Agnes

by Peter Stamm

  Once before, many years ago, I thought I was going to be a father. A condom had split. I hadn’t mentioned it to my girlfriend of the time, but I spent those weeks thinking about my impending fatherhood. The relationship in question had gotten to be rather shaky, but in that time of uncertainty I felt a new love for the woman, a tenderness and affection without any of the egoism I am always being accused of. When it finally turned out that my girlfriend wasn’t pregnant, I was disappointed and blamed her for it, as though it were any fault of hers. Soon afterward, we broke up. I made unpleasant accusations against her that she didn’t understand, couldn’t possibly understand, because they were directed against another woman who only existed in my imagination. After that, I never wanted a baby.

  I felt like writing, but in the rush I’d forgotten to take my notebook with me. I stood up to call the waitress and ask her for some paper. By the time she finally came, I just paid and left.

  I went on, dropped into a bar, and then another. It was past midnight by the time I was back at the Doral Plaza. The doorman had been relieved, and a night doorman I’d never seen before stopped me and asked me what I wanted.

  “I live here.”

  “What number?”

  “It’s on the twenty-seventh floor …”

  I’d forgotten the number of my apartment and had to spell my name for the doorman. He carefully went through the list of residents until he found me. Then he apologized profusely and explained he was new, he was only doing his job, some of the tenants had complained that they had seen strangers in the building, and so forth.

  “Out for a walk?” he said mechanically. “Must have been cold.”

  Agnes wasn’t in the apartment. Some of her clothes weren’t in the wardrobe, and her cello and toiletries were gone.

  I lay down on the bed in my clothes. When I woke up, it was light. The telephone was ringing. It was Agnes. She said she was at home, in her apartment.

  “What’s the time? I’ve been asleep.”

  “I want to go over and get my things tonight, after class. Will you arrange to be out please. I’ll leave the key with the doorman.”

  “What about the baby?”

  “You don’t have to concern yourself with that. It’s my baby. When the time comes, I’ll go to New York to be with Herbert.”

  It was afternoon already. Agnes seemed to have sorted everything out while I was sleeping. I had intended to apologize to her, but it was too late for that now. She had made up her mind.

  “You don’t want the baby,” she said, “well, you’re not having the baby.”

  And she hung up.

  That evening, I went to the library. I took out some books, and sat down in the reading room to read. I couldn’t concentrate at all, and noticed I was staring at the same page for minutes on end. I thought of Agnes, who was even then in my apartment, collecting her things together. So she’d called Herbert. I had always suspected that he’d meant more to her than she’d admitted. And he was clearly in love with her, I realized that from when she’d told me about the graduation party.

  I stayed in the library until closing time. The apartment looked like it had before. Agnes had picked out her belongings from a heap of unironed clothing. She’d folded up my shirts and T-shirts and put them away in the closet.

  21

  After a few days, I called Agnes at her department. The secretary said she’d already gone home. I tried Agnes’s apartment. A synthesized voice answered: “We’re sorry, this number is no longer available.” I waited, but the voice just kept on saying the sentence again. I wrote a letter to Agnes, and sent it to the university. I didn’t get an answer.

  One evening, a week or so after Agnes moved out, I waited for her in the street where she lived. I went into a coffee shop. From the place where I was sitting, I had a view of her front door. Agnes came back from class at her usual time. She was carrying a paper bag of groceries, and disappeared into the house without looking back. A few seconds later, the light in her apartment went on. That was all. I waited a little longer, looking up at the lighted windows, until the waiter came over and asked if I wanted to order anything else.

  “No,” I said, and I paid and left.

  November was rainy and cold. I went back to the café on Agnes’s street again and again, until finally I was going there every day. I did my shopping in the shops in her neighborhood; on Saturdays I took my laundry to the Laundromat where Agnes did her washing. And I went back to the Indian restaurant where we had gone on our first date. I wasn’t hoping to run into Agnes in any of these places, but I did feel closer to her there.

  I went out almost every night, generally to a movie and a bar afterward. I rarely went to bed sober. I couldn’t stand being in the apartment in the daytime. I spent entire days in the library, not working; I would order a thriller and take that into the reading room with me.

  “Is that your work?” I heard a voice behind me ask. I turned around, and it was Louise. She took the book from my hands and said, with mock surprise: “Murder with Mirrors by Agatha Christie. Now if you were reading Murder on the Orient Express, that’s at least got luxury trains in it.”

  Someone hissed at us to keep quiet.

  “Shall we go for a coffee?” Louise asked, just as loud.

  I followed her out of the reading room, and out of the building.

  “Not here,” I said, when I saw her heading for the coffee shop where I’d first had coffee with Agnes. But there wasn’t another one, and I said it didn’t matter, I was just being sentimental. I told Louise about Agnes, and that she’d left me. I didn’t mention anything about the baby.

  “I’m in no state to work,” I said.

  “Agnes,” she said. “Funny name. Was she your little American girlfriend then, with the thermal underwear?”

  “Yes, that’s her.”

  “I think I ought to look after you a bit.”

