To See You Again

by Alice Adams

  So far, this is what Diana had vaguely imagined would happen, but suddenly, seeing it from the center of Europe, as she stood so close to Vittorio Garibaldi, she was unable to commit herself to such a plan, unable even to say it. Instead she told him what was half a lie. With a little laugh she said, “Actually, I’ve thought of going to law school.” It was true that once she had thought about law school, but that was quite a few years ago, as a freshman in college, an enthusiastic innocent, long before meeting Braxton, years before this marriage.

  Naturally, Vittorio took her at her word. “That is marvelous,” he told her, with great warmth, a wide white smile. “You will be a wonderful lawyer, I know that.”

  And then he said, “I have never seen brown eyes to have so much gold in them as yours do.”

  Vittorio was a highly serious young man; gold-brown eyes cannot have been all that drew him to Diana, and he was powerfully drawn. He must have sensed a potentiality in her of which no one else was then aware, not her husband, nor her former professor Howard Stein, nor, surely, Diana herself. Vittorio thought she would be a good lawyer, would even attain some greatness.

  Stanley Morris, aware that he had been caught at that ignominious activity, that adolescent wrestling with a vulgar little girl from nowhere, irrationally but quite humanly directed his rage toward her.

  “You stupid little tease,” he whispered into her ear, the ear that a moment ago was listening to his endearments, his amorous persuasions. “You’re nothing but a waste of my time.” He sat up and began to rearrange his disordered clothes.

  The Estonian girl began to cry, as softly as a kitten.

  In total disgust, for he now thought the whole summer had been a waste of time, not getting him anywhere, Stanley went back into the hall, where the dance was still going on.

  If he could find Howard Stein and engage him in serious conversation, thus reassuring Howard that he, Stanley, was a worthwhile person, the evening could not be counted as a total loss. But Howard did not seem to be around.

  “Honey—” That nasal sound announced the plump presence of Braxton McBride, her young husband, at Diana’s elbow. Her just-soaring spirits dropped as she turned around.

  “Honey, I think I’m getting a sort of a headache. I’d better go on to bed. No, you stay, I’ll be all right.”

  According to the previous rules of their relationship, Diana was then supposed to express strong sympathy and concern: Braxton had frequent terrible headaches. And of course she should accompany him to bed. But tonight she did not do this. She said, “Well, okay. Sleep is probably the best thing. I’ll be along later.”

  Braxton was surprised, but there was not much he could say. With a martyred look he kissed her left cheek. He said good night and left.

  The party seemed to be winding down. The wine was not strong enough for any long-range effect, and by now they had run out of it. And the good fellowship engendered by general awareness that this was the last night was running out too.

  A conversation between the organizing, success-oriented dean and a visiting anthropologist came apart when the anthropologist described the seminar as “a bizarre but predictable group situation.”

  The dean scowled as the anthropologist tried to explain. “I mean, all the groups acted within their assigned national characters. The Danes were noble, high-minded, the Austrians untrustworthy, the Spaniards dark and mysterious. The Italians were sexually active, the Americans foolishly ignorant and the Germans pigs.”

  This did not work. The dean was thinking: Christ, these generalizing, bigoted remarks from an anthropologist? And that sentence could be read on his face.

  “Of course I am generalizing,” said the anthropologist.

  They parted in mutual distrust, dislike.

  Various people went off to their beds.

  No one was any longer playing records, the old man having gone to his bed in a narrow room just off the kitchen.

  And, strangely, the still night was hotter than ever.

  • • •

  One of the “mysterious” dark Spaniards, an intelligent and kindly fellow, walked out onto the porch for a taste of air, and there he came upon the Estonian girl, still crying. For several weeks he had been looking at her with a sort of lustful affection, and so he sat down beside her and did the obvious thing, which was to take her in his arms and stroke her hair.

  She soon calmed down, and in a gentle way they talked, in French—whispering, because it was so late and dark. It turned out that by the most wonderful coincidence, the two of them would be attending the Sorbonne that fall. They would see each other again very soon—in Paris!

