Superior Women

by Alice Adams

  Stephen, as babies go, was an easy baby—much easier, Mrs. Barnes often exclaimed, than Cathy had been. He finished off his bottles at a satisfying rate, and he slept a lot, soon adjusting to an all-night sleep schedule which made it easy for Cathy to go back to work, when he was six weeks old.

  What Cathy mentioned to no one, certainly not to her mother, was what she described to herself as a severe postpartum depression. She lay awake, ravaged with anguish, nameless grief, a sweet, piercing agony. A wild sense of loss, incomprehensible, relentless. Postpartum depression. But what had she lost, exactly?

  “I could be the priest who comes for tea, or a drink, for the Lord’s sake,” says Thomas—Father Mallory. “I’m good at that. I do it all the time. Your mother will love me.”

  “I know she would. I’m just not sure I could stand it,” Cathy told him. “Acting all that out. And Stephen.”

  “How is he? What’s he like?”

  “He’s a good baby. I guess. Nice-looking. Dark.”

  “I was dark,” says white-haired Thomas.

  Even though Stephen was “good,” and apparently content (if a little solemn, for a baby), Cathy sometimes thought, and continued to think, that she should have had him placed as she originally planned to, with some nice, merry, loving couple, maybe in a nice suburb, like Palo Alto, or Menlo Park. She could have given him to a nice young woman who would stay home and play with him all day, and in a couple of years they would adopt a younger brother for Stephen—or perhaps the fact of Stephen would overcome the young woman’s infertility problem; Cathy had read that this often happened. Stephen could have lots of brothers, sisters, a whole family of kids.

  Whereas she, Cathy, must be chaste for the rest of her life. Not to kiss any man again. No sexual joy.

  This is absolutely clear to her, a moral command.

  Thomas Mallory, Father Mallory, came for tea, for drinks several times; and Mrs. Barnes loved him and he loved Stephen, and Cathy could not bear the sight of any of this love. Watching those three people, all of whom in separate ways she herself loved, passionately—her mother, Stephen, and Thomas—watching them as they warmed to each other turned Cathy as cold and stiff as cement; she felt herself an upright cement slab—as her mother giggled and Thomas laughed and Stephen turned in a questioning way toward her, Cathy, his mother.

  “Such an interesting man,” commented her mother, later on. “It’s nice to see priests sometimes, in a social way. And I’m sure they get lonely too.”

  Cathy made an unfathomable sound, but her mother was used to such noncomments; her husband, Cathy’s father, had made the same sound quite often, even when she had said something important.

  “And he’s so nice with Stephen,” Mrs. Barnes went on.

  “I cannot stand it,” Cathy said to Thomas. “It’s that simple.”

  “But—”

  Extreme suffering was apparent in his voice, and in all the lines of his face, and in the fact that he could not speak of it. Moved, despite herself, despite other feelings and judgments, Cathy next thought: I cannot do this to him, it is too unkind. Inhuman. She said, “My mother really liked you. Why don’t you go by when I’m not there?” Painfully adding, “See Stephen.”

  His eyes blurred. “But not you.”

  “No.”

  Cathy bore that arrangement for as long as she could: coming home to hear that Father Mallory had been there for tea, for a drink, had brought a toy for Stephen. She bore all that, when it happened, and also bore the dread that it might; on any given evening her mother might say, “Well, we had a delightful visitor today!”

  And then there was the more awful possibility that he would still be there when she got home; he would have managed to “forget” the time, in order to see her. For Cathy assumed, always, that their mutual deprivation was shared. That he, like herself, lay wracked with longing, alone.

  On Stephen’s second birthday, a Tuesday, Cathy came home early to hear that she had just missed Father Mallory, who had seemed to be in more of a hurry than usual.

  Mrs. Barnes had invited some five or six neighborhood children in for cake and ice cream; she had bought soap bubble kits, little jars of liquid with blow-through rings on top. The children were enchanted, the small house was full of the shimmering, translucent spheres. As Cathy thought, This is really too much for me, his just having been here, having just seen what I now see. He has just seen Stephen, that day in a blue starched suit that his grandmother had not been able to resist, at the City of Paris.

