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

by Jane Kirkpatrick

  “Your beau stopped by for coffee. There’s no sin in that, Lilly. He seems nice enough.”

  “But he does drink, Jessie. And I doubt he’d give it up for me.”

  Jessie sat on the bed, felt the weight of her life sucking out her backbone. Neggie jumped onto her lap and let Jessie pet her. “We’re a pair, you and I,” she said to Lilly. “We’ve fallen in love with men we cannot have, knowing full well what we were doing all along. What’s the matter with us?”

  “You are in love with that man. I’m not, at least I don’t think I am. I’m just… lost in the impossibility of it.”

  Jessie stifled a sob.

  Lilly sat beside her. “I’m so sorry, Jess. I am. Did he… That is, did you…”

  She shook her head. “Not that we didn’t have opportunity and desire,” she said. “But I made him leave. Just not before he told me that he’d secured the loan for this studio and that I didn’t need to succeed here on my own at all. He would take care of me.”

  “He isn’t a good man,” Lilly said. She crossed her arms over her chest.

  “He’s not a bad man, though, Lil. He just is. I knew it when I began to fall in love those years ago. It’s my fault as much as his. Maybe loving photography too much is the real problem. Oh, Lil, how could I love something so much even though it’s brought me misery?”

  “Are you talking about your camera or Fred Bauer?”

  “Both, I guess.” Jessie wiped at her eyes. “Both have consumed me, and I’ve let them.” She sighed. “The only thing I know to do now is to absent myself from both of them.”

  “Oh, Jessie, don’t give up your camera,” Lilly said.

  “Maybe it’s less the camera than the studio, having it all my own way. The only thing I know to do is to move on.”

  Lilly rubbed Jessie’s back as she talked. It was the closest Jessie’d felt to her sister in years. “What will you do?”

  “I’m going to Seattle. I’ll stay with Aunt Mary’s half sisters.”

  “You’ll leave the studio behind, after all you’ve worked for?”

  “It was all a facade, a pose. My whole life has been swirling with illusions. I’ll find what’s true in Seattle.”

  “You have to tell Mama and Papa. They’ll… You have to say good-bye to Selma and Frog. They’ll miss you terribly.” She thought out loud. “You should stay. You can find other work, you can. Stott’s is always looking for seamstresses.” She cried now, and Jessie did too.

  “You’ll tell them for me. If I go there, it’ll just remind Papa of how I didn’t learn anything, how I still let my feelings rule. Just tell them I had to try something new. I took care of things at the bank. I’ll write. I’ll come home again. I just have to get out now. Please. You’ve got to tell them for me.”

  Neggie howled and spurted off her lap, and Jessie realized the girls had squeezed the cat between them in their last embrace. “You’ll look after Neggie for me, won’t you?”

  Lilly nodded.

  “Just go now, all right? Please? Come back and get the cat after I’ve gone.”

  Lilly hesitated, stroked the cat, then left.

  Jessie spent the rest of the evening printing the proofs she had to finish, including the Giroud sisters in their Roman togas. Then she wrote letters to her clients, telling them they could pick up their pictures at the Bauer Studio on Johnson Street. She’d leave a note for Lilly to take the prints to Voe after Jessie was gone.

  The sun rose as Jessie finished her last cup of tea, closed the trunk lid, then called for a cab that took her to the train and away from home. Again. The steam, whistle, and screech of wheels announced her departure.

  Mrs. Bauer wasn’t sure she heard the words correctly. He couldn’t be saying it. She had no warning, nothing to prepare her. “You want a divorce? Is that what you said?”

  “It is,” Fred told her. “I’ve failed you. I’ve been—”

  “Unfaithful.” She gasped.

  “That, too, I suppose,” her husband said. He didn’t sound sniveling. There was a tone, resignation laced with warning.

