Beautiful Girl

by Alice Adams

  She asked, “How’s school? How’s the graphics class?”

  “Pretty good.”

  Philip was thin, with knobby bones at his wrists, protuberant neck bones and tense tendons. He had dark-blue, thoughtful eyes. His fine hair flew about when he moved. He looked frail, as though a strong wind (or a new idea) could carry him off bodily. “I tend to get into head trips” is how he half ironically put it, not saying what kind of trips they were. He seemed to be mainly concerned with his work—drawing, etching, watercolors. Other things (people, weather, days) passed by his cool, untroubled but observant gaze—as someday, Deborah felt, she, too, might pass by.

  At the moment, however, she was experiencing a total, warm contentment. There was Philip, eating and liking the stew she had made, and they had been robbed—ripped off—and nothing of value was gone.

  “What was in the drawer?” he asked.

  “Oh, nothing. Just some stuff I keep around.”

  Again their quick glances met, and they smiled; then both ducked away from prolonged contact. Deborah had to look aside because she had suddenly thought how marvelous it would be if they could have a child, a straw-blond baby that she would nurse (she had heard that breast-feeding made big breasts smaller) and Philip would always love. The intensity of this wish made her dizzy. For concealment, she asked, “You really won’t miss those skins?”

  “Really not. You know I always hated them as much as I liked them. Good luck to whoever took them is how I feel.”

  • • •

  After dinner Deborah cleared and cleaned the kitchen, while Philip read in the living room. Early on in their life together, he had helped or at least offered to, but gradually they both realized that cleaning up was something Deborah did not mind doing. She liked that simple interval of being alone, with nothing demanded of her that she could not accomplish. Her mother said of her that she was a throwback—“my quaint hippie daughter.” Deborah supposed that there was something to that. She liked to polish the wineglasses and to shine the chrome and porcelain on the stove and sink. She did all that tonight, and then went into the living room, where Philip was, and sat near him with a book of her own. With evening, the fog had begun to roll in. Outside, the distant foghorns announced a cold, moist black night. Wind shuddered against the windows, beyond which nothing was visible. The surrounding dark and cold made an island of their room—to Deborah, an enchanted island. She thought, We could live like this forever; this peace is better than any high. She thought, Do I want to get married, is that what I mean that I want? And then, No, I only mean to stay like this, with no change. But someday a baby.

  They read for several hours. Absorbed in his book (Doctor Faustus, for the second time), Philip fought off sleep until he and then Deborah went into fits of yawns, and they gave up and went to bed.

  While they were undressing, Deborah opened the drawer where she kept her scarves.

  It was gone—her largest, most beautiful, pale striped silk scarf, all lavenders and mauves and pinks, the only present from her mother that she had ever liked. Wearing any dress at all, she could wrap herself in that scarf and be instantly elegant. Soon after she and Philip had met, she wore it to a party at the Institute, and he thought it was a wonderful scarf. The enormity of its absence had surely summoned her and made her for no reason open that drawer.

  She felt hurt enough to cry, which, with a conscious effort, she did not do. Her second decision was not to tell Philip. This was less rational, and even as she slipped into bed beside him she was not sure why. Obviously, someday he would ask why she never wore it anymore. But at the moment she only knew that she felt diminished, as though without that scarf Philip would love her less, as though their best times together were over.

  Philip turned on his side; having kissed her good night, he quickly fell asleep. She lay there in the dark, listening to the erratic mourning noise of the foghorns. She was thinking that even if she had a child he would grow up and go away. Finally, she couldn’t stand it; all her thoughts were unbearable, and she turned and pressed her body against the length of Philip’s slender warm back, holding him tightly with her arms, as though she could keep him there.

  The Swastika on Our Door

  Normally, Karen Washington took a warmly nostalgic interest in stories about and especially pictures of her husband’s former girls. They had all been pretty, some beautiful. And they reminded her that her very successful and preoccupied lawyer husband had once been a lively bachelor, vigorously engaged in the pursuit of women. But the large glossy picture of Roger and his brother Richard, who was now dead, and a girl, that she found on the top shelf of her husband’s shirt closet disturbed her considerably. Why had Roger put it there? She was not jealous; she did not suspect that he perpetuated an old liaison, but she felt left out. Why had he chosen not to tell her about this particular beautiful girl, in her high-collared coat?

