nixon or Humphrey would find himself locked into old concepts of government. She winced whenever either of them referred to law and order, and by mid-November she stopped even the pretense of attending classes.
At the beginning of December some law students at Harvard tried to get her to head a committee backing Justice Abe Fortas in the Congressional fight over his appointment as Chief Justice, but she could generate no enthusiasm. Still, the law fascinated her and she wondered if perhaps the young radicals were not right when they preached: ‘Whenever society insults you, zap it right back with super-love.’ Setting aside all other matters, she spent a day composing a careful letter, which she sent registered:
Brookline, Massachusetts
December 10, 1968
Patrolman Nicholas Woiczinsky
Police Department
Patrick Henry, Indiana
Dear Officer Woiczinsky,
I am the young woman whom your fellow officers humiliated last August at your police headquarters, the one with the guitar whom you arrested falsely as we were driving through Indiana.
I have often recalled that day, and I remember that during the time I was in that room you said nothing and did nothing to add to my dismay. It occurs to me now that you were ashamed of the whole procedure.
I also am ashamed. I am ashamed that my spirit broke and that I called you pigs. It was a hateful word, one I should not have used. You were right to react as you did, and I forgive you for having knocked me across the room. I might have done the same had I been in your position, and I now wish to apologize.
You may wonder why I did not press charges, as I threatened to do. The sworn statements of your mayor, your chief of police, the lawyer and Officer Maggidorf convinced my parents and their lawyers that I was a liar. They were also convinced that you were not in Patrick Henry that day. I wish you had not been, for you were better than the others. Please stay that way.
Yours respectfully,
Gretchen Cole
The next day she was summoned by her senior professor, who asked, ‘Are you as disorganized as you appear?’ When she nodded, he suggested, ‘Why don’t you drop out this semester? Go to Florida … Virgin Islands … some place completely new and try to get things in focus?’ He seemed the first adult who appreciated her problem.
‘I may do that,’ she said. ‘After the New Year.’
‘Why delay?’
‘In January ‘I’ll be twenty-one.’
He took off his glasses. ‘Are you only twenty? With your outstanding record?’ He looked at her undergraduate marks and then at some appended notes. ‘Didn’t you use to sing in one of the cafés?’ When she nodded, he said, ‘Go back. Forget studies for the rest of the year.’
‘What do you think I ought to do when I resume?’ she asked.
‘You can go in almost any direction,’ he said. ‘You have an inclination toward politics?’
‘I don’t think so. I thought I might like to … well … find some earlier period in history when values were in flux … Hundred Years’ War maybe …’
‘And write about it?
‘Yes.’
‘Absolutely splendid! A first-rate challenge! A first-rate relevancy!’ Gretchen smiled at his enthusiasm; it was so good to hear an adult agree with something rather than bring up a score of objections as to why the proposal could not work. ‘How’s your Latin?’
‘Eight years of A.’
‘German?’
‘I read it.’
‘French?’
‘Not so good.’
‘Then it’s very simple.’ He rose and walked about his study. ‘My God, I wish the other problems that reach this office were so simple. You’re a brilliant girl. One of the ablest undergraduates I’ve had. Go to Besançon—that’s in France, near the Swiss border—enroll in the American Institute. Brush up your French. Then come back prepared for some real work.’ He consulted a catalogue on foreign study and found the name he wanted. ‘Karl Ditschmann. Splendid fellow … Alsatian … taught at Michigan and Middlebury … tell him I sent you and that you’re not to worry about grades. Just browse … walk in the hills … imagine you’re back in the year 1360 … the first part of the war is over … Crécy and Poitiers are past … the Black Death is gone … everyone’s sighing with relief … so imagine the terror when fighting erupts again … Agincourt and the Peasants’ Rebellion lie ahead.’ He prowled the small room and said, ‘Get the feeling of France in your bones. The rioting peasants are coming down this valley—this valley here at your feet—and they storm past. Supposing you comprehend—you just might be able to write something relevant to our days.’
He imbued her with his enthusiasm, and she took down the name of the institute at Besançon, but as she was leaving, he said, ‘Maybe even more important is to sing again,’ and she asked, ‘Have you ever seen a guitar kicked to pieces? It affects singing, you know.’
