An Absence So Great: A Novel (Portraits of the Heart)

  Mrs. Bauer told the truth. And yes, she’d left a few things out that didn’t need to be spoken of in that public way. Besides, Fred was the one at fault. The judge decided it, and she knew it, and she thought FJ knew it too. Now everyone else did as well. His behavior was to blame: his lack of protection of Donald, his hours away from her and the children, his everything had caused the severing of their marriage. He’d been absent from them for years, even when he was in the same room.

  Yes, she had her part, but it was minor compared to his. Especially his carelessness that led to Donald’s death.

  She shook her head. They had agreed before the trial that she would care for the children. How disgraceful it would have been if as their mother she’d been determined unable to care for them. He would provide for them through the Johnson Street studio, which he would operate…for her. It was the best way. He would be working for and serving her in return for her granting him release. A fair trade.

  If she didn’t like the arrangements, she could change her mind. She had a year to decide. He had a year to prove that he wanted out of the marriage, not for any other woman’s companionship but because he’d been sent away, for “cruel and inhuman treatment.” It was right there in the paper.

  The children would be in soon for supper, and she’d told Melba she would prepare the meal today: the last of the canned string beans, sliced beef, her pickled watermelon, and thick slices of bread. Her own appetite had increased since she’d made the decision; well, since the day FJ had yelled at her in front of her mother and the children. She knew then that in a small, perhaps wicked way, she had won. He’d humiliated her, but he’d humiliated himself as well, had lost his orderly way of being, had succumbed to the frustration of her control. She was in charge, and he had come to accept it. A goal she hadn’t realized she longed for had been met.

  After that, she’d moved back into the house. In the comfort of her own home, with her children around her, and confident that she was right, she invited him to dinner and told him she would grant the divorce. She outlined the conditions, and he agreed.

  Yes, he’d sell properties for the children’s college. He was responsible for such as that. She hoped he’d sell that ranch. At least discontinue the seasonal studio. He’d have to hire help, she supposed. He couldn’t keep running George Haas’s Polonia Studio since that Gaebele girl had deserted it and devote himself to the Johnson Street work too.

  She was glad FJ had a decent place to stay at least. She’d never been in the apartment, but George’s wife had good taste, so she imagined it was nicely furnished—if that Gaebele girl hadn’t diminished it. That might not be fair, Mrs. Bauer thought. After all, Selma and Lilly Gaebele both demonstrated good taste. One could assume Jessie Gaebele did too, and besides, FJ shouldn’t be expected to live in squalor because of his acts. No one deserved that. But neither should he live in richness either.

  She sliced the bread and put out the butter block. Whatever happened to that Gaebele girl? Ralph Carleton didn’t seem to know or wasn’t saying. Voe Henderson hadn’t heard anything about her, if she was truthful when Mrs. Bauer deftly brought up the subject. Voe apparently didn’t keep up with the girl. Mrs. Bauer shopped at Lottie Fort’s millinery several times to talk with Selma without the girl’s mentioning her sister once. It was almost as though Jessie Gaebele had died.

  Had she? Maybe she had gone away to deliver a child! Mrs. Bauer shivered. No, he’d said they had not… and she believed him. She had to. Certainly there would have been rumors, and if Miss Gaebele had died, her sisters would have spoken of it, if not FJ himself. FJ would have mourned the girl. Maybe he wouldn’t have asked for the divorce if that was so.

  She did understand that FJ might marry again one day. But she would always be Mrs. Bauer, and when the newspaper reported on her trips to visit family and friends outside of Winona, they would call her “Mrs. Frederick J. Bauer,” even if there was another Mrs. F. J. Bauer down the street. She and FJ were linked through the children and would always be. He would forever be her husband first, no matter who else he might give his wounded heart to. No one could ever take away from her the truth: that he had loved her first and, she might venture to say, best, loving her when he was young and on his way up as a professional man. He’d never be either again.