  To the left was fat Roger, grinning and blinking into the flashbulb, having raised his glass of wine to the nightclub camera: a man out on the town, celebrating, having a good time. “The jolly Roger”: with his peculiar private irony Richard had sometimes called his brother that. On the right was skinny tortured Richard, who was staring at his brother with a gaze that was at the same time stern and full of an immoderate love. Between them, recessed into half shadow, was the long-necked beautiful dark girl, who was looking at Richard as though she thought he was either marvelous or crazy. Or perhaps she herself looked crazy. In the bright flat light her collar made an odd shadow on her cheek, and her eyes were a strange shape—very narrow and long, like fish.

  Karen sighed heavily, and then sneezed from the dust. Although of German extraction she was a poor housekeeper, and did not like to be reminded of that fact, of which both the dust and the presence of that picture on an untouched shelf did remind her. Retreating from the closet, she put the picture on her husband’s dressing table, meaning to ask him about it that night. She was a big dark handsome girl, descended from successful generations of Berlin bankers; her father, the last of the line, had come to San Francisco in the Twenties, well before Hitler, and had been prominent in the founding of a local bank. Karen had already, in ten years of marriage to Roger, produced five sons, five stalwart big Washingtons who did not remember their difficult doomed Southern uncle, Uncle Richard, cartons of whose books were still unpacked in the basement.

  Karen remembered Richard very well, and she thought of him for a great deal of that day as she moved about the enormous unwieldy and expensive house on Pacific Street, bought when Richard died and they inherited his money. The house from its northern windows had mammoth views of the Bay, and the bridge, Sausalito, the hills of Marin County. That day, that March, there were threatening rain clouds, a shifting kaleidoscope of them, an infinite variety of grays.

  Karen had felt and still did feel an uncomfortable mixture of emotions in regard to Richard, one of which was certainly the guilty impatience of the healthy with the sick. Richard had been born with a defective heart, ten months after Roger’s healthy and very normal birth, and had suffered greatly during his lifetime. But beyond his irremediable physical pain he had seemed, somehow, to choose to be lonely and miserable. He lived in a strange hotel even after he got his money; he was given to isolated, hopeless love affairs, generally with crazy girls. (“Affairs with psychopaths are a marvelous substitute for intimacy,” he had been heard to say.) He only bought books and records; his clothes were impossible.

  Like many very secure and contented people, Karen tended to be somewhat unimaginative about the needs, emotional and otherwise, of those who were not content, of those who were in fact miserable. To her credit she knew this, and so she sighed as she moved incompetently about her house with the vacuum cleaner; she sighed for Richard and for her own failure to have understood or in any way to have helped him.

  Karen’s deficiencies as a housekeeper were more than made up for by her abilities as a cook, or so her greedy husband and most of their greedy friends th
ought. That afternoon, as heavy dark rains enshrouded the city and the Bay, Karen made a superior moussaka, which was one of Roger’s favorites. It had also been a favorite of Richard’s, and she was pleased to remember that she had at least done that for him.

  Then, just as she had finished, from upstairs she heard the youngest child begin to whimper, waking up from his nap, and she went up to get him, to bathe and dress him before the older boys all tumbled home from school.

  The maid would come at three and stay until after dinner, since Roger liked a formal evening meal.

  Karen was dressing, and lost in a long skirt that she tried to pull down over big breasts, down over her increasing thighs, when Roger came in and asked her about the picture.

  “What’s that doing out here?” “Here” was “heah”; Roger had kept his Southern voice, though less strongly than Richard had.

  Her head came out of the dress, and she bridled at the annoyance in his tone. “Why not? It was up on your top shirt shelf.” At worst, in some atavistic Germanic way, Karen became coy. “Some old girl friend you haven’t told me about?” she said.

