by Alice Adams
“A marriage is like the imposition of form on feeling in poetry,” Lyman said. “Or in painting, for heaven’s sake.”
With a sharp leap of her heart, Charlotte saw what he meant; she felt it, but she was too disturbed—about the house, about Blanche, about Ian—to think in a serious way about what Lyman was suggesting.
And gloomily she foresaw that she and Lyman would eventually come to a parting over this issue, since he was clearly serious in what he said. A year or so later, when Lyman had married someone else (lots of women really want to marry, she knew, and Lyman was exceptionally nice), she, Charlotte, would wish that she were with him; then she would mourn for Lyman, as she had for various other departed men.
It was at Lyman’s that Margery reached her—not wanting to wait to call Charlotte in the morning. She had to tell her the news.
“I can’t believe this,” said Margery over the phone. “The place is going for a hundred thousand. Honestly, Char, it must be a wreck.”
Not grasping the sum of money, her mind instead wandering back to the actual house (a wreck?), Charlotte only said, “Well, it didn’t use to be.”
“Who ever would have thought that a hundred thousand could come to look like a bargain?” said Margery.
Vaguely offended at the word “bargain” being attached to her house, Charlotte murmured, “Not I.”
• • •
An odd lapse, or confusion, of memory had been disturbing Charlotte, along with her other troubles, ever since first hearing from Blanche about the house: simply, she could not remember whether a giant pine that had been near the side porch had been cut down or not. In her earliest memories it was there; as a small child she had played with dolls and Dinky toys among its roots. And she could remember it when, as an older girl, she had sat there on the porch, making out with some boy. But then: had there been talk about cutting it down? Had Ian said it had to go, that it menaced the roof, or the porch? Possessed of an unusually active visual imagination, Charlotte could see the waving heavy-boughed pine, and she could also see its stump, raw and flat and new—or was she seeing the stump from another tree, somewhere else?
Without waiting to show it to Lyman or to Margery—to anyone—Charlotte took the yellow landscape to her gallery, a new one, in Embarcadero Center, and it was sold the next day, for more money than Charlotte could believe: enough to live on for five or six months, she thought.
To celebrate, and because, marriage or not, he was an extremely nice man, Charlotte took Lyman out to dinner, inviting him to a new French place, all polished brass and big mirrors and white linen, which they had sometimes walked past.
Exactly the kind of occasion that should be fun and won’t be, Charlotte thought as she dressed, putting on an unaccustomed skirt and silk shirt and high sandals. Lyman will make some dumb scene about not letting me pay, and we won’t have anything to talk about except the food, which will not be good.
The restaurant was attractive. And as they sat down, Lyman in a coat and tie, straw hair under control, Charlotte thought, Well, we do make a fairly handsome couple.
Easily, Lyman told the waiter to put the wine on a separate check, he would take care of that.
“Mais bien sûr, Monsieur.”
As Charlotte thought, Well, so far so good.
The food, too, was good, but then after a while something in the tone of the restaurant, maybe, began to make them unfamiliar to themselves. Charlotte heard Lyman talking in a new and stilted way—indeed, discussing the food—and she began to think, I was right.
Mainly for something new to say, she asked, “How come you never talk about Portland?” more complainingly than she had meant to. “Did you like it, growing up there?”
He grinned, showing white, white teeth. “Well, I really did,” he said. “It’s still small enough to be comprehensible, sort of. There are even some cobbled streets left. And we lived out on Cape Elizabeth, right on the Atlantic.”
He went on and on about Portland—the coast, the beaches, the rocks—and Charlotte could see it all vividly as he spoke.
But why was this conversation making her so sad? And then she knew: she was hearing the nostalgia in Lyman’s voice; his missing the place he came from was making her miss her own place, her house.
She also took Margery out, for lunch, for further celebration.
“I honestly think I must be going crazy,” Charlotte said. “Lyman could not be a nicer person; he’s kind and smart, and being five years younger than I am is not important, really. But I keep making trouble. If I had better sense I could be perfectly happy with Lyman. I sometimes am.”
