The Stories of Alice Adams (v5)

by Alice Adams

  I took it home, and eagerly, right away, I began to record the newest chapter in my life, which I headed, of course, Lost Luggage.

  By rights my suitcase should then have been returned—my reward for maturity and strength—and I superstitiously believed that it actually would be. It had been missing now for five full days. And, still expecting that it would reappear, I concentrated on writing. I stopped calling the Toltec people and, instead, I called my travel agent and told her of those troubles; she would take care of everything, she said.

  I had imagined that I might try, as a sort of exercise, to record some of what I had felt and had written in my original book about the days and months just after Walter’s death, but I did not. I wrote about the colors of Mexico, still lively and brilliant in my mind, and from there I moved farther back, much farther, to some childhood colors: the calm blue-black depths of a New Hampshire lake in summer; gray winter slush on Tremont Street, in Boston. I had no purpose, really; I only knew that the hour or so I spent writing every day was a happy time for me. I finished that notebook and I bought another small one, and probably I will keep on buying them. And, without really noticing it as something remarkable, I began to feel a great deal better.

  Fate, as I should have recognized by now, tends to reward happiness rather than virtue: having to a large extent cheered up, in the same week I acquired both a paying guest and a good part-time job. The guest was a younger friend, Daisy, with whom I had worked on a couple of political campaigns; she had split with her most recent lover, and she wondered if maybe—now that—I would like to rent her a room. Well, knowing Daisy, it would not be for long, but she was entertaining, and kind, and reliable, in her way. And if this was not the cooperative venture I’d earlier dreamed of, it could be a step in that direction.

  The job was with the lawyer for whom I’d worked before—a little less work than I needed, but, like the room arrangement, it seemed a strong step forward.

  And, a month or so after that, I received, through my travel agent, a check for $343.79, from Toltec Airlines—a figure that I will never understand, but it paid a couple of bills.

  I don’t think much anymore about my lost notebook, or of those sad early days that it recorded, although I do occasionally wonder if Dick Parker, the night man at Toltec, could possibly have been right—if some misguided thief could have believed that I carried diamonds or cocaine in that shabby old bag, and found, instead, some well-worn summer clothes and the unhappy jottings of a very confused, a searching, woman.

  I don’t plan to go back to that particular Mexican resort; I believe that it has served its purpose in my life. But it has occurred to me that the next time I go on any trip, one of these new notebooks will fit easily into a carry-on bag, and that even if the book were to be lost, the loss would be minimal.

  Berkeley House

  Although Charlotte O’Mara lived in San Francisco, and her third and final stepmother, Blanche, in Berkeley, just across the bay, they traditionally communicated by postcard, an aversion to the telephone being one of the few things they had in common. Thus it was by way of a crowded card from Blanche that Charlotte first heard that the Berkeley house in which she had grown up was being sold.

  That night, at dinner with her lover, Lyman Clay, a bookseller from Portland, Maine, a tall towheaded young man, Charlotte drank too much wine, and she cried out to Lyman, “You don’t know how much I loved that house!”

  Since theirs was a relatively recent friendship, a couple of months old, Charlotte had not, so far, talked much, if at all, about her parents, both now dead. And she had said nothing about the house other than that it was in the Berkeley hills. And so, although kind and intelligent, intuitive, Lyman was understandably puzzled at the extremity of her reaction. “It was a really great house?” he asked.

  “No, actually it was pretty peculiar. Adobe, all sprawled out. It’s just that—just that I always lived there,” she told him hopelessly.

  The next day, along with some gratitude for Lyman’s kindness, and a slight hangover, Charlotte had an embarrassed sense of falseness. “Love” was too simple a word for her feelings about that house. She had reacted to its sale with rage and anguish, with an acute and wild sense of loss that she could not, for the moment, fathom, any more than she could get rid of the pain.