  Roger was holding the picture, blinking at it in the harsh light from Karen’s makeup lamp, holding it closer and closer to the bulb as though he would burn it if the picture did not reveal all that he wanted to know. He was not thinking about Karen.

  “She’s beautiful,” said Karen. She came to look over his shoulder, and pressed her cheek against his arm. She knew that he loved her.

  “She was Richard’s girl. Ellen. After that.” He pointed unnecessarily at the picture. “We were celebrating his money, after he finally sold his land. That was the night he met her.”

  Karen was quiet, looking at the peculiar girl, and at Richard, whom no large sums of money had cheered, and at jolly Roger.

  “What a creepy girl,” Roger said. “Richard’s worst. She finally had to be locked up. Probably still is.”

  “Oh.” Karen shuddered.

  Roger put the picture down with a heavy sigh. He was fatter now than when it was taken; his neck was deeply creased with fat, and his big cheeks drooped.

  Then abruptly he turned around and embraced Karen with unaccustomed vigor. “What’s for dinner?” he asked. “Did I smell what I think I did?”

  • • •

  Because Richard had been sick so much and had been tutored, he and Roger ended by finishing high school in the same June of 1943, and that July they entered Harvard together, two Southern 4-F’s in giddy wartime Cambridge, fat Roger, who also had a punctured eardrum, and thin sick Richard. They both reacted to that scene with an immediate and violent loneliness. Together they were completely isolated from all those uniforms, from the desperately gay urgency of that war, that bright New England climate.

  Roger’s fat and Richard’s illnesses had also isolated them in childhood; they were unpopular boys who spent most of their afternoons at home, reading or devising private games. But to be isolated and unpopular in a small town where everyone knows you is also to be surrounded—if not with warmth at least with a knowledge of your history. There is always the old lady approaching on the sidewalk who says, “Aren’t you Sophie Washington’s boys? I declare, the fat one is the living spit of your grandfather.” Or the mean little girl in the corner grocery store who chants softly, “Skinny and fat, skinny and fat, I never saw two brothers like that.”

  They had too an enormous retreat from the world: that huge house full of books everywhere. And the aging pale parents, Josiah and Sophie Washington, who had been and continued to be surprised at finding themselves parents, who retreated from parenthood to long conversations about the histories of other Southern families. “It was a perfect background for eccentrics of the future,” Richard later told Ellen.

  Both Roger and Richard had chosen history as their field of concentration at Harvard. During those summer afternoons, and into the gaudy fall, while R.O.T.C. units drilled in the Yard and pretty Radcliffe girls—in sloppy sweaters and skirts, white athletic socks and loafers—lounged on the steps of Widener Library, Richard and Roger studied furiously in their ground-floor rooms in Adams House, and at night they went to movies. Every night a movie, in suburbs as far-lying as the subway system would carry them, until one night when the only movie they had not seen twice was I Wanted Wings, in Arlington. So they stayed home and for a joke read chapters of Lee’s Lieutenants aloud to each other, which was not one of the texts for History I but which was the only book in the room they had not already read. It had been an off-to-college present from their not very imaginative mother. In stage Southern accents they read to each other about Fredericksburg and Chickamauga, Appomattox and Antietam.

  Roger had a photographic memory, of which Richard was wildly proud. His own memory was erratic; he easily memorized poetry but he had a lot of trouble with names and dates, with facts. As they walked across the Yard in the brilliant September air, Roger recited several pages from that book, still in that wildly exaggerated accent: “… and before the Northern armies could marshal their forces …” while Richard gamboled beside him, laughing like a monkey.

  They were taking a course called Philosophic Problems of the Postwar World. With everyone else they stood around outside Emerson Hall, waiting for the hour to sound. Richard was overheard to say to Roger, in that crazy Southern voice, “As I see it, the chief postwar problem is what to do with the black people.”

  At the end of the summer Roger had four A’s and Richard had two A’s, a C and a D, the D being in Biology. They had no friends. Richard regarded their friendlessness as a sign of their superiority; no one else was as brilliant, as amusing, as his brother, and thus they were unappreciated. Roger didn’t think much about that sort of thing then. He was solely concentrated on getting top grades.

