The Stories of Alice Adams (v5)

by Alice Adams

  The only missing element for me, and I had to admit this to myself, was my own role. I actually would have liked it if Patrick had given me the proper credit, of course I would. Better to be thought a little indiscreet than to remain almost invisible, I thought.

  In fantasy, then, I saw myself again running into Justin—and Max!—somewhere in the neighborhood. It was too much to expect that Max would remember me, despite all the lamb, but I would certainly know him, and his name. And in greeting Max I could explain to Justin how it all came about. Taking full credit.

  But would that necessarily lead to our becoming friends? Might not Justin, a somewhat formal man, simply say, “How very kind of you to have thought of me.” So that we would continue as before, acquaintances who rarely saw each other, and then only by chance.

  What I probably needed, I thought a little sadly, was a dog of my own. A really nice dog, with beautiful eyes. Like Max. Even Emma would get used to him in time, probably. The one needing a dog is me.

  More immediately, though, I could telephone Justin Solomon? Identifying myself, I could include knowing Patrick. I could tell him about the lunch, the lamb. Me and Max. “I’d really love to see him again,” I could say. “Should we meet for a walk, or something?”

  That seems the best plan, and that is what I will do tomorrow, if not sooner. And then, in the course of the walk, I’ll invite him to dinner, and I’ll cook something good, with bones—for Max.

  The Visit

  “She’s just dying to see you, so excited, and you really can’t refuse a ninety-two-year-old,” said Miles Henry to his old friend Grace Lafferty, the famous actress, who was just passing through town, a very quick visit. Miles and Grace were getting on too, but they were nowhere near the awesome age of ninety-two, the age of Miss Louise Dabney, she who was so very anxious to see Grace, “if only for a minute, over tea.”

  “I really don’t remember her awfully well,” Grace told Miles. “She was very pretty? But all Mother’s friends were pretty. Which made her look even worse. Miles, do we really have to come for tea?”

  “You really do.” He laughed, as she had laughed, but they both understood what was meant. She and the friend whom she had brought along—Jonathan Hedding, a lawyer, retired, very tall and a total enigma to everyone, so far—must come to tea. As payment, really, for how well Miles had managed their visit: no parties, no pictures or interviews. He had been wonderfully firm, and since he and Grace had been friends forever, if somewhat mysteriously, it was conceded that he had a right to take charge. No one in town would have thought of challenging Miles; for one thing, he was too elusive.

  The town was a fairly small one, in the Georgia hill country, not far from Atlanta—and almost everyone there was somewhat excited, interested in this visit; those who were not were simply too young to know who Grace Lafferty was, although their parents had told them: the very famous Broadway actress, then movie star, then occasional TV parts. Grace, who had been born and raised in this town, had barely been back at all. Just briefly, twice, for the funerals of her parents, and one other time when a movie was opening in Atlanta. And now she was here for this very short visit. Nothing to do with publicity or promotions; according to Miles she just wanted to see it all again, and she had carefully picked this season, April, the first weeks of spring, as being the most beautiful that she remembered. Anywhere.

  It was odd how she and Miles had stayed friends all these years. One rumor held that they had been lovers very long ago, in the time of Grace’s turbulent girlhood, before she got so beautiful (dyed her hair blond) and famous. Miles had been studying architecture in Atlanta then, and certainly they had known each other, but the exact nature of their connection was a mystery, and Miles was far too old-time gentlemanly for anyone to ask. Any more than they would have asked about his two marriages, when he was living up North, and his daughter, whom he never seemed to see.

  If Grace’s later life from a distance had seemed blessed with fortune (although, four marriages, no children?), one had to admit that her early days were not; her parents, both of them, were difficult. Her father, a classic beau of his time, was handsome, and drank too much, and chased girls. Her mother, later also given to drink, was smart and snobbish (she was from South Carolina, and considered Georgia a considerable comedown). She tended to say exactly what she thought, and she wasn’t one bit pretty. Neither one of them seemed like ordinary parents, a fact they made a point of—of being above and beyond most normal parental concerns, of not acting like “parents.” “We appreciate Grace as a person, and not just because she’s our daughter,” Hortense, the mother, was fairly often heard to say, which may have accounted for the fact that Grace was a rather unchildlike child: precocious, impertinent, too smart for her own good. Rebellious, always. Unfairly, probably, no one cared a lot for poor wronged Hortense, and almost everyone liked handsome bad Buck Lafferty. Half the women in town had real big, serious crushes on him.