Margery laughed. “If you had better sense you might not be a painter.”
“Well, I guess.”
Margery raised her wineglass in a toast, and then she asked, “What ever will you do with all that money?”
Charlotte frowned, her hands gestured helplessness. “I don’t know, it’s been worrying me. I should do something—sensible.”
“What about our buying the Berkeley house?”
“What?”
“Your house in Berkeley. I have some money saved up … and I could … and you could … we could … rent … invest … property values.”
Margery made the appointment and got the key from the real-estate agent—all the negotiations would have to be in her name, obviously—and on a bright October afternoon she and Charlotte drove over to Berkeley: two prospective buyers of an empty house.
They drove up Marin, and up and up, and then turned right on Grizzly Peak, at which point the sheer familiarity of everything she saw accelerated and heated the flow of Charlotte’s blood: how she knew all those particular turns of the road, those steep sudden views of the bay. And then there it was, in a clump of tall waving eucalyptus: her house. Sand-colored adobe bricks and a red tiled roof, a narrow wooden porch stuck out to one side like an ill-advised whim, long one-storied wings seeming to wander off behind. Perhaps because of the five years’ lapse since she had been there, or maybe because she was seeing it with Margery, Charlotte thought, What a nutty-looking house, it’s crazy. But that was an affectionate thought; the house could have been an eccentric relative. In fact, it reminded her considerably of Ian: uncontrolled, given over to impulse. (An adobe house in the Berkeley hills had been itself an eccentric impulse, or a sentimental one: Ian and her mother had spent their honeymoon in Mexico.)
When Margery had parked the car, they got out and walked toward it, toward Charlotte’s house. All the vines and shrubbery had increased considerably in the five years since her last visit; a green growth of wisteria almost covered the porch.
Like a thief, an accomplice in crime, Charlotte followed Margery up to the front door, which, with the real-estate agent’s key, Margery opened, and they walked into an absolutely empty, echoing house.
But why was Charlotte so frightened? She could have been an actual intruder, even a thief, so violent was her apprehension as they walked from room to room, both of them on tiptoe. And along with this fear came a total disorientation: was this small stained room the one that had always been called the guest room but where Ian slept from one wife to another? And was this smaller room her own, in which she had lain and listened to Eugenia’s weeping? Shivering, to Margery she whispered, “It all looks so small.”
“Rooms do, without any furniture. Honestly, they weren’t kidding about its being in bad shape.”
“I’m going back outside,” whispered Charlotte.
Outside was more familiar: the sweeping view of the bay—the water and sky, the darker skyline. The shrubs and trees and vines were all in their proper place, except for the big pine, which indeed was missing. Nor was there any stump where Charlotte thought the tree had been. Instead,in that spot Blanche (it must have been Blanche) had put in a bed of geraniums, her favorites; in the intense October sunlight they gave off a dusty, slightly rancid smell.
Margery came out at last, and together she and Charlotte walked around the house, Margery stoppin
g to peer down at foundations, to mutter about dry rot.
Once back in the car, seemingly having put dry rot out of her mind, Margery began to talk animatedly about possible reconstruction of the house: “It really has marvelous potential; it needs a lot of work, but I could … knock out walls … open up … a deck.”
By this time they were on the bridge, crossing the shining water far below—that day an interesting slate blue, a color that wet stones sometimes are.
“Well, so what do you think?” asked Margery.
“I don’t know. I guess it really doesn’t seem my kind of thing,” Charlotte said, with a certain effort.
“But I thought you wanted—I thought it would help.” Although clearly intending kindness, sympathy, Margery sounded very slightly huffy: her professional imagination was being rebuffed.
Margery would get over her huffiness in time, Charlotte thought. And while Charlotte could not entirely “get over” her pain at the loss of what she continued to think of as her house, it would perhaps become bearable, little more than an occasional sharp twinge.
She began a new painting, this time all shades of blue, from slate to brightest azure.
