The Stories of Alice Adams (v5)

by Alice Adams

  Roger’s new circle included quite a few Europeans, refugees like his father-in-law to be, and Mr. Erdman’s friends, and transients: visiting representatives of banks, commercial attachés and consuls. The rest were mainly San Francisco’s very solid merchant upper class: German Jewish families who had had a great deal of money for a long time. They were very knowledgeable about music and they bought good paintings on frequent trips to Europe. Among those people Roger looked completely at home; even his heavy Southern courtliness took on a European flavor.

  Mrs. Erdman was still a remarkably pretty woman, with smooth dark hair in wings and round loving eyes as she regarded both her husband and her daughter. Richard found this especially remarkable; he had never known a girl with a nice mother and he imagined that such girls were a breed apart. Ellen’s mother had jumped under a train when Ellen was thirteen and miraculously survived with an amputated foot.

  Mrs. Erdman was a very nice woman and she wanted to be nice to Richard, once it was clear to her who he was. The two boys were so unlike that it was hard to believe. “I’m so sorry that you won’t be able to come up to the lake for the wedding,” she said sympathetically.

  “But who’d want a corpse at a wedding?” Richard cackled. “Where on earth would you hide it?” Then, seeing her stricken face and knowing how rude he had been, and how well she had meant, he tried again: “I just love the way you do your hair—” But that was no good either, and he stopped, midsentence.

  Mrs. Erdman smiled in a vague and puzzled way. It was sad, and obvious that poor Richard was insane. And how difficult for poor Roger that must be.

  Roger was beaming. His creased fat face literally shone with pleasure, which, for the sake of dignity, he struggled to contain. Having decided to marry, he found the idea of marriage very moving, and he was impressed by the rightness of his choice. People fall in love in very divergent ways; in Roger’s way he was now in love with Karen, and he would love her more in years to come. He was even excited by the idea of children, big handsome Californian children, who were not eccentric. He stood near the middle of the enormous entrance hall, with Karen near his side, and beamed. He was prepared for nothing but good.

  Then suddenly, from the midst of all that rich good will, from that air that was heavy with favorable omens, he heard the wild loud voice of his brother, close at hand. “Say, Roger, remember the night they put the swastika on our door?”

  There was a lull in the surrounding conversations as that terrible word reverberated in the room. Then an expectant hum began to fill the vacuum. Feeling himself everywhere stared at, and hearing one nervous giggle, Roger attempted a jolly laugh. “You’re crazy,” he said. “You’ve been reading too many books. Karen, darling, isn’t it time we went into the other room?”

  It is perhaps to the credit of everyone’s tact that Richard was then able to leave unobtrusively, as the front door opened to admit new guests.

  And a month later, two months before the June wedding at Lake Tahoe, Richard had a severe heart attack and died at Mount Zion Hospital, with Ellen and Roger at his bedside.

  They had been watching there at close intervals for almost the entire past week, and they were both miserably exhausted. Even their customary wariness in regard to each other had died, along with Richard.

  “Come on, let me buy you some coffee,” said Roger, fat and paternal. “You look bad.”

  “So do you,” she said. “Exhausted. Thanks, I’d like some coffee.”

  He took her to a quiet bar in North Beach, near where she was then living, and they sat in a big recessed booth, in the dim late-afternoon light, and ordered espresso. “Or would you like a cappuccino?” Roger asked. “Something sweet?”

  “No. Thanks. Espresso is fine.”

  The waiter went away.

  “Well,” said Roger.

  “Well,” echoed Ellen. “Of course it’s not as though we hadn’t known all along. What was going to happen.”

  The flat reasonableness of her tone surprised Roger. Ellen was never reasonable. So he looked at her with a little suspicion, but there was nothing visible on her white face but fatigue and sadness. The strain of her effort at reasonableness, at control, was not visible.

  Roger said, “Yes. But I wonder if we really believed it. I mean Richard talked so much about dying that it was hard to believe he would.”

  The coffee came.