  A few days later Cathy called him. Father Mallory.

  His jaunty voice was the first surprise. “Oh, I’m quite fine,” he told her. “I’m glad you called. I’ve been wanting to talk to you.”

  With an effort Cathy made her noncommittal sound.

  He seemed to breathe deeply. “I wish I could see you,” he said. “To tell you—I am leaving the Church, the priesthood. I mean I’ve left.” He sighed. “I don’t think I ever had the true vocation.” He sighed again, and seemed to brace himself. “And there’s someone I want to marry.”

  Shock at once penetrated each cell of Cathy’s being, became ice in her veins. She barely stopped herself from crying out, in sheer disbelief. She was choked by a welter of emotions which she could not at that moment have sorted out, or named.

  “It was being with you, loving you, and then Stephen,” Thomas Mallory ran on, “that showed me the sort of life I was meant to have. Next year I’ll be fifty, and it’s not too late. And Mary wants children too. I hope someday that you—that I—”

  But Cathy had hung up.

  And, after the night when her mother remarked on not seeing Father Mallory since Stephen’s second birthday, and Cathy said that she had heard he was getting married, Cathy never mentioned Thomas Mallory again, to anyone, until she died.

  Cathy thinks of Megan fairly often, and sometimes she writes, although she often observes herself telling Megan that she has not much to say. But how can she write to Megan about Stephen’s progress at nursery school, kindergarten, first grade, or her own progress in the mammoth superstructure of corporation taxes?

  However, Megan turns up in her dreams (as Thomas Mallory never does). In some dreams, even, she, Cathy, seems to have turned into Megan. In those dreams she is a violently sexual Megan; in one, she Megan-Cathy has “sexual congress” with a handsome Negro trombone player (Megan used to mention one named Jackson Clay, and Cathy always assumed that they were lovers; in an interested way she has followed his career). The violence and the vividness of that dream were troublesome, embarrassing. Vicarious sex, though, as far as she knows is not a sin.

  Cathy has, in effect, no social life. She and her mother do not go out together; it would somehow seem silly, getting a baby-sitter to go to a movie with your mother. Occasionally they will take Stephen to the zoo, or to Ocean Beach, or to some restaurant in Chinatown. Or Cathy will go out to dinner and a movie with some other young working woman. She has no intimate friends, in the sense that she and Megan were intimate, but she knows a few women, about her age or a little older, who are perfectly okay for a short evening out. Some drinks, a little light talk. None of them is especially interesting; there is no one whom Megan, for example, would want to know (in Cathy’s imaginings all Megan’s New York friends are exceptional people).

  Cathy lives in a state of peaceful resignation. She puts almost all her money in a bank, for Stephen. It is rather as though, she thinks, she were her mother’s husband; she and her mother are like an old married couple, with an accidental but welcome late-life child.

  Mrs. Barnes, though, is a highly social being; she magnetizes people—most recently, a widower neighbor, a retired Italian florist, Mr. Piscetti, who likes to go dancing in the Lochinvar Room, at the Mark Hopkins Hotel, a place that Cathy has tried and failed to imagine.

  “I am baby-sitting for my mother, actually, who is out dancing at the Lochinvar Room,” she writes to Megan. “Have you ever been there? My mother admits it’s a little silly. T
here is something called the Kiltie Bar, and they wear funny clothes, but she likes the band, and she likes to dance. She likes Mr. Piscetti. I hope you think this is funny? I hope I do?”

  28

  The house in which Peg and three other civil rights workers are lodged, in the summer of 1964, is just outside a small town called Edenborough, in the hills of north Georgia. It belongs to an old couple named Sawyer, Nora and Clyde. The Sawyers are intensely religious, nominally Presbyterians, but what they actually practice is their own; it includes total abstinence from alcohol and cigarettes (their views on sex are not known), and a militant abhorrence of social inequities, legal or economic, especially those due to color of skin. Nigger lovers, they are sometimes locally called, and that is accurate; they are.

