Beautiful Girl

by Alice Adams

  Richard did not enjoy his second time at Harvard, except in the sense that one does enjoy a season of mourning. He was terribly lonely, he missed Roger vividly, everywhere in Cambridge, and his heart hurt most of the time.

  Thus it was not until the early Fifties that Richard got his teaching job in the boys’ school in San Francisco, and came out to see his brother again. And then came into his money, and met Ellen.

  In those days, even after getting his money, Richard lived in a downtown hotel—his eccentricity. He had a large room that the maid was not allowed to enter. (“In that case why live in a hotel?” practical Roger had asked.) The room was stacked everywhere with books, with records and papers. Richard took most of his meals in the hotel dining room; after he came home from a day of teaching he rarely went out. He was not well; much of the time he felt dizzy, and he ached, but again it was hard to gauge the degree to which his loneliness was chosen. If Roger, for example, had had a bad heart he would undoubtedly have had it continually in the midst of a crowd.

  Indeed, in the years since his Harvard isolation Roger had become extremely gregarious. Professionally he was hyperactive; his entire intelligence and energy were occupied. And a vivid social life grew out of professional contacts. People whose adviser he was in a legal economic sense also asked him to dinner, and he became known as a very courtly, if somewhat ponderous bachelor, as well as an astute businessman. Roger was greedy for company; he reveled in all his invitations, his cocktails and dinners and his girls.

  Girls who fell in love with Richard were always girls with whom Roger had not been successful; that was how Richard met girls. In one of their rare conversations about relationships with women, Roger remarked on Richard’s perfect score with women; Richard had never been turned down.

  “But with how many ladies have I—uh—attempted to prove my valor?” Richard asked, in the parody Southern manner that he sometimes tried to continue with Roger. “Four, or is it three? I sometimes lose track of these—uh—astronomicals.”

  Ellen made five.

  One March afternoon, a few months after they had met, Richard lay across some tufts of new grass on the bank of a duck pond in Golden Gate Park, watching Ellen, who was out wading among the ducks. Like a child, she held her skirt bunched up in front of her, at the top of her long thin childish legs. Water still had spattered the shabby gray flannel; Ellen visibly didn’t care. She splashed out toward some brown ducks who were peacefully squatted on the surface of the pond. They fled, scuttering across the water, submarining under, as Ellen screamed out, “See! They know I’m here!”

  Her long fish eyes that day were almost blue with excitement. When she was unhappy or simply remote they were gray. After she finally went mad they were gray all the time.

  At the farther edge of the pond were willows, now thickly green with spring; they grew out into the water in heavy clusters. And all about the pond were tall eucalyptus, scenting the air with lemon, shedding their bark in long strips, as the breeze fluttered their sad green scimitar leaves above Richard’s heavy head.

  Out of the water, out of her element, Ellen became a detached and languorous girl who sat on the grass not far from Richard, clutching her arms about her knees and watching him curiously, listening to that tormented and violent Southern talk.

  “Interest! Interest!” was what Richard was saying. “My own brother, my heir, and he offers me interest on a loan. My God, I told him, ‘You’re my brother, take all the money, but for God’s sake don’t offer me interest.’ ”

  Above the trees pale-gray clouds drifted ceremoniously across the sky. Half closing her eyes, Ellen turned them into doves, flocks and flocks of pale soft gray doves.

  “God, if I’d only sold the bloody land when Roger sold his,” said Richard for the tenth or perhaps the hundredth time that day. “And got only thirty thousand like him instead of this bloody hundred.”

  Richard’s wildness and the intensity of his pain had oddly a calming effect on Ellen. Unlike most people, who were frightened or impatient or even—like Roger—bored, Ellen experienced with Richard a reduction of the panic in which she normally lived. Rather reasonably she asked him what she had often been told but had forgotten: “Why didn’t you sell it then?”

