Superior Women

by Alice Adams

  “Rad-cliffe?” says Florence Greene, mother of Megan; giving the two syllables equal stress, she has made the word bizarre. Thin, bleached-blond Florence does not look old enough to be Megan’s mother.

  Megan moves restlessly through the dingy, antimacassared living room of the small house that George Wharton never entered—but where, in the early morning hours, he often let her off: her girl friend was recovering from “an operation,” Megan was staying on with her, “helping out.”

  “You noticed that new drive-in, a couple of blocks from here, out on the Bayshore?” now asks Florence.

  “Uh, sort of.” She and George once had hamburgers there; Megan recalls how they gobbled, so famished, after so much kissing.

  “They’re hiring,” says Florence. “I’m really thinking I could get me a job there. They’ve got these real cute uniforms.” Megan believes that her mother talks this way on purpose to irritate and embarrass her; after all, back in Iowa Florence taught school, before the Depression took her job and she and Harry came to California and started in with Junque. When Megan was younger, for a long time she refused to believe that Florence was her mother.

  “Oh Mother,” Megan now says—a frequent response to Florence. She has instantly imagined her mother coming up to their car, as a carhop. Coming up to George’s Model A and—oh Jesus, what could she say? “Jesus, Mother.”

  At which Florence flares up. “Don’t swear at me! You know you’re just like your father, when it comes to me. Why shouldn’t I get a job like that? You’re both big snobs, that’s what you are. Look, you want to go to Rad-cliffe, you go there, if you can get yourself a scholarship, to add to that money your granddaddy left for your college. And I want to be a carhop. I’m tired of that dirty store. Tired of being broke all the time. I want to work. And I want to wear something cute.”

  One of the things that Megan spends the second half of the winter doing is trying to answer George’s postcard. Not that it needed an answer, she knew that, but she wanted to remind him of herself, and she wanted to sound light and lovable, not a fat girl who is seriously in love. She scribbles message after message on various scratch pads, and then on a variety of unsent Christmas cards. It always comes out wrong, whatever she says.

  At last she writes what is a probably unconscious imitation of the very card that she got from him. Including no salutation. “Guess what: Radcliffe has decided to accept me and I start in June. Will live in Bertram Hall. Hope to see you sometime. Your friend, Megan Greene.”

  On the reverse side there is a picture of the Stanford Bookstore.

  2

  June 1943. Freshman Orientation Week is dizzying for Megan, in that heady bright New England air. Very much alone, and feeling herself to be a foreigner, a Californian, a hick, she looks and watches and absorbs. She smells new grass and hears old church bells, she observes strange buildings. And everywhere she sees new, alluring faces. Interesting clothes. And she thinks obsessively of George, now only a few miles away.

  This is the week when Megan first sees what she takes to be a trio of old, close friends: Lavinia, Cathy, and Peg, in the smoking room on the third floor of Cabot Hall. They all look so Eastern, those three; Megan is powerfully drawn to them. Megan, in her denim skirt and shirt, California clothes, has been talking to a small, dark, rather nearsighted but pretty girl named Janet Cohen; they have exchanged names along with certain other information about each other. Janet is “practically engaged” to a boy who is in the army, somewhere in the South Pacific. His name is Adam Marr; he is a writer, a genius, probably, but Janet’s parents can’t stand him. Her mother cries when Janet goes out with Adam. Janet sighs, as Megan thinks how pretty she is, how enviably small—and how even more enviable is the declared fiancé. Janet seems very smart; Megan likes her already, she thinks.

  And then, as they are talking, the tall Eastern trio comes in: Lavinia, in a white quilted satin robe, the lace just slightly bedraggled (a somehow endearing touch, that lace). She is laughing softly, with Peg and Cathy. Big Peg in blue chenille, Cathy in a tailored dark red flannel robe, white lotion dabbed on her face, her brown-black hair in pin curls.

  Glancing over at Megan and Janet, Lavinia gives the tiniest, slightest frown, one of her most characteristic gestures. At the time, Megan is not entirely sure who has earned that negative response, she or Janet, and why? Was it simply the fact of their presence?

