Beautiful Girl

by Alice Adams

  (My private formula for a depression is all of Jane Austen; it may be time for her now.)

  Everyone, or everyone I know, feels warmly and strongly about the Xs. Only once did I hear a negative remark about them, and that was from a harsh, competitive woman, Ms. Z, who was, I believe, simply tired of hearing Judith, in particular, so much praised. “Well,” said Ms. Z. (She has an especially unpleasant voice: loud and condescending, with a fake “Eastern” accent.) “Well, I really feel that most of her relationships are very superficial.” Though hostile, Ms. Z is not stupid; there may have been a sort of truth in her remark, if she meant that Judith’s friends are less important to her than she to them. (Another truth may be that Judith’s feelings for Ms. Z are superficial.) I for one don’t mind. I accept the fact that her husband and children are the center of Judith’s life—and Israel; she has always had a strong emotional-ideological attachment to Israel. Both she and Daniel come from originally Central European Jewish families who suffered horrors under Hitler—agonizing deaths and deprivations; of course they feel strongly about Israel.

  They have often visited there. They love it.

  Israel. I see deserts and sand dunes, modern architecture superimposed on ancient cities. Scholars and statesmen. Chaim Weizmann, Golda Meir. Maps, arrows, darkened areas of trouble. Televised wars.

  In a way I envy this attachment of the Xs to another country. When, as increasingly happens, I cannot stand the directions taken by this one—the support of wars and governments that I hate, the nonsupport of the old and sick and poor—I am sadly aware of having nowhere else to go. I love northern Italy, and southern France, but I don’t think I could live in either place.

  I would think that you have to be passionately committed to Israel to live there. Possibly you have to be Jewish?

  So, then, a part of my reaction is envy? I might have known.

  At the same party at which I lost my black silk bag, an old, ill-looking man was talking a lot about how terrible Cesar Chavez is, mentioning wetbacks, Kennedys, Catholics and more wetbacks. I said at last that although not a wetback, a Kennedy nor even a Catholic, I admired Mr. Chavez very much.

  He thought I was accusing him of calling me a wetback. Hopeless confusion. He sputtered off, enraged, his face a darker, more unhealthy mottled red.

  I wonder: is it possible that he stole my bag, hoping to find subversive literature, or dope? Or could he be the closet kleptomaniac (or queen)? I would love for these things to be true, any of them, but I am afraid he is simply a sick reactionary.

  As I have not said so far, I too am part of a couple. And I suppose our relationship with the Xs is characteristic of such couple friendships: the strong bond is between Judith and me. The men like each other well enough but without us, the women, they would probably not know each other.

  Daniel is an extremely attractive man, but (fortunately) I am never turned on by husbands of women I like. I would guess that Judith is the same.

  Judith calls, and because we so infrequently speak on the phone at first I don’t recognize her voice. But then I do, and I begin to make concealing jokes about how terrible it is that they are leaving.

  She laughs in her affectionate way, and she says, “Oh, you’re really wonderful—I love you—yours is really the best reaction. Everyone else is saying how great.”

  I tell her that I am just entirely selfish.

  “Well, what are you doing now?”

  “Now?”

  “Why don’t you two come over for dinner? I’m making some veal.”

  (Judith is an exceptional cook. Of course.)

  My husband (my third: Israel is not all that I envy Judith for; this one is nice, usually, but the two divorces were not nice at all), this husband says, comfortingly, “Well, maybe they’re not really serious. You know, it could be just an idea.”

  I laugh gratefully. “Like the way I talk about moving to Verona?”

  “Yes, sort of like that.”

  In this crazy weather I never know what to wear; it’s even hot at night. I settle on a favorite long summer cotton dress.

  As we walk toward their house we can see Judith and Daniel through their front windows; and somehow, sinkingly, from their postures I know that they are serious about Israel.

  “Serious” is in fact the correct word to describe that evening. Despite good wines and superlative (as always) food, none of us is light-hearted.