  Stirring in sugar, regarding her cup, Ellen said, “People who talk about jumping under trains still sometimes do it. But I know what you mean. We somehow didn’t behave as though he would die. Isn’t that it?” She lifted her very gray eyes to his blinking pale blue.

  He took the sugar, poured and stirred. “Yes, but I wonder what different we would have done.”

  In her same flat sensible tone Ellen said, “I sometimes wouldn’t see him when he wanted to. I would be tired or just not up to it, or sometimes seeing someone else. Even if the other person was a boring nothing.” She looked curiously at Roger.

  But he had only heard the literal surface of what she had said, to which he responded with a little flicker of excitement. “Exactly!” he said. “He was hurt and complained when I went to boring dinners or saw business friends instead of him, but I had to do that. Sometimes for my own protection.”

  “Yes,” said Ellen, still very calm but again with an oblique, upward look at Roger, which he missed.

  “People grow up and they change.” Roger sighed. “I could hardly remember all that time at Harvard and he always wanted to talk about it.”

  “Of course not,” she said, staring at him and holding her hands tightly together in her lap, as though they contained her mind.

  Roger was aware that he was acting out of character; normally he loathed these intimate, self-revelatory conversations. But he was extremely tired and, as he afterward told himself, he was understandably upset; it is not every day that one’s only brother dies. Also, as he was vaguely aware, some quality in Ellen, some quality of her listening, drove him on. Her flat silence made a vacuum that he was compelled to fill.

  “And remember that time a couple of years ago when I wanted to borrow the money?” Roger said. “He was so upset that I offered him interest. Of course I’d offer him interest. Otherwise it wouldn’t have been fair.”

  “Of course not,” said Ellen, looking deeply into his eyes. “Everyone has to pay interest,” she reasonably said.

  “It was the least I could do,” Roger said. “To be fair to him. And I couldn’t spend the rest of my life thinking and talking about how things were almost twenty years ago.”

  “Of course not,” Ellen said again, and soon after that he took her home and they parted—friends.

  But in the middle of that night Roger’s phone rang, beside his wide bachelor bed, and it was Ellen.

  “Pig pig pig pig pig pig pig pig pig!” she screamed. “Horrible fat ugly murdering pig, you killed him with your never time to see him and your wall of fat German business friends always around you and your everything for a purpose and your filthy pig-minded greed and your all-American pig success and your so socially acceptable ambitions. Richard was all Greek to you and you never tried to learn him, how lovely he was and suffering and you found him not socially acceptable to your new society and your new pig friends and I would even rather be thin and miserable and ugly me than fat you with your blubber neck and your compound interest and you couldn’t believe his heart and now you can get filthy blubber fatter on his money—”

  She seemed to have run down, and into the pause Roger asked, “Ellen, do you need money? I’d be more than happy—”

  She screamed, but it was less a scream than a sound of total despair, from an absolute aloneness.

  Then she hung up, and a few weeks later Roger heard that she had had a complete breakdown and was hospitalized, perhaps for good.

  • • •

  After the excellent dinner of moussaka, salad and strawberries in cream, Karen and Roger settled in the living room with strong coffee
and snifters of brandy. It was an attractive, comfortable, if somewhat disheveled room, very much a family room. Karen’s tastes were simpler than those of her parents. Her furnishings were contemporary; the fabrics were sturdy wools or linen; the broad sofa was done in dark-brown leather.

  Roger leaned back; he blinked and then sighed, looking up to the ceiling. Karen could tell that he was going to say something about Richard.

  “I sometimes wish,” said Roger, “that I’d taken the time somewhere along the line to have learned a little Greek. It seemed to give Richard so much pleasure.”

  “But, darling, when would you ever have had the time?”

  “That’s just it, I never had the time.” Roger’s tone when talking about or in any way alluding to his brother was one of a softly sentimental regret; Karen gathered that he regretted both his brother’s death and their lack of rapport in those final years.

