Goodbye Without Leaving

by Laurie Colwin

  The cakes, which I had helped carry down from the Vienna Café, were waiting in their pink and white boxes on a table in the small reception room.

  That morning I had left my family setting, which was often as cozy as a little den with three bears in it, and had come out into a world of which my husband and child knew nothing. An integrated person might have invited Dr. Frechtvogel home for dinner, but I never had. I did not think Johnny would get him, or he would get Johnny. Besides, Dr. Frechtvogel did not like innovation. On Mondays he had dinner with Mrs. Gusta Klein, on Tuesdays with Mrs. Weinberg. On Wednesdays he ate dinner with Bernard and Gertje. Thursday was reserved for Mrs. Mueller, and Fridays he had dinner with his sister-in-law, who now sat in the front row wearing a black veil. On Saturdays he dined with Frau Dr. Zeller, the psychoanalyst, and on Sundays he refused to go anywhere.

  Suddenly, with a great volley of coughs, Bernard stood up at the podium and began his speech. He explained that Ludwig had never worked for him. Ludwig had visited him. He had stopped by many, many years ago and had never left. And although what he mostly did was smoke and kibitz with his lady friends, he had been an invaluable adviser and friend.

  Then Buddy stood up and said more or less the same thing. Buddy had recently closed his second business deal and was on his way to achieving his childhood dream of making a million dollars before he was twenty-one. It was said he was keeping company with a much older woman who ran a small real estate empire.

  After Buddy, a parade of ladies stood to speak in German, French and English. Plain and fancy handkerchiefs were taken from handbags. The men blew their noses. I wiped my eyes on my sleeve.

  Then Gertje stood up again.

  “Those of us who loved Ludwig knew that he had no ear for music. He came to this country and said, ‘Everywhere you go they play the radio. They play music in their cars and in their coffee shops.’ He said his ears were made of tin. The only song he knew was ‘The Tennessee Waltz.’ He could actually hum it: I have heard him. He asked that this be sung at his funeral by Geraldine Miller, who works for us and who used to be a professional singer. As for Geraldine, he loved her very much. He did not allow new people into his life but he made an exception for her. Please, Geraldine, stand up.”

  I stood. My knees were made of water. I had not told Johnny that I had been asked to sing. I just wanted to do it and get it over with. I took a deep breath and began.

  The chapel was a perfect place to sing in. It made your voice carry—some rooms are like that. I had forgotten how wonderful it felt. When I finished, everyone was in tears. Gertje stood up and told them to come into the lobby for coffee. I wanted to slink out, but Leo caught me by the sleeve.

  “Ludwig would have loved that,” he said. “Please have lunch with me.”

  We stayed in the lobby to have coffee, and when people began to drift out in groups of three and four, Leo and I walked to a bar near Franklin’s school and ordered sandwiches.

  “You’re going away, aren’t you?” I said.

  “My fellowship came through,” Leo said. “I’m going to Berlin for a year.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I mean, I’m glad.”

  “I’m glad and sorry, too,” Leo said.

  “Well, everyone I know is going away. My friend Mary Abbott, who lived near you, has gone into a monastery, and now Ludwig is going to heaven. And my little boy is turning four and growing up.”

  Leo took off his glasses, held them to the light and squinted at them. Then he wiped them on a napkin and put them back on.

  “I’ll always remember the first time I saw you, dancing with Ludwig,” he said. “You can’t imagine the delight it would have given him to have you sing at his funeral. I’m so sorry he missed it.”

  “I didn’t want to do it, you know,” I said.

  “But you did it,” Leo said. “Geraldine”—he had never called me by my name before—“I want to say something … I’m not sure what. Being with you made me happy.”

  “Really?” I said.

  “Oh, yes,” Leo said. “Maybe we were a little bit in love with each other, and maybe we just needed to know each other.”

  I drank my iced tea to keep my throat from closing.

  “And now we will vanish like dust,” I said.