  “I knew it!” she charged. “I knew it. Ever since you came back from the association meeting, you’ve been strange. Why, this past week you’ve hardly said a word to either me or the children. You were with that woman! Jessie Gaebele. You were with her last week in St. Paul, weren’t you? How could you defile—”

  “I was not with her as you say, Mrs. Bauer. She did attend, as did I, but I did not…I did not—”

  “But you wished to! It is the same!” Blood rushed to her face and with it a surge of clarity and strength. Her ears rang, but she could hear each sound in the room; her eyes burned, but they were wide, taking in every inch of this betraying man who sat before her, his shoulders slumped, head bowed, the smooth spot widening in the back of his head where his hair thinned. She knew everything about him. She wanted him to deny her accusations, but he didn’t. He shook his head, clasped his hands together as he leaned his elbows on his thighs, staring at the floor between his feet. “Yes,” he whispered. “I wanted to. I’ve been so… lonely.”

  “We are all lonely,” she screamed. “Do you think your life is so special that you expect to be spared?”

  “We don’t—”

  “That’s why I’ve kept you locked out of my room these years. That’s why. You can’t be trusted. You… you…” She couldn’t find the words. “I should have known. I should have seen this.”

  “And what would you have done?” he asked, more fire in his voice as he looked up. “Just what would you have done if I’d said I had deep affection for Miss Gaebele, a girl young enough to be my daughter? That I felt alive when she spoke of photographic things, that she made me laugh when I otherwise didn’t wish to? What would you have done? Locked me out of the house as well? Told the children their father was a letch? Held even greater distance between us? What greater absence could there be…Jessie, than what our marriage has become?” He held his arms out as though to take in the entire room, the world. He looked so thin.

  She sobbed then. “Donald. It wasn’t so bad before Donald.”

  “No,” he said. “It wasn’t, though you’d left me twice by then, you had, Jessie.” He didn’t let her protest. “But I know you can never forgive me for Donald’s death, and if it’s any consolation, I’ll never forgive myself either. Not ever. Things I wish I would’ve done.” He seemed to be remembering as his eyes flitted around the room. “Set him on the seat beside me. Told him to wait with you. Taken a different road. Harnessed a different horse, for heaven’s sake!” His voice broke. He was a man in pain, and she couldn’t find a way to relieve it, for her own wounds sliced her heart and bled her dry. “I come up with no answers, and to see your grief daily is to be reminded of my great and tragic failure. There is no end to the sorrow I’ve given you. No end, and I am so sorry.” His voice caught again. “It’s why I want to set us both free of it.”

  “I will never be free,” she said.

  He nodded in agreement. She didn’t want him to be kind now. She wanted to be angry, to scrape at him until the pain in her ceased. But it wouldn’t. Ever. “Your sadness is so much deeper than my own,” he said. “Donald was a part of your very flesh. And yet his absence leaves a great hole in my heart too”—he patted his chest—“so great I cannot even fathom the time when I did not know it. It so consumes my life. Jessie…”

  She looked up at him, but he wasn’t talking to her.

  “Jessie Gaebele came into our lives—yes, both of our lives—at a time of need. I did not intend for it to become this…what it is. A longing, that to deny any longer means continued betrayal to you and to our children. She will not even have me, but I can’t live with this, with us, the way we are. So I am asking for the divorce.”

  She felt powerful, yet knew that feeling now, at this time, was wrong, very wrong, but it didn’t stop her. “You must never see that woman again. Not ever. Is that understood?”

  “I suspect she would agree with yo
u,” he said. “The truth is that she’s gone, yes? I don’t know where, but she isn’t in Winona anymore.”

  “Then what purpose is a divorce?” There was such disgrace in divorce, she thought. Such disgrace, though perhaps no more than what had already occurred. She wondered just how many others knew of her husband’s philandering, knew of his betrayal.

  “You deserve to be free of me,” he said. “I know you, too, see Donald’s death with every breath you take in my presence. You deserve something other than that.”

  “You’re pawing your own way out,” she charged. But a part of her agreed with what he said.

  “You can have the studio, this house, the children of course, the cottages on the river. I’ll continue to run the studios.” She thought he said “studios.” She must have been mistaken. “Whatever you need, Jessie, I’ll provide it.” The train rumbled by as it did this time of day, halting their conversation. “You’ll be safe and secure,” he resumed, “and free of the weight I’ve become.”