  Quite suddenly visited by despair—it was over, their evening—Diana said, very soft-voiced, to Vittorio, “I guess I ought to go now. To bed.”

  “No, you must not.”

  Taking her hand, he led her strongly out through the door, across the porch and into the hot black still night, past the clearing where, among the ghostly statuary, Howard Stein had made his hopeful commencing speech.

  After the clearing there was a small forest of pines that ran along the lake, and within that forest there was a ring of small thick trees, forming a cave. Into the cave Vittorio led Diana. Where, kissing, embracing each other, they slowly removed their clothes.

  At a certain point he said to her, sighingly, “Ah, you are so thin.”

  And suddenly, for Diana, who had always felt scrawny, inadequate, “thin” was the most beautiful word in the world. Thin.

  Years later she would sometimes hear that word said in a certain way, and she would be pierced through with remembering Vittorio, his voice and those dark hours that ended sometime close to dawn.

  Since all those events took place so long ago, more than thirty years, it is possible now to know how things turned out, what happened to everyone.

  To begin with the worst: Howard Stein committed suicide, an overdose of pills, in the early Fifties. In various intellectual communities, from his own Midwestern university to Harvard and Yale, there were frequent and overheated arguments as to why he did this. Political despair at the emerging climate of the Fifties was one of the most popular theories, repressed homosexuality the other. A few quieter voices (wives) mentioned loneliness, isolation, the sheer fatigue of living.

  The dean who had organized the seminar, and who so believed in its success, suddenly left the academic world altogether and went into real estate, where he made a fortune in the late Fifties and early Sixties.

  The eminent professors, on the whole, went on to further eminence, except for one, the historian, who, as an enthusiastic adviser to President Johnson on the Vietnam War, an eager hawk, was generally (academically) considered to have disgraced himself.

  The unreconstructed Austrian boy married the Fascist Italian girl, amid great pomp, in Venice.

  Another marriage: the dark Spanish boy and the pretty blond Estonian girl were married, at her parents’ home in Brittany.

  Most of the people in the Jewish DP camp made it to Israel; only a few, very old and already sick, died on the way. There in Israel they were generally happy, although some of the youngest were killed in later wars. The classics professor from Munich lived on to have numerous grandchildren. The physicist, having enjoyed a distinguished career at the Hebrew University, was honored at several international conferences.

  Stanley Morris did not have quite the career that anyone would have imagined for him. He married as planned, but instead of Harvard, as he had dreamed, he ended up in a large Southern university. A good school, but not Harvard. He was unfaithful to his wife with a succession of younger and younger girls, most of whom strongly resembled her; they were all dark and rich and graceful and intelligent, as she was. Stanley wrote one book—interestingly, on the theme of ambition in American literature—which did not do well. He was flabbergasted when, in early middle age, his wife left him for a much younger man.

  Vittorio Garibaldi, who had taken a train to Rome, via Innsbruck, early on the morn
ing after the dance, thus not seeing Diana again, enrolled that fall in law school in his native Padua. A few years after that he married a beautiful girl from Ferrara. He remained a Socialist, despite strong pressures from almost all other directions, and he had, increasingly, a reputation for kindness, intelligence and utter probity. He was at last appointed to a judgeship, a position in which he continued to be admired, sought after, loved. His wife and children loved him very much. He was truly a remarkable man; in his way, a hero of his times.

  For a while Diana McBride did follow the wives-of-graduate-students pattern, rather than the grander plan of law school that she had announced to Vittorio, and sometimes she felt that as a broken pledge. She went to work in a law firm, thus helping to support the education of Braxton McBride; she was underpaid and condescended to, and she even had a miserable, punishing affair with one of the junior partners. But what she managed to learn of the law was extremely interesting to her, even exhilarating; she found the judicial system fascinating.

