by Alice Adams
Barbara senses that he is talking to himself, which is an impression that Michael often gives, but she agrees with him anyway. After all, he is right.
“This way,” Michael says.
He leads her to the rear of a large white picket-fenced house, and up a double flight of outside stairs. He opens a door, to the dirtiest, messiest room that Barbara has ever seen. The windows cut into the slanted ceiling are small, and on that rainy day the light is dim, but as Barbara gets used to the dimness, the mess looks worse. Books and papers are loosely piled in small stacks, like the droppings of an animal. Against one wall is a tangle of sheets, presumably a bed. In another corner a sink and stove and a small table are piled with dirty pots and dishes. Dead center in the room is a small pair of crystal candlesticks, evidently just unpacked—paper and excelsior are scattered about the dark stained carpet. Distaste chills Barbara; it looks like a room whose inhabitants are mad.
“Louisa must be in the bathroom,” Michael tells her; quite unnecessarily he adds, “I guess she didn’t feel like cleaning up today.”
Sounds of water flushing from an adjoining room confirm his supposition. Then Louisa emerges.
“Honey, we’ve been wanting to see Barbara again, and here she is!” Michael goes over to nuzzle and then kiss his wife’s thin neck; Barbara looks away.
Surprisingly, Louisa is enthusiastic about Barbara’s visit. “Oh, yes, we haven’t seen you since that ghastly dinner, when she said all those awful things. God, wasn’t it terrible?” And before Barbara can answer she has turned back to her husband. “Did you see these horrible little candlesticks? God, I couldn’t believe them. Our wedding present from your parents.” But she sounds more triumphant than outraged.
Michael picks up a candlestick and begins a speech. “You don’t understand,” he tells Louisa and Barbara. “The gift is determined by the economic status of the recipient. I can just hear my mother, ‘A silver service would look out of place in their home.’ She buys dreck in Filene’s basement—she’s got trunks full—and every time she says it will make a lovely gift, she means it could have no other possible use. But you should have seen the actual silver service they sent to Cousin Albert when he married a New York Strauss. From Tiffany’s, yet.”
Unmoved by the astuteness of her husband’s analysis, which she has heard before, Louisa continues to hold and regard the other candlestick. “Pure dreck,” she repeats, with her odd mixture of triumph and wonder and despair.
Barbara does not know that word, but she understands that Louisa is trying to sound Jewish, and she wonders why.
Michael offers to make coffee, which Barbara declines. She would not have dared eat or drink anything that was served in that room.
“My parents have been worse than you could believe,” Louisa tells Barbara. “My father. He’s been writing horrible letters about never wanting to see Jewish grandchildren, and couldn’t I make Michael change his name.”
Michael laughs. “Like Martin wants to, and maybe they’d rather I was screwing cabdrivers instead of you.”
To this laboriously unfunny remark Barbara reacts directly; at that moment she loves her friend Martin and she loathes his brother. She is not sufficiently sensitive (or kindly) to sense the panic behind Michael’s laboriousness, his doomed eagerness to please. (And neither is Louisa.)
Barbara gets up. “I have to go.”
“I hope I didn’t shock you,” says Michael, convincing Barbara that he hoped the contrary.
“I just remembered an appointment,” Barbara says, seizing on the most transparent in her repertoire of social untruths.
Louisa grimaces and hurries toward the bathroom.
Partly because she regards it as a gentile holiday, Mrs. Wasserman does not dress for Sunday dinner. She wears a housedress, one of her collection of drab shapeless cotton shifts from what she calls The Basement—Filene’s. Sighing, she serves the dry roast chicken.
Louisa cannot eat. Her illness has made her despise all food; she would have chosen to get rid of, rather than to nourish, her body.
“Louisa, you’re not eating,” says Mrs. Wasserman.
“I’m sorry, I’m not very hungry.”
“I suppose you’re used to a different kind of food,” insinuates her hostess, who correctly regards rejection of her food as a rejection of herself, but who has further (incorrectly) concluded that Louisa is pregnant.
