by Alice Adams
Popsie Hooker, who was later to play a curious, strong role in my life, at that time interested me not at all; if I had a view of her, it was closer to my mother’s than I would have admitted, and for not dissimilar reasons. She was ludicrous, so small and silly, and just a little cheap, with those girlish clothes, all ribbons and bows, and that tinny little laugh. And that accent: Popsie out-Southerned everyone around.
“It’s rather like a speech defect,” my mother observed, before she stopped mentioning Popsie altogether.
Aside from her smallness and blue-eyed prettiness, Popsie’s local claim to fame was her lively correspondence with “famous people,” to whom she wrote what were presumably letters of adulation, the puzzle being that these people so often wrote back to her. Popsie was fond of showing off her collection. She had a charming note from Mr. Fitzgerald, and letters from Eleanor Roosevelt, Norma Shearer, Willa Cather, Clare Boothe Luce. No one, least of all my mother, could understand why such people would write to dopey Popsie, nor could I, until many years later, when she began to write to me.
However, I was too busy at that time to pay much attention to my parents or their friends, their many parties at which everyone drank too much; my own burgeoning new life was much more absorbing.
My walks at night with various boys up and down that stretch of highway sometimes came to include a chaste but passionate kiss; this would take place, if at all, on the small secluded dirt road that led down from the highway to our house.
One winter, our fourth year in Hilton, when I was fifteen, in January we had an exceptionally heavy fall of snow, deep and shadowed in the valley where our house was, ladening boughs of pine and fir and entirely covering the privet and quince and boxwood that edged the highway. For several days most of the highway itself lay under snow. Cars labored up and down the hill, singly, at long intervals, wearing unaccustomed chains.
Those nights of snow were marvelous: so cold, the black sky broken with stars as white as snow. My friends and I went sledding; that winter I was strongly taken with a dark boy who looked rather like Paul, now that I try to see him: a thin, bony face, a certain Paul-like intensity. On a dare we sledded down the highway, so perilously exciting! We lay on the sled, I stretched along his back.
We went hurtling down past the back road to my house, past everything. At last on a level area we stopped; on either side of us fields of white seemed to billow and spread off into the shadows, in the cold. Standing there we kissed—and then we began the long slow ascent of the highway, toward my house. He was pulling the sled, and we stopped several times to kiss, to press our upright bodies warmly together.
As we neared and then reached the back road to my house, we saw a car stopped, its headlights on. Guiltily we dropped hands. Dazzled by the light, only as we were almost upon it could I recognize our family car, the only wood-panelled Chrysler in town. In it was my father, kissing someone; their bodies were blotted into one silhouette.
If he saw and recognized us, there was no sign. He could easily not have seen us, or, knowing my father, who was nothing if not observant, I would guess it’s more likely he did see us but pretended to himself that he did not, as he pretended not to see that my mother was miserably unhappy, and that I was growing up given to emotional extremes, and to loneliness.
“Stricken” probably comes closest to how I felt: burning rage, a painful, seething shame—emotions that I took to be hatred. “I hate him” is what I thought. Oblivious of the tall boy at my side, I began to walk as fast as I could, clumping heavily through the snow; at the door of my house I muttered what must have been a puzzlingly abrupt good night. Without kissing.
By the time we left Hilton, the summer that I was sixteen, my parents were entirely fed up with Hilton, and with each other. My father thought he could get a job in the Pentagon, in Washington—he knew someone there; and my mother had decided on New York, on graduate school at Columbia; I would go to Barnard.
I was less upset about my parents’ separation than I was about leaving Hilton, which was by now to me a magic, enchanted place. In the spring and summer just preceding our departure there were amazing white bursts of dogwood, incredible wisteria and roses.
I wept for my friends, whom I would always love and miss, I thought.
I hated New York. The city seemed violent and confusing, ugly and dirty, loud. Voices in the streets or on subways and busses grated against my ears; everyone spoke so stridently, so harshly. Until I met Paul I was lonely and miserable, and frightened.
