by Alice Adams
By contrast to everyone else, Cathy feels herself more Irish, more Catholic than ever, as well as scrawnier, darker.
Cathy comes gradually to realize that not only had she hoped to duplicate the excitement of Megan’s going-East experience, she had also hoped to duplicate Megan, in a way. Not in her own person, no hope of that, Cathy turning into voluptuous, chattering, happily laughing Megan—but in California Cathy had hoped to find another Megan as a friend, someone bright and funny and offbeat. And naturally, no such luck. Just cashmered blondes, as bland as they are fair.
Even the architecture at Stanford is depressing to her. All that Spanish tile and brownish stucco. And the trees: huge dry ugly dusty palm trees, that rattle like snakes. The palms have the look of prehistoric birds, Cathy decides, in a state of terminal disease.
She especially hates the fall, in Palo Alto, everywhere dry blond grass, and warm winds. Nothing brisk in the air. No red leaves.
In the winter of 1905, William James, who was teaching at Stanford, wrote to his brother, Henry:
… so simple the life and so benign the elements, that for a young ambitious professor who wishes to leave his mark on Pacific civilization while it is most plastic or for any one who wishes to teach and work under the most perfect conditions for eight or nine months, and who is able to get to the East, or Europe, for the remaining three, I can’t imagine anything finer. It is Utopian. Perfection of weather. Cold nights, though above freezing. Fire pleasant until 10 o’clock A.M., then unpleasant. In short, the “simple life” with all the essential higher elements thrown in as communal possessions. The drawback is, of course, the great surrounding human vacuum—the historic silence fairly rings in your ears when you listen—and the social insipidity. I’m glad I came, and with God’s blessing I may pull through.
Cathy copies out this passage, and she sends it to Megan, retaining James’s original emphases, and she adds a few of her own, in red pencil; she underlines both instances of “simple,” and also with two fierce lines she underlines “the historic silence, social insipidity.” Another red line under the last phrase, “and with God’s blessing.” She simply signs the whole thing, Love Cathy—and that is her first letter to Megan from California.
The housing situation in Palo Alto, in and around Stanford, at that time is terrible, and has been for some years, particularly with the influx of World War II veterans, often with their wives. A low-cost housing development is too small to do much to alleviate this situation, and is of course out of the question for Cathy, who is neither a veteran nor married. Childless. A woman.
Many local homeowners have cannily appraised the situation and have turned it to their own considerable advantage. A well-off widow, say, with a too large house, and perhaps one guest room that she has not used for years, can rent out that room; if it has its own bath, she can get as much as seventy-five dollars a month. If she can divide that room in half, and somehow put in a vestigial kitchen, she can advertise an apartment for rent, plenty of room for a studious young man and his working wife, if they are careful not to have children or noisy parties, and if they can pay ninety dollars a month, or sometimes more.
And that is what Cathy has, a divided room, which was formerly an attic, with a hot plate and an icebox and a “separate entrance”: rickety stairs which were once a fire escape. All this is on College Terrace, just south of the Stanford campus. For ninety dollars. Paying that much rent is a little hard, since Cathy is trying to live on two hundred a month, which is what her father sends her. (What she guiltily accepts; she knows that he is opposed to graduate schools, for girls, and she plans to repay, as soon as she gets a job.) Next year, maybe she can get a couple of freshman sections to teach. Although there too, as with the cheap housing, the preference is to veterans, and to men. Girls can usually get money from home, that is what girls are supposed to do, according to the current line of thought. And Cathy has to concede that it may be to some extent true, but then she thinks, Suppose you can’t? Suppose your family is seriously poor? Well, the answer to that one comes easily: a girl from a truly poor family goes to work or she gets married very young, she does not go to graduate school, and surely not to Stanford.
Not being given to self-pity, lonely is not a word that Cathy would use, as applied to herself, but that is what she is; she is acutely, excruciatingly lonely. She almost never has a conversation with anyone, only a few short occasional dialogues with some other student whom she encounters in the library, or in what is called the quad. Or in the Stanford Bookstore, where Megan said she worked, one high school summer. “Where I met my great love, George Wharton,” is how Megan, laughing, in her way, has put it.
