Caroline's Daughters

by Alice Adams

  “I don’t know.”

  Nineteen

  For a variety of reasons, and he has to admit that Caroline was always among those reasons, Roland Gallo has taken to dropping in to see his old acquaintance Ralph Carter—although they were never exactly intimates. First off, Roland was looking to Ralph’s well-known political savvy: in a word, how did Ralph view his, Roland’s, mayoral candidacy? could he win, or was he liable to fall on his face, not to mention all that money down the drain? And besides, Roland has always liked old Ralph (Roland tends to forget that they are very nearly of an age, he and old Ralph). He likes the country harshness of Ralph’s very Texan speech, and Ralph’s extreme courtesy, in a bad, rude world. He appreciates Ralph’s wit and sharpness—he values Ralph as that great rarity, an honest man.

  Furthermore, late-afternoon visits to Ralph tend to put Roland home fairly late but with the most legitimate, time-honored of all excuses: he was actually, literally visiting an old sick friend. Joanne could call him there if she would like to check it out.

  And, then, there was Caroline.

  At the close of his first few visits, as Roland departed she would come up to the front door with him, to thank him and to say goodby. On these occasions they would exchange the same brushing kiss that everyone does these days, perhaps with a little more warmth involved than was quite usual. Roland liked her, and she was grateful for the visit, probably. But one day, somehow, their mouths slid together, and met, and held, surely not by accident.

  But the next time he came to visit Ralph, as Roland got up to go Caroline seemed nowhere in sight, as he hesitated, looking around. He descended the stairs as noisily as he could, and then, at the front door, he heard her voice calling down, “Oh, Roland, sorry, I was on the phone, but you can let yourself out, can’t you?”

  And the next time a neighbor was there.

  Roland thinks about that semi-kiss, though. He was (curiously) very turned on by it, and he observes in himself a series of sexual fantasies concerning Caroline. A little more flesh than he is used to, but that might be very nice. And talking to her, making plans to get together, then somehow doing it—and hearing whatever she would say to him in bed. Hearing his sexual self praised in that high-toned voice. The truth is, he really wants to make love to Caroline.

  Making it with Caroline would be like getting into the P.U. Club, he thinks to himself with a laugh—and regrets that there is no one he could say that to.

  But how to suggest it to Caroline? Even assuming that she might possibly say yes. She would not mess around, Roland is quite sure of that; if she says no she will mean it, no for good—and if she says yes, well, well hooray!

  She should get out more, Caroline knows that—and still, even when the weekly Guatemalan woman Nelia comes to clean (a gentle woman, whom Ralph clearly likes and trusts), even with Nelia there in the house, Caroline mostly stays home. She putters—and now for the first time she understands the meaning of that word. She polishes silver that is not even in use, she dusts invisible corners.

  And she takes long naps. Sleeping poorly at night, she allows herself to collapse in the guest bedroom, where sometimes these days she sleeps, for an hour or so in the afternoon.

  Her dreams, which are vividly, undeniably sexual in nature, inform her of one thing that is clearly wrong: sheer deprivation, hunger. She suffers the loss, the lack of love, until now such an active element in her life.

  How do her daughters manage? Caroline wonders. She is thinking especially of Fiona and Jill—who, as far as she knows, are not “with” or “seeing” anyone. But of course they manage with the knowledge that eventually someone will show up, they’re both so young. Also, although she chooses not to dwell on this, it is clear to Caroline that those two daughters “relate” to men in ways that are quite unlike her own. She finds it hard to imagine either of them in love—or, perhaps “in love,” but not feeling whatever it is that she, for example, feels for Ralph.

  However, finding that this line of thought is making her very uncomfortable, Caroline turns her attention instead to thoughts of Liza—at which she smiles; and Sage, to whom she gives the smallest worried frown.

  But before she can even consider Portia the phone rings.

  How did she know that it would be Roland Gallo? For in the instant before picking up the receiver and hearing his voice, Caroline did know just who it was. And she almost knew what he would say.

  “Caroline? Roland Gallo here. Well, how’re you? I was wondering, possibly, could you—lunch someday, like, tomorrow?”

  Having said, No, terribly sorry, never go out to lunch these days—and hung up, and struck anew with the ferocity of her own needs, obviously so great that she does not dare even have lunch with Roland Gallo, whom in many ways she does not even like, Caroline bursts into unaccustomed tears.