  Sometimes she thought of Vittorio, and longingly she would imagine that she had run off with him and shared whatever life he made; remembering that he had not asked her to was painful. In fact, those hours with Vittorio, recalled, were bruising to her during her own worst years. What she had experienced as beautiful rebuked her; she had turned out to be unworthy after all. At other times she could barely believe that it had happened.

  Braxton got his degree, and then he got a job, in another, smaller Midwestern university. At that point, to everyone’s surprise (including her own, although she was sustained in part by a sense of having fulfilled a contract), Diana said no, she did not want to move to the smaller town with Braxton. She wanted to go to law school, and she wanted, almost incidentally, a divorce.

  By this time William McBride had died and Braxton was rich. Diana asked for enough money to put herself through law school. She applied to and was accepted by Yale, her undergraduate record having been exceptional—a fact that over the years she had tended to forget.

  Braxton eventually became the head of his department in his very small college. But he was a very big frog, and he liked it there.

  Initially terrified, Diana worked her head off at Yale, and she did extremely well. And gradually she was able to calm down and to enjoy it, this first experience of competence, of gratifying work. She learned how to keep up superior grades with a somewhat more relaxed work schedule. And she was crazy about New England, exploring the countryside. During one gaudy fall she became involved with a fellow student, another older overachiever named Jerry Stein, from Worcester, Massachusetts. Jerry was a strong, dark man, sturdily built. He was more easygoing, much more relaxed than Diana was, warm and friendly, whereas she tended to be diffident; they were good complements to each other.

  “I used to know a professor named Stein. He was famous, very distinguished. Howard Stein,” Diana said one morning to Jerry—an idle remark as from his bed she watched him making breakfast; thin Diana, huddled in blankets. It was early November, after one of their first nights of staying together.

  “Well. Howard Stein was my cousin, distantly. The Boston branch.”

  They smiled at each other, delighted at this new coincidence (the first had been of feeling), this new proof of the logic of their love.

  Then Jerry said, “He never liked me much. He thought I was one more unnecessary little brat running around.”

  “Oh, really? He didn’t like me either, not at all.” And slowly, but eagerly, over breakfast, the good coffee and warm rolls and cheese, Diana told about the seminar that summer: Howard Stein’s opening speech, in the clearing, among the statuary, and the dumb thing she said to him on the truck ride home, about the look of the countryside.

  “Well, that wasn’t really so dumb. He must have heard worse.” Jerry laughed.

  “I know, but he looked so mad. I felt awful. I hated that summer.” Saying this, Diana thought suddenly, sharply of Vittorio, and to herself she added: I hated everything about it but Vittorio—and even at that moment, newly in love with Jerry, she had the most vivid sense of Vittorio. She could hear his voice.

  She never tried to tell Jerry about Vittorio, as much out of a sense of impossibility as from delicacy: how to describe such a collision, and its long reverberations?

  The involvement with Jerry, which Diana never thought of as an affair, and certainly not as a “relationship,” continued over the winter and into an extraordinary New England spring. Diana felt herself to be another person; she hardly recognized this new, confident, loved woman—a thin woman, with gold-brown eyes. She and Jerry got married over a long weekend late in August, almost ten years after the seminar, after Vittorio and after Diana’s time with him.

  Out of law school, both Diana and Jerry managed to get federal jobs in Washington, and during the Sixties they were actively involved in civil rights, and then in the peace movement.

  Toward the end of the Sixties, discouraged at the political scene in Washington, they moved back up to New England, to a small town in western Massachusetts, near the Berkshires, and also not far from Worcester, where Jerry had grown up, and where he had sometimes met his distinguished cousin Howard Stein at some family gathering. Jerry and Diana were very busy, both practicing law, and they remained, for the most part, quite happy with each other.

  In the early Seventies, perhaps as an outcome of the growing women’s movement, Diana was elected a district judge. She was tremendously proud of that office, and she worked extremely hard. And she, like Vittorio some five or six thousand miles away, acquired a reputation for fairness, for honesty and kindness—a coincidence all around, which neither of them could possibly have known about, and which, assuredly, no one could account for.