  “Oh, no!” Leo said. “It’s not like that at all. It is my job to go off to Berlin, and it’s your job to bring up your child. We aren’t meant to be together, but we’re important to each other. Unless I’ve got this all wrong.”

  “You’ve got it all right,” I said.

  “But it’s our job to know each other,” Leo said. “Why can’t we do that? I need to know you. You’re a four-square, right-on American.”

  “Yes, and you’re the Man from Western Civ,” I said.

  “Well, you’re the Girl from Rock and Roll. I think your going on tour was a wonderful thing to do. I really admire you for it.”

  “Wonderful!” I said. “You speak three languages and you know European history, and you think it was wonderful that I was a rock and roll singer?”

  Leo reached over and patted my hand. “Dumb girl,” he said. “Think of the Regensteins. They were European history and they spent half their lives with a bunch of old bluesmen.”

  I looked at Leo. I liked to think about him newly arrived from China wearing Eton shorts and high gray socks. Of his mother taking him to the Kleine Café for tea, when Leo would much rather have been playing baseball with his pals. I thought of him trying to become an American boy.

  “In college we used to listen to Ruby singing ‘Boy Oh Bad,’” Leo said.

  “That was before my time,” I said. “But she liked to keep all her big hits in her repertoire, so I sang it once.”

  “You know,” Leo said, “I would like to think we will probably always know each other.”

  “Why will we?” I pleaded.

  “Well, we both loved Ludwig,” Leo said. “And besides. You’re my American. I’m your European.”

  63

  On a cloudy spring morning I sat with my husband and son, watching my boy eat Cheerios one by one. It was my morning to observe Little Franklin’s class. I would sit on a tiny blue chair hoping that my child would not pay too much attention to me.

  Although I longed for this opportunity, I dreaded the idea of showing up at school. Paulette Goldberg, the former Pixie Lehar, was lying in wait for me. The school fair was drawing ever closer and I knew I had to tell her one way or the other what I intended to do.

  As my husband ate his way through a stack of toast, he hectored me.

  “Come on. It’ll be good for you,” he said.

  “What will be good for Mommy?” said Little Franklin.

  “Pankie,” said Johnny. “Remember when Mommy swam across the lake? You didn’t know she was a great swimmer. Well, she’s a great dancer and a great singer. Before you were born, she used to sing on stage.”

  “Where was I?” said Franklin.

  “You weren’t born,” said Johnny.

  “But where was I?”

  “You were in my tummy,” I said.

  “Even before you knew Daddy?”

  “You were always in my tummy,” I said. This was a conversation we had had thousands of times.

  “Did you have a big tummy when you sang?”

  “You were just an idea in my tummy,” I said. “Very, very tiny.”

  This satisfied him, and he went back to his cereal.

  “Would you like to watch your mama dance and sing?” Johnny said.

  “Why, you little shitheel,” I whispered. “Don’t you dare!”

  “What kind of dance?” said Franklin.

  “Your mommy wore a beautiful green dress,” said Johnny. I stared at him in disbelief. He had gotten a faraway look in his eyes, and his voice sounded misty, as if he were about to spout forth one of the Just So Stories. “Your mama wore a beautiful green dress and green shoes. She wore her hair fixed up on top of her head, with curls down the sides. Up on sta
ge she looked like a tropical bird. When she sang, it was the most wonderful sound in the world.”

  “Shut up,” I said. Franklin looked raptly at his daddy.

  “She still has that beautiful green dress in her closet,” Johnny said.

  “You manipulative little pismire,” I said.

  “If you asked her, I’ll bet she would go and get it,” said Johnny.

  “Let’s see, Mommy,” said Franklin. “I want to see now, Mommy, okay?”

  I had never felt hatred for my husband until that moment. My child ran off like a shot to my closet, where he began pawing through my clothes.

  “Get out of there, Franklin,” I said.

  “Is this it? Mommy, is this your bird dress?”

  Since I was still in my nightgown, it was easy enough to slip on my chartreuse dress with the fringe. It actually fit. My child looked at me in perfect wonder.

  “Hey, Mommy. Look at all those strings,” he said.