  Certainly they made a striking threesome, tall Grace and those two tall men, during the short days of her visit, as they walked slowly, with a certain majesty, around the town, Grace’s new friend, or whatever he was, Jonathan Hedding, the lawyer, was the tallest, with heavy, thick gray hair, worn a trifle long for these parts but still, enviably all his own. Miles and Grace were almost the exact same height, she in those heels she always wore, and in the new spring sunlight their hair seemed about the same color, his shining white, hers the palest blond. Grace wore the largest dark glasses that anyone had ever seen—in that way only did she look like a movie star; that and the hair, otherwise she was just tall and a little plump, and a good fifteen years older than she looked to be.

  Several times in the course of that walking around Miles asked her, “But was there something particular you wanted to see? I could take you—”

  “Oh no.” Her throaty voice hesitated. “Oh no, I just wanted to see—everything. The way we’re doing. And of course I wanted Jon to see it too.”

  Miles asked her, “How about the cemetery? These days I know more people there than I do downtown.”

  She laughed, but she told him, “Oh, great. Let’s do go and see the cemetery.”

  Certainly Grace had been right about the season. The dogwood was just in bloom, white fountains spraying out against the darker evergreens, and fragrant white or lavender wisteria, across the roofs of porches, over garden trellises. Jonquils and narcissus, in their tidy plots, bricked off from the flowing lawns. As Grace several times remarked, the air simply smelled of April. There was nothing like it, anywhere.

  “You should come back more often,” Miles chided.

  “I’m not sure I could stand it.” She laughed, very lightly.

  The cemetery was old, pre-Civil War; many of the stones were broken, worn, the inscriptions illegible. But there were new ones too, that both Grace and Miles recognized, and remarked upon.

  “Look at those Sloanes, they were always the tackiest people. Oh, the Berryhills, they must have struck it rich. And the Calvins, discreet and tasteful as always. Lord, how could there be so many Strouds?”

  It was Jonathan who finally said, “Now I see the point of cemeteries. Future entertainment.”

  They all laughed. It was perhaps the high point of their afternoon, the moment at which they all liked each other best.

  And then Grace pointed ahead of them, and she said, “Well for God’s sake, there they are. Why did I think I could miss them, totally?”

  An imposing granite stone announced LAFFERTY, and underneath, in more discreet lettering, Hortense and Thomas. With dates.

  Grace shuddered. “Well, they won’t get me in there. Not with them. I’m going to be cremated and have the ashes scattered off Malibu. Or maybe in Central Park.”

  Five o’clock. Already they were a little late. It was time to go for tea, or rather to be there. Grace had taken even longer than usual with makeup, with general fussing, though Jonathan had reminded her, “At ninety-two she may not see too well, you know.” />
  “Nevertheless.” But she hadn’t laughed.

  Miles lived in a small house just across the street from Miss Dabney’s much larger, grander house. It was thus that they knew each other. As Grace and Jonathan drove up he was out in front poking at leaves, but actually just waiting for them, as they all knew.

  “I’m sorry—” Grace began.

  “It’s all right, but whyever are you so nerved up?”

  “Oh, I don’t know—”

  Inside Miss Dabney’s entrance hall, to which they had been admitted by a white-aproned, very small black woman, where they were told to wait, Jonathan tried to exchange a complicitous look with Grace: after all, she was with him. But she seemed abstracted, apart.

