by Alice Adams
The shabbiest, saddest-looking vendors of all are those who sell peanuts. All men, mostly old. The younger and relatively more prosperous men have terrible carved birds for sale. Or, so unappealing in this heat, woven woolen rugs.
Many of the women wear a sort of costume: full dark blue skirts with layers of petticoats, and modestly ample white blouses with long sleeves and big floppy lace collars. Perhaps an Indian tribe? They are selling jewelry: armloads of colored glass or plastic beads, all in lovely colors, dark blues and greens, pinks and amethysts.
And silver, endless streams of silver. Necklaces, bracelets, earrings.
Later, Evelyn will buy presents for all her daughters and her daughters-in-law. Her female grandchildren.
Zelda Hoskins is neither talking to the maid nor unpacking, but writing a secret letter. One that she has written quite often before, and sometimes mailed but more often not. A letter in which she tells her lover, Evan, that they simply must break off. Seeing him makes her feel too terribly guilty with Abe, who after all is so nice. No more Evan, never again.
Evan is a computer salesman based in New York who occasionally comes to Toronto, to stay in the Harborfront Hotel, where Zelda has her travel office. These letters of hers never seem to affect him in the slightest; he shows up anyway, no more or less frequently than before. Looking shy, he comes into her office, saying couldn’t they at least have a drink in the bar? Maybe lunch? And there they soon are, back in bed again. In love.
Evan does not look at all the part that he plays with Zelda. A worried, chronically rumpled young man, light-skinned (well, sallow) and too thin, he looks more like the other things that he is, a husband and father, with a heavy mortgage in Douglas, Long Island. A salesman. With Zelda, though, as he has often told her, he is someone else, a strong, confident, often laughing man. “Lord, I even feel handsome,” he once half-jokingly confided.
“Darling, you are” was of course what Zelda said (with the odd thought that actually of the two men Abe is better-looking, just a little older).
However, today she is not getting far with her letter. “My darling,” she has written. And then she is distracted by a rustle of large black birds, just settling in the bush beyond her terrace. Three of them, a family. Their sleek wings shine, with hints of darkest blue, blue-black velvet. “This time I absolutely,” Zelda writes before crumpling up her paper.
Abe too has been watching the vendors, and he, like Evelyn Fisk, sees the peanut vendors as the saddest of all. Even their voices are sad, and their faces are so long. Trickle-down economics, Abe thinks. Poverty trickles down very fast to these poorest of the poor.
Just then, though, a group of small boys appears, bearing newspapers. Abe watches as Evelyn (whom he thinks of as the cat woman) buys a paper. But when the boy reaches him, Abe waves him off, saying, “No, Gabino.” Meaning, I’m waiting to buy a paper from Gabino.
The child looks puzzled, whether as to Abe’s meaning or the identity of Gabino, Abe can’t tell, and so he asks, “Gabino. Dónde?” (He does know a very few words of Spanish.)
The small boy shrugs and goes off, leaving Abe with no paper. With nothing.
He probably should have bought one, what the hell? A few pesos here or there won’t mean much even to Gabino. However, to the next boy with a bunch of papers who cries “English language! Mexico City News!” Abe hears himself repeating, “No, Gabino.”
This child, though, seems to understand. And he speaks some English. He asks Abe, “You wait Gabino?”
“Sí!” Enthusiastically. And then, “Gabino. Dónde?”
The small brown monkey face scrutinizes Abe’s much larger, paler face before he says, “Gabino está muerto. Dead.”
“No.”
The devil-child begins to laugh. “Sí, Gabino está muerto!” and he runs off after the others, down the beach.
There in the heavy heat Abe sits frozen, immobilized. Muerto. Does it mean just dead, or killed? Slain, murdered. How awful for there to be just the one word. And how plausible a violent end would be for Gabino, an artful, ambitious little boy, a Mexican street child. It is entirely horrible. Abe has no words, no way of dealing with this.
And should he tell Zelda? Such a shadow over their trip, and Zelda tends to be superstitious.
Easy enough not to tell her, Abe decides.