  “You’ll not get off that easy,” she sneered. “I’m taking the children and going home to Mother’s until I’ve had time to think this through.”

  “As you like,” he said.

  She watched him rise and walk, beaten, from the room. Her desire to run after him, to shake sense into him, argued with her need to talk immediately to Reverend Carleton. A terrible emptiness consumed her, almost as great as when she’d learned of Donald’s death, and yet a weight had been lifted from her soul. She couldn’t understand why.

  Jessie slept through the morning on the train. After waking, she watched the miles of prairie and grasses, wheat leaning into wind. Beyond Fargo, in small towns along the Northern Pacific, people waved if the train slowed but didn’t stop, and she waved back, watching as they returned to their hoes or to hanging aprons and men’s work shirts on sagging lines. She saw a sign with the name of a town and an arrow pointing north toward “Jessie.” Imagine. A town with such a name. What kind of place was that? A confused, chaotic place, she imagined.

  Occasionally dogs scampered beside the train until they saw the futility of it, and while she couldn’t hear them, she could see them barking at the invader that rolled through their territory. At one lonely station, she watched a cat arch its back and saunter into the building. Her eyes watered as she thought of Neggie and everything else she’d left behind.

  A squeal from a child on the seat across from Jessie caught her attention. Nothing wrong, just a child bringing attention to herself. Jessie took out a slice of ham she’d brought with her, then wrapped it back up. She wasn’t hungry. She wondered if she ought to have brought the photograph Fred had taken of her. She’d left it behind, not needing a constant reminder of what could never be, its presence a reflection of their failures. She shook her head, stared out at the afternoon that no longer inspired.

  The bank notified Fred of the status of his secured loan and explained he had to make some changes. He hoped to find out from Mr. Horton where Jessie had gone, or at least hear details of the president’s encounter with her. Fred grasped for information, wanted it to fill the emptiness. He made an appointment with the bank to discuss the matter and was just leaving for it when Lilly Gaebele walked into his studio. Lilly had the same soft mouth, the same large, alluring eyes as Jessie, but her face was rounder, her hair tidier, and she lacked Jessie’s quiet grace.

  “Miss Gaebele,” he said. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

  “I doubt you’ll find my visit pleasurable,” she told him. She handed him folders of prints, then stood, tapping her foot. She reminded him of a banty rooster ready to attack. “My sister has told people to come here to get their prints,” she said. “I guess you know why.” He nodded, looked through the folders without attention.

  “I’m glad we can help. Is this arrangement temporary?”

  Lilly snorted.

  “Would you like tea?” he asked, looking up. “I’ll have Voe fix it.” He didn’t want the young woman to leave, wanted to know where Jessie was, how she was. Lilly was the last thread connecting him to her presence.

  She didn’t answer, looked around, her gaze stopping at the toddler’s toys strewn across the reception room floor. She fanned herself. It shouldn’t be that hot on this August day of… It was his birthday. The tenth of August. What a way to acknowledge it. “Can I get you a glass of water? Anything at all?”

  “I just wanted to see for myself what it was about you and this place that set my sister on her course to degradation.”

  He winced. “Nothing about your sister is shameful or corrupting.”

  “She left feeling humiliated,” Lilly contradicted.

  “And I am sorry for that, beyond anything I could ever say. Where has she…left to?”

  The young woman hesitated. “To the West Coast, Seattle, if you must know. We don’t know where, or when she’ll come back. Our parents are devastated, Roy is bereft, and Selma has cried herself to sleep every night she’s been gone. My sister loves her family, and she loved her studio, the more because she thought it was hers.”

  “It was,” he whispered.

  “Not the way she wanted it. You took that from her, along with her innocence. You made her want to leave us. You should be ashamed.”

  “I am,” he said. “I am.”

  “Well, that’s one good thing to come of this then,” she said. She turned and walked out.