  • • •

  Later she will ask her close friend Lavinia, “But why don’t you like Janet?”

  The famous frown. “Oh, I don’t know. She’s just so—so Jewish.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.” Megan’s voice is tight.

  Lavinia laughs. “Megan, Megan, you’re such a California innocent. If you’d ever lived in a big city where there’re lots of them, you’d know.”

  Megan experiences the total frustration that comes of knowing you are right, but being for whatever reasons unable to argue. Lavinia’s flawless sophistication, which is incredibly impressive in a girl of seventeen, makes Megan feel simple and silly. Lavinia is from Washington, D.C. She knows everything.

  In the smoking room at Cabot, that first night, on the other side of the room Lavinia (no longer frowning; they come and go quickly, those little frowns) and Peg and Cathy go on with whatever they were talking and laughing about.

  As Megan says to Janet, “There was this boy, I knew him last summer. He was taking a chem lab course at Stanford. He’s at Harvard Med. I really like him, I guess, and I sent him a postcard, but I said I’d be in Bertram. I didn’t know about Cabot, for this week. And it’s four more days. I just don’t know—”

  “Well, if I loved him I’d certainly call him,” says valiant Janet, who loves Adam Marr.

  “Really, do you think so?” Megan is breathless at the very idea of calling George.

  “Well, sure. But maybe wait until you move to Bertram. That way if you have to leave a message it won’t sound confused.”

  Wonderful, practical Janet. Very smart indeed. Who goes on to say, “I know it’s hard to wait, sometimes.”

  The sound of laughter from across the room has reached a higher pitch, and Megan imagines that they are talking about sex, sharing confidences, maybe. Gradually it dies down, those mingled laughs, and from the diminishing sounds one voice emerges, such a light and pretty voice that it must belong to the blond one, Lavinia, who says, “Well, the truth is I’m just terribly frustrated.”

  “George!” At the sound of his voice, having left her message and then waited four days for his call, all Megan’s plans for cool control collapse; her George could be heard all over Bertram Hall.

  At his end, presumably the med school dormitory, George chuckles. “God, you sound terrific,” he says to Megan. “Are you liking it here? You like Cambridge?”

  “Oh, it’s fantastic. I’m absolutely crazy about it, it’s wonderful—”

  Another chuckle. “Well, I’m glad. It’s a town I’ve always liked, especially there around the Square. But say, do they let you out at night? Could you come out for a beer?”

  “Oh sure, I’d love to.” So much for being coolly casual. Blasé. Sophisticated.

  George, in army khakis, is something of a surprise. Unused to each other, in new surroundings, he and Megan sit facing each other in a booth in the Oxford Grill; two beers sit on the table between them, and a large wine bottle covered with candle drippings, years of multicolored wax, just now topped with a large red candle. Megan has not seen this done before, and she imagines it to have been accidental.

  George still likes her. Megan can tell by his eyes and his smile, as he looks across at her; when he says, “Gosh, you really look great!” she can almost feel that love has been declared.

  He tells her how busy he is in med school, how really hard they have to work just to keep up, not to mention his wanting to do really well. Last summer he had told her that his father and grandfather and his great-grandfather all were doctors, and now the weight of this reaches her, the pr
essure he must feel as fourth in line, generations of distinguished Boston doctors. No wonder he is paler and thinner now, the bony line of his jaw yet more pronounced.

  Because of gas rationing George has taken the subway over from Boston; leaving the O.G. (as Megan is quick to learn to call it) they walk very slowly, in the gentle June dark. Earlier he asked what time she had to be in, and Megan airily told him, “Oh, any time before midnight.”

  “Well, I call that really liberal,” was George’s comment.

  Megan did not tell him that she had to ask for a special permission, with a lie about a friend’s brother on his way overseas.

  They are not heading toward the Radcliffe dorms, she notices, but are going in an opposite direction. They reach a boulevard which she knows to be Memorial Drive, beside the river, the Charles. They cross the street. Traffic is light, no one speeding. On the river bank George begins to talk in a nervous way about rowing, “crew,” one of his favorite undergraduate pastimes, he tells her. Megan is reminded of their first drive together, from the Stanford bookstore out to Rossi’s, George going on and on about his car.