Perhaps she will buy all her silver presents today, thinks Evelyn Fisk. Get it over with and simply not consider presents again. She decides this as a very young, dark, Indian-looking girl approaches her palapa, a girl with lovely, luminous black eyes and terrible teeth, too large for her face, askew, protuberant. But a radiant smile.
Evelyn, whose Spanish is excellent, asks her name.
Lupe.
Evelyn. Eva.
Lupe has a small brown briefcase of silver things, plus the pretty glass necklaces held over her arm. In a random way Evelyn begins to choose. Later she will sort them out, considering their recipients. In the meantime she talks to Lupe.
Is this her first year on the beach selling silver? Evelyn does not believe she has seen her before.
No, Lupe came before with her mother, Carmelita. However, at that time she was still in school for much of the day. Next year Lupe will have for sale tapes, instead of these, and in a deprecating way she indicates her jewels.
Tapes? Evelyn at first does not understand.
Tapes! Music! All kinds of music. All the latest hits. Music, on tapes.
Zelda, passing the palapa of Evelyn Fisk to get to her own, to reach Abe, sees Lupe there with her silver, her bright glass, and on an impulse she stops. She smiles, and by way of greeting to Evelyn she says, “Oh, it’s all so pretty.”
“I’m afraid I’ve been very extravagant.” Evelyn Fisk smiles back. “But I have all these grandchildren. Not to mention daughters.”
“Oh, then you are married.” Zelda had not meant to say this. The words rushed out, unbidden.
“Oh indeed. Very much so. But I need a little time off, now and then.”
“Oh, really.”
“Lupe has been telling me that next year she’ll have tapes for sale,” Evelyn Fisk says firmly, putting an end to further personal conversation.
“You must miss the cats this year,” persists Zelda. Her curiosity has been intensely aroused by this woman, whom she sees close up to be much more interesting-looking than from a distance. For one thing, the white pants, dark shirt, and straw hat that across the dining room look like everyone else’s clothes are actually extremely smart. Unusual. Working within a hotel has taught Zelda something about such distinctions. She knows at a glance which guests at the Harborfront are rich, or European, or from the States, as opposed to Canadians, rich or medium rich, from Ottawa or Calgary. Evelyn Fisk is very rich, and from the States.
“I try not to think about the cats,” says Evelyn Fisk somewhat dismissingly, turning back to Lupe.
…
Abe, out in the water, has observed Zelda’s arrival at the beach, and he has noted with some surprise her stop at the cat woman’s palapa. He waves, but she probably can’t see him, can’t tell him from any other bather out there in the surf. Nearsighted Zelda is vain about her large dark blue eyes: no glasses. He watches as she settles down with her magazines and lotions in their own palapa, and he thinks, What a pretty woman. He decides again not to mention Gabino.
The quality of that water, in that particular bay, is amazing, extraordinary. Abe concentrates on his sense of the water, its lively, active buoyancy, its blue-green clearness. Its perfectly embracing warmth. It is quite unlike any other water, Abe believes. A unique experience of water.
Up on the beach, Zelda is talking to a young Mexican. A news vendor, but considerably taller than the rest. Abe watches as she buys a paper from this boy. She seems in fact to engage him quite unnecessarily in some sort of conversation; even at this distance, out in the waves, Abe sees them laugh, notes their friendly postures. And he experiences a flush of jealous blood—so ridiculous, a Mexican child. Sti
ll, there have been times with Zelda when she has given him good cause for jealousy. If not actual, at least approximate.
With a jaunty wave to Zelda, the boy heads down the beach with his armload of papers, and after a calculated minute or two Abe starts in. Swimming, not riding waves. Until he stands up and begins to wade.
He can see Zelda, now smiling and waving in his direction. It is probably the stripes on his new bathing suit that she recognizes.
…
What Evelyn Fisk absolutely must not think about, she now reminds herself, is just how Oscar got rid of the cats. No speculations along those lines. None. Never.
There were quite a lot of cats. Several families.
Oscar must have—
Someone must have—
NO.
“Well, of course it was Gabino,” insists Zelda, at lunch, over Abe’s continuing incredulity. “I told you, he wanted to thank you for the shoes. Only he’s outgrown them and he’d like another pair.” She laughs. “Some con man, that kid. I’m sure he’ll go far.”