  Thus, Nora and Clyde provide comfortable lodgings and generous meals to Movement workers, who come that summer to register Negro voters. But no one can smoke or drink on the premises. The Sawyers are nice about it, but very clear: “We don’t hold with drinking anything alcoholic, and so if you young people can just refrain while you’re stopping with us, we’d take it kindly.” They are nice people, both of them rather gray, and thin; they look somewhat alike, as is said to happen in cases of unusual compatibility. They share a deceptive look of frailty.

  In their early years, in the thirties, just out of Black Mountain College, the Sawyers built this house themselves. It is simply constructed, large and square, two stories and an attic. It sits on a hilltop, in a grove of oak and pine, overlooking a valley of green cornfields, in the summer, and a brighter green thick border of a creek. It looks west to other hills, all gently rounded, green. Because of this view, which is invariably, richly beautiful, newly so in each changing season, the Sawyers’ final addition to their house was a long, broad porch, with a sloping green-shingled roof, now overgrown with thick wisteria vines—and just now, in midsummer, overhung with lavender blossoms, hanging heavily, falling finally to the drying grass below.

  Coming in late from work, that August, Peg is exhausted to the marrow of her bones from so much walking, or driving in a jeep over perilously rutted roads; and her brain is dulled from so much talking. And sometimes she is afraid. But always she is struck by the peacefulness of that house; its restful lack of clutter (as opposed to the “plantation” house, in Midland, where she still lives) is balm to her soul, she loves its bareness. It is even miraculously cool, that house, on most of the sultry, heavy summer nights, as though an actual kindly god loved the Sawyers, and sent winds to their house. Or, more plausibly, by some fortunate accident the house is situated so that it catches any possible passing breeze.

  Peg is always grateful for the quiet house, for her narrow but private room, in the slanting attic, for the good meals and the light cool breezes, all that; but sometimes she acutely needs (or believes that she needs) a drink and a cigarette. Of course she feels guilty about these baser needs, although the other workers seem to share them; they are fortunately no more saintly than she is.

  Down a white dirt road, about a quarter of a mile from the Sawyers’ house there stands (still, incredibly) an old tobacco barn: a big square log cabin, chinked with mud, from whose high rafters the tobacco leaves once were hung to dry. The floor is dirt, red clay, and all around the big bare room are low, uneven stones, a primitive bench. The only windows are high up, near the eaves; through these openings the baking, drying sunlight used to enter, making motes and beams in the rising red clay dust. These days, or rather nights, the tobacco barn is where the guilty Movement workers sneak off for moonshine and cigarettes, appropriately enough: sooner or later everyone makes that joke about going out to the tobacco barn for a smoke.

  No one knows whether or not the Sawyers know about this practice; the accepted, comforting theory is that they do but pretend that they do not.

  Walking down that road alone, one black night that summer, Peg is especially tired, and fearful: this is the first of August, and three civil rights workers, in Mississippi, have been missing since June 22.

  Peg has been out trying to register people to vote with a new friend, Vera, who is another worker. Vera too lives in the Sawyer house (as does Henry Stuyvesant: an as yet unknown coincidence). Vera is a social worker from Los Angeles, a Mexican; she is very dark, so dark that at first Peg took her to be Negro. She is very beautiful, Peg thinks, so proud and thin, with amazingly lashed eyes. All summer, on the streets of Edenborough, as she walks along with Vera, Peg has been aware of suspicion, an angry distrust from the town’s street corner loiterers, the men and boys in dusty jeans, smoking thin cigars or pipes. Not talking much, just staring, unabashed. To Peg they look both stupid and dangerous, and even the women seem inimical, in their flowered dresses, their shielded, covert faces—even as they smile and say, “Hey, how you.” Thin smiles, and cold bright eyes.

  In a conscientious way Peg has given some thought to how she and Vera must appear to them, to these not-prosperous low-mountain Georgians, who have probably never been as far from home as Atlanta. These people would look at Peg and Vera, and they would see dark Vera, probably to their eyes a Negro, “cullud.” And herself, big white Peg, whose jeans no longer fit—she keeps losing weight, she is often too tired to eat, who has given up on her hair and just pulls it back with a rubber band.

