To See You Again

by Alice Adams

  “Sometimes I can’t remember when you first came here,” Ran said one night. “Was it before or after Lucinda killed herself?”

  “Just after,” I told him as I digested what I had only half known, or heard as rumor before, what he thought I already knew—Lucinda’s suicide. And I sadly wished that he had been able to say this before; it might have eased some pain for him, I thought. And I thought about Lucinda, her long novels and small madrigals, her dislike of the “cluttered” landscape, and I cursed her for adding to a deeply guilty man’s store of guilt. In the long run, really, Gloria had done him a lot less harm.

  “I guess by now I think you’ve always been around,” he said, with a new half-smile, so that my heart lurched with an aching, unfamiliar tenderness for him.

  On another evening of that summer Ran told me that he was going to sell his house. “It’s too big,” he said. “Taxes. So many rooms. Maids. The windows.” He had a new and alarming habit of quick breaths between almost each word, and deep difficult breaths between sentences. Now, after such a labored pause, he added, “I’m tired of it.”

  “You lying bastard.” Fear made me rough; it was at about this time that I began to adopt my stance of gruffness, to perfect my just-not-rude snort. “You wouldn’t know what to do without this house,” I told him, and then I laughed. “But if you really want to sell it, I’ll buy it from you.”

  That night was as close as we had come to quarreling for some time, but in the course of those hours we worked out a highly original real-estate deal, whereby I would buy Ran’s house, but I would not take possession of it until I had paid for over half of it, by which time we both knew that Ran would be dead.

  And that, Ms. Heffelfinger, in brief, is how it went. I bought Ran’s house, and soon afterward, early that fall, he died, and I moved in. I sorted and labeled and stored away all his papers, his manuscripts, his library, as though it had all been infinitely valuable, which, to me, it was. (He had kept no letters from Gloria, which was both gratifying and frustrating.)

  • • •

  After so much heavy thought, and so much to drink, I should have awakened the next day in a state of hung-over exhaustion—a state that my poor guilty Presbyterian Ran used to describe as being “richly deserved.” But I did not feel terrible, not at all. I got up and made myself a healthy breakfast, and then I telephoned the inn, for Candida Heffelfinger.

  She came over promptly, in answer to my invitation (a summons, it must have sounded like), and she looked as I had imagined that she would: contrite and tired, and rumpled. Unlike me, she could not have slept well.

  She told me that she had been walking around the town, and how much she liked it, and I agreed. Then we both admired, again, the bright fall view from my windows.

  And then she said, “I’ve been thinking—and I hope this won’t sound presumptuous, but would you mind if I shifted the focus of our talk a little? I mean, so many people have written about the legendary love affair.”

  This was irritating: she was saying to me exactly what I had meant to say to her.

  I snorted. “I suppose you mean to take another tack, and zero in on our fights?”

  “Oh no, of course not. I wouldn’t—”

  “In point of fact,” I told her, “the written accounts are remarkably close to the truth. I was in Italy, and Gloria Bingham visited here for a while, and then she left. Ran and I both had our flings, but no one else mattered much to either of us.”

  Candida seemed to find that statement both moving and final, as I did myself. She was silent for a while, and then she said, “I really meant about your work. It’s interesting, your beginning with those small figures. The gain in scope.”

  “It undoubtedly had something to do with my physical size,” I told her, very dry.

  “I can understand that,” she said. Well, I believed that she could, indeed; we are about the same height. Big ladies.

  “What really happened,” I then told her, “was in Italy, for the first time, I saw real Michelangelos. In the Bargello, and in the Vatican, St. Peter’s—”

  We talked for several hours, and I saw that I had been right all along about Candida; my instincts still were fine. She was very nice indeed, and smart. I liked her. Our talk went on all morning, and into the afternoon.

  I had a marvelous time.