  Charlotte was a painter, and in that precarious way she made her living—although that year, the year of the sale of the house, she had a very good fellowship. She thought she knew a lot about joy and grief, about broke and flush, failure and relative success. Still, she was surprised at the violence of her feelings about the house, about Blanche’s selling it. Waking at three in the morning, she thought of crossing the Bay Bridge from Potrero Hill, where in their separate flats both she and Lyman lived, and going over to Grizzly Peak Boulevard, in Berkeley, where the house was. And burning it down. If I can’t have it no one will, she wildly thought, at that most vulnerable predawn hour.

  And she had no right to any of those emotions, any more than she had any “legal” right to the house. After all, her father, Ian O’Mara, had left the house to Blanche, his fourth wife, “to make her feel more secure.” He had told Charlotte this in the same letter in which he first told about his will. But at that time Charlotte was living in Paris, studying, happily broke, and she hardly paid attention to what he said. She could not then focus on anything as distant and unlikely as her father’s death.

  She was aware, though, in a distant way, that Blanche, a fading tall blond Southern belle from Savannah, had not found much security in Berkeley, with those threatening academic people, or with Ian, who was inveterately mean to women: mean to Charlotte’s mother, who had died young, and miserable; mean to his next, long-wooed wife, Pinky; and mean to Avis, the third. Mean to Blanche, often not speaking to her for days. In a way, leaving the house to Blanche was one of Ian’s kinder gestures, although not exactly kind in regard to Charlotte.

  Later, back from Paris and living in New York, very broke, nowhere near making it, Charlotte had remembered Ian’s letter, and with uncharacteristic bravado—she was generally, and with good reason, quite frightened of her father—she wrote to him and said, “What exactly did you mean about leaving Blanche the house? Don’t I get any of it?” And Ian, a smooth talker, wrote back reassuringly, “Of course Blanche will leave it to you. You’ll get it all, eventually.” But he did not say that in his will, and, what with taxes and repairs, the place probably was too much for Blanche, who was getting on. No surprise that she would have to sell the place, except that Charlotte was surprised; she was horrified.

  A week or so after the postcard came, after Charlotte had begun to lie awake thinking always of the house, she had lunch with her friend Margery, an architect. Charlotte had formed the habit of telling Margery much, although never all, of what was on her mind. That day she talked for a while to Margery about Lyman, saying that it bothered her that he was five years younger, although why should that be a problem? She did not say that she really liked him enough to scare her, a little.

  And then she tried to say what she felt about the house. She spoke, however, without much hope of comfort or understanding; she believed that because of her profession Margery would have a rather anatomical view of houses. To Margery, a house would be a shell for living in, designed and built in a certain way, in a certain state of repair.

  Charlotte said, and she felt her breath tighten as she spoke, “It’s crazy, the very idea of that house’s being sold makes me feel dislodged. Deracinated.” She tried to laugh, and coughed.

  Margery laughed, too, and then she said, “Well, once I felt pretty much that way, when the house in Illinois that I grew up in was being sold. And then I thought, What’s wrong with me? I spent the worst years of my life in that house, I was miserable there.”

  “Oh, Margery,” Charlotte cried out. “It was horrible. My mother dying, and then Ian fighting with Pinky, and then Avis. Not speaking to Blanche.”

  Home from lunch, in her stu
dio, from which on clear days she could see the Berkeley hills, Charlotte thought back to all the misery and unhappiness of the Grizzly Peak house. And maybe now, remembering, she would be all right?

  But she was not all right. Lyman had gone to a convention of booksellers in Los Angeles, and that night, instead of sleeping, Charlotte argued ragingly with Ian, who had been dead for five years: “Why didn’t you say in your will that I was supposed to have the house? What made you trust Blanche? You know she doesn’t like me, none of them have. Why didn’t you think of me when you made your will?”

  And to Blanche: “If you’re so broke why don’t you go to work, for a change? You could try interior decoration, or real estate. I’ve always supported myself, one way or another, and if you think I liked being a waitress at Zim’s …”

  She got up in the morning scratchy-eyed, heavy in the head and heart, with no mind for work. She did work, though, on a stylized landscape, its tidiness possibly being a counter to the confusion in her mind: a great flat yellow stretch of fields, hills nearly the same color and a paler-yellow sky.