So for the last weeks of 1968 she lay about the house, read in desultory fashion about the Hundred Years’ War, and kept to herself. Boys from Harvard and Amherst and MIT who had known her stopped by occasionally to talk, but she drew back from them as if they were leprous. Once when four of them were with her she saw their faces change into that circle of policemen at Patrick Henry.
The Cast Iron Moth asked her to sing, both at Thanksgiving and at Christmas, but she could not bring herself to do so. She did not even sing when she was by h
On January 10, her birthday, she marched into the office of her family’s lawyer and informed him that she wished one quarter of her yearly income. She said further that she would advise him by letter at the beginning of each quarter where future checks should be mailed. When he started to explain what she ought to do with the money, she cut him short: ‘I shall be here to pick it up tomorrow at nine.’
‘This time you must be careful of your companions …’
She looked at him with contempt. His had been one of the strongest voices advising against her lawsuit. He had spoken first and had set a pattern for the group’s acceptance of the charges against her. She thought of a dozen clever things she ought to tell this cautious old man, but she knew that communication would be impossible, so she controlled her anger and withdrew from his office. He followed her into the hall to ask, ‘Where did you say the subsequent payments were to be sent?’ and she could not forbear replying, ‘Perhaps Nepal. Maybe Marrakech. I don’t know yet myself, but I’ll keep you advised.’ On her way home she laughed as she thought of him poring over his atlas, trying to locate Nepal and Marrakech. She couldn’t have helped him; they were names that some of the kids at the café had dropped.
On January 11 she picked up her first check, went to the bank, transferred it into a fistful of traveler’s checks, went to the Air France office to collect her flight ticket, and that afternoon informed her mother, ‘I’m flying to France on the eight o’clock plane.’
‘When?’
‘Tonight. You can tell Father.’ She would divulge no more of her plans.
Mrs. Cole immediately telephoned her husband, who rushed home in a taxi to demand, ‘What’s this?’
‘I’m going to France,’ she said. ‘When I’m settled I’ll tell you what I plan to do.’
‘How can you go to France?’ her father cried.
‘Very simply. I catch a cab, go out to the airport and board the plane.’
But we can’t give you the money … your university fees will be wasted …’
‘I don’t need you, Father,’ she said coldly. ‘In October I needed you badly.’
‘You mean about the Patrick Henry business?’ her mother asked. ‘Darling, we’ve forgiven you … no matter what happened out there … we’ve forgotten.’
‘I haven’t,’ she said, and she would not allow them to accompany her to the plane.
Besançon was ideally constructed for the purpose of helping a confused American girl regain her balance. Set beside a river and within a cup of hills, it had always stood on the frontier. Julius Caesar had used it as one of his capitals, and Roman legions, weary of pursuing barbarians in the north, always returned with relief to the security of Besançon. Later it had been the frontier between Germans and French, and its rows of stolid stone houses had often given sanctuary. It was not a beautiful city, but it was stable and courageous, and Gretchen appreciated its stalwart quality.
Dr. Ditschmann was a burly, cabbage-eating scholar who each day muttered a prayer of thanks for his good luck in getting back to civilization after those long years of exile in Michigan and Vermont. He had been chosen by a consortium of American universities to head a graduate seminar which they conducted in loose affiliation with the University of Besançon, one of Europe’s principal centers for language study. Ditschmann delighted in his work, finding the European academic life refreshing after his long absence. He understood young Americans and provided an anchor for troubled ones like Gretchen, because he appreciated the contradictions that assailed them. ‘Today it is more difficult to be a thoughtful American than it was two thousand years ago to be a thoughtful Roman,’ he said, and his American wife, a no-nonsense young woman from Vermont with a bizarre New England sense of humor, agreed: ‘I’m always amazed when I find an American who can manage her back buttons.’ The Ditschmanns liked to run off on short trips to Switzerland, Germany or Italy and take students with them to savor new lands.
Ditschmann approved Gretchen’s idea of burrowing into the earth to establish contact with the motives that had animated the Hundred Years’ War. ‘Today you be the peasant and I’ll be the knight,’ he would propose, ‘and I have come riding by to ravish your daughter,’ and his wife would add, ‘A hell of a lot of ravishing you would accomplish. You couldn’t even catch her.’ He interrupted his work to drive along country roads to places like Cravant and Agincourt, where battles had been fought, and to Orléans, where Jeanne D’Arc had entered the wars, but by mid-April it was obvious to both Gretchen and the Ditschmanns that she was not finding the combination of values she sought. Her French had improved, but her involvement in the wars had practically vanished.