  Related Histories

  In the late Forties, just after the Second World War, a large party—in fact, a dance—took place in a small castle in Central Europe. It was late August, a very black, hot still night. In the castle’s million-windowed central hall, American music, on records, issued from a Victrola. Glasses and pitchers of pale watery wine were set out on a long table. An elderly man in a shabby white coat poured out the wine and changed or turned over the records—indifferently, since he did not speak English and disliked the music.

  Couples, some in costume, most in some variety of festive or at least dressed-up attire, danced out on the floor; other people stood about in clusters, in animated or sometimes serious conversation. The next day, everyone there would be leaving the castle, the American professors, instructors, American wives and all the European students, for this had been an experiment in international education, and the six weeks were just over.

  One person, the very distinguished Professor Howard Stein, an elegant Bostonian, brilliant, of a high, exacerbated consciousness, was neither dancing nor talking to anyone. He was listening to the saccharine, meretricious music—longing for Mozart, for a soaring of Bach—and thinking that the experiment, the seminar, had been a failure. With deep embarrassment, and perfect clarity—his fate—he recalled the speech that he himself gave on the first afternoon of the conference, in a small clearing, among romantic statuary, beside the castle’s lake. They had all come to this place, he had said and now could hear himself saying, from widely divergent histories, geographies, in some cases opposing ideologies, but they were all now united in staunch and sober anti-Fascism, were all opposed to the forces of darkness recently defeated.

  Wild applause and cries of approval, in various languages, greeted those remarks, and later, fervent handshakes from moist-eyed colleagues, fellow teachers at the eminent Midwestern university that had sent them all there.

  And what he had said turned out to be, quite simply and horribly, not true. Many of the German and Austrian students, and one of the Italians, a skinny young woman, had gradually and sometimes inadvertently revealed themselves as Nazi-Fascists still. During the second week of the seminar, the Danish students, a splendidly blond and handsome group, had left in a body, having recognized one of the Germans as a former professor who had been forced to leave Denmark because of Nazi sympathies. (The German left too, a day later, with a face-saving story of illness.) At a poetry reading a German student loudly remarked that Heine was not a German, he was Jewish. And a supposedly “reconstructed” Austrian, who had spent time in a POW camp in Texas and had been horrified at the Southern treatment of Negroes, announced, when asked, that he saw no relationship between that treatment of a “race” and what had gone on in Germany. That same Austrian and the Italian woman were later overheard (by Howard Stein) in a shared reference to “our Navy.”

  The question about the treatment of races had been put to the Austrian by Howard’s least favorite wife of an instructor, one of his own former students; an unbearably serious young woman, too thin, with hyperintense brown eyes, who was just then dancing past with an authentic anti-Fascist, a young Italian who was known to have fought with the partisans.

  Diana McBride, the young American wife not liked by Howard Stein, would surely have agreed with him, however, about the seminar. In fact, earlier in the evening she had said to the university dean who organized the whole thing, in her half-tentative, half-bold way, “Wouldn’t it have been better to have it in a more friendly country, like France?”

  “You should not make that suggestion unless you are prepared to act on it, to perform the work of removal,” she was told, with conside
rable force, by the dean. Of necessity, he believed that the seminar had been a great success.

  Silenced by power, although uncomfortably aware of the illogic of what he had said, Diana felt that everything she had done, all summer, had been wrong. To begin with, their very presence at the seminar, hers and her husband’s, was suspect. The other instructors were chosen for academic distinction, whereas Braxton McBride was asked in the hope that his father, rich old William McBride, would contribute substantially to the project. Instead, Mr. McBride’s contribution was as penurious as were most of his gestures, and there Braxton was, already announced as an instructor. Hideously embarrassing: Diana felt it much more than Braxton did. He behaved as he always had, like a plump rich spoiled only child, taking interest in and appreciation of himself for granted. Not bothering to please anyone.