  We have come there, really, to hear in detail the Xs’ plans, and we do; we hear all about it, we argue and concede.

  They are going to sell everything, Daniel says: his business, their comfortable large house—this house—and their summer country cabin. My husband, in many ways a practical man (although a sculptor, an excellent one, and he teaches at a local art school)—he suggests that they rent this house for a while, instead of selling, and have the rent as income, there in Israel.

  “No.” Daniel has thought of and rejected this. “I want to go there completely committed. We’re not just sticking our toes in the water.”

  They will go, then, with a fair amount of money. Which they are going to use to buy or invest in a new business: an English language bookstore. They are informed that there is room for such a shop in Jerusalem, which is where they want to live. The book business appeals strongly to them both, and we have to admit that it makes sense.

  (Now, this is curious: the more definite their intentions sound, the better I am able to accept them. As one would a clear diagnosis—I am not glad, not at all, but merely sad, rather than darkly depressed.)

  By the end of the evening we are saying that we will all meet glamorously in Rome, or that we will come to visit them in Jerusalem.

  “You’d really love it.” Judith is sure.

  We go home more or less cheered.

  But sometime after midnight, at some terrible pre-dawn hour, suspended between black and gray light, I begin to think of the four people whom I knew well who have died this year. Cancer (two), emphysema, a suicide. It has seemed a year of death, of thinking of death, living near it. And then I see that in my list I forgot Simon’s grandfather, who died of a heart ailment. Five.

  I believe that several epidemics are going on.

  • • •

  That morning, getting up, we see that one of those violently wrenched changes in the weather has occurred, to which we in San Francisco seem fated. (It is surprising that we don’t all have pneumonia, often.) It is extremely cold; the sky is black, with menacing clouds, and a harsh wind blows, and blows. Surely now it will rain?

  But it doesn’t rain. By noon the clouds have disappeared, and the day is brilliant with sunshine, although still very cold. And then, in late afternoon, the clouds come back. But still no rain.

  Actually, my husband and I have not been getting along especially well. Nothing terrible, and nothing definite; simply—a slackening of whatever tensions have drawn and held us together. A lessening of warmth, of interest. We talk less. We spend more hours at home in separate rooms.

  My first two husbands were both doctors. Perhaps a sculptor is too radical a change?

  Are there any solutions?

  My son telephones. His grandfather’s will has been read, and he will “come into,” as the phrase goes, quite a lot of money.

  (Will he go to Wales?)

  “Simon, that’s terrific,” I say, concealing fear (I think). “Whatever will you do with all that?”

  I am notoriously stupid about money; ludicrous for me to advise him; besides he is too old.

  “I think I’ll buy a pair of flats on Potrero Hill.” Potrero, across the city from Pacific Heights, is a looser, more varied neighborhood than this upper-middle-class one, where Simon grew up. “With that much of a down payment I could pay it all off soon with rents, and have some income left.”

  Simon is a painter (he and this husband get along very well); this seems a wonderfully practical solution for him. I am amazed, really delighted.

  “A building on top of one of the h
ills. I could have the top floor for a studio,” he is saying.

  Sometimes Simon makes me think that there is, after all, some hope for the rest of us.

  That night, half asleep, I hear a curious small steady sound, which I do not understand. But it is not the rain, which by now we do desperately need.

  The next morning, still sleepy, I get up first and walk toward the front of the house, and gradually I become aware that outside, beyond the windows, something extraordinary is happening. Snow! I call out, “Snow!” waking my husband, alarming the cats. “Look—snow!”

  It never snows in San Francisco (the last real snowfall was in 1876) but there it is: white on the rooftops of cars parked along the street, and still coming down—softly, gently, with infinite delicacy. A miracle.

  Bundled in sheepskin, wearing boots, I go out for a walk. Light snow feathers my face—it is lovely!

  I head for the clinic where Judith works, and there she is, also in sheepskin but hers is white; she bought it in Israel. She is coming out the door as I approach. She says happily, “A patient just canceled and I thought I’d walk down to the park. See the trees with snow.”