  “I preferred to be land poor.” This was in the old stage Southern voice. “Ah pruhfuhd.” Then, “Christ, I didn’t want the money. I still don’t. If I could only just give it to him. Without dying, that is.” And he laughed wildly.

  By this time pain had deeply lined Richard’s face. There were heavy lines across his forehead, lines down the sides of his nose and beside his wide, intensely compressed mouth. Many people, especially recent friends of Roger’s, considered Richard to be crazy, but even they were aware that what sounded like madness could have been an outcry against sheer physical suffering.

  “I may not even go to New York,” Ellen said. “It takes so much nerve.”

  Ellen was a mathematician—“of all things,” as most people said. Especially her Oakland-Baptist-John Birch Society mother said that, and often. Ellen was talented and had been offered a fellowship at Columbia.

  “Stay here,” Richard said. “Let me keep you. God, won’t anybody take my money?”

  The melodramatic note in that last told Ellen that Richard was going to talk about Roger again, and she sighed. She liked it better when he was reading poetry to her, or when he didn’t talk at all and played records, Telemann and Boccherini, Haydn and Schubert, in his cluttered and most personal room.

  But Richard said, “Roger wants to invest in some resort land at Squaw Valley, with some of his rich new German friends. Do you know the altitude at Squaw Valley? Six thousand feet. I wouldn’t last a minute there. How to explain why his brother is never invited for weekends or summer vacations. I am socially unacceptable to my brother—isn’t that marvelous?”

  Richard’s eyes were beautiful; they were large and clear and gray, in that agonized face. Those eyes exposed all his pain and anger and despair, his eyes and his passionate deep Southern voice. He was really too much for anyone, and certainly for himself. And there were times, especially when he ranted endlessly and obsessively about Roger, when even Ellen wanted to be away from him, to be with some dull and ordinary person.

  Ellen had met Roger, who always retained a few intellectual friends, at a Berkeley cocktail party, and she had had dinner with him a couple of times before the night they celebrated Richard’s money at the silly expensive restaurant, where the picture was taken. Ellen had not liked Roger very much. He was exceptionally bright; she recognized and responded to that, but she was used to very bright people, and all the money-power-society talk that Roger tried to impress her with alarmed her. “You could marry extremely well if you wanted to,” Roger told her. “With your skin and those eyes and those long legs. And no one should marry on less than thirty thousand a year. It can’t be done.” Then he had laughed. “But you’d probably rather marry a starving poet, wouldn’t you? Come and meet my crazy brother, though, even if he has just come into money.”

  And so Richard and Ellen met, and in their fashions fell in love.

  Now, feeling dizzy, Richard lay back on the bright-green grass and stared up through the lowering maze of silvered leaves to the gray procession of clouds. Sickness sometimes made him maudlin; now he closed his eyes and imagined that instead of the pond there was a river near his feet, the Virginia James of his childhood, or the Charles at Harvard, with Roger.

  Not opening his eyes but grinning wildly to himself, he asked Ellen, “Did I ever tell you about the night they put the swastika on our door?”

  Of course Richard lent Roger the money, with no interest, and their dwindling relationship continued.

  Sometimes even in the midst of his burgeoning social life Roger was lonely; he hated to be alone. Sometimes late at night he would telephone to Richard, who always stayed up late reading and playing records. These conversations, though never long, were how they kept in touch.

  At
some point, a couple of years after Richard had met Ellen, Roger began to talk about a girl named Karen Erdman, and Richard knew that she was the one he would marry. But Roger took a long time deciding—Karen was a patient girl. Richard did not meet Karen until the engagement party, but he was so intuitively attuned to his brother that he could see her and feel the quality of her presence: that big generous and intelligent girl who adored his brother. After all, Richard also loved Roger.

  “The question seems to me,” advised Richard, “as to whether you want to marry at all. If you do, obviously Karen is the girl you should marry.”

  “I have a very good time as a bachelor,” Roger mused. “But it takes too much of my time. You break off with one girl and then you have to go looking for another, and at first you have to spend all that time talking to them.”

