The Stories of Alice Adams (v5)

by Alice Adams

  I continued on my walk, a circle of back roads on which I was pleased to find that I still knew my way, which led at last back to the highway, and up the hill, to the inn.

  I had called Popsie Hooker from Washington, and again from the inn, when I got there. She arose from her nap about four in the afternoon, she said, and if I could come out to her house along about then she would be thrilled, just simply thrilled.

  By midafternoon it was too hot for another walk, and so I took a taxi out to Popsie’s house, in the direction opposite to mine. I arrived about four-thirty, which I assumed to be along about four in Southernese.

  Popsie’s house, the fruit of one of her later marriages, was by far the most splendid I had yet seen in town: a Georgian house, of ancient soft red brick smartly trimmed in black, with frequent accents of highly polished brass. Magnificent lawns, magnolias, rhododendrons. By the time I got to the door I half expected to be greeted by an array of uniformed retainers—all black, of course.

  But it was Popsie herself who opened the door to me—a Popsie barely recognizable, so shrunken and wizened had she become: a small woman withered down to dwarf size, in a black silk dress with grosgrain at her throat, a cameo brooch. She smelled violently of gardenia perfume and of something else that at first I could not place.

  “Emma! Emma!” she breathed up into my face, the old blue eyes filming over, and she caught at both my arms and held them in her weak tight grasp. I recognized the second scent, which was sherry.

  “You’re late,” she next accused me. “Here I’ve been expecting you this whole long afternoon.”

  I murmured apologies, and together we proceeded down the hallway and into a small parlor, Popsie still clutching my arm, her small fierce weight almost tugging me over sideways.

  We sat down. The surfaces in that room were all so cluttered with silver and ivory pieces, inlay, old glass, that it could have been an antique shop, or the parlor of a medium. I told Popsie how happy I was to be there, how wonderful Hilton looked.

  “Well, you know, it’s become a very fancy place to live. Very expensive. Lots of Yankees retiring down here, and fixing up the old houses.”

  “Uh, where do the poor people live?”

  She laughed, a tiny rasp. “Oh, there you go, talking liberal, and you just got here. Well, the poor folks, what’s left of them, have moved out to Robertsville.”

  Robertsville was the adjacent town, once predominantly black, and so I next asked, “What about the Negroes?”

  “Well, I guess they’ve just sort of drifted back into the countryside, where they came from. But did you notice all the fancy new stores on Main Street? All the restaurants, and the clothes?”

  We talked for a while about the new splendors of Hilton, and the rudeness of the new Yankees, who did not even go to church—as I thought, This could not be the woman who has been writing to me. Although of course she was—the same Popsie, half tipsy in the afternoon; she probably spent her sober mornings writing letters. This woman was more like the Popsie of my early years in Hilton, that silly little person, my mother’s natural enemy.

  Possibly to recall the Popsie of the wonderful letters, I asked about the local rest home. How were things out there?

  “Well, I have to tell you. What gripes me the most about that place is that they don’t pay any taxes” was Popsie’s quick, unhelpful response. “Tax-free, and you would not believe the taxes I have to pay on this old place.”

  “But this place is so beautiful.” I did not add, And you have so much money.

  “Well, it is right pretty,” she acknowledged, dipping her head. “But why must I go on and on paying for it? It’s not fair.”

  Our small chairs were close together in that crowded, stuffy room, so that when Popsie leaned closer yet to me, her bleary eyes peering up into mine, the sherry fumes that came my way were very strong indeed. And Popsie said, “You know, I’ve always thought you were so beautiful, even if no one else ever thought you were.” She peered again. “Where did you get that beauty, do you think? Your mother never was even one bit pretty.”

  More stiffly than I had meant to, I spoke the truth. “Actually I look quite a lot like my mother,” I told her. And I am not beautiful.

  Catching a little of my anger, which probably pleased her, Popsie raised her chin. “Well, one thing certain, you surely don’t favor your daddy.”

  “No, I don’t. I don’t favor him at all.” My father had recently moved to La Jolla, California, with another heiress, this one younger than I am, which would have seemed cruel news to give to Popsie.

  After a pause, during which I suppose we both could have been said to be marshalling our forces, Popsie and I continued our conversation, very politely, until I felt that I could decently leave.

  I told her how much I liked her letters, and she said how she liked mine, and we both promised to write again, very soon—and I wondered if we would.

  On the plane to New York, a smooth, clear, easy flight, I was aware of an unusual sense of well-being, which out of habit I questioned. I noted the sort of satisfaction that I might have been expected to feel on finishing a book, except that at the end of books I usually feel drained, exhausted. But now I simply felt well, at peace, and ready for whatever should come next.

  Then Paul returned from nowhere to my mind, more strongly than for some time. In an affectionate way I remembered how impossible he was, in terms of daily life, and how much I had loved him—and how he had loved me.

  Actually he and Andreas were even more unlike than he and Lewis were, I next thought, and a little wearily I noted my own tendency to extremes, and contrasts. Andreas likes to fix and mend things, including kidneys, of course. He is good with cars. “I come from strong Greek peasant stock” is a thing that he likes to say, and it is true; clearly he does, with his powerful black hair, his arrogant nose. His good strong heart.