  “Marvelous.”

  People are driving more slowly than usual; everyone looks about with a sort of wonderment.

  We reach the Presidio, the woods: eucalyptus, bent cypresses and pines, today are all dusted over with white, although it is no longer snowing. It is very beautiful, as Judith and I say to each other.

  Then Judith says, “When friends from Israel come to see us, we always bring them here, and sometimes out to Muir Woods. You know, they have so few trees there.”

  This remark, rather sadly spoken, remains in my mind, with echoes. And for the first time it occurs to me that we are not, after all, entirely opposed on this issue of their going to Israel. It is not as though Judith had no misgivings about their move, and I no good wishes for them.

  I say, “But you’ll come back sometimes to visit?”

  “Oh, of course. We’ve got our parents, and all the kids, and you.”

  We laugh at this, but I do feel better.

  That afternoon it occurs to me that perhaps some ceremony or ritual would help, and I choose the one available to my age and social group: a party. We will give a party for the Xs, a farewell party. It is strange that I had not thought of this before: my husband and I like to give parties; it is something that we do well together. We have worked out a formula that is somewhere between a cocktail party and a buffet dinner (we both dislike both those labels). It is just a party, with a lot of food and drink.

  Judith is delighted—is touched. Daniel at first demurs. “Oh, God, please, no parties.” But then he smiles and gives in.

  My husband says, “Oh, good. We haven’t had one for a while.”

  I begin to call friends, to invite them.

  I start with another favorite friend, Nora Y, a Berkeley novelist. (Thank God the Ys are not moving anywhere.) Nora, who also loves Judith, says terrific, a party, what a good idea.

  And then she says, “But are they sure they’ll like it there? I think I’d rather go to England, or southern France.”

  “Oh, so would I.”

  “Well, why don’t we? Let’s start an adult colony in the Dordogne, or somewhere like that.”

  “Terrific.”

  We laugh and hang up.

  The next day I read in the paper that it has snowed in Jerusalem, where I had thought it also never snowed.

  I go by to see Judith; she is busy—she says that it does sometimes snow in Jerusalem, but very rarely.

  I report on the progress of the party.

  It is now raining steadily, the rain we needed.

  And for the first time in months almost anything seems possible.

  Roses, Rhododendron

  One dark and rainy Boston spring of many years ago, I spent all my after-school and evening hours in the living room of our antique-crammed Cedar Street flat, writing down what the Ouija board said to my mother. My father, a spoiled and rowdy Irishman, a sometime engineer, had run off to New Orleans with a girl, and my mother hoped to learn from the board if he would come back. Then, one night in May, during a crashing black thunderstorm (my mother was both afraid and much in awe of such storms), the board told her to move down South, to North Carolina, taking me and all the antiques she had been collecting for years, and to open a store in a small town down there. This is what we did, and shortly thereafter, for the first time in my life, I fell permanently in love: with a house, with a family of three people and with an area of countryside.

  Perhaps too little attention is paid to the necessary preconditions of “falling in love”—I mean the state of mind or place that precedes one’s first sight of the loved person (or house or land). In my own case, I remember the dark Boston afternoons as a precondition of love. Later on, for another important time, I recognized boredom in a job. And once the fear of growing old.

  In the town that she had chosen, my mother, Margot (she picked out her own name, having been christened Margaret), rented a small house on a pleasant back street. It had a big surrounding screened-in porch, where she put most of the antiques, and she put a discreet sign out in the front yard: “Margot—Antiques.” The store was open only in the afternoons. In the mornings and on Sundays, she drove around the countryside in our ancient and spacious Buick, searching for trophies among the area’s country stores and farms and barns. (She is nothing if not enterprising; no one else down there had thought of doing that before.)