  She would never marry again, she was certain of that. The obligations of intimacy simply overpowered her. It was the greatest guilt she felt over this… divorce. A man had a right to expect physical closeness from his wife, shared tenderness of touch, but her nature—she didn’t know why—made even the thought of such intimacies turn her as cold and frozen as Lake Winona in winter. No amount of gentle talking thawed her, and she regretted the years she’d subjected FJ to such resistance. Maybe if she had told the doctors in Rochester everything, if she had truly confessed to Reverend Carleton how difficult this aspect of her marriage was, why she locked the bedroom door, maybe it might have been different.

  She felt a sob rise in her chest, and she grasped her apron at her heart. She must collect herself. The children shouldn’t see her grieve. They’d managed well, she thought, because she’d been strong, talked of positive things with them, how they’d know for certain their father was coming each Saturday, how their parents would both be happier.

  “What about us?” Russell had countered. “How come we can’t be happy with both of you home at the same time?” Winnie had nodded, and even Robert looked tearful.

  “Perhaps you should discuss that with your father,” she told them. She had no words to give them further comfort.

  She stood, poured a glass of lemonade, and drank it. What’s done is done. Outside, Robert chased a ring with his stick while Winnie cheered him on. The laughter pleased her. She had her children, her home, her memories. She would live on. Melba was back in their lives, at least for a time. After all, it was work tending children all alone through the summer months. They couldn’t go fishing all the time. She didn’t drive, nor did she have a car. She must talk with FJ about that. Russell would be fifteen in August and able to drive. A few states required licenses now. She’d have to see if that was so in Minnesota. Russell would like that, being able to drive her and her mother and maybe even her sister around to shop for household things, or out to the cottages. FJ now owned those, but he’d certainly allow her to take the children out to fish and swim. Yes, that would bring the children gladness.

  Her work now was to ensure that she made new memories and that old memories did not overcome her. It’s what she thought as she sank onto the chair and stared at her glass of lemonade. It was all she had energy for. Reworking old ways fatigued.

  Jessie left the newspaper for Virginia’s patrons to read. But she copied the article word for word on a separate piece of paper. No mention of the Polonia Studio. She wondered what had happened. Was Fred running it? Had he lost his money over it? She swallowed. She didn’t know where the forty acres might be. Possibly he’d moved away since Mrs. Bauer now owned the Bauer Studio. No, he’d want to be near the children, even though, oddly, it said Mrs. Bauer must support them, not Fred. That might be an error, she thought, but she didn’t understand divorce issues—nor did she want to.

  It was enough that the Bauers had come to a decision about their lives without her being a part of it. Was that a truthful statement? She’d like to discuss it with Virginia, but to do so meant referring to the article, and then Virginia would know. Maybe that wasn’t so awful, letting Virginia know, especially if Jessie and Fred had no future. Maybe confession required naming names. She’d only be discussing an interlude in her life, though a valuable interlude, one that resulted in her learning how to seek spiritual peace, learning to lessen the distance between her faith and her future. She’d found those answers in North Dakota. She intended to keep giving those gifts to herself.

  In her cabin that evening, Jessie lay awake, being honest. She thought about the women who waited for their men kept at the penitentiary. How many remained faithful to their marr
iage vows? How difficult it must be to wait. Many of the men would be there for their entire lives, and yet their wives, as Virginia recounted, moved to Bismarck, found jobs, and raised their children, all to be as close to their men as possible. Did they consider divorce, starting over? Would the stigma be worse as a divorced woman than as the wife of a convict?

  She remembered an incident that occurred when Virginia was in Denver. A Mr. Brady came by to pick up proofs of his children, and Jessie couldn’t find them.

  “Mrs. Butler took them last year, and I’m just now able to pay for them.”

  Jessie looked carefully through the B file but found no pictures of young children that might belong to the big ruddy-looking Irishman. “They must have been misfiled. I’m so sorry, I just can’t find them. I’ve looked on either side, A and C as well.”