  Diana, in many ways her husband’s opposite, took very little for granted, and sometimes she tried too hard to please; it was this latter quality which had gone so wrong with Howard Stein on one of the first days of the seminar. They were coming home from a group excursion to a neighboring, larger and grander castle, and by accident, surely, Diana and Howard sat down next to each other in the long open truck, the transportation for that day’s excursion. Wildly casting about for something to say to the distinguished critic, her former professor, Diana seized upon the passing scenery: a gentle landscape of woods and meadows. “It looks rather like New England, don’t you think?” she observed (unavoidably tight-voiced, and stilted). Dr. Stein turned fully on her; he glared as what she took to be tears of rage filled his eyes. “Most emphatically not,” he said, and he turned around to begin a conversation with a knot of Spanish students (Loyalists) on his other side. Confronted with his narrow back and the black, patrician shape of his skull, Diana felt tears sting her own eyes.

  Howard Stein had a reputation for not liking wives, even for being rude to them; still, Diana was sorely aware of it.

  However, the afternoon before the dance, a good thing happened to Diana: in the neighboring town, in a small shop, she found a pretty dress which fit her perfectly, a dark silk, embroidered with small flowers. It was a little peasanty, a costume, but perfect for the farewell dance. And since for six weeks there had been nothing to spend money on but ice cream at the local PX, she had plenty of traveler’s checks.

  Generally, Diana did not like the way she looked, but that night, in that dress, she felt transformed. It fit her so smoothly, seeming to shape her thin body; its sheen added color to her face and eyes.

  And then that nice boy, Vittorio, asked her to dance.

  • • •

  Out on the porch, Stanley Morris, from Brooklyn, a young, enthusiastic and most promising instructor, was vigorously embracing a young Estonian girl, and at the same time deciding that he would, after all, marry the dark, graceful, intelligent and clearly rich girl whom he had met on the boat coming over.

  With her natural elegance, Vassar, Phi Beta, she would be a terrific asset wherever Stanley went; even at Harvard, his wild and not unfounded hope, she would fit right in. And she was sexy, too; those nights on the boat were wonderful.

  The Estonian girl, a small round blonde, was terribly attracted to that handsome American; she couldn’t help squirming against his hands. But some still cool part of her mind was thinking that she didn’t trust him, quite. He had told her that he had no girlfriend, and that after the seminar he would come up to visit her, in the small town in Brittany where her family now lived, but somehow she didn’t believe him, and she managed to push his hand away.

  It was an extremely hot night, still; an almost full pale moon, earlier a slight illumination, now had set. The lake was flat, unmoving, and no breeze stirred in the surrounding shrubbery, the concealing pines.

  Tired of watching the dancers, and there was no one around he wanted to talk to—he was tired of everyone there—Howard Stein decided to go out for a breath of air. He opened the wide door to the porch, and as he passed them, he dimly recognized Stanley Morris amorously engaged with the slutty-looking Estonian girl. Howard gave a slight twitch of disgust; he felt infinitely alone.

  And with the most terrible sadness, as he walked out toward the lake, he remembered another, much happier summer of his life, twenty years back, when as a young man he had taken a hiking tour through some of the Loire Valley, the Dordogne, with Kenneth Carlisle, his great friend, now dead for several years. It was quite possible, tortured Howard had forced himself to admit, that he had been in love with Kenneth; certainly those were his strongest feelings, ever, about another human being. However, Kenneth, who later married, could never have suspected anything of the sort; they were, quite simply, perfect friends, perfectly happy together. And there had been nothing of that nature in Howard’s later life, nothing at all.

  Passing the grove, with its silly statuary, where he made that awful sentimental speech, Howard realized that he was close to tears.

  He would have to do something, get a grip on himself, somehow. This fall he would start a new book; maybe at last the one on Melville.

