After You've Gone Read Online Free

Russell—and moved into an apartment together. Caroline became pregnant, and a week before the birth of Amy they yielded to their parents and got married.
    â€œLauren Whitfield is going steady with Tommy Russell,” Julie reported to her mother at breakfast on Saturday morning. They were both feeding Baby, alternating spoonfuls of cereal with scrambled eggs, which was Baby’s preferred method. Amy slept upstairs, on into the day.
    â€œIsn’t that rather sudden?” Caroline was a little surprised at the censoriousness with which she herself spoke.
    â€œOh yes, everyone thinks it’s terribly romantic. He asked her on their first date.”
    Impossible for Caroline to gauge the content of irony in her daughter’s voice. “I somehow thought she was more—” Caroline then could not finish her own sentence, and she realized that she had to a considerable degree already lost interest in this conversation, a thing that seemed to happen to her far too often.
    â€œYou thought she was more intelligent?” Knowing her mother well, Julie supplied the missing bias. “Actually she’s extremely smart, but she’s sort of, uh, dizzy. Young. Her parents are breaking up, that’s why she’s here with her grandparents. They drink a lot, her parents.”
    â€œPoor girl.”
    â€œYes. Well, anyway, she’s bright but she’s not all intellectual. Yet.”
    â€¦
    Julie herself did not go out a lot with boys that year. But she seemed both busy and contented. She studied hard and read a lot, at home she helped Caroline with Baby. She also functioned as a sort of occasional secretary for her mother, opening mail and often shielding Caroline from extreme isolationist vituperation.
    And Julie and Egon Heller, the German-English refugee boy, did become friends, of sorts, if not in the romantic way that Caroline had hoped. Their friendship was in fact remarked upon, so unusual was it in those days of rigidly coded adolescent behavior. Simply, they spent a lot of time together, Egon and Julie. They could be seen whispering over their books in study hall, though very possibly about assignments. Never holding hands, no touching, nothing like that. Sometimes they went to the movies together, but usually on a Saturday afternoon, sometimes with Baby along. Not at night, not a date.
    Very odd, was what most people observing them thought. But then exceptionally bright children were often odd; psychologists said so.
    Caroline heard from Arne in a somewhat longer than usual postcard that he would not, after all, be coming home to Madison for Christmas, for a number of reasons; money, time, and work were cited. Nothing very original by way of an excuse.
    But Caroline, who had painful premonitions of just this announcement, reacted with a large sense of relief. To her own great surprise. Oh,
good
, is what she thought. I won’t have tomake a lot of Christmas fuss—or not Arne’s kind of fuss. No big parties, and I won’t have to try to look wonderful all the time. And worry that he’s drinking too much and making passes at undergraduate girls. I can just do the things I like, that he thinks are dumb. I can bake cookies, maybe run up a new formal for Amy. (Caroline had a curious dramatic flair for making certain clothes. Highly successful with evening things, she had never done well with the small flannel nightgowns, for example, that other women did in no time.) I can read a lot, she thought. And I’ll go for a lot of walks in the snow.
    The snows had come somewhat earlier than usual to Madison that year. Soon after the first of November (just after the election), serious snowfalls began, blanketing the steeply sloped university campus, causing traffic trouble in the streets—and making life far more wonderful for all children, including those in high school.
    Couples on dates went tobogganing on the vast golf course of the Black Hawk Country Club, an