Beautiful Girl

by Alice Adams

  Looking at Jessica, whom, curiously, she has always liked, Barbara feels a chill in her heart. Are they doing the right thing, she and Tom? He says they are; he says Jessica has her bookstore and her student poet friends (“Fairies, most of them, from the look of them,” Tom says), and that living with him does not make her happy at all; he has never made her happy. Is he only talking to himself, rationalizing? Barbara doesn’t know.

  All these people, so many of them Southern, make Avery’s husband, Stanley, feel quite lost; in fact, he finds it hard to understand anything they say. Tom is especially opaque: the heavy Southern accent and heavier irony combine to create confusion, which is perhaps what Tom intends. Stanley thinks Tom is a little crazy, and feels great sympathy for Jessica, whom he admires. And he thinks, Poor Avery, growing up in all that—no wonder Devlin’s queer and Avery has to go to a shrink. Stanley feels an awful guilt toward Avery, for not supplying all that Tom and Jessica failed to give her, and for his persistent “premature ejaculations”—and putting the phrase in quotes is not much help.

  “I remember your whooping cough very well indeed,” says Tom, pulling in his chin so that the back of his head jerks up; it is a characteristic gesture, an odd combination of self-mockery and self-congratulation. “It was the same summer you pushed Harry McGinnis into the swimming pool.” He turns to Stanley, who is as incomprehensible to him as he is to Stanley, but he tries. “Odd gesture, that. Her mother and I thought she had a sort of ‘crush’ on young Harry, and then she went and pushed him into the pool.” He chuckles. “Don’t try to tell me that ladies aren’t creatures of whim, even twelve-year-old girls.”

  “I was nine,” says Avery, and does not add, You had a crush on Harry’s mother, you were crazy about Irene that summer.

  Jessica thinks the same thing, and she and Avery are both looking at Tom, so that he feels the thought.

  “I remember teasing Irene about the bathing suit she wore that day,” he says recklessly, staring about with his clear blue eyes at the unfamiliar room.

  “What was it like?” asks Barbara, very interested.

  “Oh, some sort of ruffled thing. You know how those Southern gals are,” he says, clearly not meaning either his wife or his daughter.

  “I must have thought the whooping cough was a sort of punishment,” Avery says. “For having a crush on Harry, as you put it.”

  “Yes, probably,” Jessica agrees, being herself familiar with many varieties of guilt. “You were awful sick—it was terrible. There was nothing we could do.”

  “When was the first summer you came to Maine?” Devlin asks Babs, coldly curious, nearly rude. It is plain that he wishes she never had.

  “Nineteen thirty-five. In September. In fact September 9th,” she says, and then blushes for the accuracy of her recall, and looks at Tom.

  “Verlie took care of me,” says Avery, still involved with her whooping cough.

  Jessica sighs deeply. “Yes, I suppose she did.”

  Almost ten years later, in the middle Fifties, Tom and Barbara are married. In the chapel of the little church, the Swedenborgian, in San Francisco, both their faces stream with tears as the minister says those words.

  In her forties, Barbara is a striking woman still, with her small disdainful nose, her sleekly knotted pale hair, and her beautiful way of walking, holding herself forward like a present. She has aged softly, as very fine-skinned, very blond women sometimes do. And Tom is handsome still; they make a handsome couple (they always have).

  Avery is there; she reflects that she is now older than Barbara was in 1935, that summer in Maine. She is almost thirty, divorced from Stanley, and disturbingly in love with two men at once. Has Barbara never loved anyone but Tom? (Has she?) Avery sees their tears as highly romantic.

  She herself is a nervy, attractive girl with emphatic dark eyebrows, large dark eyes and a friendly soft mouth, heavy breasts on an otherwise slender body. She wishes she had not worn her black silk suit, despite its chic; two friends have assured her that no one thought about wearing black to weddings anymore, but now it seems a thing not to have done. “I wore black to my father’s wedding”—thank God she is not still seeing Dr. Gunderscheim, and will use that sentence only as a joke. Mainly, Avery is wondering which of the two men to marry, Charles or Christopher. (The slight similarity of the names seems ominous—what does it mean?) This wondering is a heavy obsessive worry to her; it drags at her mind, pulling it down. Now for the first time, in the small dim chapel, candelit, it wildly occurs to her that perhaps she should marry neither of them, perhaps she should not marry at all, and she stares about the chapel, terrified.