  The parlor into which they were at last led by the same small silent maid was predictably crowded—with tiny tables and chairs, with silver frames and photographs, loveseats and glassed-in bookcases. And, in the center of it all, Miss Dabney herself, yellowed white hair swathed about her head like a bandage but held up stiff and high, as though the heavy pearl choker that she wore were a splint. Her eyes, shining out through folds of flesh, were tiny and black, and brilliant. She held out a gnarled, much-jeweled hand to Grace (was Grace supposed to kiss the rings? She did not). The two women touched fingers.

  When Miss Dabney spoke her voice was amazingly clear, rather high, a little hoarse but distinct. “Grace Lafferty, you do look absolutely lovely,” she said. “I’d know you anywhere; in a way you haven’t changed a bit.”

  “Oh well, but you look—” Grace started to say.

  “Now now. I’m much too old to be flattered. That’s how come I don’t have handsome men around me anymore.” Her glance flicked out to take in Miles, and then Jonathan. “But of course no man was ever as handsome as your daddy.”

  “No, I guess—”

  “Too bad your mother wasn’t pretty too. I think it would have improved her character.”

  “Probably—”

  Miss Dabney leaned forward. “You know, we’ve always been so proud of you in this town. Just as proud as proud.”

  The effect of this on Grace was instant; something within her settled down, some set of nerves, perhaps. She almost relaxed. Miles with relief observed this, and Jonathan too.

  “Yes, indeed we have. For so many, many things,” Miss Dabney continued.

  A warm and pleasant small moment ensued, during which in an almost preening way Grace glanced at Jonathan—before Miss Dabney took it up again.

  “But do you know what you did that made us the very proudest of all?” Quite apparently wanting no answer, had one been possible, she seemed to savor the expectation her non-question had aroused.

  “It was many, many years ago, and your parents were giving a dinner party,” she began—as Miles thought, Oh dear God, oh Jesus.

  “And you were just this adorable little two- or three-year-old. And somehow you got out of your crib and you came downstairs, and you crawled right under the big white linen tablecloth, it must have seemed like a circus tent to you—and you bit your mother right there on the ankle. Good and hard! She jumped and cried out, and Buck lifted up the tablecloth and there you were. I don’t remember quite how they punished you, but we all just laughed and laughed. Hortense was not the most popular lady in town, and I reckon one time or another we’d all had an urge to bite her. And you did it! We were all just so proud!”

  “But—” Grace protests, or rather, she begins to protest. She seems then, though, to remember certain rules. One held that Southern ladies did not contradict other ladies, especially if the other one is very old. She also remembered a rule from her training as an actress: you do not exhibit uncontrolled emotion of your own.

  Grace simply says, “It’s funny, I don’t remember that at all,” and she smiles, beautifully.

  Miles, though, who has known her for so very long, and who has always loved her, for the first time fully understands just what led her to become an actress, and also why she is so very good at what she does.

  “Well of course you don’t,” Miss Dabney is saying. “You were much too young. But it’s a wonder no one ever told you, considering how famous—how famous that story was.”

  Jonathan, who feels that Grace is really too old for him, but whose fame he has enjoyed, up to a point, now tells Miss Dabney, “It’s a marvelous story. You really should write it, I think. Some magazine—”

  Grace gives him the smallest but most decisive frown—as Miles, watching, thinks, Oh, good.

  And Grace now says, abandoning all rules, “I guess up to now no one ever told me so as not to make me feel small and bad. I guess they knew I’d have to get very old and really mean before I’d think that was funny.”

  As Miles thinks, Ah, that’s my girl!

  The Last Lovely City

  Old and famous, an acknowledged success both in this country and in his native Mexico, though now a sadhearted widower, Dr. Benito Zamora slowly and unskillfully navigates the high, sharp curves on the road to Stinson Beach, California—his destination. From time to time, barely moving his heavy, white-maned head, he glances at the unfamiliar young woman near him on the seat—the streaky-haired, underweight woman in a very short skirt and green sandals (her name is Carla) who has somewhat inexplicably invited him to come along to this party. What old hands, Benito thinks, of his own, on the wheel, an old beggar’s hands. What can this girl want of me? he wonders. Some new heaviness around the doctor’s neck and chin makes him look both strong and fierce, and his deep-set black eyes are powerful, still, and unrelenting in their judgmental gaze, beneath thick, uneven, white brows.