  As the train moved west, Jessie focused on the wide, treeless horizon. The train like a giant canoe pushed through waves of grasses. Here, Indians once roamed. She had read of that. Here, native artisans now worked. She’d seen a few sitting beside the tracks near the stations, with pottery and colored blankets before them on the ground. Fred had pots like those at the studio. She wondered if he’d bought them near this place, where the train rolled by not far from the reservations. The engine stopped at Medina to take on water, then chugged out again. The sameness of the landscape mesmerized her. It was long and undulating, with no bluffs to break it, no woods or timber, only lines of trees—shelterbelts, she thought Fred called such rows of plum trees, box elders, and ash—planted to slow the winds that roared across the landscape, scooping up soil left unprotected by such borders. She remembered that Fred had told her something his favorite poet wrote: that love was when two solitudes came together to “protect and border and salute.” The trees did border and protect the land, and their greenery against the yellow, ripening wheat could be called a salute, she supposed. Perhaps trees were God’s way of expressing love to creation. Hadn’t Emerson written that flowers were how the earth laughed?

  Their love, hers and Fred’s, had failed to border, protect, and salute. Maybe only divine love was really enough, a love that gave one longing and the gifts to pursue it without fear of defiling it or, worst of all, losing it and being left alone.

  She wondered if she’d ever want to take another photograph again.

  Her passion for the art was what had put her on this train. No, that wasn’t true. She had lost her way, had “taken the wrong turn,” as Ralph Carleton would say. He’d told her a Hebrew word for sin that translated as “missing the target or taking the wrong road.” That was her, all right. Maybe running away was just another means of taking the wrong road. Her foot bumped the camera case at her feet. Maybe her waning desire to photograph anything was the punishment being meted out for her having lost sight of the light, the very thing every photographer needed for the perfect shot.

  The train slowed. “We’re approaching Bismarck,” the woman across from her announced. “We’ll cross the Missouri River through Mandan and then truly be in the West.”

  This whole landscape felt like the West to Jessie, so big and open, wide with possibilities, nothing to fetter a soul unless one planted shelterbelts against the ravages. As the train slowed she recognized a meadowlark leaning out at the very edge of a bowed grass stem: something familiar.

  “They’ll let us get out and walk around,” the woman told her. “You should
get up and stretch, dear. Your legs will swell.” Jessie had learned that the couple headed to Spokane and made the trip often to see family in St. Paul. People seemed to think she needed tending. Was it her small frame? Her youth? Being a woman alone? She nodded and thought of Fred. Had he merely been tending her?

  She took in a deep breath, and when the train stopped, she stepped off along with the others to stretch her legs and move without having to balance herself between the rows of seats as the train rocked its way west. She’d have black and blue marks on her thighs from all the bumping, even though she’d stopped trying to walk the aisles miles before. Her ankles were swollen, she noted.

  “Rent your room at the Bismarck or the Mandan Hotel.” A man hawked his way along the station, shouting. “Thirty days residency and you can settle those domestic affairs in a legal way.” Jessie noticed a few people taking his fliers. She wondered what on earth he sold.

  Inside the Spanish-looking depot, marble walls and floors kept the building cool. She took a drink of water from her canteen. It tasted warm now. She found the privy, then stepped out, opening the stuffy door to an astonishment in the western sky.

  Big, billowy clouds rose up over the wide prairie of North Dakota. Had she not noticed them before? Behind the clouds, the sun glowed orange and red, outlining with colored lace the great pillows in the sky. The shapes and colors of the sunset changed as Jessie watched, reminding her of fire. The light filtered and glowed through the climb of them as the sun eased behind. This was a new landscape where clouds marked the high points, as dramatic as the bluffs burned in the spring above the Mississippi. Huge white birds soared above her. Could they be pelicans? She’d thought such birds were only at the ocean!

  She turned. Two towers with red roofs rose above the depot. Across the way, Jessie saw grasses waving in the evening breeze and nothing beyond to obstruct her view. There might be bluffs beyond if the Missouri River ran there. There might be hawks and eagles sinking below her if she climbed to such heights. She couldn’t always see what lay ahead.