  “I pronounce you man and wife,” says the minister, who is kindly, thin, white-haired. He is very old; in fact he quietly dies the following year.

  And then, almost as though nothing had happened, they have all left the chapel: Tom and Barbara, Avery and Devlin, who was Tom’s best man. (“I gave my father away” is another of Avery’s new post-wedding jokes.) But something has happened: Tom and Barbara are married. They don’t believe it either. He gives her a deep and prolonged kiss (why does it look so awkward?) which embarrasses Devlin terribly, so that he stares up and down the pretty tree-lined street. He is thinking of Jessica, who is dead.

  And he passionately wishes that she had not died, savagely blames Tom and Barbara for that death. Trivial, entirely selfish people—so he sees them; he compares the frivolity of their connection with Jessica’s heavy suffering. Since Jessica’s death Devlin has been in a sort of voluntary retreat. He left his window-display job and most of his friends; he stays at home on the wrong side of Telegraph Hill, without a view. He reads a lot and listens to music and does an occasional watercolor. He rarely sees Avery, and disapproves of what he understands to be her life. (“You don’t think it’s dykey, the way you sleep around?” was the terrible sentence he spoke to her, on the eve of Jessica’s funeral, and it has never been retracted.) Sometimes in his fantasies it is ten years back, and Tom and Jessica get a divorce and she comes out to live in San Francisco. He finds her a pretty apartment on Telegraph Hill and her hair grows beautifully white and she wears nice tweeds and entertains at tea. And Tom and Barbara move to hell—Los Angeles or Mexico or somewhere. Most people who know him assume Devlin to be homosexual; asexual is actually the more accurate description.

  They stand there, that quiet striking group, all blinking in a brilliant October sun that instantly dries their tears; for several moments they are all transfixed there, unable to walk to their separate cars, to continue to the friend’s house where there is to be the wedding reception. (Why this hesitation? Do none of them believe in the wedding? What is a marriage?)

  Five years later, in the early Sixties, Avery drives up to Maine from Hilton, for various reasons which do not include a strong desire to see Tom and Barbara. She has been married to Christopher for four years, and she came out from San Francisco to Hilton to see how it was away from him. Away from him she fell wildly in love with a man in Hilton named Jason Valentine, and now (for various reasons) she has decided that she needs some time away from Jason.

  She drives smoothly, quietly, along the pine-needled road in her Corvair to find no one there. No car.

  But the screen door is unlatched, and she goes in, stepping up from the old stone step onto the long narrow porch, from which the long table has been removed, replaced with a new one that is small and round. (But where did they put the old one?) And there are some bright yellow canvas chairs, new and somehow shocking against the weathered shingled wall.

  Inside the house are more violent changes, more bright new fabrics: curtains, bandanna-red, and a bandanna bedspread on the conspicuous wide bed. Beside the fireplace is a white wicker sofa (new) with chintz cushions—more red. So much red and so much newness make Avery dizzy; almost angrily she wonders where the old things are, the decaying banners and sepia photographs of girls in Greek costumes. She goes into the kitchen and it is all painted yellow, into what was the large closet
where she used to sleep—but a wall has been knocked out between her room and Devlin’s; it is all one room now, a new room, entirely strange, with a new iron bed, a crocheted bedspread, which is white. Is that where they will expect her to sleep? She wishes there were a phone. Tomorrow she will have to drive into town to call Jason at his studio.

  Needing a drink, Avery goes back into the kitchen, and finds a bottle of an unfamiliar brand of bourbon. She gets ice from the refrigerator (terrifyingly new—so white!), water from the tap—thank God, the same old sink. With her clutched drink she walks quickly through the living room to the porch, down to the end. She looks out across the lake with sentimentally teared eyes, noting that it is clear but not quite clear enough to see Mount Washington.

  Being in love with Jason, who is a nonpracticing architect (he would rather paint), who worries about his work (his nonwork), who loves her but is elusive (she has no idea when they will see each other again), has tightened all Avery’s nerves: she is taut, cries easily and is all concentrated on being in love with Jason.