I would not have told him of my unease right away, even though Paul and I began as friends. But he must have sensed some rural longings just beneath my New York veneer. He would have; almost from the start Paul felt whatever I felt—he came to inhabit my skin.
In any case, our friendship and then our love affair had a series of outdoor settings. Paul, melancholy and romantic, and even then not well, especially liked the sea, and he liked to look out to islands—which led us, eventually, to Yugoslavia, our desolate summer there.
Not having had an actual lover before, only boys who kissed me, who did not talk much, I was unprepared for the richness of love with Paul—or, rather, I assumed that that was how love was between true intimates. Paul’s sensuality was acutely sensitive, and intense; with him I felt both beautiful and loved—indescribably so. You could say that Paul spoiled me for other men, and in a way that is true—he did. But on the other hand Paul knew that he was dying, gradually, and that knowledge must have made him profligate with love. We talked and talked, we read poetry; Paul read Wallace Stevens and Eliot aloud to me, and his own poems, which I thought remarkable. We made jokes, we laughed, we made love.
Since Hilton was only twelve hours from New York by train, and we both liked travel, and trains, in a way it is odd that Paul and I did not go down to Hilton. I know he would have said yes had I suggested a trip. His curiosity about me was infinite; he would have wanted to see a place that I cared so much about. I suppose we would have stayed at the inn, as I was to do later on, when finally I did go back to Hilton. We could have taken a taxi out to what had been my house.
However, for whatever reasons, Paul and I did not go to Hilton. We went to upstate New York and to Connecticut, and out to Long Island.
And, eventually, to Yugoslavia.
Our unhappiness there in the ugly yellow hotel on the beautiful rockbound coast was due not only to Paul’s declining health and my unreal but urgent wish to marry. Other problems lay in the sad old truth, well known to most adults but not at that time to us, that conducting a love affair while living apart is quite unlike taking up residence together, even for a summer. In domestic ways we were both quite impossible then—and of course Paul did not get time to change.
I could not cook, and our arrangement with the hotel included the use of a communal kitchen, an allotted space in the refrigerator and time at the stove; my cooking was supposed to save us money, which my burned disasters failed to do. Neither could I sew or iron. I even somehow failed at washing socks. None of this bothered Paul at all; his expectations of me did not run along such lines, but mine, which must have been plucked from the general culture rather than from my own free-thinking mother, were strong, and tormenting.
Paul had terrible troubles with the car, a Peugeot that we had picked up in Paris, on our way, and that had functioned perfectly well all across the Italian Alps, until we got to Trieste, where it began to make inexplicable noises, and sometimes not to start. Paul was utterly incapable of dealing with these crises; he would shout and rant, even clutch melodramatically at his thin black hair. I dimly sensed that he was reacting to the car’s infirmities instead of to his own, which of course I did not say; but I also felt that men were supposed to deal with cars, an insupportable view, I knew even then, and derived from my father, who possessed remarkable mechanical skills.
We were there in Yugoslavia for almost three months in all, from June to September. It was probably in August, near the end of our stay, that I had my
dream of going back to Hilton, and walking down the highway to our house—in the heat, with the pain in my heart that must have been Paul’s pain. The dream that I did not tell Paul.
And in the fall I went back to America, to Washington, D.C., to study at Georgetown.
And Paul moved up to Trieste, where shortly after Christmas he went into a hospital and died.
Sheer disbelief was my strongest reaction to the news of Paul’s death, which came in the form of a garbled cablegram. I could not believe that such an acute and lively intelligence could simply be snuffed out. In a conventional way I wept and mourned his loss: I played music that he had liked—the Hummel trumpet concerto, of which he was especially fond—and I reread “Sunday Morning” and “Four Quartets.” But at the same time I never believed that he was entirely gone (I still do not).
Two years after Paul’s death, most unexpectedly my mother died, in a senseless automobile accident; she was driving to see friends in Connecticut and swerved on a wet highway to avoid an oncoming truck. I was more horrified, more devastated, really, than I could have believed possible. I went to an analyst. “I haven’t even written her for a month!” I cried out, during one dark fifty-minute hour. “How many letters does it take to keep a mother alive?” was the gentle and at least mildly helpful answer. Still, I wrestled with my guilt and with the sheer irresolution of our connection for many, many years.
