The Drifters (40 page)

At this point Frederick Cole showed himself to be the stalwart man I had known in our negotiations. ‘If our daughter has suffered what she says took place in that police station,’ he told the family circle, ‘we are going to defend her all the way. Not only for herself, but for all other young people who might find themselves in similar situations.’

‘You mean … fight it all over again in the headlines?’ his wife asked. ‘That would be too much. Gretchen, tell him to stop.’

In compromise, Mr. Cole asked one of the Brookline detectives to try to unravel what had really happened. He left for Patrick Henry in early October, worked two weeks and returned with disquieting news. At a conclave attended by Gretchen, her parents and the corporation lawyers, he
reported: ‘I’ve checked all the records, and they seem to be quite clear. Chicago police had broadcast a valid warrant for your arrest on suspicion of assault against one of the policemen. Four Chicago witnesses identify you from photographs as the girl with the guitar who hit the policeman in the face with a brick … or a stone … or something.’

‘I didn’t have a guitar in Chicago,’ Gretchen protested.

‘The police have a photograph of you with a guitar,’ the detective said, and presented a picture which showed her carrying the guitar of the boy from Duke whose jaw had been broken.

‘But that’s not my guitar,’ she protested again, and as she spoke she looked at the faces of her family, at her family lawyers, and each was impassive, because everyone knew that Gretchen had a guitar.

‘Now as to Patrick Henry, the testimony is overwhelming—almost irrefutable, I’d say—that Patrolman Nicholas Woiczinsky was not on duty that day in Patrick Henry. Also, the mayor and the lawyer, Halliman, have given sworn depositions that when they got to the police station you were fully clothed and that nothing had happened. I got the strong feeling that if you dare to go back to Patrick Henry, you’re going to find yourself in jail, either for the proven assault in Chicago or on the charge of bringing false witness against the local police.’

‘But what about the driver of our car? He saw Woiczinsky. He saw me in the police station.’

The detective coughed and said, ‘I didn’t want to bring this up, but I have three depositions here. The first shows that the police have run a check on that young man and he has a conviction in the state of Connecticut … on what charge do you suppose? Marijuana. Now as for these next two’—and here he slipped a pair of legal papers to Gretchen—‘you may prefer keeping them to yourself. I haven’t shown them to your parents.’

Gretchen saw that the first related to the Blue-and-Gray Motel at the Breezewood Interchange of the Pennsylvania Turnpike, whose night clerk had deposed that on the night of Thursday, August 29, Gretchen Cole of Brookline, Massachusetts, and Randolph Pepperdine of New Haven, Connecticut, had registered together. The second deposition came from the maid, one Claribelle Foster of Somerset, Pennsylvania, who swore that the two had shared the
same room. ‘The marijuana charge would blast the young man’s testimony right out of court,’ the detective warned, ‘and these could make you look awful bad. Take my advice, tuck those papers away and forget the whole affair.’

This Gretchen was tempted to do, but something within her made surrender impossible, so without thinking of the consequences, she threw the depositions before her father and cried, ‘They’re lies. We did check in at the motel together … along with other kids. They’ll testify I shared my room with two other girls.’

But as soon as she said this she saw with dismay that only one person in the room accepted her story. To the others it was incomprehensible that a college student should be right and the mayor of a city wrong. She was a young person, mixed up with strange philosophies and stranger people, and nothing that was charged against her was improbable. In a kind of dumb fury she looked from one stern face to the next, realizing that in them she was seeing the jury that would listen to her case in Patrick Henry, and the dreadful futility of her position bore down upon her. The very people who should have been defending her had become her accusers.

For the first time her father spoke. He was the one who believed. ‘I spent the last week checking up on the four young people who shared that car with you, and I’m convinced that what you say is true.’ Gretchen looked at him with the compassionate love that a young woman can sometimes feel for her father when she suddenly sees him as a man who has had to fight against the world, and she waited for him to tell the family lawyers to proceed, but instead she heard him say, ‘But there’s absolutely nothing we can do. With their fabric of interlocking lies, they’ve got us boxed in.’

‘What do you mean?’ she cried.

‘That there are times when a conspiracy makes the individual helpless.’

‘Now wait a minute, Mr. Cole!’ the detective protested. ‘If you think that I’m so dumb I can’t spot a conspiracy …’

‘Of course it’s a conspiracy,’ Cole said evenly. ‘I’ve seen Randolph Pepperdine’s notebook and he took down Woiczinsky’s name and number. You don’t make up things like that.’

Gretchen was stunned by this conclusion. In consternation
she pointed to the depositions lying on the table, and cried, ‘I suppose you believe them, too?’

Mr. Cole placed his arm about his daughter and said, ‘I think I know what happened at the motel. Do you think your mother and I would believe depositions like that?’

Gretchen looked at the lawyers, at her red-eyed mother, at the obdurate detective. In her frustration she bowed to the latter and said, ‘The people of Brookline should feel secure with you protecting them.’ Then she fled from the room, and when she was gone her mother dropped her head on the table and muttered, ‘Thank God, it’s not to go any further.’

The balance of 1968 was a trying period for the Coles. Gretchen, after the session with the detective and the quashing of her lawsuit, continued living at home but found it impossible to speak with her parents. Mrs. Cole attempted a conciliation, with assurances such as: ‘We are on your side, dear, no matter what you did in Chicago.’ Gretchen dismissed her as a fool, which she was not.