  “Would you mind if I looked?” he asked. His request annoyed Jessie, with its implication of her ineptness, but she stepped back and allowed him to pass before her to the file box. His wide fingers moved the rust-colored holders awkwardly as Jessie stood aside, waiting.

  “Here they are,” he said, handing her the file. He smiled.

  Jessie looked at the photographs and caught herself in a gasp.

  “I’m sorry—I wasn’t looking for—”

  “I know. People don’t expect a man pale as me to have children black as coal, but they’re mine. And my wife’s, of course. Good li’l ones they are, too.” His eyes widened with pride as he sifted through each shot.

  “Of course,” Jessie said. “They’re beautiful.”

  As she took the money for his photographs, she wondered just how much scorn the man must endure, he and his wife and children, for their mixed-race marriage in a world where the races were so clearly divided. She hoped her reaction hadn’t added to it. She wondered how the children felt. As he left, she saw them run out from the wagon he’d parked in front, and they oohed and aahed over their portraits like children everywhere. People could live with the occasional raised eyebrows, she supposed, especially when the cause of it was no act of their own.

  Maybe that was how the children of the convicts endured. It was no fault of theirs.

  She tossed and turned. Why was she considering such things? She had found a new direction in her life; Fred and Jessie Bauer had made their decision. She was not part of it. That, at least, would make it easier for her to remember his children happy, rather than dwelling on the pain they must have gone through—and still faced—before the article in the paper captured details without feeling.

  “I have to go to south, near Linton,” Virginia told Jessie one morning in late August. “A studio’s going out of business, and we might be able to purchase their equipment at good prices. I want to stop at a few others along the way to suggest they let us do their printing. Would you like to come along? We could both use a holiday.”

  Jessie shook her head. She wasn’t feeling well, and a stage ride south did not appeal to her. That’s how Virginia planned to go, to save the train fare of traveling east, then changing to the southbound spur. She’d hire a livery wagon to bring back whatever she might buy.

  “A group is taking the steamboat over to Fort Abraham Lincoln after church,” Jessie said. “I’ve never been to the Mandan area in the summer, so if I feel up to it, that’s where I’d like to go.”

  “It would be nice for you to see it by steamboat instead of walking across the ice like last winter.”

  Jessie looked at the appointment book and said absently, “What’s the name of the studio going out of business?”

  “I believe it’s a seasonal, in Hazelton, owned by a Mr. Bauer.”

  “I’ve several frames I have no need for,” Fred told Mrs. Butler. She was a comely woman with a good business sense, he could tell that. “And the enlarger can go.”

  “I’m sorry I didn’t realize your studio was here,” she told him. “I could have done your developing for you during the winter and kept your clients happy.” He’d told her he’d been bringing the proofs back with him to Minnesota and then sending them back and forth, answering clients’ questions, clarifying the retouching they might want, and the coloring, and so on. She was right; he ought to have checked out surrounding studios. There were a lot of things he might have done differently through the years.

  As she fingered different items, Fred’s mind wandered. Things hadn’t gone smoothly since the divorce decree. Mrs. Bauer contacted him regularly about repairs needed in the houses, about questions regarding the children, about finances. Like most photographic studios, business had waned with the war talk, as people chose not to spend money on what they thought was frivolous. He’d had to make a change, and cutting back in Hazelton seemed the best plan.

  He’d arrived on the North Coast Limited, which boasted sixty-nine hours from Winona to Seattle. It was the first electric lighted train, and he’d read the paper through the dark night. While racing across Minnesota, he learned of the terrible Frank Lloyd Wright–related murders of the Cheney woman, her children, and several workmen. A photograph of the architect’s burned-out Wisconsin home, Taliesin, he called it, filled the page. The newspaper story suggested that the woman had brought this devastation on herself by divorcing her husband and living with a man she wasn’t married to. Fred shook as he read that. He’d once proposed that Jessie live in the Polonia apartment as a “kept woman,” as she’d put it. She’d rightfully refused. He felt ashamed again for the suggestion, for what he’d put his family through, for the time it had taken for him to face the truth.