  From Caroline’s bedroom, Caroline’s and Ralph’s, the sunset has faded to a dusky, ashen blue. As Ralph still sleeps, and she sits, dry-eyed, beside him with her tea, Caroline simply watches the sky—still in early evening fairly light, streaked with dark clouds, above the eastern horizon. In her further view, great purposeful, powerful jets rise up from the international airport, heading south, moving with infinite deliberation up and across the sky. One can even, occasionally, confuse a plane with a bird, from this perspective their size is about the same, and sometimes a large bird will seem to move so slowly, so majestically as to emulate the motion of a plane.

  In the middle distance the lacy spires of a church are reminders of Notre-Dame, or Chartres—and not far from that sacred stone is an extremely strange cluster of very tall, very delicate structures. Like children’s toys, Caroline has thought, the Erector Sets (such a funny name, actually) that are surely meant for boys but that she could never resist buying for her girls, who loved them. Especially Sage, who was always building something. These structures, in her view, so delicately balanced that sometimes they sway or very slowly swing about, like masts, sometimes catching a wink of sunshine—they are actually cranes, Ralph has told her, building cranes, in the midst of the Western Addition. They have risen there like swamp weeds, so Caroline imagines, from a bog of bureaucratic arguments. They are quite crazily beautiful, and Caroline has thought how she would miss them, should they ever finish whatever work they are supposed to be doing, and go. They are part of her ravishing landscape, the most beautiful painting that is her view.

  These days Ralph has moments or even hours, almost, of lucidity. A total return of all his old intelligence, his sharpness. But these intervals can be neither predicted nor summoned, they relate to no known exterior stimulus. Ralph, as always, responds to no will but his own.

  And now, just as Caroline is about to submit to the end of her sunset observation, to relinquish her birds and the spires and the building cranes to the coming night—as she starts to get up and go downstairs to heat up their soup, Ralph comes fully awake.

  And with an announcement: “Very interesting news on the tube this afternoon. You catch any of it? No? Well, it seems this guy named Buck Fister is about to be indicted by the Grand Jury. All manner of unsavory charges. Interesting. I’ve never liked the fellow, I was just saying so the other day to Gallo. But I’m sure Gallo had no idea what he was up to.”

  “Who is he, this Buck Fister?”

  “Actually I hardly know the fellow. Friend of Gallo’s, though I never did understand quite why, or I didn’t want to. But he’s been running some kind of a call-girl operation. A very fancy one, it looks like.”

  “You mean Roland Gallo could have been involved?” Shuddering, Caroline experiences a small vague nausea, as though she has eaten something a little off.

  “Oh no, nothing like that. That wouldn’t be Gallo’s style at all, I wouldn’t imagine. He’s a rather old-fashioned gentleman in his way, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Well, yes, I would have.”

  “Your true womanizers don’t run to whores. That’s more for neuter types like Fister.”

  “I’m
sure you’re right, darling,” says Caroline. “Ostensibly, what does this Fister do?”

  “Real estate. This town’s prime industry, right? Every whore and pimp in town is into real estate.”

  “But that isn’t what Roland Gallo does. I don’t see why you keep mentioning him in connection with this fellow, this Fister.”

  “Because they’re pals, that’s all. They have lunch together. Herb Caen sees them at the Big Four together and talks about it. And that’s one more black mark on the page against Gallo running for mayor. If they really nail Fister, and it looks like they’re going to, it’s not good at all for anyone who knows him. Has lunch with him.”

  Pulling herself together (after all, there was nothing, really, between herself and Roland Gallo, nothing happened), Caroline says, “Well, it’s really lucky that we don’t know this Fister, and don’t know Gallo any better than we do, don’t you think so, darling? And now are you ready for some really super minestrone?”

  “Sure, sweets. But first a kiss.”

  Twenty

  “It’s terrifically cold in New York,” Liza, on the phone, tells Sage. “You can hardly imagine. Saul and I were there at those meetings about this time last year. Oh, I nearly froze! And then all the buildings and everyone’s apartments are so overheated. But the snow is wonderful, so beautiful in Central Park. We walked there—”

  “Actually I don’t much like snow. You remember at Tahoe, when we were kids?” Sage in fact finds the very idea of snow terrifying, and especially in New York: the whole city could be buried, smothered in snow, all of life there frozen. Though perhaps in that way preserved, like the slaves and domestic animals in Pompei. But she is horrified at the thought of a snowstorm in New York while she is there.

  And she leaves the day after tomorrow.