  A car drives up, a Mustang—Barbara is faithful to Fords. And there they are saying, “Avery, but we didn’t expect you, we went into Portland, for lobsters. Oh, dear, how awful, we only bought two!” Embracing, laughing. Tears (why?) in everyone’s eyes.

  They settle down, after packages are put away, Avery’s bags in the new guest room, and they watch the sunset: a disappointing pale pastel. And they drink a lot.

  Barbara is nervous, both because of this shift in schedule and because of Avery, whom she regards as an intellectual, like Tom. She is always afraid of what Avery will say—a not unfounded fear. Also, she is upset about the prospect of two lobsters for three people.

  What he considers her untimely arrival permits Tom’s usual ambivalence about Avery to yield to a single emotion: extreme irritation. How inconsiderate she is—always has been! Besides, he was looking forward to his lobster.

  Avery chooses this unpropitious moment to announce that she is leaving Christopher. “We’ve been making each other miserable,” she says. “We have been, for a long time.” She trails off.

  Tom brightens. “Well, old dear, I always think incompatibility is a good reason not to live together.” He has no notion of his own prurience in regard to his daughter.

  She does. She says, “Oh, Christ.”

  Barbara goes into the kitchen to divide up the lobster; a skilled hostess, she does quite well, and she makes a good mayonnaise as she listens to the jagged sounds of the quarrel on the porch. Avery and Tom. She sighs.

  Now darkness surrounds the house, and silence, except for a faint soft lapping of small waves on the shore, and tiny noises from the woods: small animals shifting weight on the leaves, a bird moving on a branch.

  “Although I have what I suppose is an old-fashioned prejudice against divorce,” Tom unfortunately says.

  “Christ, is that why you stayed married to mother and made her as miserable as you could? Christ, I have a prejudice against misery!” Avery feels her voice (and herself) getting out of control.

  Barbara announces dinner, and they go to the pretty new table, where places are set, candles lit. Barbara distributes the lobster, giving Tom the major share, but he scowls down at his plate.

  As Avery does at hers—in Hilton, with Jason, she was generally too overstimulated, too “in love” to eat; now she is exhausted and very hungry. She turns to Barbara, as though for help. “Don’t you ever wish you’d got married before you did? What a waste those years were. That time in San Francisco, why not then?”

  Startled, Barbara has no idea what to answer. She has never allowed herself to think in these terms, imaginatively to revise her life. “I feel lucky we’ve had these years we have had,” she says—which, for her, is the truth. She loves Tom; she feels that she is lucky to be his wife.

  “But those last years were horrible for Mother,” Avery says. “You might have spared her that time.”

  “I think I might be in a better position than you to be the judge of that.” Enraged, Tom takes a characteristic stance: his chin thrust out, he is everyone’s superior—he is especially superior to women and children, particularly his own.

  “Oh, yeah?” In her childhood, this was considered the rudest remark one could make; then Avery would never have said it to Tom. “You think she just plain died of a heart attack, don’t you? Well, her room was full of empty sherry bottles. All over. Everywhere those drab brown empty bottles, smelling sweet. Julia told me, when she cleaned it out.”

  This information (which is new) is so shocking (and so absolutely credible) to Tom that he must dismiss it at once. His desperate and hopeless guilts toward Jessica have forced him to take a sanctimonious tone in speaking of her. He must dismiss this charge at once. “As a matter of fact, Julia is quite unreliable, as Verlie was,” he says.

  Avery explodes. “Julia is unreliable! Verlie was! Christ—why? Because they’re black? Because they’re women?”

  Barbara has begun to cry. “You’ve got to stop this,” she says. “Why quarrel about the past? It’s over—”

  Tom and Avery stare at each other, in terrible pain; they would like to weep, to embrace, but they are unable to do either.

  Tom draws himself up stiffly—stiffly he turns to Barbara. “You’re quite right, old dear,” he says.

  Several things attack Avery’s mind at once: one, that she would like to say goddam you both, or something obscene, and take off down the turnpike, back to Boston; two, she is too drunk for the turnpike; and three, she has just noticed that Tom speaks to Barbara exactly as though she were Jessica, as though neither of them were a person but something generic named Wife.