When, a few weeks later, a postcard came from Blanche, in Santa Barbara, showing lots of palms and flowers, and announcing that she was going to marry the most wonderful (underlined) man with a lovely house on the ocean, near the Biltmore Hotel, Charlotte stuck the card in a box with letters that she meant to answer soon.
It was a few months after that, near Christmastime, that, waking with Lyman in his wide, eccentrically carved oak bed—their most recent decision had been to make no decision, no firm plans about legalities or moving in—in a wondering voice Charlotte said, “You know, it’s curious, I don’t dream that I live in Berkeley anymore. My dreams don’t take place in that house.”
“I didn’t know they ever did,” Lyman said.
A Wonderful Woman
Feeling sixteen, although in fact just a few months short of sixty, Felicia Lord checks into the San Francisco hotel at which her lover is to meet her the following day. Felicia is tall and thin, with the intense, somewhat startled look of a survivor—a recent widow, mother of five, a ceramicist who prefers to call herself a potter. A stylish gray-blonde. Mr. Voort, she is told, will be given the room next to hers when he arrives. Smiling to herself, she then follows the ancient, wizened bellboy into an antique elevator cage; once inside, as they creakingly ascend, he turns and smiles up at her, as though he knows what she is about. She herself is less sure.
The room to which he leads her is a suite, really: big, shabby-cozy living room, discreetly adjoining bedroom, large old-fashioned bath, on the top floor of this old San Francisco hotel, itself a survivor of the earthquake and fire, in an outlying neighborhood. All in all, she instantly decides, it is the perfect place for meeting Martin, for being with him, in the bright blue dazzling weather, this sudden May.
San Francisco itself, connected as it is with Felicia’s own history, has seemed a possibly dangerous choice: the scene of her early, unlikely premarital “romance” with Charles, her now dead husband; then the scene of holiday visits from Connecticut with the children, treat zoo visits and cable-car rides, Chinese restaurants; scene of a passionate ill-advised love affair, and a subsequent abortion—all that also took place in San Francisco, but years ago, in other hotels, other neighborhoods.
Why then, having tipped the grinning bellboy and begun to unpack, silk shirts on hangers, silk tissue-papered nightgowns and underthings in drawers, does she feel such a dizzying lurch of apprehension? It is too intense in its impact to be just a traveler’s nerves, jet lag. Felicia is suddenly quite weak; she sits down in an easy chair next to a window to absorb the view, to think sensibly about her situation, or try to. She sees a crazy variety of rooftops: mansard, Victorian curls, old weathered shingles and bright new slate. Blue water, paler sky, green hills. No help.
It is being in love with Martin, she thinks, being “in love,” and the newness of Martin Voort. I’ve never known a farming sailor before, and she smiles, because the words don’t describe Martin, really, although he owns some cranberry bogs, near Cape Cod, and he builds boats. Charles was a painter, but he was rich (Martin is not rich) and most of his friends were business people. Martin is entirely new to her.
And at my age, thinks Felicia, and she smiles again, a smile which feels tremulous on her mouth.
“Wonderful” is the word that people generally have used about Felicia. She was wonderful with Charles, whose painting never came to much, although he owned a couple of galleries, who drank a lot. Wonderful with all those kids, who were a little wild, always breaking arms or heads.
Her lover—a Mexican Communist, and like Charles a painter, but a much better painter than Charles—Felipe thought she looked wonderful, with her high-boned face, strong hands and her long, strong voluptuous body. She was wonderful about the abortion, and wonderful too when he went back to his wife.
Felicia was wonderful when Charles died, perfectly controlled and kind to everyone.
Wonderful is not how Felicia sees herself at all; she feels that she has always acted out of simple—or sometimes less simple—necessity.
Once married to Charles, and having seen the lonely, hollow space behind his thin but brilliant surface of good looks, graceful manners, skill at games—it was then impossible to leave him; and he couldn’t have stood it. And when the children had terrible coughs, or possible concussions, she took good care of them, sometimes staying up all night, simply because she wanted them well, and soon.