  They stop at a bridge, and George says, “I’m always curious about what’s underneath a bridge, aren’t you?”

  Underneath that particular bridge is very hard, sharply sloping ground, onto which they nevertheless fall, and kiss, and kiss.

  A few days later, walking along Brattle Street, Megan experiences an extraordinary recognition: she suddenly, blindingly sees that at that moment, in the brilliant June New England air—she understands that she is perfectly happy (in a way that most people, sadly, recognize only in retrospect: Ah, then I was happy). Everything that Megan could possibly want is either present or is imminently possible for her, just then. The new air is distinctly not Western, it could not exist in California; the air is as novel to her as the architecture is: she deeply responds to the bright strict lines of wooden houses, so much wood and paint and sometimes silvered shingles, or softly aged, rose-colored brick, and the violet-tinted, diamond-shaped glass, in rare ancient windowpanes.

  Nowhere adobe or tiles, no California stucco, painted pastel. No Bayshore Highway. No Junque!

  The air and Brattle Street form her most beautiful immediate present. And Megan’s racing warm blood even suggests that George Wharton could come to love her, and say so. And that those three girls whom she first saw in Cabot, those so-Eastern girls, whom she watches having coffee and muffins together in Hood’s might someday be her friends. (She understands that they all live in Barnard Hall, just across the way from Bertram.) At this very moment she is hurrying along Brattle Street, toward Hood’s, where they all might be.

  However, on this particular day, the only one of the three who is sitting in Hood’s is Lavinia, the thinnest and blondest, the most Eastern, richest-looking—the most lovely and delicate. The kind of girl, Megan has decided, who does not even let boys kiss her, much less all the writhing and touching that she and George do, every time they see each other, ever more feverishly.

  Very carefully not looking at Lavinia, Megan, who is still perfectly happy, goes over to get her coffee; she takes out a book and begins to look at French verbs—she has French next. She is thinking that George could call her tonight; at that moment even that seems possible. She smiles to herself.

  Absorbed in that thought of George, Megan forgets the time; looking at her watch, she sees that she is almost late. She picks up her books and is about to hurry out when from behind her she hears herself addressed, a light voice saying, “Well, good morning, Bertram Hall.”

  She turns to find Lavinia, teasingly smiling, saying, “Oh! you’re always in just the biggest hurry!” Her accent is faintly Southern—sometimes.

  Megan grins, feeling heat in her face. “I guess so,” she says.

  Lavinia asks, “What do you have next?”

  “French.”

  “Oh. I have Gov.”

  And so, within minutes Lavinia and Megan are walking up toward Harvard Square, they are circling Brattle Street, passing the Coop, and crossing through traffic, over and into the Yard. Anyone seeing them would take them for good friends, the two of them, chattering as they walk.

  “You look to me as though you came from some place really far away,” Lavinia observes, at some point along their walk. She has narrowed her eyes, as though her observation had been profound.

  Megan says, “California. Palo Alto, actually. It’s fairly near San Francisco.”

  “Ah, you see? I could tell—I know all about you, Bertram.” Lavinia laughs provocatively.

  “Oh, you do?” Eager, ungraceful Megan.

  But Lavinia is leaving her, Lavinia is going into Harvard Hall, for Gov. She smiles delicately as she says, “Well, see you later, Bertram.”

  “Oh, yes. See you.” Megan is left dizzy in the sun, and just slightly less happy than before.

  3

  Why is it, almost from that day of meeting at Hood’s, that Lavinia quite aggressively invites the friendship of Megan—why does Lavinia so clearly seek her out? On the surface, as friends they seem a very unlikely combination: tall thin blond, impeccably expensively dressed Lavinia—and plump dark Megan, in her slightly wrong California clothes. And, as the two girls do indeed become friends, it often occurs to Megan that other girls must find their friendship strange, especially those who themselves would like to be friends of Lavinia’s.