  And tomorrow he would force himself to make a final visit to the Jewish DP camp just down the road from the castle. This hastily and poorly thrown together camp, housing some four hundred displaced Jews who were waiting to go to Israel, had been, for Howard, an aching problem. First, Stanley Morris, good-looking, warm and ebulliently sympathetic to those people, went over there to pay a sort of investigatory call. He returned to the castle with wrenching stories of how he had been received: with such dignity and grace, such appreciation. He was served tea; those people were overjoyed to find a cultivated American who spoke Yiddish—they were terrific people, Stanley said. Compassionate and concerned, and feeling strong kinship with those displaced Jews, Howard overcame his own shy reluctance to go anywhere; the next time Stanley visited the camp, Howard went along. (Howard did not speak Yiddish; for generations no one in his family had.) And Howard too was deeply moved by just what Stanley had described: the dignity, the courage, the gratitude for distinguished visits. One of the men had been a classics professor in Munich; another, a Polish physicist.

  However, after that Stanley announced that he had been too disturbed ever to return; it tore him apart, he said, alluding to relatives lost in the Holocaust. Believing that in all conscience he must respect Stanley’s feelings, Howard returned to the camp for several visits alone. In his academic German he had to explain Stanley’s absence: extreme busyness, he said. He felt apologetic about not knowing Yiddish; in fact, he felt himself to be a poor substitute for Stanley.

  But tomorrow he would visit them once more, to say goodbye.

  One reason that Diana McBride felt badly about Howard Stein’s evident distaste for her was that he was the greatest teacher in her experience. She had taken two courses from him as an undergraduate, one on Donne and the Metaphysical poets, another an American literature survey. She had not read Donne before, nor any of those poets, and she was powerfully affected both by the marvelous poetry and by Howard Stein’s concise and brilliant lectures. She would leave the lecture hall in a sort of daze, illuminated, stirred, still in her mind hearing that crisp and elegant voice, those sharp Bostonian vowels.

  And his lectures at the seminar had been wonderful; he spoke on Melville, Whitman, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams.

  To the Italian boy, as they slowly danced, she said, “Dr. Stein’s lectures were terrific, weren’t they?”

  “I think that he is a great man,” said Vittorio Garibaldi.

  Vittorio was a slender, fair-complected northern Italian from Padua. There was the faintest physical resemblance between him and Diana; both were light, slight people—a kinship of which they themselves were unaware, being so entirely unfamiliar to each other, but which they may have sensed as a sort of affinity.

  Diana was aware of feeling less shy with Vittorio than she usually was, even dancing better. She felt light on her feet as they whirled to “Tuxedo Junction,” and a little lightheaded, al
most silly; possibly from the wine? But she hadn’t had that much.

  The record stopped and she and Vittorio looked at each other, and for no reason at all they laughed.

  “Is that young girl, young McBride’s wife, partly Italian?” an eminent historian asked an eminent economist; both were American professors.

  “I haven’t a clue. I don’t know her, actually.”

  “Funny, she and that Italian boy look rather alike.”

  The economist peered in the direction indicated. The idea of a conversation about an instructor’s wife bored him a great deal, but then so had the one they were just having, about prices in Paris before the war. “If you ask me they both look drunk,” he decisively said.

  “My country is—how do you say?—a complete mess,” Vittorio seriously told Diana, during a long pause between records. “So torn in pieces, so everywhere divided. People with not homes. And the political parties, everybody fighting. Communists fighting Socialists, fighting Christian Democrats, fighting Monarchists. So much to do. I have to find some place in all that. Some work.”

  “Which is your party?” asked Diana, with timid but intense interest.

  “It is called the Action Party. Mainly former partisans. But it is so small, it will be absorbed by some larger, stronger party, either Socialists or Communists.”

  His high seriousness was stirring to Diana; he seemed to take a useful life for granted; work to be done meant that he must do it. She tried to think of her own country, the States, in that way, and she then sighed with helplessness; undoubtedly there too were things to be done, but she would not know how to start, having so far never thought in those terms.

  Very gently Vittorio asked her, “And you, what of your life?”

  The truth was that for the moment Diana planned to follow the course currently prescribed for wives of graduate students. She would get a job and help support her husband until he got his doctorate (William McBride did not hand out a lot of money, not believing in “spoiling” his son, unaware that he already had); then, according to this pattern, the husband with the Ph.D. could get a job and the wife could start having babies.