The only person whom Cathy meets in the bookstore is that priest, from her Milton seminar. Standing behind him in line, she hears him say a few words to the clerk (he has never spoken in class, so far) and she is then unable not to say to him, “Oh, you’re from Boston!”
He turns and smiles quickly, his smooth face a shade more red. “Dorchester. How’d you guess? Are you from around there too?”
“Uh, no, but I went to school—I’m from Philadelphia. Ardmore, actually. Father.”
Cathy feels her own face reddening, at the sheer impossible stupidity of this exchange. And how rude of her to remark on his accent. She is obviously out of touch, she thinks; isolation is making her more than a little nutty. (And then she does think the forbidden word, lonely.)
But the priest is saying, “Well now, Radcliffe, I’ll be bound. You don’t have the look of a B.U. girl. I’m a Tufts man myself, but of course that’s a long way back.”
“Oh,” is all Cathy can think of to say. On her face she feels the presence of a simpering smile.
And so he finishes it off, their nonconversation. “Well, I’ll see you in class,” he says, and he moves away from her, out of the store and out into the alien California sunlight. He has a jaunty, athletic walk, more like a tennis player than a priest (but a priest could play tennis; why not?).
Despite the white hair, close up that priest looked younger than she had thought, Cathy muses later on, when she is “at home.” He must be about her father’s age, late forties, but he is thinner, healthier-looking than her fat, bold, adored-feared father. Why couldn’t she at least have asked him how he likes it out here, which is not as dumb a question as it might sound. She could mention the quote from William James. Priests get lonely too, they like to talk. Cathy’s mother is always befriending some priest, having priests to dinner, in the small Ardmore house. Cathy is used to priests (or she should be), to seeing them outside as well as in church.
She next thinks, daringly: Maybe I should invite that priest to dinner? (But suppose he said no!) And what could I cook for two people on a hot plate? Maybe ask him for a drink? A lot of priests like to drink. But what would I buy? And everything costs so much, Scotch, Irish whiskey (her father drinks Irish, drinks much too much of it).
He probably wouldn’t come, no matter what I asked him to, Cathy then decides. What an insane idea.
She would like to telephone Megan, but is frightened by the probable cost of the call. She knows that what she needs, though, is a good long laugh. What with the strangeness of California, Stanford, everything, she is just a little out of control. Her thinking has got a little bizarre; she has never even imagined asking a priest to dinner before.
18
In New York, down in the Village, the quarters in which Megan lives are considerably smaller than those occupied by Cathy, in California. Megan has one room on the top floor of a brownstone on West 12th Street, just off Fifth Avenue—an impressive address, but she is in what once were the servants’ quarters, four small rooms around a large, central (and entirely wasted) space, with a grime-filled skylight in the middle. Megan has one of those four rooms, and she shares the bath with two anonymous and seemingly identical old men, whom she almost never sees, their hours being somehow opposite to hers. The fourth room is fortunately unoccupied.
In her narrow r
oom there is a single bed, and a table which holds alternately her typewriter and a hot plate. She has a chair, one bookcase. Her window opens onto a fire escape where she sometimes sits and smokes, on those chokingly hot New York summer nights. From that perch she can peer into what must be a dance studio, on Fifth Avenue (she finds later that it is indeed a dance studio, Martha Graham’s). What she sees are portions of marvelously leaping, prancing bodies, long brown arms and legs, in black tank suits or tights.
For her room Megan pays fifteen dollars a week, from her salary of forty-five, also weekly, at the publishing house. She occasionally takes a few books from the mail room and sells them, but that does not bring in much cash, and besides, it seems so sordid, petty thievery—although she is assured that all the underlings in publishing do just that, that year.