  Lavinia, if asked, could easily explain; she would simply and quite emphatically say that Megan is one of the most brilliant people she has ever met. Megan has read everything; her term papers come back with invariable A’s and flattering professorial comments. (Actually, perhaps surprisingly, Lavinia herself has a remarkably high IQ; in those numerical terms the two girls are identical.) Before Radcliffe, Lavinia went to a Southern boarding school (it is not true, as Megan at first imagined, that Lavinia and Peg and Cathy were all at school together); at that school, as well as being the prettiest girl, Lavinia was also by far the brightest, as well as the most formidably sophisticated. She enjoyed her position, all that devout praise from wondering teachers, themselves generally “unattractive” (a frequent word of Lavinia’s, of course; one of the many that she generally sets off in quotes, for a special, private emphasis)—“unattractive” and nowhere near as bright as Lavinia. But Lavinia was often bored silly, at that school. She welcomes the intelligence and the wit of Megan, and of Peg and Cathy too, who are both, in their separate ways, also very smart.

  A deeper reason for Lavinia’s seeking her out, which Megan only comes to understand much later, is that Lavinia has two and only two patterns of serious friendship with women. Her first and most usual kind of friend is a not-very-attractive (as opposed to “unattractive”), somewhat maternal sort of girl, Peg being the perfect example, although of course there were others, quite as perfect in their ways as Peg. The other kind of friend is pretty, attractive, also bright, but sexy, wild. Lavinia’s wild friend at boarding school, Kitty, was finally thrown out, having been discovered in a “compromising position” (how Lavinia relished that phrase!) with a boy from St. Christopher’s (“We both had our pants down, it was really terrific,” Kitty reported to Lavinia) in the chapel of the school, an episode much enjoyed by Lavinia, all around. Actually, although less apparently, Lavinia’s own sexual impulses are also wild, strong and imperative, but her deepest nature is intensely conservative; appearances are almost everything for beautiful Lavinia.

  Many years after college, still puzzling over it all, Megan wonders if maybe, at first, Lavinia could have chosen her, Megan, as another in her line of exploited maternal friends, perhaps equating fat with motherliness, as people frequently, so mistakenly will. It would have been only later, as they began to talk, that Lavinia recognized Megan as the wild and sexual sort of friend, the kind whose sexuality would get her into various forms of trouble—whereas sexy Lavinia just liked to hear about others’ escapades.

  • • •

  Peg’s function in Lavinia’s life was
absolutely clear, even in those earliest days. Peg mothers Lavinia, in a jolly, masochistic way. And sometimes she scolds, as mothers will: “Lavinia, you’ve gone and lost four boxes of my bobbypins already this month.” (Bobbypins: in those war years a valuable commodity.) And so Peg jokes, the tiredest, heaviest joke of all by now: “Don’t you know there’s a war on?” (Actually it could of course be said that none of them do.)

  The connection between Cathy and Lavinia is less clear to Megan, beyond the fact that Cathy has simply fallen prey to Lavinia’s powerful charm, as everyone does.

  One afternoon, in August of that first Cambridge summer, Megan walks that short distance from Bertram Hall to Barnard; that morning in Hood’s, Lavinia, there alone, has said, “You never come to see me! You just stay stuck over there in Bertram all the time. But I’ll bet you have some terrific night life going on, now don’t you, little Megan?”

  Megan blushes. Could Lavinia know about George, or has she just made a wild and accurate guess? But the fact is that Lavinia would find it very unlikely that Megan would “have someone.” Megan instantly grasps this, and uncomfortably she realizes that she is being teased, and not kindly.

  Barnard Hall, where she has not been before, feeling not invited, is considerably bigger than Bertram, and probably newer. The girl at the switchboard (this duty is passed about; it is called being on bells), says to Megan, “Oh, they’re all up on the fourth floor.”

  And so Megan begins to climb up the wide, dead-white brown-banistered stairs.

  And the first person she sees, at the top of the stairs, is small Janet Cohen, sitting out there alone, smoking, a heavy book across her blue-jeaned knees.

  In the split second before they greet each other, Megan sees that for an instant Janet has believed herself to be the object of the visit. Just as quickly, and as visibly, Janet sees that she is not. I might have known you wouldn’t come over here just to see me, is what Janet’s second expression says.