  That same evening, Louise called me. Her parents were giving a party on Thanksgiving. It was going to be all business associates of her father’s, and she would be only too pleased to have someone at the table who could talk about something other than the maize harvest and pork bellies. Louise lived with her parents in Oak Park, a wealthy suburb of Chicago. I said I’d be there.

  After talking to Louise, I felt guilty somehow. It was as though I’d cheated on Agnes. Maybe that was why, for the first time in weeks, I pulled up the story about her on the computer, and read through everything I’d written so far. I’d never gotten past that scene on the stairs, the dream where Agnes told me she was scared of me. I wiped that last section, and read the zoo scene again, where we said we’d get married. And then I wrote.

  We kissed.

  Then Agnes said: “I’m having a baby.”

  “A baby?” I said. “That’s not possible.”

  “Yes, it is,” she said.

  “How come? Did you forget your Pill?”

  “The doctor says it can happen even if you’re on the Pill. One percent of women who are on the Pill …”

  “It’s not about you, or the baby,” I said. “Please don’t think … but I’m frightened of becoming a father. What do I have to offer a kid … I don’t mean money.” Neither of us said anything.

  Finally Agnes said: “These things happen. You won’t be any worse at it than anyone else. Won’t we at least give it a go?”

  “OK,” I said, “we’ll make it somehow.”

  22

  “Frank Lloyd Wright built around thirty houses in Oak Park,” said Louise’s father. He had a more marked French accent than his daughter.

  “And Hemingway was born here,” said Louise’s mother. “Switzerland is a great little country. Last year we went to Stanton.”

  “St. Anton is in Austria, chérie,” said her husband, turning to me again. “I hear you’re a writer?”

  “Louise has told us all about you,” said the mother, “she likes you. And we’re only too pleased if she settles down a bit. American men are so superficial. Aft
er all, I married a European myself.”

  She winked at her husband, who smiled modestly and said: “We met in Paris. My wife had gone to Europe to catch herself an aristocrat. She had to make do with me.”

  “I do hope you like turkey,” said the mother, “we’re having a traditional Thanksgiving dinner.”

  I was relieved when Louise came, slipped her arm in mine, and dragged me away from her parents.

  “I’m just going to show him the garden,” she said.

  Her mother twinkled at me, and said: “I quite understand. You young people want to be alone together.”

  We strolled around the garden. There was an aquamarine swimming pool under an enormous maple. The water was littered with its dead leaves. It was cold, and we shivered, but the sun still felt hot on my skin. The air was dry and crisp. When you looked up at the treetop, the sky between its bloodred leaves was almost black.

  “I’m amazed by how much more colorful everything is here,” I said, “the leaves, the sky, even the grass. Everything has more vitality than its counterpart in Europe. As though everything was still young.”

  “A man lives and dies in what he sees, says Paul Valéry, but he can only see what he thinks,” Louise observed ironically.

  “I really do think the colors here are different. Maybe it’s to do with the air.”

  “My little pocket Thoreau. Try not to be so naïve. This country is no older or younger than any other.”

  “But I get the sense that more things are possible here.”

  “That’s because you have no history in this place. The idea Europeans have of America is less to do with the place than with themselves. And of course vice versa. My mother’s grandfather was the editor of the Chicago Tribune. From an old English family that could trace their descent back to the fourteenth century. So in a way, there’s more history on my mother’s side of the family than my father’s. He came from a simple background. Made a good marriage. And there’s my mother, rather pleased with herself for her European husband, even though he’s exactly the sort of self-made man the Europeans suspect all Americans of being.” She laughed.

  “What did you tell your parents?” I asked. “They treated me like a prospective son-in-law.”

  “Oh, that’s nothing. They’d love to have me married off. And they’re pleased if I have a boyfriend who has some sort of sensible job. I told them you’re a journalist, and you write books.”

  “Your mother said Hemingway was born around here.”

  “Yes, I know. She’s a great name-dropper.”

  “Do you like Hemingway?”

  “I’m not sure,” said Louise. “I liked A Farewell to Arms, but that may have been because of the music and Gary Cooper.”

  After lunch, she showed me the apartment her parents had set up for her at the top of the house. Then she took me for a drive around the area, and showed me where Frank Lloyd Wright had worked, and where Hemingway was born. In the bookshop of the Hemingway house I found a copy of A Farewell to Arms, and gave it to Louise.

  “You ought to read it,” I said, “it’s better than the film.”

  “And you ought to come and see me at work, so I can take you around our archives.”

  23

  During my preliminary research in Switzerland, I’d kept coming across the name George Mortimer Pullman, but it wasn’t until I got to Chicago that I discovered that the legendary constructor of sleeping cars was not only the inventor of the luxury train, but also made history with the model settlement that bore his name, south of Chicago. The small town of Pullman, which, from the provision of gas and water, through to its churches, was entirely the creation of the great industrialist, and which he ruled more as a father figure than as a proprietor, came to be the site for a series of strikes, civil disturbances, and violent protests that loomed large in the history of the labor movement in nineteenth-century America. In the end, they called in the army, but by then it was too late. Pullman’s dream was in ruins.

