I asked if she thought she might fall in love with him.
And she took another sip of her sparkling water and said, “It’s funny that you should ask me that, because when I first saw him I thought, Oh my God, no, I could never fall for him! Which was a good thing, of course. But you know, it’s funny, because this last time after seeing him, I’ve just been thinking about him, and you know, it might have the tinge of—”
“Hello!” a younger woman said to her then, throwing her arms around her, and the woman I was talking to said, holding up her glass of sparkling water, “Oh my God it’s you!” And that was the last I saw of her.
People are lonely, is my point here. Many people can’t say to those they know well what it is they feel they might want to say.
* * *
We arrived in Houlton around noontime. The sun was shining down on big brick buildings: a courthouse, a post office. Main Street had a few shops—there was a furniture store and a dress shop—and we drove slowly through and then I saw a sign that said Pleasant Street, and I yelled, “William, we’re on Pleasant Street!” I looked out the window and the houses were small and wooden, two white ones we passed. And then we passed by number 14, and it was the nicest house on the block. It was not a small house: It was three stories and freshly painted a dark blue with red trim, and it had a little garden in the front, and a hammock was in the front yard as well. William stared at it as we drove past, and then he kept driving and we pulled over on the next block up.
“Lucy,” he said.
And I said, “I know.”
We sat there for a few minutes with the sun coming through the windshield, and I looked around and there was a library right near us. “Let’s go to the library,” I said.
“The library?” William said.
“Yes,” I said.
* * *
Inside the library we saw a staircase that wound its way up and also a checkout counter, and a couple of people were in there, a young woman and an old man, they were both reading newspapers. It had a very nice feel to it, the way a library should feel in a small town. The librarian looked up at us. She was maybe in her mid-fifties, and she had hair that was almost without color, and by that I mean just a very pale brown—she must have been blond in her youth—and her eyes were not big or small, what I mean is she looked very neutral, but she was pleasant and she said to us almost immediately, “Is there anything I can help you with?” So perhaps she knew we were from out of town.
I said, “We’re visiting because my husband’s father was a German POW who came here to work in the potato fields. Do you have anything on that?”
And she watched us, and then she came around from behind her desk and said, “Yes, we do.” She brought us over to a corner of the main room devoted to the German POW experience, and I saw William’s face moving with emotion when he saw this. There were pieces of artwork on the wall in that corner that had been painted by some of the German POWs. And there were old magazines opened to articles about the POWs, and also a book that was slender.
“My name is Phyllis,” the woman said, and William shook her hand, which I thought seemed to surprise her. She asked his name and he told her and then she turned to me and asked me my name and I murmured, “Lucy Barton.” “Well, you have yourselves a look,” Phyllis said, and she pulled up two armchairs nearby for us to sit in and we thanked her.
There was a shelf of old photographs, and as I peered at one I said, “William! Here he is!” The photograph gave the names of four men who were shown kneeling on the ground. One was smiling, and the rest were not. Wilhelm Gerhardt was on the end of the group. He was not smiling. His cap was not on straight and he looked at the camera with a serious look, almost a Screw You look, I thought. William took the photograph and kept staring at it; I watched his face as he looked at it. And then I looked away.
When I looked back, William was still gazing at the photograph; he finally turned his face to me and said, “It’s him, Lucy.” Then he added in a quieter tone, “It’s my father.” I looked again at the photograph, and I was struck—again—with the look on William’s father’s face. All the men seemed thin, but William’s father’s brow was dark and his eyes were dark and he seemed to carry within himself a small disdainfulness.
Phyllis was still standing behind us and she said, “We’re very proud of how they were treated when they were here. Look at these—” And she showed us in a book copies of a few letters that some POWs had written back to the farmers they had worked for once they had gone home. I saw that each letter was asking for food to be sent over to Germany. “One farmer sent boxes and boxes of supplies to them,” Phyllis said, and she flipped through the narrow book and showed us a photo of the farmer loading many large boxes onto a conveyor belt. The farmer’s name was not Trask. I had not expected that it would be. “You take your time,” Phyllis said, and she walked away, back behind the checkout desk.