  We were planning a trip to Greece the following fall. Andreas had gone back as a boy to visit relatives, and later with both his first and second wives. And he and I had meant to go, and now we would.

  We planned to fly to Rome, maybe spend a few days there; we both like Rome. But now another route suggested itself: we could fly to Vienna, where we have never been, and then take the train to Trieste, where we could pick up a car and drive down to Greece by way of Yugoslavia. We would drive past the ferry to the island of Rab, and past the road that led to our yellow hotel. I did not imagine driving down to see it; Andreas would be in a hurry, and my past does not interest him much. He would see no need to stop on such an errand.

  Nor do I. And besides, that particular ugly, poorly built structure has probably been torn down. Still, I very much like the idea of just being in its vicinity.

  La Señora

  The grand hotel is some kilometres beyond the village, on a high road that winds between the jungle and the sea. It has been there for years now, standing taller than the palm trees that surround it, the fat-trunked palms all wrapped with flower vines.

  The face of this hotel has many balconies with small fringed awnings, and everywhere windows, all wide and open to the air. Even the dining room, the largest of all rooms and by far the most grand, looks out openly to the sea.

  Some of the village girls work there as waitresses. They are very pretty girls, but silly, most of them, and not serious in their work. Older women, if they still are strong, with luck may obtain positions as room maids. Those maids have in their care the rows of large and very beautiful rooms where the hotel guests come to live—the gringos, from everywhere up north. The room maids also have charge of all the sheets and towels, each day supplying more to each room, all fresh and clean. They dust out the rooms, those maids, even sweeping under the beds, if they choose to do so.

  The room maids in most respects are more fortunate than the dining room girls. The work of the girls is harder, which is just, since they are much younger, and their wages are somewhat higher; but often the room maids have closer associations with the guests,
some of whom are especially kind, in terms of tips and presents. Many guests come year after year and often to their exact same rooms, each year, and they remember the names of the maids—though often pronouncing them strangely, and confusing Teodola with Teodora, for example. Naturally some other guests are not at all sympathetic, with their floors full of wet towels and sand, their strong-smelling bottles and broken glasses, their stains of lipstick, dark smudges on sheets, pillowcases.

  There is one guest, a very thin and now very old North American, a woman who came there always with her husband and then for a time alone, a lady always referred to by the maids and even the silliest dining room girls as La Señora, always said in a certain way, “La Señora,” so that only this lady is meant.

  She is very white, the señora, everything white, her skin and her hair like white silk and almost all of her clothes. She is white, but with great dark eyes, like Mexican eyes. Despite all her years this lady moves very swiftly, and with great smoothness; she might balance a jug of water on her head, and never spill. She is kind, this lady, but at times she can be fiercely angry, when she feels that what has been done is not quite right. Many of the maids greatly fear her, and dread her coming; she was even heard to raise her voice in a harsh way with her husband.

  With Teodola, though, the oldest room maid, the one who has been there longest, the lady has never been angry. To Teodola it seems that they have a way of understanding each other. She, Teodola, understands that it is important to the lady that the floors of the room all be dusted, even under the beds; that the sheets on the bed be stretched tight; and that all of the white parts of the bathroom be washed many, many times. And the lady understands that Teodola does not like to be called Teodora, and that inquiries as to her health are received as great courtesies. The lady brings large boxes of chocolates to Teodola; Teodola does not eat candy any longer but she enjoys handing it out to her grandchildren.

  Each year the lady brings her dictionary of Spanish words, and each year she speaks more, and she seems better able to understand Teodola. In the mornings after taking her breakfast the lady always sits for a time on the terrace of her room, in former years with her husband (whom now Teodola has almost forgotten, as even her own dead husband has dimmed in her mind), in recent years alone. She reads from books, she writes in another small book, she writes on postcards. But she seems for most hours just to rest there, to regard the flowers that border her terrace, the bushes and vines; the pink, red, purple blossoms, white butterflies, black hummingbirds. The far-off sea.

  In her own late years Teodola is often unclear as to seasons, except to observe that the weather, which should never change, now does so; there is rain, even coolness, quite unexpectedly. There is thus no seasonal way for her to know precisely the day of the arrival of the lady, except that she does know: her dreams inform her. She begins to dream of the lady, several nights of such dreams, and then there will come a morning when she knocks on a certain door—and there is La Señora, the very white lady in her light white clothes, embracing Teodola—a small quick light kiss on each cheek, like the kiss of a bird—and the lady saying, “Ah, Teodola, well, here I am again. I never believe I’m going to make it ever again, but here I am. And how happy I am to see you! You look very well—you have had a good year? Your health has been good—and your children? Tell me, how many grandchildren by now? Please, I want you to say all their names to me.”

  And Teodola will begin to recite: “Ernesto, Felipe, Sara, Elvira, Carlos, Eva. And the infant Jiménez, Jimmy.” Then both she and the lady will laugh from sheer happiness, Teodola being happy to see the lady again, the lady who now will be there for quite a while; and the lady, who is every year more white, and smaller in her bones, is happy to be resting in the warm bright days, to be watching her birds and flowers, and the gold-blue ocean waves.