Louisa blushes and excuses herself to go to the bathroom. By this time there is no ambivalence; she is disgusting, she loathes herself.
On Louisa’s return, Mrs. Wasserman remarks, in her “earthy” manner, “I should have known there was only one reason for hasty weddings.”
Puzzled, almost stupefied, Louisa stares at her, then says, “I think I have colitis.”
That changes everything. Mrs. Wasserman is consumingly fond of diseases. Enthusiastically she cries out, “But you poor thing, why didn’t you tell me? You must be miserable. You know,” she goes on, addressing her whole family, in which Louisa is now for the first time included, “that’s interesting. I was just reading about some experiments on colitis patients with ACTH. Cortizone.” She turns to Louisa. “How many times a day do you have to go?”
The following spring, after having served in the occupation army, Eliot Spaulding comes home to Boston. To Barbara. And eventually to his father’s law firm. Barbara and Eliot are very happy together. For the next few years or so there are a lot of parties, reunions, and weddings all over Boston and up on the North Shore, down in New Haven and New York. They are not as splendid as the parties that now are referred to as “prewar,” but they are fun. Barbara and Eliot are very much caught up in all that postwar fun. Busy and quite content, Barbara has no further need or even time for Martin, who would not have fitted in. Although almost.
But she is, or has been, very fond of Martin, and one day on a nostalgic impulse she calls and asks him over for lunch. He accepts eagerly, and arrives with a small bunch of spring flowers. But he looks so badly that Barbara is almost sorry she called him. His face is terribly dark and sallow and drawn, and there are what look like bruises on his neck. Uneasily they settle with sherry in Barbara’s pretty living room, simultaneously aware that neither of them has personal news that can be presented to the other as conversation.
As always, Martin tries very hard. He compliments her on the room, in the new Chestnut Street apartment, skillfully selecting touches which are surely hers: the small Victorian chair in toile, the good framed Klee that he remembers from her old apartment. “It’s wonderful to be in a place where there are no Lautrec posters,” he tells her, laughing as though they were still close friends.
“There do seem to be a lot around,” she agrees.
“Droves. As bad as last year’s ‘Sunflowers’ or that Picasso mother.”
Finding no other response, or available topic, Barbara asks, “How is your mother?”
“Oh, fine. She’s eternal,” Martin has forgotten for the moment that Barbara has met his mother, as well as Michael and Louisa. “A rather upsetting thing has happened with my brother, though,” he says. “His wife has some awful disease and they tried to treat it with cortisone and the drug made her go crazy. They called it a toxic psychosis. We all think Michael should do something about a divorce.”
Actually only Martin thinks Michael should do something about a divorce. Mr. Wasserman is against all divorce; he finds the idea terrifying. What would he do if he were free? And Mrs. Wasserman argues that it would be unfair to poor sick Louisa, thus insuring herself against more daughters-in-law.
Barbara notices now that she is feeling worse and worse—both more impatient and more paralyzed, and she has no idea why. The truth is that Martin’s depression and his anxiety—he is at the far limits of both—are affecting her, as cold germs or even a bout of yawning might have done.
Sensitive Martin understands what he is doing to her. He is sorry he has come, and he thinks of leaving suddenly, on any pretext at all. He doesn’t kn
ow what to do, and so he does the worst thing he could have done. He says, “Dear old Barbara, I’m sorry to have come to you in such bad shape. The truth is that I’m in the middle of an absolutely disastrous love affair. Last night he tried to strangle me.” Martin smiles and fingers his neck as his large dark eyes fill with tears.
Barbara is horrified. She has of course known that Martin is “queer,” but she has not extended this knowledge to include his having love affairs with men, and certainly not men who would try to strangle him. Rather stiffly she says, “I’m terribly sorry, Martin.” And then, “Excuse me, I have to see about lunch.”