  “God, what a romantic view. In that case perhaps you should marry.”

  “But she wants children. I find it almost impossible to imagine children.”

  “Sir, what kind of a man would deplore the possibility of progeny?” Richard asked, in their old voice.

  “I can’t decide what to do,” said Roger. Then, as an afterthought: “How is Ellen?”

  “Marvelous. She has managed to turn down four fellowships in one year.”

  “She’s crazy.”

  “You’re quite right there.”

  “Well. Good night.”

  “Good night.”

  A heavy engraved invitation invited Richard to the Erdmans’ engagement party for their daughter. “Oddly enough,” Richard said to Ellen. “Since they’re being married at Tahoe I’m surprised they didn’t do the whole thing up there. Or simply not mention it until later. God knows I don’t read the society pages.”

  Richard was not asked to bring Ellen.

  The Erdman house, in Seacliff, was manorial. Broad halls led into broader, longer rooms; immense windows showed an enormous view of the Bay. And the décor was appropriately sumptuous: satins and velvets and silks, walnut and mahogany and gilt. Aubusson and Louis XV. For that family those were the proper surroundings. They were big dark rich people who dressed and ate and entertained extremely well.

  In those crowded, scented, overheated rooms Richard’s pale lined face was wet. He went out so infrequently; the profusion and brilliance of expensive clothes, in all possible fabrics, of jewels—all made him dizzily stare. The acres of tables of incredibly elaborate food made him further perspire. He stood about in corners, trying to cope with his dizziness and wildly wondering what he could find to say to anyone there. Lunatic phrases of gallantry came to him. Could he say to the beautiful blonde across the room, “I just love the way you do your hair, it goes so well with your shoes”? Or, to the tall distinguished European, who was actually wearing his decorations, “I understand you’re in money, sir. I’m in Greek, myself. Up to my ass in Greek.” No, he could not say anything. He had nothing to say.

  Roger’s new circle included quite a few Europeans, refugees like his father-in-law to be, and Mr. Erdman’s friends, and transients: visiting representatives of banks, commercial attachés and consuls. The rest were mainly San Francisco’s very solid merchant upper class: German Jewish families who had had a great deal of money for a long time. They were very knowledgeable about music and they bought good paintings on frequent trips to Europe. Among those people Roger looked completely at home; even his heavy Southern courtliness took on a European flavor.

  Mrs. Erdman was still a remarkably pretty woman, with smooth dark hair in wings and round loving eyes as she regarded both her husband and her daughter. Richard found this especially remarkable; he had never known a girl with a nice mother and he imagined that such girls were a breed apart. Ellen’s mother had jumped under a train when Ellen was thirteen and miraculously survived with an amputated foot.

  Mrs. Erdman was a very nice woman and she wanted to be nice to Richard, once it was clear to her who he was. The two boys were so unlike that it was hard to believe. “I’m so sorry that you won’t be able to come up to the lake for the wedding,” she said sympathetically.

  “But who’d want a corpse at a wedding?” Richard cackled. “Where on earth would you hide it?” Then, seeing her stricken face and knowing how rude he had been, and how well she had meant, he tried again: “I just love the way you do your hair—” But that was no good either, and he stopped, midsentence.

  Mrs. Erdman smiled in a vague and puzzled way. It was sad, and obvious that poor Richard was insane. And how difficult for poor Roger that must be.

  Roger was beaming. His creased fat face literally shone with pleasure, which, for the sake of dignity, he struggled to contain. Having decided to marry, he found the idea of marriage very moving, and he was impressed by the rightness of his choice. People fall in love in very divergent ways; in Roger’s way he was now in love with Karen, and he would love her more in years to come. He was even excited by the idea of children, big handsome Californian children, who were not eccentric. He stood near the middle of the enormous entrance hall, with Karen near his side, and beamed. He was prepared for nothing but good.

  Then suddenly, from the midst of all that rich good will, from that air that was heavy with favorable omens, he heard the wild loud voice of his brother, close at hand. “Say, Roger, remember the night they put the swastika on our door?”