  “Come on, baby, let the good times roll,” said Johnny. “It still looks boss.”

  “Aren’t you a relic,” I said. “It’s a little tight under the arms.”

  “It looks wonderful,” Johnny said. “Come here, Franklin. Remember that record we listened to with Amos the other day? ‘Jump for Joy’? Your mommy used to sing and dance to that song.”

  My hatred, which had begun as a smoldering coal, turned into a veritable barbecue. So my husband had been listening to old Ruby records with my child behind my back!

  He threw “Jump for Joy” on the turntable and gave me a significant look. Oh, what the hell, I thought. I could have done that routine in my sleep. My child gaped at me.

  “Be the dancer! Be the dancer, Mommy,” said my boy. I did my routine and then I scooped my son into my arms and danced around the room with him. He closed his eyes and smiled a smile of fright and rapture.

  By the time we were dressed I had re-metamorphosed into Franklin’s mother, and together we walked off to school.

  At the school door Pixie Lehar, in her guise as Paulette Goldberg, was waiting for me.

  “Are you going to say yes?” she said. “We really want you.”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  Because we were early, the doors were not yet open and so Little Franklin and I sat on a ledge outside. I watched the light bounce off Pixie’s expensive watch, and then I looked up at the pure gray sky. That morning Leo was flying off to Berlin. He had finished his academic year and was off to begin his fellowship. I wondered what Mary was doing at her monastery, and what she would advise me to do. How lucky were people in their vocations! How sweet and easy life was for the identified, I thought.

  In little Franklin’s classroom I watched him and his friends build complicated structures out of blocks, and paint at easels, and do woodworking with real saws and hammers. My child barely acknowledged that I was in the room.

  Then it was time for rhythms, a combination of movement, dance and imagination, invented by the founder of the Malcolm Sprague School. It took place in a large, gymlike room made of polished wood. On a small stage was a grand piano at which a woman in a white sweater sat.

  I sat on the stage and watched Little Franklin and his classmates file in. Then the music began, a jaunty kind of march. The children knew exactly what to do: they pranced and skipped.

  “Hello,” said the rhythms teacher. “Now that you’ve all marched in so nicely, maybe we should have a little gentle gallop.”

  At this the music picked up. The children galloped and skipped in a circle, and jumped in the air.

  “Now,” said the teacher. “Once more around, and then trot up to the front.”

  When they were assembled in front of her she said; “You know, it’s such a cloudy day, I thought it might be nice to have some color.”

  “Scarves!” shouted my son.

  From a large cloth bag the teacher took a number of long crepe de chine scarves of brilliant colors. “I dye them myself,” she said to me. “It’s the only way I can get the colors I want. Now, let’s see who wants which color. Franklin, is your favorite color still green? Yes? Then have your mommy tie this one around your waist.”

  I tied his scarf and the scarves of several of his pals.

  The music began again, and the children were asked to imagine that they were birds. They swooped and glided, and picked up the ends of their scarves and used them for wings.

  I sat on the stage and watched my boy. He had forgotten I was there. He twirled and danced and then he and his classmates settled into their nests and draped their scarves around them. When the music changed, they got up and stretched, and little by little they flew again.

  I could not take my eyes off these beautiful children. Their skin gleamed in the dark light, and the whites of their eyes were blue. They moved as easily and happily as leaves in the wind, like fish, like birds. That space was theirs to dance and glide through, like water to a swimmer.

  I followed my boy, whose coppery hair flopped into his eyes. I thought of what he would be, what I had been, of the old man he would turn into whom I would never know. The journey seemed impossibly strange, amazingly long, and over in a flash.

  They were in their element, as free as shooting stars or dragonflies. My boy danced around and waved his crepe de chine wings at me.

  I thought to myself that I might as well say yes to Pixie Lehar. Why not? It was an undeniable fact of my life that long ago I had been a singer and a dancer and, in the end, it was certainly something I still knew how to do.

  A Biography of Laurie Colwin

  Laurie Colwin (1944–1992) was an American novelist and short story author, most famous for her writings on cooking and upper-middle-class urban life.