  Roger also sounded sentimentally regretful when he referred to anything cultural—those soft pleasures which he valued but for which he had never had time.

  “I wonder what’s ever happened to that girl. Ellen,” said Karen.

  “I’m not sure I’d even want to know,” said Roger. “Did I ever tell you that she called me the night he died?”

  “Really? No.”

  “Yes, she was quite hysterical. I think she was angry because she knew I was Richard’s heir.” By now Roger had come to believe that this was indeed the case. He was convinced that other people’s motives were basically identical to his own. “Yes,” he said. “She probably thought I should give her some of his money.”

  In the large safe room, beneath other large rooms where her sons were all sleeping, Karen shuddered, and together she and Roger sighed, for Richard’s pain and death and for poor lost Ellen’s madness.

  “Here,” said Karen, “have more coffee. Poor darling, you look as though you need it.”

  “You’re right. I do.” And Roger reached out to stroke his big wife’s smooth dark cheek.

  Flights

  “Oh, yes, Valerie will like it very much,” said the energetic young man with blue-black hair and a sharply cleft chin, in an accent that was vaguely “English.” He and Jacob Eisenman were standing in the large shabby room that overlooked the crashing Pacific, on Kauai, one of Hawaii’s outermost and least populated islands.

  Jacob later thought that the implications of his tone were a sort of introduction to Valerie, although at the time he had not entirely understood what was being implied. Jacob, the gaunt sardonic literary German who, incongruously, was the owner of this resort. Then he simply wondered why, why very much? The young man’s clothes were pale, Italian, expensive; it was unlikely that he (or Valerie) would be drawn by the price, which was what drew most of the other guests: older people, rather flabby and initially pale, from places like North Dakota and Idaho and, curiously, Alaska—and a few young couples, wan tired families with children. These people stayed but were not enthusiastic; they would have preferred a more modern place. (Jacob was subject to radar intuitions.) And so this young man’s eagerness to register for the room and pay in advance, which was unnecessary (with a hundred-dollar bill), made Jacob apprehensive, as though he were being invaded—a sense that he dismissed as paranoia, to which he was also subject. But before he could sort out reactions, the young man had swung out of the driveway in his orange Datsun, presumably to fetch Valerie from the nearby hotel, which he had said they did not like. “So loud, you know?”

  In fact, for no reason Jacob found that his heart was beating in jolts, so that quite out of character he went to the bar, unlocked it and poured himself a shot of brandy.

  The bar, a narrow slat-roofed structure, was ten winding steps up from the pool, between the rental units and Jacob’s own office-apartment-library. Curiously, it was almost never used by the Alaskan-North Dakotans, the young couples. Nor was the neat functional built-in barbecue, which was adjacent. Most of the units had kitchenettes, but still wouldn’t they sometimes want to cook outside? The barbecue was the last “improvement” that Jacob had given to his resort. He had spent most of his earlier years in California, going from Los Angeles up to International House at Berkeley; he later concluded that he had been misled by that background; only Californians liked barbecues, and no one from California seemed to come his way.

  Except for a disastrous visit from his best friend, fat Otto from I. House days, and Otto’s new wife—a visit which Jacob had determined not to think about.

  The Datsun rushed back into the parking area, and “Valerie” got out. At first and somewhat distant glance, filtered through the bougainvillaea that hung about the bar, she was a delicately built young blonde. In dazzling white clothes. Huge dark glasses on a small face. An arrogant walk.

  Jacob took a too large swallow of the rough brandy, which made him cough. So that both people turned to see him there at the bar, at eleven in the morning. (“You aroused such false expectations,” Valerie said, later on.)

  The young man, registered as Larry Cobb, waved, and Valerie smiled indefinitely. And a few minutes later, all the way from the room that he had rented them, Jacob heard a loud harsh voice that boomed, “But, darling, it’s absolutely perfect.”

  Could that voice have come from such a delicate girl? He supposed it must. Jacob pulled on the large straw hat he always wore—he detested the sun—and hurried away from the bar.