Megan likes her room very much, and she was pleased to find it, in her favorite part of New York, even her favorite block. And it is handy to her job; she can walk over to Fourth Avenue by way of Union Square. When she can afford it she stops at the Fifth Avenue Schrafft’s for breakfast. And that is her general rule: breakfast out, and lunch at a counter, somewhere. At night she heats something on her hot plate, a can of soup or stew.
She enjoys coming back to her room at night, alone; to her it seems compact rather than much too small. It reminds her a little of her room in Paris, in the Welcome Hotel; this too is her absolute, independent domain.
It is not, however, a room to which to invite her friends, and sometimes Megan decides that that is just as well; she does not need another Danny moving in with her, for example. But at other times she strongly wishes for more space.
As it is, only two people ever visit Megan, in her 12th Street room: Jackson Clay, and Biff Maloney, the editor whom Megan told Lavinia that she thought was “queer,” and who is by now a considerable friend. (The two men do not visit her together, naturally.)
Jackson very much objects to Megan’s room. He snorts unpleasantly, derisively, whenever she refers to it as her apartment (which is how she thinks of it). For a while Megan does not understand what he finds so objectionable; after all he does not have to live there—there has never been even the slightest question of their living together, not at that time. And for a few drinks, a few hours of love, which is how they use the room, it is perfectly adequate. But since Megan is truly, deeply fond of Jackson, she tries to understand what bothers him about it.
“Look,” she tells him. “It’s really okay for me. I don’t feel crowded. I love this neighborhood, and it’s so cheap.”
Evasively, he tells her, “I bet I could find you some place, more uptown?”
“But Jackson, I like it down here.”
“Oh, the Village’s okay. I been to some Village places I like just fine.”
“Well, I know this is small, but I don’t give parties here, I don’t even want to give parties, for heaven’s sake.”
“Oh, parties. I been to enough parties to last me for good. But baby, I think about you, like when I’m doing a date in Chicago, or D.C., and I think about you in this room, and that really brings me down.”
And at last Megan begins to understand: this small cheap room simply does not coincide with Jackson’s view of her. To Jackson she is a superior woman, who should therefore live in grand surroundings. And while Megan does not necessarily agree, she is touched by his concern. Jackson is one of the nicest men she has ever known, if not the nicest.
They are linked, she and Jackson Clay, in ways that are both mysterious and strong. And interesting, to Megan; she gives considerable thought to the mysteries of their connection—God knows it escapes all the usual definitions. Certainly none of the current concepts of “in love” quite apply, although in their ways Megan and Jackson do love each other. But they are not jealous or even curious about other people in each other’s lives, as people in love are supposed to be. Megan supposes that Jackson sees other women; well, he must—he is extremely handsome, sexy, attractive, and he spends so much time away, on tours. And she supposes that he assumes the same of her—although actually, for several years, the years of seeing Jackson most, Megan only makes love with him. But she sees no point in telling Jackson that; he might find it in some way alarming, or even embarrassing, her unsought fidelity.
And their needs to see each other are in perfect accord, seemingly; just when Megan has begun to wonder when she will see him again, when she feels that she must see him, suddenly there he is. From out of the blue he will call; he will tell her that he just got back into town, is she free? He’ll come by her place long about seven o’clock.
Generally, almost always, Megan works considerably past the eight hours that she is paid for; but on the days that she is expecting Jackson she will leave her office at about five thirty, very early for her. In a happy anticipatory daze she will walk home (not having to stop for a can of stew, or soup). Sometimes she will buy a small bunch of flowers, fall asters or daisies; she has learned that Jackson likes these touches (they improve her “apartment”). Back home, she will take a long bath, at last emerging all clean and smooth and perfumed, all dusted with powder. Black underthings, a black dress, some makeup—and she is ready, waiting for Jackson.
But he is always late; she has come to think that his “long about” means late, and during that time of waiting for him her blood does race, her heart beats anxiously. Perhaps, after all, she is in love with Jackson?
Then she hears those well-known, unmistakable steps, bounding, heavy. He always runs up her stairs; a big tall man, he is out of breath at her door. Handsome Jackson, in his sharkskin suit and camel’s hair coat, his shining yellow-brown skin and wide dark eyes. Jackson, who kisses her with his whole mouth, her whole mouth, and all of their bodies. So eagerly, with love.