  One of the things that Charlotte did not tell Margery—and she hated to think what a shrink would make of this—was about her dreams: almost always, all her life, they had taken place in that pale adobe hilltop house, with its sprawling wings, in its high grove of redwood, and eucalyptus trees. Even in Paris, or New York, in her dream life, there she would be. This struck her as unbearably sentimental, not to mention infantile. Nevertheless, it was true.

  For a time, then, Charlotte managed to get her worrying about the house down to ten or fifteen minutes a day; during those minutes she would still rave and rage, first at Ian, then at Blanche, but afterward she would get to work. She was working well, on that yellow landscape.

  Also, she was getting along happily with Lyman Clay—surprisingly, since most of her love affairs had been marked by turbulence. Lyman was in fact such a gentle man, sensitive and keenly appreciative of her painting, and of her, that at times Charlotte wondered if he could be gay; no evidence pointed in that direction, it was just a way that living in San Francisco in those end-of-the-seventies years could make you think. She very much liked his unmanageable white-blond hair, his flat Maine voice and his Yankee wit.

  A couple of weeks after getting the first postcard, in a mood of relative peace Charlotte decided that, in a simple and honest way, she would tell Blanche that she was indeed upset about her selling the house but that she now almost understood. She could almost stand it. After all, Blanche had been nicer than her two other stepmothers; once she had taken the trouble to polish and pack and deliver some old wineglasses of Charlotte’s mother’s (just in time, Charlotte was sure, to keep Ian from breaking them). But Charlotte forgot, as she thought of writing to Blanche, Blanche’s deep suspicion of anything Charlotte did or said. Suspicion, Charlotte had to admit, not entirely unfounded. “I’ve tried to love Charlotte,” Blanche had remarked one time to Ian, who reported this to Charlotte, in a concurring way—the effort of loving her being too much for anyone, it would seem.

  And so, in answer to her postcard, Charlotte got back a long typed letter from Blanche, mainly to the effect that Charlotte had no legal right to the house. As if Charlotte didn’t know her father’s will by heart.

  Even in her postcards, Blanche spoke what Charlotte thought of as “Southern,” by which she meant the content as well as the accent. It was always necessary for Charlotte to shove aside a lot of words to get at what Blanche meant. That letter, translated, meant: Your father didn’t care about you at all, he only cared for me. Which Charlotte had heard and even concluded on her own. Still, it hurt to have it pointed out.

  In other, lighter moods, Charlotte could almost think of Blanche as funny; she was much a master, or mistress, of the velvet barb—as when she once remarked to Charlotte, “And I’ve always thought you were so pretty, even if no one else ever did.” Well, Charlotte had never thought of herself as especially pretty—except maybe for a few minutes, sometimes. She no more needed to have that pointed out than she needed to be reminded of her father’s non-caring. Still, the way Blanche got it across was fairly funny, Charlotte guessed.

  Because Charlotte had been only six when her mother died, her memories of Eugenia, though clear, were brief, truncated. Eugenia had played the recorder, and she had gone to all the chamber-music concerts that came to Berkeley—a lot of concerts. Her erudition in both musical and literary areas was legendary. To this day she was talked about. She had had many friends in the academic community—professors, musicians, literary types, who no doubt disliked noisy, self-made Ian, as he probably disliked them back, and disliked Eugenia’s friendships with them, and finally disliked Eugenia. And turned to beautiful, rich Pinky.

  What Charlotte remembered best was lying in bed, her wing of the house juxtaposed to her mother’s solitary wing, and hearing Eugenia weeping, weeping—hours of tears. Those terrible sounds were what Charlotte instantly, audibly remembered when her friend Margery said how miserable she had been in her parents’ house. Eugenia’s tears, her thick and heavy unhappiness had made the child Charlotte sick and heavy with unhappiness as Eugenia lay there crying over Ian—Ian the handsome, the unkind, the menace to women.