‘Are you disappointed in me?’ she asked as the Ditschmanns drove her back from Troyes, where one of the treaties had been signed.
‘Not at all,’ he said. ‘It’s the good minds that find difficulty in committing themselves. A lesser girl would have felt obligated to plod ahead. You inspect for twelve weeks … find a host of weaknesses … in yourself or in the subject … you’re well advised to chuck it.’
Mrs. Ditschmann asked, ‘What decided you?’
‘Jeanne d’Arc. She’s too amorphous. She absorbs the landscape and I’m not equipped to deal with her. I need a more solid footing … among the peasants.’
So it was agreed that she would quit Besançon, but she had to stay around until her next check arrived. Of course, when she sent her address to the bank, they passed it along to her father, who found that it was only a few miles from Geneva to Besançon. He sent me a cable asking if I could meet him there to discuss matters with his daughter, but I was in Afghanistan and my secretary did not forward the cable, for she expected me back in Geneva momentarily. I arrived during the last week in April and immediately wired Cole that I would proceed to Besançon, for I was eager to discover what had happened to Gretchen.
I am partial to that mountainous region of France, for if modern history has passed it by, so has progress, and it is always pleasant to see old manners being maintained on old farms. Linguists claimed that the best French in the empire was spoken in Besançon, so it was reasonable for the American universities to locate their institute here. When I reached it, however, I found that Dr. Ditschmann and his wife had taken some students on a field trip to the oft-besieged city of Belfort. They would return in time for dinner. In the meantime, his secretary told me, Mr. Frederick Cole of Boston was arriving on the evening plane, but when I asked if I could see Miss Cole, the secretary mumbled that Dr. Ditschmann would explain when he returned, so I concluded that Gretchen must have accompanied them to Belfort.
I retired to my room knowing nothing of her problem, except that she still had one, because her father was not the kind of man to take an airplane to Besançon, or Washington either, unless something grave had transpired. As I recalled a remark of Gretchen’s, ‘Father’s not apt to run if he can walk, nor fly if he can dog-trot,’ the phone rang to announce that Cole was waiting for me in his room.
In Boston I had respected this man; in Besançon I liked him, for he showed himself to be a compassionate human being, much disturbed over the welfare of his daughter. ‘I didn’t advise you earlier that she was so close,’ he explained, ‘because I didn’t know where she was. That’s right. She rejected us completely. It was our fault, but once we’d made the mistake, she would permit no amends. How do you think we learned where she was? Through the bank. How pitiful.’
‘Why did she leave?’ I asked.
The terseness of his reply startled me. ‘Ugly external reasons. Worse internal ones.’
‘What triggered it?’
‘She was, as you know, intereste
He sank into a chair, poured himself a half-glass of whiskey and pushed the bottle to me. ‘There was also some nonsense about a law student from Duke and a marijuana case at Yale. What happened, we really don’t know.’
I tried to digest this mélange of information, but could make no sense of it, for through it all I saw the stalwart figure of Gretchen Cole as I had known her, shy but self-assured, and with a sense of dignity that no police or no law student from Duke could undermine. ‘You must have it wrong,’ I protested. ‘I got to know Gretchen fairly well when I was in Boston. No, let me put it this way. That English girl from Vwarda that I told you about … now if you said that she had raised hell in Chicago, I’d ask, “So what’s new?” Not Gretchen.’
‘That’s why I wanted you to come here to talk with her … because you do know her.’
‘I’m most eager to find out what happened,’ I assured him.
At seven that evening we took a taxi to the institute to see Gretchen, but in the reception room we were met by the secretary, who advised us that Dr. Ditschmann and his wife would be down to see us shortly. Mr. Cole shrugged his shoulders and looked at me as if to say, ‘What’s the poor girl done now?’
His speculation ended when Dr. Ditschmann came in with his American wife. He was rosy-cheeked and ebullient, the kind of man you would expect to find running a gymnasium in rural Germany. She was a sharp-eyed girl, much younger than he but with the same infectious enthusiasm. It was apparent they enjoyed their work and would feel no hesitancy about telling Mr. Cole what had happened to his daughter. However, the interview started wrong.