  Since late June, when those three workers disappeared in Mississippi, Peg has seen, or thought she has seen, even more suspicion on those pale guarded faces, as though she and Vera, connected to those who have disappeared, were dangerous themselves—as people might feel suspicious of the family members of persons dangerously ill. She and Vera are viewed as being where they do not belong; they are there to stir up trouble, and nothing good will come of it.

  (And Vera is so sensitive, vulnerable, despite professional training; if anyone did anything to Vera, Peg would kill, would die for her. She loves Vera ferociously, as though Vera were Cornelia and Lavinia in one, and all Peg’s daughters. She knows that there are several ugly names for what she feels about Vera, and she is determined that no one, least of all Vera, must ever know.)

  Even in the outlying country cabins where the black people live, those small clapboard boxes raised up from the dirt on brick stilts—even out there, that day, Peg has been aware of more resistance, more possible hostility than usual. Innately polite, these country people always masked suspicion as a lack of interest. “I’m just not studying to vote,” they would say, with warm, evasive smiles. Today, though, at three separate houses, all reached after miles and miles of impossibly rutted, narrow roads, Peg and Vera were summarily turned away. “We don’t want to hear nothing ’bout that,” they were told, just before the firm flat final closing of the door.

  Now, on the hard white road, in the warm August night of no stars but strange white looming clouds, a night unnaturally still, Peg is scared. The sweet-smelling, ancient roadside privet could conceal anyone; and what better place for an ambush than the tobacco barn itself?

  Sternly, Peg tells herself that this is very foolish indeed; for one thing she is simply not that important, to anyone. She also tells herself that she does not really need a cigarette or a drink. She could perfectly well, with perfect safety, turn around and go back to the big safe house behind her. Which she almost does.

  She is alone because Vera said she was just too tired; she couldn’t wait to go to bed. Another man, Charlie, who also lives at the Sawyers, has gone to Atlanta for a meeting of some sort. The most recent arrival in the house is someone named Henry Stuyvesant, whom Peg has barely met, and they have not talked at all. In any case, Peg is not sure at this moment where he is.

  She and Vera were too late for dinner, and instead made sandwiches in the kitchen; one of the generous customs of the house is a constant supply of sandwich makings, sliced cold chicken and tomatoes, homemade mayonnaise and good crusty bread.

  Henry Stuyvesant (what a silly name, Peg thinks) could be anywhere at all. He could in fact be out in the barn, where Peg is headed. Thinking of that possibil
ity, Peg very much hopes not. He seems nice, but something about him terrifies her: he is so serious, so intent, with an air of seeing everything at once, and judging, probably. And so tall, taller than Cameron, even, thinner, more elegant. The possibility of Henry Stuyvesant is almost more scaring than that of being alone.

  And there ahead of her is the century-old barn, on its lonely knoll, darker against the dark night sky. A staunch survivor. Its windows emit no sound, its face is blank.

  There is a prearranged signal so that none of the workers will scare each other, nor be scared: three whistled notes, whip-poor-will. Peg does this now, standing outside in the thick sweet darkness, and as no one answers, she thinks, I just won’t bother going in, looking for the jug of booze, bourbon that I surely do not need. I’ll just have a quick cigarette, right here, right now.

  But someone in white clothes, a white person, at that moment emerges from the barn’s open front door, ghostly, in the shadows. For an instant Peg is frozen in panic, which then becomes more ordinary fear, actually shyness, as she sees that it is Henry Stuyvesant.

  “Oh, hi,” they say to each other, in much the same tone.

  And then Henry says, “How very nice. I really wanted a drink but I was holding off. Wanting some company.”

  “Oh, me too,” Peg says, feeling choked. But she follows him in, follows his white back into the cool shadowy room, the big space that is darker than the night. Big clumsy Peg, who at that moment wishes that she were anyone else at all.

  The bourbon and a supply of paper cups are kept in a hollowed-out place under one of the long stone benches. Henry gets them out, as Peg, shaky-fingered, lights her cigarette, and sits down close to the door. As far from him as she can.

  With a small flourish Henry hands her the half-filled paper cup; he says, “Well, cheers. I needed this. How about you?”