Jackson would like to help her out with money. He hints around at this, so that Megan has understood what he means before he is able to ask her, in a very low, strained voice: “They pay you okay, at that book house?”
“Oh, I guess so.”
“You ever need a loan, or anything extra, you come to me, you hear?”
“Oh sure, Jackson. Uh, thanks.”
But of course she cannot, would not ever ask Jackson for money. Even though she does need money, and he seems to have a lot, and they are friends. Megan is aware of the illogic of her view, but she is deeply prudish, in this way. And she knows that she is much more prudish than she would be if she were not so broke. If she were richer she could probably say something like, Jackson, I’m really in over my head at Lord & Taylor, at Bendel’s—could you let me have a hundred, two hundred, five? Whereas, as it is, she cannot ask for the twenty or thirty dollars that she is usually short of, by the end of the month.
When Jackson is in town, and playing on 52d Street, Megan would like to go and hear him every night, if she could; she still is crazy about his music, that hot wild blasting trombone—and crazy too about the way he sings, those sliding lilts. And his eyes, as he sings to her.
Going to one of those clubs presents a problem for her, though. In those days it is almost impossible for her, a young woman, to go alone. And it is hard for her to ask anyone to take her there, unless by some odd chance she has a date, someone she knew at Harvard, calling her up, and whom she knows has enough money for the fairly stiff cover charge. (Saying to someone, Look, please let me pay half was just not done, not then.)
“You don’t just know some guy, some guy like a brother, you could ask him to be your guest at the club?” sensitive Jackson asks her, as they discuss her coming to hear him, at the Onyx. “That way,” he says, “I tell the manager you my guests.”
Megan laughs. “But I don’t have any brothers.”
However, of course she thinks of Biff, at work.
One of the ways in which Megan sees Biff is at the counter of the corner Rexall’s, where they both often go for sandwiches at lunchtime. She has concluded that Biff has no money either, other than what is probably a salary not much larger than hers (but somewhat l
arger; he has been there for two years longer, and men are always paid more, no matter what they do, of course).
Broke or not, Biff’s manner is very grand indeed. He is a small man, barely taller than Megan is, with extremely curly, extremely red hair. Wide-spaced blue eyes, and freckles; he is the most freckled person Megan has ever seen. An Irish kid, obviously, from some never mentioned suburb of Boston. His accent and his whole demeanor, however, are the purest, perhaps even exaggerated Harvard, or possibly Back Bay. Old days in Cambridge are one of the things that he and Megan talk about, as Biff’s huge eyes tear with nostalgia, remembering the best days of his life.
And so it seems quite natural for Megan to ask Biff, over grilled cheese and coffee, “Biff, did you ever go to any of those jazz places in Boston? The Savoy?”
“Oh, did I not!” The wide eyes widen expressively. “Although I must say, those places sometimes made me rather nervous. I was much more comfortable, really, at the Napoleon Club.”
“I heard of it, but I never went there.”
“Well, you wouldn’t have, it’s of another generation. But there used to be a wonderful singer. Johnny something. He was terribly Dwight Fiske. You know.”
“Oh. Well, I was sort of wondering. Do you know a trombone player named Jackson Clay?”
“Not personally, but I’ve heard of him, if that’s what you mean. He’s rather sensational, I thought.”
“Well, I do sort of know him. He’s a friend of a friend.” (Is this a necessary lie? Megan feels bad about it, but is not sure how else to explain.) “Anyway, when he’s in town I can get in free, free drinks and all, with anyone I want. So I wondered if you—”
“But my dear girl, I’d be enchanted.”
And that is how it comes about that Megan and Biff from time to time go together to the Downbeat, or the Onyx Club; they are admitted free, and guided to a table near the bandstand, near Jackson—who sings and smiles to Megan, and sometimes nods in a friendly way to Biff, Megan’s “brother.”