The Drifters (41 page)

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, interested in McCarthy’s campaign. At the Chicago convention a series of miserable things happened—what, we don’t know for sure. On the trip home her car was stopped by small-town police who gave her …’ He hesitated, looked down at his knotted fingers, then said, ‘They gave her what newspapers call a working-over. Extremely rough for a girl … for anyone. She became outraged—had every right to—and launched a public complaint … through the Cleveland papers, if you please. Mrs. Cole and I panicked. Purely to protect Gretchen, we took steps to hush things up, and Gret felt that we had abandoned her. Mrs. Cole said some inappropriate things, and I must have looked quite wishy-washy. That’s when the internal trouble started. She rejected us. Terminated her education. Went into a blue funk … or worse … and here I am.’

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.

‘My good friend Cole!’ Ditschmann cried as he hurried across the room and grasped my hand. ‘I’m her father,’ Cole said stiffly.

Ditschmann stopped, studied us, and said to me, ‘I’d have thought you were Cole. You look more European. Gretchen’s very continental, you know. Wonderful with languages.’ Without embarrassment he turned and shook Cole’s hand. ‘You have a most superior daughter.’

‘A delightful girl,’ Mrs. Ditschmann agreed.

‘Then she’s not in trouble?’ I asked.

‘Gretchen? Heavens, no. I wish all our young people …’

‘Could we see her?’ Cole asked abruptly.

Dr. Ditschmann turned to him in some surprise. ‘See her? Hasn’t she told your

‘She tells us nothing,’ Cole said quietly.

‘My dear man!’ Ditschmann said. ‘Sit down. Please.’

Mrs. Ditschmann pulled up a chair and took Mr. Cole by his two hands. ‘You mean … she hasn’t written to you about her plans?’

‘No,’ Cole said, withdrawing his hands. ‘She has not.’

The Ditschmanns looked at each other, and he cocked his head in an Alsatian mannerism as if to say, ‘She must have had a damned good reason.’ Aloud he said, ‘Then you aren’t aware that Gretchen is no longer with us? Hasn’t been for two weeks?’

‘Where is she?’

‘I don’t really know,’ Ditschmann said. Turning to his wife, he asked, ‘Did she leave any clue with you as to where she might be on’—he consulted his Swiss watch for the date—‘on May 5?’

‘No,’ Mrs. Ditschmann said without visible concern. ‘I think the group was going to look at the Loire Valley … then maybe the Cote D’Azur.’

‘No need to get excited,’ Ditschmann said reassuringly. Again turning to his wife, he asked, ‘Who was in the group?’

She reflected for a moment, then ticked them off: ‘Wasn’t there the boy from Denmark? How about the German girl? The American girl, yes. And some other boy. He wasn’t associated with the institute.’

‘You mean you don’t even know …’

‘Mr. Cole,’ Ditschmann explained patiently, ‘we have many young people here. From all parts of the world. They come, they go, some of the finest human beings on this earth. Your daughter is with three or four of them right now. Where, I don’t know. Somewhere in Europe. In due course she’ll let us know.’

‘I’m perplexed,’ Cole said. ‘Our daughter enrolls here … and you don’t even know where she is. Somewhere in Europe. With three or four other young people equally irresponsible.’

‘Mr. Cole,’ Mrs. Ditschmann corrected, ‘Gretchen is not irresponsible. She is, if anything, one of the stablest students we’ve had. She has absorbed all we have to offer and is intelligent enough to know it. Where is she now? She’s looking.’

‘For what?’ Cole asked.

‘Ideas,’ Dr. Ditschmann said. ‘She came here with a plan … to write something about the Hundred Years’ War. Upon inspecting it
in situ
, she found it wasn’t her thing, as they say. She had the guts to drop it. Just drop it. And now she’s looking for something else.’

‘What?’ Cole repeated.

‘I told you. An idea. She’s looking through France for
an idea big enough to absorb her interest and her talent for the next dozen years. Such ideas are very difficult to find. We must all wish her luck.’

‘This is most distressing,’ Cole mumbled. ‘An educational institution which doesn’t even know where its children …’

Dr. Ditschmann smiled. ‘We don’t think of twenty-one-year-old girls with IQs of 170 as children. As a matter of fact, your daughter was probably never a child. At this moment I’d say she’s right where she ought to be.’

‘Where?’ Cole insisted.

‘In a yellow pop-top … knocking around Europe … with a bunch of bright-eyed young people.’

‘What is a yellow pop-top?’ Cole asked, trying to control his temper.

Dr. Ditschmann deferred to his wife, and she explained, ‘Volkswagen of Germany has produced this new idea in station wagons. Very popular with young people. Provides an ingenious arrangement of sleeping bunks plus a roof that can be swung up to give extra space and a view of the scenery.’

‘Sleeping bunks?’ Cole repeated as if a chasm separated him from the Ditschmanns.

‘When Gretchen decided to quit the institute,’ Dr. Ditschmann explained—‘With our full blessing,’ his wife interpolated—‘she had just received a rather large check from Boston. From you, no doubt. So she had this happy idea of buying a pop-top. My wife helped her pick it out.’

‘We encouraged her,’ Mrs. Ditschmann corrected. ‘You see, from the first day when pop-tops became available, Karl and I have wanted one. It would be great for taking students camping, so I guess you could say that in abetting Gretchen we were sublimating our own desires. Anyway, she had her heart set on a yellow pop-top. No other color would do. The dealer had this groovy red one …’

At her use of the word
groovy
Mr. Cole winced, and I was afraid that the interview would end in disaster, but Mrs. Ditschmann ignored him: ‘So our dealer here in Besançon telephoned Belfort, where they had a bright yellow one, and we drove up to inspect it, and when Gretchen saw it shining in the sun, she ran up and kissed it and said, “I’ve been with dark things too long.” She bought it on the spot, paid cash, and next day drove south.’
She hesitated, then added, ‘With our blessing, Mr. Cole. With our complete blessing.’