In my late twenties I married one of my former professors: Lewis—a large, blond, emphatically healthy, outgoing man, as much unlike Paul as anyone I could have found; this occurred to me at the time as an ironic twist that only Paul himself could have appreciated. We lived in New York, where we both now taught.
To sum up very complicated events in a short and simple way: my work prospered, while my marriage did not—and I present these as simultaneous conditions, not causally linked. A happier first marriage could have made for even better work on my part, I sometimes think.
During those years, I thought of my mother with increasing sympathy. This is another simplification, but that is what it came to. She did her best under very difficult, sometimes painful circumstances is one way of putting it.
And I thought of Paul. It was his good-friend aspect that I most missed, I found, in the loneliness of my marriage. I felt, too, always, the most vast regret for what seemed the waste of a life.
And Hilton was very much in my mind.
Sometimes I tried to imagine what my life would have been like if I had never left: I could have studied at the university there, and married one of those lean and sexy sweet-talking boys. And often that seemed a preferable way to have taken.
I divorced Lewis, and I had various “relationships.” I wrote and published articles, several books—and I began getting letters from Popsie Hooker. Long, quite enthralling letters. They were often about her childhood, which had been spent on a farm in Illinois—southern Illinois, to be sure, but, still, I thought how my mother would have laughed to hear that Popsie, the near-professional Southerner, was really from Illinois. Popsie wrote to me often, and I answered, being compulsive in that way, and also because I so much enjoyed hearing from her.
Some of her letters were very funny, as when she wrote about the new “rest home” in Hilton, in which certain former enemies were housed in adjacent rooms: “Mary Lou and Henrietta haven’t spoken for years and years, and there they are. Going over there to visit is like reading a novel, a real long one,” Popsie wrote, and she added, “They couldn’t get me into one of those places if they carried me there on a stretcher.” I gathered that Popsie was fairly rich; several husbands had come and gone, all leaving her well endowed.
We wrote back and forth, Popsie and I, she writing more often than I did, often telling me how much my letters meant to her. Her letters meant a great deal to me, too. I was especially moved when she talked about the seasons down there in Hilton—the weather and what was in bloom; I could remember all of it, so vividly. And I was grateful that she never mentioned my parents, and her own somewhat ambiguous connection with them.
During some of those years, I began an affair with Andreas, the doctor whom I eventually married: a turbulent, difficult, and sometimes rewarding marriage. Andreas is an exceptionally skilled doctor; he is also arrogant, quick-tempered, and inconsiderate, especially of other people’s time—like all doctors, I have sometimes thought.
Our conflicts often have to do with schedules: his conference in Boston versus mine in Chicago; his need for a vacation in February versus mine for time to finish a book, just then. And more ordinary arguments: my dislike of being kept waiting, his wish that I do more cooking. Sometimes even now his hot, heavy body next to mine in bed seems alien, unknown, and I wonder what he is doing there, really. At other times, as I have said, I am deeply stirred by an accidental touching of our hands.
At some of our worst moments I think of leaving Andreas; this would be after an especially ugly quarrel, probably fuelled by too much wine, or simply after several weeks of non-communication.
In one such fantasy I do go back to Hilton, and I take up the rest of my life there as a single woman. I no longer teach, I only do research in the library, which is excellent. And I write more books. I imagine that I see a lot of Popsie Hooker; I might even become the sort of “good daughter” to her that I was so far from being to my own mother. And sometimes in this fantasy I buy the house that we used to live in, the rambling house down the highway, in the valley. I have imagined it as neglected, needing paint, new gutters, perhaps even falling apart, everything around it overgrown and gone to seed.