  And so the moment goes, the awful emotions subside and they all retreat to trivia. Although Avery’s hands still shake, she comments on the mayonnaise (she is not excruciatingly Southern Jessica’s daughter for nothing), which Barbara gratefully takes up.

  “I’m never sure it will come out right,” she says. “I’ve had the most embarrassing failures, but of course tonight, just for family—” She is unable to finish the sentence, or to remember what she meant.

  Later, during the next few years before Tom’s death, Avery looks back and thinks that yes, she should have left then, drunk or not. She could have found a motel. That would have been a strong gesture, a refusal to put up with any more of what she saw as Tom’s male imperialism, his vast selfishness. (But poor Avery was constantly plagued with alternatives; she constantly rewrote her life into new versions in which she did not marry Stanley. Or Christopher. After Tom died she thought that perhaps it was just as well she hadn’t left, but she was never quite sure.

  • • •

  Against everyone’s advice, early in the summer after Tom died, Barbara drove alone to Maine. Even Devlin had called to dissuade her. (In fact ever since Tom’s funeral, to which Avery did not even come—Tom had died while she was in Mount Zion Hospital being treated for depression—a new and warm connection had been established between Barbara and Devlin; they wrote back and forth; she phoned him for various pieces of advice—she had begun to rely on him as she was used to relying on Tom.)

  Devlin said, “Darling Barbara, do you see it as an exercise in masochism? I wouldn’t have thought it of you.”

  “Angel, you don’t understand. I love that house. I’ve been extremely happy there.”

  “Barbara, let me be blunt: don’t you think you’ll be fantastically lonely?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  And so, after visits with friends and relatives in Boston, Barbara drives on to Maine in her newest Ford, and arrives in a twilight of early July. She parks near the house, gets out, pausing only briefly to observe the weather, which is clear, and to smile at the warm familiar smell of pines. Then she walks briskly over to the porch and opens the padlock on the screen door.

  Her first reaction, stepping up onto the porch, could be considered odd: she decides that those yellow chairs are wrong for the porch. This pleases her: changi
ng them for something else will give her something to do. She enters the living room, sniffs at the musty, airless space and goes into the kitchen, where last summer she hid a bottle of bourbon in the flour bin. (Sometimes stray hunters or fishermen break into the house and take things.) No one has taken it, and she makes herself a good stiff drink, and goes to the rounded end of the porch, to sit and rest.

  And much more clearly than she can remember anything that happened last month, last winter or fall, she sees that scene of over thirty years ago, sees Tom (how young he was, how handsome) as he urged her to play her ukulele (play what? did he name a song?), and she sees Jessica come out to where they are (making some reference to the girls who used to come to camp—poor Jessica), and Wilfred, as always angrily serious, puffing although not yet fat, and then wild, skinny Avery (why did she and Jason Valentine not marry?) and frightened Devlin, holding his mother’s arm. She sees all those people, and herself among them, and for an instant she has a sense that she is all of them—that she is Jessica as well as Barbara, is Wilfred, Avery, Devlin and Tom.

  But this is an unfamiliar mood, or sense, for her, and she shakes it off, literally shaking her head and lifting her chin. She remembers then that she put the old chairs and the table in the shed next to the kitchen.

  Three days later Barbara has restored the lodge to what (to herself) she calls its “old look.” The old chairs and old table are back. She has even put up some of Jessica’s old pictures in the living room.

  She has no idea why she made such an effort, except that she firmly believes (always has) in the efficacy of physical work; she was driven by a strong, controlling instinct, and she also believes in her instincts. She even laughs to herself at what could seem a whim, and in writing a note to Devlin she says, “You’d have thought I was restoring Williamsburg, and you should see my blisters!”

  And so at the end of her day she is seated there at the end of the porch, and everything but herself looks just as it did when she first saw it. She drinks the two stiff highballs that she allows herself before dinner, and she remembers all the best times with Tom, San Francisco hotels and Paris honeymoon, the big parties in Hilton, and she sheds a few tears, but she does not try to change anything that happened. She does not imagine an altered, better life that she might have had.