By the time she comes back to say that lunch is ready, Martin has pulled himself together, and though it takes all of his exhausted strength, he talks with most of his old animation, his desperate charm, all during lunch. He has read or somehow heard about various phases of Barbara’s new life, a life that is fully as attractive to him as his is repellent to her. He amuses her with gossip, managing to make it “Jamesian” in its subtlety and its discretion, and managing at the same time to suggest that they both know that she is superior to the apparent frivolity of her life. Thus he quiets various doubts that sometimes, if weakly, nag at Barbara’s generally cheerful mind. He almost succeeds in making her forget what he earlier said.
But that unfortunate day is, for the moment, the end of their friendship, Barbara’s and Martin’s. He wisely does not call her to thank her for lunch. And soon afterward he reads that Mr. and Mrs. Eliot Spaulding have moved to San Francisco. (Like many Navy men, Eliot fell in love with that city, and had dreamed of living there.)
And soon after that Martin recovers from his love affair.
Barbara and her husband flourish in San Francisco. In common with most of their class, they survive and pass as very nice people, partly by blocking out or not seeing what is unpleasant: burned Asians, the American poor. Even the mildly “intellectual” phase of Barbara’s life has come to an end; she finds that she has less and less time to read. Besides, no one is reading Henry James any more.
And occasionally, when Barbara grows older and makes her remark to the effect that the first Jews she ever met were horrible (“unfortunately”), it is pointed out to her by more thoughtful friends that the awfulness of the Wassermans has little if anything to do with their being Jewish. She will, of course, agree. She is even heard to remark of recently met “quite attractive” Jews that they do not seem Jewish—meaning that they do not remind her of the Wassermans. For there in Barbara’s mind is always the image of Mrs. Wasserman at the head of her table, her eyes wild and unfocused in that dreadful face, as she absorbs all the combined energies of her husband and her sons.
By the time Barbara and Martin see each other again, much has changed: terrible Mrs. Wasserman is dead, and Martin (as Martin Walters) has moved to San Francisco, and with his inheritance has bought a small and very smart antique store, and (what no one could conceivably have predicted) he is on the verge of a happy (if somewhat eccentric) marriage.
And so, at that time, once more he and Barbara fill spaces in each other’s lives.
Four / 1951
A cold red February dusk, in the early fifties. On a suburban railway platform, south of San Francisco, two young women hurry toward each other. They are so unlike that their rush together seems improbable; one, Louisa, is very pregnant, stoop-shouldered, and rather shabby; the other girl, Kate, with dark red hair, is erect and stylish. But it is true; they are old friends who have not seen each other for five years, and not been truly in touch for longer than that.
“Oh, Louisa, you’re beautiful pregnant!” Kate cries out.
Unused to kissing, and not quite used to shaking hands, they stand there grasping each other’s arms.
“ ‘Built-for-birth’—remember?” Ironically Louisa quotes the epithet from her early adolescence, “B.B.,” which the standardized “popular” kids had repeated, tittering not quite out of her hearing, before she was discovered by Kate and became herself a popular Sub-Deb.
Even now Kate flushes. She was always popular (very), but she loved (and loves) her friend.
“And you’re so chic!” Louisa says. (Is that a compliment?)
“Oh, well, I have to, with my silly job,” says Kate, who works in the advertising department of a fashionable store. She is wearing a trim gray flannel coat, neat white gloves, high black patent shoes. She wears her hair long; she has long exotic dark eyes and an eager vulnerable mouth. A strong voluptuous body and an impetuous mind. She has been married for less than a year and her husband, a doctor, has been in Korea for the past five months. David: she often tries not to think of him at all, but this does not work.
The area around the small station has been fanatically landscaped: oleander bushes forced into smooth rounded shapes beside gently rising paths, and the parking lot is surrounded with smooth round stones that are gray in the dying light. The girls walk toward a large and muddy car, an old Hudson, with swollen sides—conspicuous among the bright new (postwar) station wagons and sparkling convertibles. “This is ours,” says Louisa, and then, mysteriously, “Michael doesn’t really believe in cars.”