Last June, when I had agreed to give a series of lectures at Georgetown, Andreas and I made reservations in a small hotel where we had stayed before, not far from the university. We both like Washington; we looked forward to revisiting favorite galleries and restaurants. It was one of the many times when we needed a vacation together, and so, as I might have known would happen, this became impossible: two sick patients got sicker, and although I argued, citing the brilliance and the exceptional competence of his partners (an argument that did not go over very well), Andreas said no, he had to stay in New York, with the kidneys of Mrs. Howell and old Mr. Rosenthal.
I went to Georgetown and to our hotel alone. I called several times, and Andreas and I “made up” what had been a too familiar argument.
In Georgetown, the second day, as I walked alone past those elegantly maintained houses, as I glanced into seductively cloistered, luxuriantly ferned and flowered gardens, some stray scent of privet or a glimpse of a yellow rosebush in full bloom—something reminded me strongly, compellingly of Hilton, and I thought, Well, why not? I could take the train and just stay for a couple of days. That much more time away from Andreas might be to the good, just now. I could stay at the Hilton Inn. I could visit Popsie. I could walk down the highway to our house.
And that is what I did, in more or less that order, except that I saved the visit to Popsie for the last, which turned out to be just as well. But right away I stopped at a travel agency on Wisconsin Avenue, and I bought a ticket to Raleigh, treating myself to a roomette for the five-hour trip; I felt that both ceremony and privacy were required.
I had thought that on the train I would be struck by the deep familiarity of the landscape; at last, that particular soil, that special growth. But actually it was novelty that held me to my window: the wide flat brown shining rivers that we crossed, with their tacky little marinas, small boats, small boys on the banks. Flooded swamps, overgrown with kudzu vines and honeysuckle. I had the curious illusion that one sometimes gets on trains, of traversing an exotic, hitherto untraveled land. I felt myself to be an explorer.
That night I had an unmemorable dinner alone at the inn—which, having been redone, was all unfamiliar to me. I went to bed early, slept well.
Sometime in the night, though, I did wake up with the strange and slightly scary thought that in a few years I would be as old as my mother was when she died, and I wondered what, if anything, that
fact had to do with my coming back to Hilton, after all these years.
The next morning’s early air was light and delicate. Dew still shone on the heavy, dark-green shrubbery around the inn, on silver cobwebs, as I set out for my walk—at last! The sky was soft and pale, an eggshell blue. Walking along the still graveled sidewalk, beside the tarred road that led from the inn out to the highway, I recognized houses; I knew who used to live in almost all of them, and I said those names to myself as I walked along: Hudson, Phipps, Zimmerman, Rogerson, Pittman. I noticed that the old Pittman place was now a fraternity house, with an added sun porch and bright new paint, bright gold Greek letters over the door. In fact, the look of all those houses was one of improvement, upgrading, with their trim lawns, abundant boxwood, their lavish flower beds.
I reached the highway, still on the graveled walk, and I began the long descent toward my house. The air was still light, and barely warm, although the day to come would be hot. I thought of my dream in Yugoslavia, of this walk, and I smiled, inexplicably happy at just that moment—with no heat, no pain in my heart.
I recognized more houses, and said more names, and I observed that these houses, too, were in splendid shape, all bright and visibly cared for. There was much more green growth than I remembered, the trees were immense, and I thought, Well, of course; they’ve had time to grow.
No one seeing me as I walked there could know or guess that that was where I used to live, I thought. They would see—a tall thin woman, graying, in early middle age, in a striped gray cotton skirt, gray shirt. A woman looking intently at everything, and smiling to herself.
And then, there before me was our house. But not our house. It, too, had been repainted—all smartened up with bright white paint and long black louvred shutters, now closed against the coming heat and light. Four recent-model sports cars, all imported, were parked in the driveway, giving the place a recreational, non-familiar air. A group of students, I thought; perhaps some club? The surrounding trees were huge; what had been a small and murmurous pine grove at one side of the house now towered over it, thickly green and rustling slightly in a just-arisen morning breeze. No one came out while I stood there, for not very long, but I was sure that there was not a family inside but some cluster of transients—young people, probably, who liked each other and liked the house, but without any deep or permanent attachment.