I remembered how she talked very little of her past, very very little; she had had an older brother that she always dismissed with a shake of her head, saying, “Oh he had troubles,” and the brother had died in an accident at a train crossing years ago. But when Catherine spoke of her potato farmer husband she always put him down, saying that he was “unpleasant” and that they had never loved each other. She had been eighteen when she married him; she did not go to college until she moved to Massachusetts with the German POW, William’s father.
About meeting Wilhelm, as William’s father was named （although when he came to America for good he too was William）， we knew that story well. Wilhelm had been one of twelve prisoners of war who worked on the farm; they were driven in a truck daily from their barracks out near the local airport in Houlton. And Catherine took them doughnuts she had made one day about a month after the men had first arrived, she took them doughnuts to eat with their lunch out by the potato house; she told us the men were not fed enough, and she said that Wilhelm had glanced at her in a way that made her positively shiver.
But here is when Catherine fell desperately—oh just desperately—in love with Wilhelm. The potato farmer, Clyde Trask, had a piano in his living room; his mother had apparently played it, and she had died right before Catherine married Clyde Trask. The piano sat there, it was an old upright. And Catherine said that one day when her husband was not home—he had gone to Augusta because he was in the state legislature and they had some committee meeting even though the legislature was not in session—Wilhelm walked into the house. Catherine was frightened, but he smiled at her; he had a cap on his head and he took it off, and then he walked into the living room and he sat down at the piano and he played.
This is when Catherine fell for him frantically, irretrievably. She said she had never heard anything as beautiful as what Wilhelm played that day; it was summer and a window was partly open, and a breeze picked up the curtain and tossed it gently, and he sat there and played that piano. It was Brahms he played, she found this out later. He played and played, glancing up at her only once or twice. And then he stood up and gave her a tiny bow—he was a tall man with dark blond hair—and he walked past her back out to the fields. She watched him through the window, he had strong arms that showed because his shirtsleeves were rolled up, and on the back of the shirt were the large black letters POW, and he wore the old pants that the POWs wore, and he had boots on and she watched the back of him as he walked to the fields, a tall man walking erect, and he turned around once, just briefly, and smiled, although she was certain that he could not see her watching him from that distance as she stood near the curtains at the window.
Whenever Catherine told us this story, her eyes got very faraway; you could tell that she was picturing this: the man who had stepped into her house and taken his cap off and sat down at the piano and played. “And that was that,” she said, returning to us. “That was that.”
How they conducted their love affair I do not know, she never said. But apparently Wilhelm knew a little English; that was unusual, Catherine indicated to us, for most of the POWs. But she told us about the day she left her potato farmer husband. It was a year after she had last seen Wilhelm, he had been sent back when the war was over; he had been sent first to England to do reparations—he had to help clean up the war damages there—for six months, and then he returned to Germany. They wrote letters. I do not know if her potato farmer husband found the letters, but she did tell me once that she would walk to the post office every day to see if there was a letter from Wilhelm, and that the postmaster in that small post office in Maine grew suspicious of her; she said that. And she said that the last letter she wrote—after Wilhelm had written her that he was now in Massachusetts—telling him that she would be on the train that pulled into North Station in Boston at five o’clock in the morning, she must have named the day; it was November and there was almost a foot of snow on the ground—that when she went to mail it, she was afraid the postmaster would not send it. Except that he had to, she thought, and he obviously did. She told us that she had waited until her husband’s sister came to visit before she left; she wanted the potato farmer husband to not be alone when he realized she had gone. I was always struck with that.
Otherwise I knew almost nothing about Catherine. She would shake her head when I asked her what her childhood had been like. “Oh, not so great,” she said one time. “But fine.” She never returned to Maine again.