  There must come a year when the lady does not appear; this is something that Teodola has considered. The lady is very old: one day she must die. What Teodola does not know is in what way she herself will receive this information. It is possible that she will simply dream of the death of the lady, but even if such a dream did come she would not quite trust it, for lately she has received information from dreams that is quite unreliable. She has seen her husband alive again, and wanting more sons, wanting ever more sons, and she has dreamed of her grandchildren old and dying in wars—all craziness.

  But someday the lady will be permanently gone, and in the meantime Teodola’s own days go faster and faster, always less time between dawn, the moment of leaving her hut just outside the village, and sunset, the long tired downhill homeward trudge.

  Teodola is much respected by the other room maids. They respect her right to private naps, sometimes, in an unused room just next to the storeroom of linens. They do not ask that she carry the largest stacks of clean sheets, or full trays of new glasses. They even (usually) obey her when Teodola says that a certain floor must be dusted yet once again, especially in the room of the señora, who at any moment could still reappear. The maids and the girl waitresses too all respect Teodola, but they do not have true friendship for her; to them Teodola seems just a woman alone, become old and strange. Teodola knows of their feelings, but such isolation is a part of becoming old that one must accept, she believes.

  However, on a certain day all the waitress girls and the hotel maids together decide to play a trick on Teodola, a trick that is at last too much for her.

  It begins quite early one morning, when Teodola is walking slowly up the steep dirt road, all crevassed and full of holes, toward the main hotel road, and on her way she encounters a very young and pretty waitress girl, Elisabeta, who says to her, “Oh Teodola, have you heard the news? La Señora does not come this year. She has died up in the north, in New York.”

  Teodola experiences a sharp sudden pain, but she frowns, refusing to be teased in this way, and by this particularly foolish girl, who is always much too familiar with the manager. “You know nothing,” she tells the girl. “You are so silly, believing whatever a man says to you!”

  Elisabeta makes an angry face, but she hurries away without more lying.

  But later on that same day when Teodola insists that one of the room maids, Margarita, again dust the floor of the room of the lady, Margarita simply stares at Teodola and asks her, “But why, Teodola? Why dust the floor? You know that we have heard that the lady is dead.”

  Although it is not yet noon the sun is especially hot, and Teodola already is very tired; she had just been thinking of her coming nap. Perhaps for those reasons she is crosser than she intended to be with Margarita. “Enough of your teasing and laziness!” she cries out. “You say anything that arrives in your head to avoid doing work. You tell lies!”

  Margarita shakes her head in an angry way, as Teodola recalls that she, Margarita, is the aunt of Elisabeta: of course, it is a story that the two of them together have concocted, for tormenting Teodola.

  Teodola herself then sets about dusting the floor in the room of the lady, and that work is a comfort to her. As always, she feels the presence of the lady there; she can almost smell the flower-sweet scent of the lady’s clothes, can almost hear the sound of the lady’s voice, as she tries new Spanish words.

  In the afternoon of that day two other maids try the same trick on Teodola, both of them saying, “Teodola, did you hear? La Señora has died.” But by now Teodola knows not to say anything whatsoever, not to gratify them by her anger, nor to show that she knows that they lie. She ignores them; she does her work of making the beds and arranging the flowers in all the bedside tables. Those words have given her a queasy feeling, though, an inner blackness.

  At the end of the day, the huge red sun slipping down below the line of the darkening sea, Teodola starts home. The walk seems much longer and harder than usual, but at last she arrives at her hut. Too tired to eat, she lies down on her mattress, and is soon fast asleep.

  Night comes without her waking, and with it strange dreams. In one of them th
e señora has indeed arrived at the hotel but she herself, Teodola, has died. Very strange indeed: within the dream Teodola knows that she is dreaming, and that nothing in the dream is true—of course if she were dead she would not be dreaming. Yet when she struggles very hard to wrest herself from sleep and from the dream, she cannot. She is powerless against her sleep, against the dream.

  New Best Friends

  “The McElroys really don’t care about seeing us anymore—aren’t you aware of that?” Jonathan Ferris rhetorically and somewhat drunkenly demands of his wife, Sarah Stein.

  Evenly she answers him, “Yes, I can see that.”

  But he stumbles on, insisting, “We’re low, very low, on their priority list.”

  “I know.”

  Jonathan and Sarah are finishing dinner, and too much wine, on one of the hottest nights of August—in Hilton, a mid-Southern town, to which they moved (were relocated) six months ago; Jonathan works for a computer corporation. They bought this new fake-Colonial house, out in some scrubby pinewoods, where now, in the sultry, sulfurous paralyzing twilight no needle stirs, and only mosquitoes give evidence of life, buzz-diving against the window screens.

  In New York, in their pretty Bleecker Street apartment, with its fern-shaded courtyard, Sarah would have taken Jonathan’s view of the recent McElroy behavior as an invitation to the sort of talk they both enjoyed: insights, analyses—and, from Sarah, somewhat literary speculations. Their five-year marriage has always included a great deal of talk, of just this sort.