Mr. Cole did his best to understand the torments his daughter was suffering; at one point he wrote to me in Geneva:

He made many overtures to his daughter, admitting that he was misguided in persuading her to drop her charges against the police, but he was powerless to regain her respect, and they lived as enemies in the house where she had learned to sing.

Her fellow students, aware of what was happening, asked her how she could bear to stay in the same house,
and she explained, ‘I’m not twenty-one till January. But with the first income from my inheritance … goodbye to Brookline forever.’

By late October it was apparent that she could not concentrate on her graduate work at Radcliffe, nor could she get excited about the election, since she was convinced that either Nixon or Humphrey would find himself locked into old concepts of government. She winced whenever either of them referred to law and order, and by mid-November she stopped even the pretense of attending classes.

At the beginning of December some law students at Harvard tried to get her to head a committee backing Justice Abe Fortas in the Congressional fight over his appointment as Chief Justice, but she could generate no enthusiasm. Still, the law fascinated her and she wondered if perhaps the young radicals were not right when they preached: ‘Whenever society insults you, zap it right back with super-love.’ Setting aside all other matters, she spent a day composing a careful letter, which she sent registered:

The next day she was summoned by her senior professor, who asked, ‘Are you as disorganized as you appear?’ When she nodded, he suggested, ‘Why don’t you drop out this semester? Go to Florida … Virgin Islands … some place completely new and try to get things in focus?’ He seemed the first adult who appreciated her problem.

‘I may do that,’ she said. ‘After the New Year.’

‘Why delay?’

‘In January ‘I’ll be twenty-one.’

He took off his glasses. ‘Are you only twenty? With your outstanding record?’ He looked at her undergraduate marks and then at some appended notes. ‘Didn’t you use to sing in one of the cafés?’ When she nodded, he said, ‘Go back. Forget studies for the rest of the year.’

‘What do you think I ought to do when I resume?’ she asked.

‘You can go in almost any direction,’ he said. ‘You have an inclination toward politics?’

‘I don’t think so. I thought I might like to … well … find some earlier period in history when values were in flux … Hundred Years’ War maybe …’

‘And write about it?

‘Yes.’

‘Absolutely splendid! A first-rate challenge! A first-rate relevancy!’ Gretchen smiled at his enthusiasm; it was so good to hear an adult agree with something rather than bring up a score of objections as to why the proposal could not work. ‘How’s your Latin?’

‘Eight years of
A.
’

‘German?’

‘I read it.’

‘French?’

‘Not so good.’

‘Then it’s very simple.’ He rose and walked about his study. ‘My God, I wish the other problems that reach this office were so simple. You’re a brilliant girl. One of the ablest undergraduates I’ve had. Go to Besançon—that’s in France, near the Swiss border—enroll in the American Institute. Brush up your French. Then come back prepared
for some real work.’ He consulted a catalogue on foreign study and found the name he wanted. ‘Karl Ditschmann. Splendid fellow … Alsatian … taught at Michigan and Middlebury … tell him I sent you and that you’re not to worry about grades. Just browse … walk in the hills … imagine you’re back in the year 1360 … the first part of the war is over … Crécy and Poitiers are past … the Black Death is gone … everyone’s sighing with relief … so imagine the terror when fighting erupts again … Agincourt and the Peasants’ Rebellion lie ahead.’ He prowled the small room and said, ‘Get the feeling of France in your bones. The rioting peasants are coming down this valley—this valley here at your feet—and they storm past. Supposing you comprehend—you just might be able to write something relevant to our days.’

He imbued her with his enthusiasm, and she took down the name of the institute at Besançon, but as she was leaving, he said, ‘Maybe even more important is to sing again,’ and she asked, ‘Have you ever seen a guitar kicked to pieces? It affects singing, you know.’

So for the last weeks of 1968 she lay about the house, read in desultory fashion about the Hundred Years’ War, and kept to herself. Boys from Harvard and Amherst and MIT who had known her stopped by occasionally to talk, but she drew back from them as if they were leprous. Once when four of them were with her she saw their faces change into that circle of policemen at Patrick Henry.

The Cast Iron Moth asked her to sing, both at Thanksgiving and at Christmas, but she could not bring herself to do so. She did not even sing when she was by herself at home. The only thing that retained her interest was committe work in helping draft evaders slip into Canada; one tall Californian to whom she had given money aroused her from her lethargy, for he seemed a gentle person, aware of the confusions that had overtaken her, but when he tried to kiss her goodnight in thanks for what she had done, she shied away from him.

On January 10, her birthday, she marched into the office of her family’s lawyer and informed him that she wished one quarter of her yearly income. She said further that she would advise him by letter at the beginning of each quarter where future checks should be mailed. When he started to explain what she ought to do with the money, she cut him short: ‘I shall be here to pick it up tomorrow at nine.’

‘This time you must be careful of your companions …’

She looked at him with contempt. His had been one of the strongest voices advising against her lawsuit. He had spoken first and had set a pattern for the group’s acceptance of the charges against her. She thought of a dozen clever things she ought to tell this cautious old man, but she knew that communication would be impossible, so she controlled her anger and withdrew from his office. He followed her into the hall to ask, ‘Where did you say the subsequent payments were to be sent?’ and she could not forbear replying, ‘Perhaps Nepal. Maybe Marrakech. I don’t know yet myself, but I’ll keep you advised.’ On her way home she laughed as she thought of him poring over his atlas, trying to locate Nepal and Marrakech. She couldn’t have helped him; they were names that some of the kids at the café had dropped.