  The practical or surface reason for Jacob’s presence in this unlikely setting was that he had inherited it from his parents. However, as Otto had pointed out more than once, he could have sold it when they died, when the place was still in good shape. Now he’d have to spend God knows how much to fix it up—assuming, as Otto did assume, that he wanted to sell.

  The Eisenmans had fled Berlin in the early thirties, with their young son and a few remnants of their once-thriving rare-book business; following the terrible and familiarly circuitous route of the time (theirs had included Hong Kong), they finally reached Los Angeles, where they set up shop again and were (finally) successful enough to send their son to Berkeley. Later they were persuaded to invest in and retire to a warm island resort. It worked out well. They loved Kauai, where the sun warmed their tired bones and all around them magnificent flowers—flowers hitherto associated with expensive florists—effortlessly bloomed. Birds of paradise. Poinsettias, and of course everywhere the violent colors of bougainvillaea and hibiscus. They tended their property lovingly, and, a loving couple, they died peacefully within a week of each other. Jacob flew out to settle the estate and quixotically decided to stay. Well, why not? His Berkeley landlady could, and did, ship his books; besides, he was tired of graduate school, instructorships. And, as he wrote to Otto, “You know I have a horror of airplane flights. This way I avoid the return trip.”

  He promoted the woman who had been his parents’ housekeeper to the position of manageress. Mrs. Wong, whom he then instructed to hire some local girls to help with the cleaning up. He was aware—his radar told him—that some of the local islanders imagined Mrs. Wong to be his mistress. He didn’t mind; actually he liked her very much, but nothing could have been further from the truth.

  Mrs. Wong was plain, round-faced, plump, and slovenly in her dress, and Jacob was sexually fastidious to the point of preferring celibacy to compromise. In fact in his entire life—he was almost fifty—he had had only three love affairs, and none of long duration; he was drawn to women who were violent, brilliant and intense, who were more than a little crazy. Crazy and extremely thin. “Basically I have a strong distaste for flesh,” he had once confided to Otto.

  “Which would explain your affection for myself.” Otto had chuckled. “Pure masochism, of course.”

  Their kind of joke, in the good old lost days.

  “It was like labor pains,” Valerie loudly and accusingly said; she was speaking of the waves that later that afternoon had knocked her to the sandy bottom of the ocean, and from which the young man, Larry, had grabbed her out. “When Quentin was bo
rn, they kept coming back and back—”

  She spoke furiously: why? From behind the bar where Jacob was making their drinks (he had never done this before, but the bar girl was sick and Mrs. Wong was somewhere else) he pondered her rage. At being a woman, forced painfully to bear children—blaming Larry for Quentin? No, they were not married; Larry certainly was not the father of Quentin, and she was not that silly. At Larry for having rescued her? No.

  She was simply enraged at the sea for having knocked her down. It was an elemental rage, like Ahab’s, which Jacob could admire; that was how he felt about the sun.

  In the vine-filtered sunlight he could see that Valerie was older than he had thought, was somewhere in her thirties. All across her face, over the small nose, the slight rise of cheekbones, were tiny white tracings. Tiny scars. An exquisitely repaired face: Jacob did not want to imagine the accident involved, but then he did—driving too fast (in a convertible, it would have to have been a convertible) north of Boston, she had gone through a windshield. Her eyes were large and very dark, at first glance black, then perceived as an extraordinary midnight blue. Her voice was rasping, a whiskey voice, the accent crisply Bostonian. She was wearing something made of stiff white lace, through which a very small brown bikini was visible.

  She gulped at her drink: straight gin, with a twist of lime. “God,” she said, “I’m all scratched.”

  Larry asked her, “Does it hurt?”

  “No, it just looks funny.” She turned to Jacob. “You’re so pale. Don’t you go swimming at all?”

  “No, I hate to swim.”

  She stared at him for an instant, and then seemed to understand a great deal at once; Jacob could literally feel her comprehension, which reached him like an affectionate hand.