  “We’re almost there,” he tells the girl, this Carla.

  “I don’t care; I love the drive,” she says, and moves her head closer to the window, so her long hair fans out across her shoulders. “Do you go back to Mexico very often?” she turns now to ask him.

  “Fairly. My very old mother still lives there. Near Oaxaca.”

  “Oh, I’ve been to Oaxaca. So beautiful.” She beams. “The hotel—”

  “My mother’s not in the Presidente.”

  She grins, showing small, white, even teeth. “Well, you’re right. I did stay there. But it is a very nice hotel.”

  “Very nice,” he agrees, not looking at her.

  His mother is not the doctor’s only reason for going to Oaxaca. His interests are actually in almost adjacent Chiapas, where he oversees and has largely funded two large free clinics—hence his fame, and his nickname, Dr. Do-Good (to Benito, an epithet replete with irony, and one that he much dislikes).

  They have now emerged from the dark, tall, covering woods, the groves of redwood, eucalyptus, occasional laurel, and they are circling down the western slope as the two-lane road forms wide arcs. Ahead of them is the sea, the white curve of beach, and strung-out Stinson, the strange, small coastal town of rich retirees; weekenders, also rich; and a core population of former hippies, now just plain poor, middle-aged people with too many children. In his palmier days, his early, successful years, Dr. Zamora often came to Stinson from San Francisco on Sundays for lunch parties, first as a semi-sought-after bachelor (“But would you want your daughter actually to marry …?” Benito thought he felt this question), and later, less often, with his bride, the fairest of them all, his wife, his lovely blond. His white soul. Elizabeth.

  After Elizabeth died, now some five months ago, in April, friends and colleagues were predictably kind—many invitations, too many solicitous phone calls. And then, just as predictably (he had seen this happen with relatives of patients), all the attention fell off, and he was often alone. And at a time impossible for trips to Mexico: rains made most of the roads in Chiapas impassable, and he feared that he was now too old for the summer heat. Besides, these days the clinics actually ran quite well without him; he imagined that all they really needed was the money that came regularly from his banks. (Had that always been the case? he wondered. Were all those trips to Chiapas unnecessary, ultimately self-serving?) A
nd his mother, in her tiny stucco villa, near Oaxaca, hardly recognized her oldest living son.

  Too much time alone, then, and although he had always known that would happen, was even in a sense prepared, the doctor is sometimes angry: Why must they leave him now, when he is so vulnerable? Is no one able to imagine the daily lack, the loss with which he lives?

  And then this girl, this Carla, whom the doctor had met at a dinner a month or so before, called and asked him to the lunch, at Stinson Beach. “I hope you don’t mind a sort of last-minute invitation,” she said, “but I really loved our talk, and I wanted to see you again, and this seemed a good excuse.” He gratefully accepted, although he remembered very little of her, really, except for her hair, which was very long and silky-looking, streaked all shades of brown, with yellow. He remembered her hair, and that she seemed nice, a little shy; she was quiet, and so he had talked too much. (“Not too unusual, my darling,” Elizabeth might have said.) He thinks she said she worked for a newspaper; it now seems too late to ask. He believes she is intelligent, and serious. Curious about his clinics.

  But in the short interval between her call and this drive a host of fantasies has crowded old Benito’s imagination. She looked about thirty, this girl did, but these days most women look young; she could be forty-two. Still a long way from his own age, but such things did happen. One read of them.

  Or was it possible that Carla meant to write about him for her paper? The doctor had refused most interviews for years; had refused until he noticed that no one had asked, not for years.

  “What did you say the name of our hostess was?” he thinks to ask her as they round the last curve and approach the first buildings of the town.

  “Posey Pendergast. You’ve never met her?”

  “I don’t think so, but the name—something goes off in my head.”

  “Everyone knows Posey; I really thought you would. She’s quite marvelous.”