  The failure of Pullman’s vision and the uprising of his labor force against the complete control of their lives by their employer fascinated me more than the company’s celebrated railroad cars. It seemed that Pullman had planned for every contingency, except his workers’ desire for freedom. He thought he had constructed a kind of paradisal community for them. But his Paradise didn’t have a door, and as times grew harder and jobs were in ever shorter supply the workers felt they were little more than prisoners. Pullman never realized his mistake, and until the end of his life, he felt he was up against human ingratitude.

  I didn’t expect very much from the archives at Pullman Leasing, but I wanted to see Louise again, so I looked her up in her office a few days later. She gave me a tour of the gigantic site of the former factory, and showed me where, up until just after the Second World War, the railroad cars had been built. The factory halls had never been taken down; their demolition would have cost the company more than it could have earned from the sale of the site. Names were inscribed on the walls. On one pillar, someone had drawn a crude outline of a female form, to which someone had later added a face, with finer brushstrokes.

  “Pullman started off as a master carpenter. But he made his first fortune by keeping houses on swampy terrain from subsiding. Don’t ask me how he did it.”

  “Can you imagine the way this must have been once, when it was full of workers and noise and productivity?”

  “There’s nothing but rats and mice here now,” said Louise. “Watch yourself, everything’s filthy.”

  Once, she took my hand as we were walking over an uneven bit of ground, where clumps of grass had shot up.

  “Come on, I’ll show you the archive,” she said. “I can’t spend all day giving you a tour of the place.”

  As expected, the archive wasn’t terribly helpful to me. There was hardly anything to do with the early history of the company. A lot had been thrown away, Louise admitted, and some things had been given to the library.

  “You wouldn’t have found anything about the Pullman Strike here anyway,” she said. “They didn’t like to talk about it then, and no one cares about it today.”

  She was leaning against a rack where dusty cardboard boxes were stacked. The archive was right at the top of the building, and the air here was warm and dry. The only light came from above, through Plexiglas skylights. Neither of us said anything. Louise looked at me and smiled. I kissed her.

  “You don’t love me, and I don’t love you. But what’s it matter,” she said, laughing. “So long as we’re having fun.”

  24

  I didn’t think about Agnes while I was with Louise, and I was fine. When I came home, I felt like I was going back to prison. I left the apartment door ajar, but then I heard voices outside in the corridor, and I went to shut it. I lay down on the sofa for half an hour, then I got up and went to the library, and from there on to the lake, to the café at the end of Grant Park.

  I was thinking about the baby Agnes was carrying. I wondered if it would be like me, or have a character like mine. I couldn’t imagine what it would feel like if there was a child of mine somewhere in the world. Even if I never saw Agnes again, I would still be a father. It will change my life, I thought, even if I never get to see it. And then I thought, I couldn’t stand never to see it. I want to know what kind of kid it is, what it looks like. I got out my notebook and tried to sketch a face. I couldn’t do it, so I started writing instead:

  Our baby was born on May 4. It was a little girl. She was very small and light and had very fine blond hair. We called her …

  For a long time I thought about what I was going to call the baby. The waitress brought me a refill, and I saw she had a nametag with “Margaret” on it. I thanked her for the coffee and wrote:

  … Margaret. We put her crib in my study. Every night she cried, and every day we took her for walks in her stroller. We would stop in front of the toyshop and wonder what to buy her, later, when she was older. Agnes said she didn’t just want Marga
ret to have dolls.

  “I want her to play with cars and airplanes and computers and trains.”

  “Yes, but we’re starting her off with cuddly toys and dolls …” I said.

  “Legos,” said Agnes. “When I was little, I used to like Legos much better than dolls. I think Margaret should have whatever she wants.”

  “I can teach her all about luxury trains, if you like,” I said.

  We started looking for a more spacious apartment, on the edge of town somewhere, where there were parks and woods. We thought about moving to California or Switzerland. My book was going well, in spite of the extra work with the baby. It was the happiest summer of my life, and Agnes too had rarely been so happy.

  That’s all I wrote. I realized I knew precious little about babies, and decided to get a book on the subject. I was convinced now that Agnes and I would get together again. I wrote a letter to her, stuffed it in my pocket, and went home as fast as I could.

  I was just opening the front door of the apartment when I heard the phone ringing. I picked it up, still in my coat. It was a colleague of Agnes’s, one of the violinists in her quartet.

  “I’ve been trying to get hold of you all day,” she said.

  “I’ve been out walking,” I said.

  She hesitated.

  “Agnes is sick,” she finally said, “she hasn’t been coming to rehearsal.”

  “What are you playing?” I asked, I have no idea why.

  “Schubert,” she said. Then for a moment she said nothing.

  “Agnes would kill me, if she knew I got in touch with you. But I think she needs your help.”

  “What’s the matter with her?” I asked, but that was all she was prepared to say.

  “I think you should go and see her,” she said, “she’s not well.”

  I thanked her and promised to visit Agnes. I tore up the letter I’d written. I got a beer out of the fridge and sat down by the window.