  There was a lull in the surrounding conversations as that terrible word reverberated in the room. Then an expectant hum began to fill the vacuum. Feeling himself everywhere stared at, and hearing one nervous giggle, Roger attempted a jolly laugh. “You’re crazy,” he said. “You’ve been reading too many books. Karen, darling, isn’t it time we went into the other room?”

  It is perhaps to the credit of everyone’s tact that Richard was then able to leave unobtrusively, as the front door opened to admit new guests.

  And a month later, two months before the June wedding at Lake Tahoe, Richard had a severe heart attack and died at Mount Zion Hospital, with Ellen and Roger at his bedside.

  They had been watching there at close intervals for almost the entire past week, and they were both miserably exhausted. Even their customary wariness in regard to each other had died, along with Richard.

  “Come on, let me buy you some coffee,” said Roger, fat and paternal. “You look bad.”

  “So do you,” she said. “Exhausted. Thanks, I’d like some coffee.”

  He took her to a quiet bar in North Beach, near where she was then living, and they sat in a big recessed booth, in the dim late-afternoon light, and ordered espresso. “Or would you like a cappuccino?” Roger asked. “Something sweet?”

  “No. Thanks. Espresso is fine.”

  The waiter went away.

  “Well,” said Roger.

  “Well,” echoed Ellen. “Of course it’s not as though we hadn’t known all along. What was going to happen.”

  The flat reasonableness of her tone surprised Roger. Ellen was never reasonable. So he looked at her with a little suspicion, but there was nothing visible on her white face but fatigue and sadness. The strain of her effort at reasonableness, at control, was not visible.

  Roger said, “Yes. But I wonder if we really believed it. I mean Richard talked so much about dying that it was hard to believe he would.”

  The coffee came.

  Stirring in sugar, regarding her cup, Ellen said, “People who talk about jumping under trains still sometimes do it. But I know what you mean. We somehow didn’t behave as though he would die. Isn’t that it?” She lifted her very gray eyes to his blinking pale blue.

  He took the sugar, poured and stirred. “Yes, but I wonder what different we would have done.”

  In her same flat sensible tone Ellen said, “I sometimes wouldn’t see him when he wanted to. I would be tired or just not up to it, or sometimes seeing someone else. Even if the other person was a boring nothing.” She looked curiously at Roger.

  But he had only heard the literal surface of what she had said, to which he responded with
a little flicker of excitement. “Exactly!” he said. “He was hurt and complained when I went to boring dinners or saw business friends instead of him, but I had to do that. Sometimes for my own protection.”

  “Yes,” said Ellen, still very calm but again with an oblique, upward look at Roger, which he missed.

  “People grow up and they change.” Roger sighed. “I could hardly remember all that time at Harvard and he always wanted to talk about it.”

  “Of course not,” she said, staring at him and holding her hands tightly together in her lap, as though they contained her mind.

  Roger was aware that he was acting out of character; normally he loathed these intimate, self-revelatory conversations. But he was extremely tired and, as he afterward told himself, he was understandably upset; it is not every day that one’s only brother dies. Also, as he was vaguely aware, some quality in Ellen, some quality of her listening, drove him on. Her flat silence made a vacuum that he was compelled to fill.

  “And remember that time a couple of years ago when I wanted to borrow the money?” Roger said. “He was so upset that I offered him interest. Of course I’d offer him interest. Otherwise it wouldn’t have been fair.”

  “Of course not,” said Ellen, looking deeply into his eyes. “Everyone has to pay interest,” she reasonably said.

  “It was the least I could do,” Roger said. “To be fair to him. And I couldn’t spend the rest of my life thinking and talking about how things were almost twenty years ago.”

  “Of course not,” Ellen said again, and soon after that he took her home and they parted—friends.

  But in the middle of that night Roger’s phone rang, beside his wide bachelor bed, and it was Ellen.