  Colwin was born on June 14 in Manhattan, New York, to Estelle and Peter Colwin. She spent her childhood in Lake Ronkonkoma, Long Island; Philadelphia; and Chicago. During her time in Philadelphia she attended Cheltenham High School and was inducted into its hall of fame in 1999. After graduation she continued her education at Bard College, the New School, and Columbia University.

  In 1965 Colwin began her career working for Sanford J. Green burger Associates, a literary agency in New York City. From there she went on to work at several leading book publishers, holding editorial positions at Viking Press, Pantheon Books, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, and E. P. Dutton. Most notably during this time, Colwin worked closely with Isaac Bashevis Singer, winner of the 1978 Nobel Prize in Literature, editing and translating his works.

  An aspiring writer all her life, Colwin sold her first short story to the New Yorker in 1969 at the age of twenty-five—an auspicious start. Over the course of the next few years, her work appeared in Harper’s Magazine, Allure, Redbook, Mademoiselle, and Playboy. Many of these early stories were included in a collection, Passion and Affect, which was published in 1974.

  Food and the act of cooking played an influential role in Colwin’s life from early on. During the Columbia University campus uprisings of 1968, she famously cooked for student protestors occupying various buildings. “Someone put a piece of adhesive on the sleeve of my sweatshirt that read: KITCHEN/COLWIN,” she wrote in Home Cooking, published in 1988. “This, I feel, marked me for life.”

  As Colwin began crafting her short stories, she also became a regular food columnist for Gourmet magazine, and many of her columns were anthologized in Home Cooking. The release of this work secured a fan base of up-and-coming casual gourmands who loved Colwin’s unfussy, personal style and who remain devoted to her long after her death. Later in her life, even as she wrote about privileged Manhattanites, Colwin continued to volunteer and cook for homeless shelters in New York.

  By the late seventies, Laurie Colwin was writing full time. Her first novel, Shine On, Bright & Dangerous Object, was published in 1975, and in 1977 Colwin received the prestigious O. Henry Award for short fiction. Her second novel, Happy All the Time, was received with much critical acclaim in 1978. By the time The Lone Pilgrim—a short story collection—and the
novel Family Happiness were published in 1981 and 1982, respectively, Colwin had solidified her reputation as a writer to watch. She became known for her entertaining wit and wonderfully complex protagonists, whom readers understood immediately.

  Colwin’s story collection Another Marvelous Thing was published in 1986, and the next year, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 1990 she published Goodbye Without Leaving, the last novel that would go to press before her untimely death.

  Laurie Colwin died of an aortic aneurysm in her Manhattan home on October 24, 1992, at the age of forty-eight. She was survived by her husband, Juris Jurjevics, a founder of Soho Press, and their daughter, Rosa.

  In 1993 A Big Storm Knocked It Over and More Home Cooking were published posthumously, serving as final invocations of Colwin’s distinct voice and the New York characters she loved.

  The author’s parents, Estelle Colwin (née Wolfson) and Peter Colwin.

  The Wolfsons, Colwin’s mother’s family, lived in Philadelphia and congregated there for the holidays. Colwin (at front), her older sister, Leslie (at upper left), and their father, Peter, pose by a statue in Rittenhouse Square, Thanksgiving, c. 1950.

  Colwin at age seven or eight. As a child and teen, she did print modeling work at her mother’s urging.

  Colwin receiving an award at Ronkonkoma Grade School.

  Colwin as a teenager. Childhood friend Willard Spiegelman, a writer and professor, recalls that Colwin often held “salons” in her bedroom.

  By the time she was a teenager, Colwin had developed a keen interest in art. Here, she sketches with charcoal, obviously impressing her companion.

  Colwin as a counselor at Camp Burr Oaks in Wisconsin. She had also attended as a camper in earlier years.

  Colwin’s Cheltenham High School graduation photo, 1962.

  After graduating from high school, Colwin traveled to Europe by boat. Her mother (at right), saw her off at the dock.