  He wondered if he’d ever love again. He’d snorted to himself at that so loudly that a child on the train had pulled on his mother’s sleeve and asked, “Does that man have the croup?”

  He assured them he did not, that he was healthy indeed, but still, the idea that he would ever love anyone but Jessie Gaebele was as elusive as mist rising up over Lake Winona in the morning.

  He hoped for a new start by selling the Hazelton studio. One more loss to face. He’d gotten off at the McKenzie junction and taken the spur line south to where his partner, Herman Reinke, picked him up in the car. But once in Hazelton, he found himself enjoying the landscape, as he so often did. He understood why Mr. Roosevelt said he might never have been president if not for North Dakota, its wildness and bigness inspiring him to do great things. It was to North Dakota Mr. Roosevelt had come for healing after his wife and mother died on a Valentine’s Day. Like him, Fred felt invested in this state, and its prairie always brought hopefulness to his heart despite the tragedy. He didn’t really want to sell the ranch or the studio, he realized. At least not right now. There would be interest in photographing branding operations or wheat harvests. Maybe he could even sell such pictures for penny postcards.

  Could he continue to manage all three studios? Likely not. He was aging.

  Mrs. Butler spoke. “We could still manage your off-season work for you, if you didn’t sell completely out.” Her gloved hand picked up various props, moving the photographer’s brace. “I have an assistant who does fine work, especially retouching.”

  “Maybe we can consider that, after all,” he told her. “I made the decision to sell while in Minnesota. But then I arrive here and end up taking pictures, letting the landscape work its magic. Maybe I could work out an arrangement with the Butler Studio.” Saying that brought great relief.

  “Good.” She smiled. “Will you want to reconsider the sales of these items then?”

  “I’ve no need for that particular enlarger or the frames and mats you’ve picked out.”

  He’d close the Polonia instead, make it a medical office. He was exhausted managing both studios anyway. It would be better to focus on one business in Winona and operate Hazelton when he came west. “Maybe I’ll take pictures out in the countryside. Like one of those tramp photographers.” He grinned.

  “My assistant prefers that to studio work,” she said. “You have something in common.”

  Jessie played the piano long after
her lesson was over. She lost herself in music the way she often did in photography. At least while playing, Fred’s words did not come to mind as they did when she arranged a pose, dealt with a patron, matted and framed a photograph. Music had no history associated with Fred.

  The bluffs above the Missouri had no history with Fred either, but when she climbed them, she thought of the bluffs of Winona and of the times she’d looked out over her city and lake to the Mississippi River and felt at home. She felt attached to these bluffs too. She missed her family and wasn’t sure she wanted to spend another Christmas here, without them. Bluffs made her thoughtful, longing for home, and yet, at the heights, she could surrender to whatever was in store, without planning or posing at all.

  Instead of taking the steamboat to Mandan with the youth group, she climbed the hills, hoping the exercise would supplant her stomachache. She knew the paths of Bismarck’s parks, had walked them often, but the bluffs set her free. At the top, overlooking the Missouri, she sat and breathed and prayed and didn’t carry her camera with her at all. Instead, she wrote notes to herself about what she felt and what she wished for. She often read books, let Scripture speak new ways to her as the breeze snarled her hair.

  Today atop those hills looking west, she affirmed that she might never marry, but she could be part of something good if she set aside regrets, if she ceased demeaning and instead admitted that her self-pity, jealousy, and hopelessness were as offensive as her part in another family’s separation. Perhaps then she could be available for… love, for the good God intended for everyone. That’s what her pastor assured. She decided that self-pity was an even greater transgression than going to a movie theater or attending a sporting dance, even greater than leaving film too long in a developing solution and costing her employer a contract, maybe even greater than loving a man who belonged to someone else or being a child who failed to watch her little brother.