  • • •

  Given Ian, then, it is hardly surprising that Charlotte should have had her share of troubles with men. And maybe more. It sometimes seemed that way to Charlotte. She had been known to fall madly in love with the most impossible men—but a lot of women did that. What Charlotte also did, and what seemed even more dangerous, was: on the rare occasions when she was involved with a nice man, she would somehow induce him to behave in a cruel way. Or, even if she did not really succeed in that enterprise, she would somehow, nevertheless, begin to see the nice man as cruel.

  The next Blanche postcard announced that since the house was for sale, and she was thinking of moving to Santa Barbara, she was putting the furniture in storage; if there was anything Charlotte wanted, would she please come over and get it right away, at least before next Tuesday. Well, “next Tuesday” was the day after Charlotte got the card, and for that and several other reasons she decided not to take Blanche up on her offer.

  Other considerations being: if there was anything Charlotte really wanted, Blanche would come up with a strong justification for not giving it to her. That had been established when Ian died and the carved Spanish bench that Charlotte asked for turned out to have already been promised to a distant cousin.

  “I just never would have known you wanted that little old bench,” rambled Blanche, in her explanatory postcard. “You never once sat on it when you came here to visit, and I just knew it was too teeny and old-fashioned to be anything you’d ever want.”

  Of course I never sat there, not since I was a child, but I liked to look at it, it’s so graceful and pretty—is what Charlotte despaired of trying to say to Blanche. Except for the bench, which would have been nice, furniture was actually the last thing Charlotte needed, her apartment being already crowded with canvases. Finally, and maybe most important, she could truly not bear the thought of going to the house, and going over all those remaining things, those silver and mahogany souvenirs of her past. With Blanche.

  Any more than she could bear the house’s being sold.

  • • •

  “It isn’t so much the money that’s involved,” Charlotte had said to Margery when telling her of the house, “but it hurt my feelings, being disinherited.” She had meant what she said, but as she listened to the echo of her words she heard an unexpected sanctimoniousness in them, a falseness, really. It was certainly true that her feelings had been hurt, badly hurt, but it was also true that she minded about the money. Her livelihood was precarious; certainly she could have used the proceeds from the sale of a large house.

  “How much do you think she’ll get for the house?” asked Margery, who had never seen it, Charlotte not being given to taking friends over to meet Blanche.

  “I haven’t any ide
a. I don’t know about real estate,” Charlotte said. “It’s a big house, though. Sort of spread out.”

  “Well, anything in the Berkeley hills is worth at least two hundred grand,” said Margery, who did know about those things.

  Two hundred thousand dollars. With even half that, decently invested, Charlotte figured that she could live for the rest of her life. Not worry about selling paintings. Just paint.

  But, in a way, the realization that something as concrete as money figured in her pain was comforting; it made her feel less blackly doomed—less crazy.

  Margery mused, “It would be interesting to know what she’ll get for it.”

  “I can’t exactly ask her, though.”

  “Maybe I could find out.”

  As though things in her life were not difficult enough at that moment, Lyman Clay began to push Charlotte toward getting married. Or that is how Charlotte felt: pushed.

  Typically, he presented his ideas in a literary way, over a dinner at his place. A dinner that he had cooked. And Lyman’s cooking was another source of amazement and slight suspicion for Charlotte.

  “A marriage is like the imposition of form on feeling in poetry,” Lyman said. “Or in painting, for heaven’s sake.”

  With a sharp leap of her heart, Charlotte saw what he meant; she felt it, but she was too disturbed—about the house, about Blanche, about Ian—to think in a serious way about what Lyman was suggesting.

  And gloomily she foresaw that she and Lyman would eventually come to a parting over this issue, since he was clearly serious in what he said. A year or so later, when Lyman had married someone else (lots of women really want to marry, she knew, and Lyman was exceptionally nice), she, Charlotte, would wish that she were with him; then she would mourn for Lyman, as she had for various other departed men.