During the unanesthetized abortion, she figured out that you don’t scream, because that would surely make the pain much worse, when it is already so bad that it must be happening to someone else, and also because the doctor, a Brazilian chiropractor in the Mission District, is hissing, “Don’t make noise.” And when your lover defects, saying that he is going back, after all, to his wife in Guadalajara, you don’t scream about that either; what good would it do? You go back to your husband, and to the clay pots that you truly love, round and fat or delicately slender.
When your husband dies, as gracefully as he lived, after a too strenuous game of tennis, you take care of everything and everyone, and you behave well, for your own sake as well as for everyone else’s.
Then you go to visit an old friend, in Duxbury, and you meet a large wild red-haired, blue-eyed man, a “sailor-farmer,” and you fall madly in love, and you agree to meet him for a holiday, in May, in San Francisco, because he has some boats to see there.
She is scared. Sitting there, in the wide sunny window, Felicia trembles, thinking of Martin, the lovely city, themselves, for a long first time. But supposing she isn’t “wonderful” anymore? Suppose it all fails, flesh fails, hearts fail, and everything comes crashing down upon their heads, like an avalanche, or an earthquake?
She thinks, I will have to go out for a walk.
Returned from a short tour of the neighborhood, which affords quick beautiful views of the shining bay, and an amazing variety of architecture, Felicia feels herself restored; she is almost her own person again, except for a curious weakness in her legs, and the faintest throb of blood behind one temple, both of which she ascribes to fatigue. She stands there for a moment on the sidewalk, in the sunlight, and then she re-enters the hotel. She is about to walk past the desk when the bellboy, still stationed there, waves something in her direction. A yellow envelope—a telegram.
She thanks him and takes it with her into the elevator, waiting to open it until she is back in her room. It will be from Martin, to welcome her there. Already she knows the character of his gestures: he hates the phone; in fact, so far they have never talked on the telephone, but she has received at least a dozen telegrams from Martin, whose instructions must always include: “Deliver, do not phone.” After the party at which they met he wired, from Boston to Duxbury: HAVE DINNER WITH ME WILL PICK YOU UP AT SEVEN MARTIN VOORT. Later ones were either jokes or messages of love
—or both: from the start they had laughed a lot.
This telegram says: DARLING CRAZY DELAY FEW DAYS LATE ALL LOVE.
The weakness that earlier Felicia had felt in her legs makes them now suddenly buckle; she falls across the bed, and all the blood in both temples pounds as she thinks: I can’t stand it, I really can’t. This is the one thing that is too much for me.
But what do you do if you can’t stand something, and you don’t scream, after all?
Maybe you just go to bed, as though you were sick?
She undresses, puts on a pretty nightgown and gets into bed, where, like a person with a dangerously high fever, she begins to shake. Her arms crossed over her breast, she clutches both elbows; she presses her ankles together. The tremors gradually subside, and finally, mercifully, she falls asleep, and into dreams. But her sleep is fitful, thin, and from time to time she half wakes from it, never at first sure where she is, nor what year of her life this is.
A long time ago, in the early Forties, during Lieutenant (USN) Charles Lord’s first leave, he and Felicia Thacher, whom he had invited out to see him, literally danced all night, at all the best hotels in town—as Felicia wondered: Why me? How come Charles picked me for this leave? She had known him since childhood; he was one of her brother’s best friends. Had someone else turned him down? She had somewhat the same reactions when he asked her to marry him, over a breakfast glass of champagne, in the Garden Court of the Palace Hotel. Why me? she wondered, and she wondered too at why she was saying yes. She said yes, dreamily, to his urgent eyes, his debonair smile, light voice, in that room full of wartime glamor, uniforms and flowers, partings and poignant brief reunions. Yes, Charles, yes, let’s do get married, all right, soon.
A dream of a courtship, and then a dream groom, handsome Charles. And tall, strong-boned, strong-willed Felicia Thacher Lord.