  The Break-In

  In a fairly new Porsche, on a Friday night early in June, two people—a young woman and an almost middle-aged man, Cynthia and Roger—are driving up from San Francisco, toward an exceptionally beautiful house in the mountains, near Lake Tahoe. A house that was broken into the night before. They have been talking, unhappily and disjointedly, about knowing versus not knowing about the break-in in advance of their arrival—as though there had been a choice. They have agreed that it is on the whole better to know, despite this present miserable anticipation.

  The house belongs to Roger, but since they plan to marry in the fall it soon will be partly Cynthia’s, and sometimes she sighs at the thought of such responsibility; she is unused to owning things, her instincts being somewhat nomadic. And the news of this break-in has deeply upset her; she feels an unaccustomed rage and an ugly desire for vengeance: whoever broke in should be punished, and this sentiment is out of character too, for Cynthia.

  Once a couple of years ago, Roger, probably with another girl, arrived to find the house flooded, dirty water everywhere, stained upholstery. Another time he came up to find it severely burglarized, all the pewter and copper things tastefully selected and removed. He says that it is better to know.

  Cynthia, who is in her late twenties, works as a reader for a local publishers’ representative. In fact, just before meeting Roger, she had a rather silly affair with her employer, an erratic and on the whole irresponsible young man. Roger’s stability as well as his age have seemed reassuring. She has never married, just had a lot of affairs, most of which in retrospect also look silly, if great fun at the time. Roger has been married three times, each ending in divorce; no children. But he is ready to try again; he really wants to marry Cynthia. They both think that it is time she married. They look well together: small, red-haired, brown-eyed and lively Cynthia, and large, just-graying Roger, who does not look ten years older than she, not really. He likes the commitment of marriage, an attitude new to Cynthia, who is used to more feckless younger men.

  Cynthia means to marry Roger, but he has one habit that bothers her: he sometimes calls her by the names of his former wives: Charlotte, Caroline, Christine. “You see? I’m faithful to the letter C,” he teases. But none of those names soun
d like Cynthia; can’t he tell the difference?

  Lately, before the rip-off, Cynthia has begun to wonder if the house doesn’t figure, perhaps, too prominently in her marriage dreams: does she think of marrying Roger, and like the thought, partly because he has such an exceptional house? Roger inherited the house from his mother, a famous beauty in her day, and sometimes Cynthia thinks he cares too much about it, but by now so does she, and this break-in has sorely afflicted her spirits.

  The phone call came that morning from an aging and lonely mountain neighbor, Mary Drake. She had no phone,and was calling from a gas station, in her oddly childish voice, among the other voices and sounds of cars and trucks and dogs. On her way to the Safeway that morning she had noticed that the draperies in Roger’s house were drawn and a light was still on. Going bravely to look in a window, she saw, she told Roger, “all this broken glass and food spilled all over. Liquor bottles.” From the Safeway she had called the sheriff, who, by the time she finished shopping, was at the house, and with him she went in. “I think someone got sick,” she indistinctly, and horrifyingly, told Roger.

  Still, Cynthia and Roger were glad to be forewarned, although they were powerless to do anything but race toward the house, both their minds full of appalling images.

  “Free-floating” anxiety (Why free? she has wondered) is sometimes a problem for Cynthia; she dislikes vague problems like when to end a love affair, when to marry. She functions better when, as now, there is something concrete to deal with. She stares out the window at the speeding scenery, the lovely slopes of ground, live oaks, cows, and she tells herself that it is only a house. This works, and she achieves some degree of calm.

  Roger, to whom it is not only a house; it is his house—Roger is less generally anxious than she is; he is more direct. In extreme situations, like this one, he copes by outstripping the stimulus, so to speak. He shouts and swears, he makes things even worse than they are; he keeps the small car racing up the highway.