by Alice Adams
The Chapel Hill house, as my parents first found and bought it in the early twenties, a few years before I was born, was a small, possibly run-down and isolated farmhouse on a lovely broad hilltop. Very likely it was a good buy, cheap even for those pre-boom days; my father, as a just-hired professor at the university, would certainly not have had much money. In any case, my mother and father must have been drawn to all that space, a couple of acres; they may have already been planning the gardens, the tennis court and the grape arbors they were to put in later. And they must have fallen in love with the most beautiful view of farther gentle hills and fields, and a border of creek. They would have placed those aesthetic advantages above the convenience of a smaller lot, a tidier house in town. And along with the space and the view, they chose an unfashionable direction (which would have been characteristic; my parents—especially my mother, a snobbish Virginian—were always above such considerations).
Although in those days Chapel Hill was an extremely small town, there was already a row of fairly grand houses on Franklin Street, which continued on to become the Durham Road; whereas the highway running down past our house went on to Pittsboro, which was then a very déclassé town. And although our house became rather grand too in its way, there was always the Pittsboro connotation. “Oh, you live almost to Pittsboro,” early non-driving beaux used to say to me by way of complaint about the distance they had to walk to get to my house, then back into town for a movie or what ever, back home with me, then back to wherever they lived, maybe Franklin Street.
By the time I was born, a small wing had been added to the old farmhouse, with a large upstairs bedroom for my parents and a small living room below. And that is what I first remember, that slightly lopsided house with the narrow front porch, a new wing on one side and on the other the tiny separate building that housed my father’s study. In early snapshots the house looks bare, rather naked on its hilltop, with new, spindling trees out in front.
But what I most remember is flowers—everywhere. Roses, pink and white ones, climbed up a trellis and over the roof of the porch, entangled there with thick wisteria vines; rose petals and heavy lavender blossoms brushed the roofs green shingles and the ground. Over an arbor, next to the red-clay tennis court, more wisteria mingled with the gray-green grapevines—and then there was the garden itself: terraced beds of more rosebushes, crape myrtle and Japanese quinces, tall hollyhocks, sunflowers, cowslips, sweet william and lilies of the valley. Below the garden proper, beyond a green wooden fence, was a small apple orchard. Our family laundry was hung out there, billowing white sheets among the whiter apple blossoms.
In the side yard grew rows of irises and a bed of jonquils, a flowering plum tree, more quinces. That yard sloped down to a small, much steeper area of pinewoods above the swimming pool that my father put in during the early thirties with his World War I bonus. In those woods bloomed white dogwood and wildflowers—tiny, amazing wild irises and yellow dogtooth violets—nestled down among the dead pine needles and rotting leaves that covered the earth.
Of course it is highly unlikely—impossible, even—that all those flowers and shrubs and trees came to blossom at anywhere near the same time or even within a single season. But that is what I remember: the flowers all in bloom and as taken for granted (by me) as the grass, as the sweeping view of hills and fields, of everything green—a view that no longer exists from that house.
I am writing, then, at least in part, about the vagaries of memory and about the house that in dreams I permanently inhabit—or, it might be more accurate to say, the house that inhabits me.
Indoors, even before the final ungainly additions to the house, some strangeness prevailed, some awkwardness as to proportion and transition from one room to another. Upstairs, there was even a dead-end hall and several completely nonfunctional closets. The final, large addition to the house was built where my father’s study had been. This new wing included a big living room and a big new study for my father, a prominent feature of which was a locked liquor closet (Verlie, who worked for us, was thought to drink). Upstairs was a double bedroom for my parents, a guest room and a sleeping porch. In actual fact, my mother slept in the guest room and my father out on the sleeping porch, an arrangement that seemed perfectly normal to me at the time.
Other people, though, did remark on the size of that house for just three people. “Don’t you all get lost in all these rooms?” was the standard question. I did not exactly see us as lost, but I do remember a not-quite-conscious feeling that my parents were too far away from where I slept; that they were also far from each other did not strike me as strange until sometime later.
Below us, in a small house down the hill (even closer to tacky Pittsboro), lived a family of six: two parents, four small children. Very likely they were truly needy people. I somehow learned, or heard, that they all slept together in one bed. And I felt the most passionate envy of that condition, that bodily family warmth. As I imagined it, they would all lie cuddled like puppies, with the mother and father on the outside edges, protectively.
For reasons I can no longer remember, I was moved about among those oddly shaped bedrooms in the old part of the house. I slept alone, of course, and was generally frightened at night—until I learned to read. Then, as now, books served to keep the terrifying world at bay for a while.
Downstairs was generally more cheerful than up; the house was splendid for parties, for bringing people home to. Everyone admired its impressive size and the splendid view. And we three difficult, isolated people got along much better when there were others around. Even Verlie, she who supposedly drank (my own view is that my father simply thought she might if tempted; it is what he thought Negro servants did), liked cooking for parties more than for just us three. So my parents entertained a lot, and later I was encouraged to also. “We love to have your friends here,” I was always told.
Downstairs was better, but outside was better yet. Once we had the pool, that was where most of the parties were. People were always invited to “come by for a dip,” drinks were brought down, and then the guests were probably encouraged to stay on for supper. At one end of the pool, a privet hedge shielded us from the road, and it flowered, intensely sweet.
Still, it is strange to me that I am so fixed, so literally rooted in a house of which my memories are not of a very positive nature on the whole, and standard psychological explanations of fixation by trauma seem both simplistic and uninteresting. Last summer, as I have said, I went to see the house, “my house,” which I had not seen for twenty-five years, not since my father died and my stepmother, who had inherited it outright, put it up for sale (a serious trauma, that: it was made clear that indeed I had never owned the house, nor had my mother, who might as well have been a guest). And what is curious is that I cannot now, six months later, recall just how it looked. It had been repainted a new color. But was it gray? Pale yellow? I have no idea. (I recently saw my former husband in a local bank, and for one fleeting instant I did not know who he was, but I know very clearly how he looked thirty years ago.) Across the road from the house, though, I am sure that there was a total obstruction to the view. Huge trees, I think.
But that freshly painted, viewless house is non-existent in my mind; it is not where I live. I live in a huge, mad house with the loveliest view. With everything in bloom.
A Note About the Author
Alice Adams was born in Virginia and graduated from Radcliffe College. She was the recipient of an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. She lived in San Francisco until her death in 1999.
Books by Alice Adams
Careless Love
Families and Survivors
Listening to Billie
Beautiful Girl (stories)
Rich Rewards
To See You Again (stories)
Superior Women
Return Trips (stories)
After Yo
u’ve Gone (stories)
Caroline’s Daughters
Mexico: Some Travels and Travelers There
Almost Perfect
A Southern Exposure
Medicine Men
The Last Lovely City (stories)
After the War
The Stories of Alice Adams