“I can’t get over hearing muerto,” Abe tells her. “It just seemed so plausible for a kid like Gabino. For really any Mexican kid, these days.”
“But it wasn’t true,” Zelda reminds him. “I keep telling you, he’s fine. Just suddenly looking adolescent, not a cute little boy anymore. With acne, poor guy.”
Abe can less easily imagine Gabino with acne than he was able to imagine him dead.
“Some nerve he has demanding more shoes.” Zelda laughs. And she says again, “He’ll go far.”
“It seems to me that the prawns were better here last year, don’t you think?” Abe recognizes his own reluctance to talk about Gabino as he says this. As Zelda sometimes points out, he tends to avoid issues. A male characteristic, according to Zelda.
She now regards him somewhat narrowly, but she seems willing to leave the topic of Gabino. “Maybe,” she says of the prawns. “I don’t know, it’s all still so beautiful here. I don’t much notice flaws.”
“On the other hand,” says Abe, somewhat later in their meal, “why blame Gabino for trying to get anything he can? Lord knows what his life is like. Where he lives. In what. I may send him three more pairs of shoes. Why in hell not?”
By midafternoon, which is still beachtime for most people, between lunch and their long siestas, the color of the sky is a queer bright ocher, unnaturally intense. And the heavy hot still air is rippled by occasional small spasmodic winds. Out at sea, the color is dark and strange.
No one knows what will happen next.
Many guests start up toward their rooms.
Finding themselves together on the path, Evelyn Fisk and Zelda and Abe all smile, murmuring at the oddity of the weather. Abe insists on carrying Evelyn’s rather large book bag—at which they exchange a small laugh.
Pausing for a moment—the path is fairly steep—they turn, the three of them simultaneously, for a backward look at the menacing sky, the beach.
And down there beside the water is Oscar, striding along as though rain were out of the question, were expressly forbidden by himself.
Evelyn. “He really is dreadful.”
Zelda. “Horrible. I wonder whatever happened to his wife. Remember Marya?”
“Yes, actually I do. Well, it’s not hard to cast him as a sort of Bluebeard.”
Perhaps from some automatic impulse of male solidarity (women tend to go too far, almost always), Abe demurs. “Well, come on now. But he is a mean S.O.B., that’s for sure.”
At the top of the path he hands Evelyn her books, they separate and go off to their own rooms, to bed.
And then the rains begin. A heavy roar of water, pounding down. Water slapping against the concrete walkways. Attacking the roof like bullets. A ferocious rain, that goes on and on, and on.
Believing Abe to be asleep, Zelda pulls the light blanket from the end of the bed to cover his shoulders and her own. And then, that small wifely task completed, she burrows down, breathing the unexpectedly new cool air. For her the sounds of rain are a summer sound, any winter rains in Toronto being muffled by snow. But of course it is summer down here, a perpetual summer. That’s why they come here.
Zelda then begins to think of a small trip alone somewhere. Maybe to San Francisco. Well, why not? This is something that women do all the time these days. She could get tickets through the agency, and she could see the city, San Francisco! (She notes with some interest that she is not thinking of New York, or Evan.)
Dozing off, Zelda dreams of freedom. Somewhere else.
Beside her, Abe, who is not asleep, is thinking somewhat resentfully of Gabino, who after all could have written a note when he got the shoes. Abe very carefully included his own name and address, both inside and outside the package. A postcard, any sort of acknowledgment would have done. And today he didn’t even wait for Abe to come up from swimming. Surely Zelda would have said that that was where he was.
Or would she?
The intensity of the downpour, the extreme heaviness of that deluge suggests that it won’t last long, the rainstorm. But it seems to go on and on, heavy water pouring from the sky.
It could cause some very bad flooding, Abe thinks next, as he envisions the dry riverbeds, the eroded sloping fields that they pass on their way from the airport to this hotel. And in his mind he can also see a cluster of shacks, the floorless dwellings of the very poor. Small and fragile, hardly shelters at all, precariously perched on the crumbling hillside earth.