  Those Harvard years were, or perhaps became in memory, the happiest of Richard’s life. Completely isolated from their classmates and from the war that for most people dominated the scene, he and Roger went about their scholarly pursuits; he had Roger’s almost undivided attention, and it was a time when Roger laughed at all his jokes.

  Aside from the Southern joke, which was their mainstay, they developed a kind of wild irony of their own, an irony that later would have been called sick, or black. Roger’s obesity came into this. “You must have another hot dog, you won’t last the afternoon,” Richard would say as Roger wolfed down his seventh hot dog at lunch at the corner stand. And when Roger did order and eat another hot dog they both thought that wildly funny. Richard’s heart was funny too. At the foot of the steps of Widener Roger would say, “Come on, I’ll race you up to the top,” and they would stand there, helplessly laughing.

  That was how Richard remembered those years: big fat Roger, tilted to one side chuckling hugely, and himself, dark and wiry and bent double laughing, in the Cambridge sun. And he remembered that he could even be careless about his health in those years; he almost never hurt. They went for long walks in all the variously beautiful weathers of Cambridge. Years later, in seasonless California, Richard would sigh for some past Cambridge spring, or summer or fall. Roger remembered much less: for one thing he was in later life so extremely busy.

  They were reacted to at Harvard for the most part with indifference; other people were also preoccupied, and also that is how, in general, Harvard is—it lets you alone. However, they did manage to be irritating: to the then current remark, “Don’t you know there’s a war on?” both Roger and Richard Washington had been heard to respond, “Sir, the War has been over for almost a hundred years.” Also, those were very “liberal” years; racism, or what sounded like it, was very unpopular. No one made jokes about black people, no one but Roger and Richard.

  Therefore, it is not too surprising that one night Roger and Richard came back from the movies (a revival of a Broadway Melody in Dorchester: Roger loved musicals) to find that someone had put a swastika in black chalk on the door to their room. Richard was absolutely enchanted; in a way it was the highest moment of his life. All h
is sense of the monstrosity of the outside world was justified, as well as his fondness for drama; he was persecuted and isolated with his brother. “Roger,” he said very loudly and very Southernly, “do you reckon that’s some kind of Indian sign they’ve gone and put on our door?”

  Roger laughed too, or later Richard remembered Roger as laughing, but he recalled mainly his own delight in that climactic illuminated moment. They went into their room and shut the door, and after them someone yelled from down the stairwell, “Southern Fascists!” Richard went on chortling with pleasure, lying across the studio couch, while Roger walked thoughtfully about the room, that big bare room made personal only by their books and some dark curtains now drawn against the heady Cambridge spring night. Then Roger put a Lotte Lenya record on the player.

  That was more or less that. The next day the janitor washed the chalk off, and Roger and Richard did not speculate as to who had put it there. Anyone could have.

  But a week or so later Roger told Richard that he was tired of history; he was switching his field of concentration to economics. And then he would go to law school. “Fat makes you already eccentric,” he said. “And eccentrics have to be rich.”

  “In that case I’ll switch to Greek,” Richard countered furiously, “and remain land poor.”

  And that shorthand conversation made perfect sense to both of them.

  They both did what they said they would, except that soon after their graduation (Roger summa cum laude and Phi Bete) Richard had a heart attack that kept him in the hospital at home in Virginia, off and on for a couple of years, fending off his anxious mother and writing long funny letters to Roger, who seemed to be enjoying law school.

  So it worked out that by the time Richard went back to Harvard for his master’s in Greek literature, Roger had got out of law school and gone out to San Francisco, where he began to succeed as a management consultant to increasingly important firms. He was too busy even to come home for the funerals of his parents, who died within a month of each other during his first winter in San Francisco—Josiah and Sophie Washington, who had, they thought, divided their land equally between their two sons. Roger sold his immediately for thirty thousand, and thought he had done very well. He urged Richard to do the same, but Richard lazily or perversely held on to his, until the advent of a freeway forced him to sell, for a hundred thousand.