Kate has been told that Michael Wasserman is a graduate student, in psychology. She is a little afraid of this meeting; some of the intellectual awe in which she has always held Louisa has carried over to Michael—and it is worse since he is a man. (She really believes this.) Men usually like Kate, she bolsteringly reminds herself, but at the same time, she wishes that she had worn something else; she will feel overdressed in the pink silk that her coat now hides. (She is right—she will.) “Louisa,” she says, “it’s so marvelous to see you. I can’t quite believe it. When does the baby come?”
“April. That’s what I can’t believe.” Louisa laughs jerkily as, finally, the car starts up and they back vigorously out of the parking lot.
“I hope you’ll have an absolutely beautiful girl who looks just like you.”
This remark, although she knows it to be sincere (she knows Kate) makes Louisa stiffen; for one thing, she has never believed herself to be beautiful (though many people in her life have told and will tell her so); for another, she is passionately anxious that her child be a boy, so anxious that she has admitted this wish to no one. She mutters, “Christ, I’d drown her at birth,” and she hunches down over the clutch, shifting violently.
“Oh, Louisa,” chides Kate as she often did in the forties, ten years back, when Louisa’s classically lovely face went unnoticed because her body was the wrong size: she was very tall, broad-hipped, with minuscule breasts. Shame made her gawky, and for a time the only boys who liked her were shrimps. (Were they trying to make her look worse, out there on the dance floor?)
“Well, at least I’ll get to quit work next month,” Louisa says. “I tell you—this job—in the Purchasing Department. Of course, I don’t see how we’ll manage. Even working Saturday mornings. Michael’s parents—” she vaguely says.
None of this, besides a generalized sense of discontent (or fear?), makes much sense to Kate, but she decides to wait. She is looking forward to a drink. A martini, she hopes.
Between blocks of anonymous one-story California architecture, the old car heads toward a reddened sunset sky—heads west. The shade of the sky against the sharp black of the hills pierces Kate with nostalgia for those Virginia years of her late childhood, and she wants to say something to Louisa about what she still thinks of as home, but (out of character—she usually speaks her mind) she does not say this; she senses that Louisa is completely involved with her present life. Also, Louisa can be snappish; you have to be sure of her mood.
And so it is Louisa herself who asks, “Well, what do you hear from home?”
“Not much. You know Mother and Dad moved up to New Jersey a few years ago.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“And I’m so terrible about writing. Only to David.”
Quickly sympathetic (after all, it is her old friend Kate, not just a dangerous chic
guest), Louisa asks, “David—how much longer will he be there, do you think?”
“Eighteen months, a year and a half.”
“God, poor Kate.”
“Well, yes. For one thing, he’s so much fun to live with.”
(She will not know how this sentence is to haunt her friend, or how Louisa is startled by it. Fun?)
“And he’s so ambitious,” Kate goes on heedlessly. “He really wants more surgical training. He’s interested in hearts. And lungs.”
“Oh” is what Louisa says, and then, “Some friends of ours are coming by after dinner, I think.”
“You were so good to ask me down to dinner.”
“Oh, it won’t be much. Michael and I don’t—” She lets whatever she meant to say trail off, and Kate suddenly understands that it is not so much that she is afraid of meeting Michael as she is afraid that he will be awful: a monstrous wasting of Louisa.
As he first appears, coming out to the car from the lamplit doorway of a small and literally vine-covered cottage, Michael is not terrible at all. He is short (well, of course; Kate was prepared for that), a little plump, blond, soft-fleshed, and very smiling. Jolly, he seems, in nice Brooks Brothers clothes. (But why is he so much better dressed than Louisa is?)
He says, “I’m really glad you could come. Louisa’s Southern Gothic childhood—of course she’s mentioned you a lot.”
He seems ebulliently eager to please—a quality that Kate finds sympathetic. She smiles, glad to like her old friend’s husband.
The house is sparsely furnished with cheap-looking things that Kate supposes (rightly) to have come with the rental; a long dark lumpy sofa, some large and shapeless armchairs, a maple table and dining chairs. It is not very clean, tidy Kate discerns. (But she thinks: Who cares? What’s really so important about cleaning a house?) It seems hastily pulled together, books and records stacked in corners—things shoved aside, or hidden.