Where Gabino might well come from.
His resentment vanished as though washed away in the rain, Abe determines that tomorrow he will go and find Gabino. He will find out just where he lives (he has kept the address), what the circumstances of his family are.
Evelyn Fisk, alone in her wide lumpy hard bed, is thinking that if the cats were still around she would at this moment be worried about where they were now, in the drenching, unaccustomed rain. However, she derives small solace from the fact that there are no cats for her to worry about. Really no solace at all.
In a terrible and permanent way she misses all of them, with their long skinny graceful bodies, their blue-green-yellow wise watchful eyes.
Unspeakable Oscar.
And Grantly, never allowing cats in their house. She has never seen him sneeze or turn red, no true allergic symptoms. He simply doesn’t like them.
Well, thinks Evelyn, warm beneath her covers, taking in cool air, Well, there’s more than one solution to that problem.
And she smiles.
CHILD’S PLAY
A long time ago, in the thirties, two little girls found almost perfect complements in each other. Theirs was a balanced, exceptionally happy friendship: skinny, scared, precocious Prudence Jamieson and pretty, placid, trustful Laura Lee Matthews. Such friendships quite often occur, of course, among small girls. They find each other. What was perhaps unusual about this one was its having been arranged, indeed contrived, by the parents involved, for their own convenience—so often under such circumstances the children refuse to like each other. But Prudence and Laura Lee really took to each other, as their grateful, hard-drinking parents remarked, making everything easy for the parents (for a while).
In any case, in the long, Southern summer twilights, after supper the small girls used to play in the sprawling, bountiful Matthews garden, and one of their favorite pastimes involved making a series of precariously fragile, momentarily lovely dolls out of flower petals. Pansy faces with hollyhock skirts, like dancers’ tutus, for example, or petunia skirts and tiny rosebud faces. The idea had been Prudence’s, but Laura Lee was more successful in its execution, being more patient and much more deftly fingered. This occupation entirely absorbed both children, and it formed an idyllic part of their childhood, something they lightly, laughingly mentioned to each other as they became more complex but still firm adult friends.
The friendship among the four grown-ups, which did not end well, was based largely upon their shared enthusiasm for dri
nk—three of those four people were borderline alcoholics; the fourth, Sophia Jamieson, mother of Prudence, became a full-fledged alcoholic. Another bond, even more perilous, was the violently flaring, illicit (though never even nearly consummated) love affair between Dan Jamieson, father of Prudence, and Liza Matthews, the beautiful mother of pretty Laura Lee. Given all these danger-fraught circumstances, it is surprising that the four-way adult connection continued for as long as it did; in recent, more accelerated times, disaster might well have struck much sooner.
All these things happened, then, in a place called Hilton, a college town in the middle South, a pleasantly heterogeneous collection of old buildings, old houses, and a lot of ancient brick and ivy and Virginia creeper. Both town and college were built among gently rising inland hills whose green velvet undulations gave credence to a local theory that all that land had once lain beneath the sea.
Many of the faculty members and a few of the more imaginative townspeople lived a mile or so from town in what had once been farmhouses, old rambling structures now more or less converted into practical houses. The Jamiesons, Dan and Sophia and Prudence, lived in one such house on a hilltop; Liza and Carlton Matthews, with Laura Lee, lived on another hill, about a mile away. Small, handsome, jokey Dan Jamieson taught history at Hilton. Big, serious Carlton Matthews was a doctor, one of the two in town, and consequently he was overworked and often terribly tired; at night he liked to drink. Liza Matthews, in addition to keeping a perfect house and cooking well (and being very beautiful, a blue-eyed, black-haired sprite), was a gifted gardener; almost single-handedly she had achieved the generous garden in which the little girls played their games of dolls among the flowers.
Sophia Jamieson seemed to drink less than the others did, at first; she even carried glasses of Coke and water, resembling bourbon and branch, to fend off assiduous hosts. She was a difficult, complicated woman; to her daughter she was terrifying. In fact, Prudence was so afraid of her mother that she could not have named that emotion, fear, in much the same way that extremely lonely people often do not quite know that loneliness is what is wrong.