  Although frequently embarrassed by her aggression—she thought nothing of making offers for furniture that was in use in a family’s rooms—I often drove with her during those first few weeks. I was excited by the novelty of the landscape. The red clay banks that led up to the thick pine groves, the swollen brown creeks half hidden by flowering tangled vines. Bare, shaded yards from which rose gaunt, narrow houses. Chickens that scattered, barefoot children who stared at our approach.

  “Hello, there. I’m Mrs. John Kilgore—Margot Kilgore—and I’m interested in buying old furniture. Family portraits. Silver.”

  Margot a big brassily bleached blonde in a pretty flowered silk dress and high-heeled patent sandals. A hoarse and friendly voice. Me a scrawny, pale, curious girl, about ten, in a blue linen dress with smocking across the bodice. (Margot has always had a passionate belief in good clothes, no matter what.)

  On other days, Margot would say, “I’m going to look over my so-called books. Why don’t you go for a walk or something, Jane?”

  And I would walk along the sleepy, leafed-over streets, on the unpaved sidewalks, past houses that to me were as inviting and as interesting as unread books, and I would try to imagine what went on inside. The families. Their lives.

  The main street, where the stores were, interested me least. Two-story brick buildings—dry-goods stores, with dentists’ and lawyers’ offices above. There was also a drugstore, with round marble tables and wire-backed chairs, at which wilting ladies sipped at their Cokes. (This was to become a favorite haunt of Margot’s.) I preferred the civic monuments: a pre-Revolutionary Episcopal chapel of yellowish cracked plaster, and several tall white statues to the Civil War dead—all of them quickly overgrown with ivy or Virginia creeper.

  These were the early nineteen-forties, and in the next few years the town was to change enormously. Its small textile factories would be given defense contracts (parachute silk); a Navy preflight school would be established at a neighboring university town. But at that moment it was a sleeping village. Untouched.

  My walks were not a lonely occupation, but Margot worried that they were, and some curious reasoning led her to believe that a bicycle would help. (Of course, she turned out to be right.) We went to Sears, and she bought me a big new bike—blue, with balloon tires—on which I began to explore the outskirts of town and the countryside.

  The house I fell in love with was about a mile out of town, on top of a hill. A small stone bank that was all overgrown with
tangled roses led up to its yard, and pink and white roses climbed up a trellis to the roof of the front porch—the roof on which, later, Harriet and I used to sit and exchange our stores of erroneous sexual information. Harriet Farr was the daughter of the house. On one side of the house, there was what looked like a newer wing, with a bay window and a long side porch, below which the lawn sloped down to some flowering shrubs. There was a yellow rosebush, rhododendron, a plum tree, and beyond were woods—pines, and oak and cedar trees. The effect was rich and careless, generous and somewhat mysterious. I was deeply stirred.

  As I was observing all this, from my halted bike on the dusty white hilltop, a small, plump woman, very erect, came out of the front door and went over to a flower bed below the bay window. She sat down very stiffly. (Emily, who was Harriet’s mother, had some terrible, never diagnosed trouble with her back; she generally wore a brace.) She was older than Margot, with very beautiful white hair that was badly cut in that butchered nineteen-thirties way.

  From the first, I was fascinated by Emily’s obvious dissimilarity to Margot. I think I was somehow drawn to her contradictions—the shapeless body held up with so much dignity, even while she was sitting in the dirt. The lovely chopped-off hair. (There were greater contradictions, which I learned of later—she was a Virginia Episcopalian who always voted for Norman Thomas, a feminist who always delayed meals for her tardy husband.)

  Emily’s hair was one of the first things about the Farr family that I mentioned to Margot after we became friends, Harriet and Emily and I, and I began to spend most of my time in that house.

  “I don’t think she’s ever dyed it,” I said, with almost conscious lack of tact.

  Of course, Margot was defensive. “I wouldn’t dye mine if I thought it would be a decent color on its own.”

  But by that time Margot’s life was also improving. Business was fairly good, and she had finally heard from my father, who began to send sizable checks from New Orleans. He had found work with an oil company. She still asked the Ouija board if she would see him again, but her question was less obsessive.