  San Francisco, just now in the throes of January rainstorms, is bad enough, the soughing, powerful winds, water pelting the windows of Sage’s house. All this weather seems an omen, a warning of worse things to come, in New York: if this is so nearly unbearable, how possibly can she even consider a still more treacherous climate, colder weather, snow? Sage feels that she is being asked this, is being accused in this way. How can you deliberately fly into your doom? is the question.

  “I think you’ll have a wonderful time,” pronounces Liza. “You’ll love the snow. You probably didn’t like it at Tahoe because Jim overdid it, with skis and all that. But now you will. Just take along a lot of warm clothes, if you’re warm enough you’ll be fine.”

  “Oh God, I hate to pack. I’m so bad at packing, the very idea of packing drives me crazy.”

  “It is awful,” Liza agrees. “Actually I hate it too. But I’ll tell you my secret method. Allow an enormous hunk of time just for packing. That really works out, for me. Hours and hours.”

  “But. But I still don’t know what to take.”

  “Saul has an idea about that,” says Liza, who is not generally given to quoting her husband. “It’s to do with displacement. We tend to displace other anxieties, other fears onto what to take on a trip. Women do, mostly. It really comes down to what to wear. How we want to present ourselves. As though it mattered, deeply. We’re all so brainwashed when it comes to clothes, don’t you think? It’s actually quite interesting.”

  Liza thinks almost everything is interesting, thinks Sage, with some annoyance. Liza is so objective, no wonder she and Saul get along so well; they’re basically scientific, both of them. Liza may think of herself as a literary person, but she’s really a scientist.

  “The point is, I suppose,” continues Liza, apparently unaware of sibling hostility, “you have to work out what you’re really scared of. And then you can pack.”

  “Thanks a lot. But that’s easy enough, in my case. I’m scared of my show. I’m terrified.”

  “Well, there you are. Just convince yourself that what you pack won’t really affect how your show goes. Try to tell yourself that it really doesn’t matter.”

  “But it does matter. Everything matters. To me.” And Sage makes an incoherent sound of pure helplessness.

  “Well, call me back if you need anything. If there’s anything I could do.”

  “I’m afraid not, but thanks.”

  And that is quite true of Sage: to her everything does matter. And almost everything frightens her, in one way or another. Her show is only the start. There is also the terror of unknown New York weather, so cold it might strike her dead—or so Sage feels its threat. And the city itself is a source of increasing panic, with its muggings, murders, its very streets filled with rage and hatred, with murderous impulses.

  Furthermore, Sage is frightened of her meeting with Calvin Crome, now such an important person in her life. He is capable, she has so far perceived, of a considerable spectrum of behavior, and in her experience this is not a good sign.

  She is frightened too of leaving Noel alone in San Francisco.

  She is frightened of Noel, who is far more unpredictable than anyone, ever in her life.

  Years back, after her time with Roland Gallo, Sage discussed her fears with her psychiatrist, her fears that Roland Gallo would leave her, as he did in fact eventually do. And they discussed her older fears that her mother would marry Jim McAndrew and have more children. Her fear that Caroline and Jim would divorce, and that Caroline would marry this huge new scary man with the funny accent, Ralph Carter. “You see? Whatever I most fear seems to come true, I am not really so irrational,” Sage pointed out. Anna Weldon: “It’s perhaps the intensity that is irrational.”

  Sage had of course lost the fears that revolved around Roland, and in time she did cease her mourning for him, but she remained very much that same person: the woman who had loved Roland to distraction, always terrified that she would lose him, was very much the same woman who now loves Noel, a far more dangerous man. Loves and fears him, mortally.

  Packing, Sage now regards her open suitcase with panic, as though nothing she could possibly, imaginably think of to take with her could protect her from the violence of New York, from cold or snow. Nor could anything conceivably equip her for an exhibition of her work (“exhibit”: the very word is horrifying). The small, highly personal ceramic sculptures now all nakedly exposed—if not broken in transit. She has not even been able so far to call Calvin Crome to see if they got there all right; this seems such an amateur question, full of juvenile or at best adolescent anxiety.

  She carefully folds a heavy white sweater and places it in the suitcase. Then takes it out and puts it back on the shelf.

  Because she is concentrating on warmth, the question of what to wear to the opening itself is almost buried in her avalanche of anxieties, but occasionally it surfaces, like an iron post in deep snow. Dangerous, immoveable.

  The green silk shirt, so happily, optimistically bought for the specific occasion of her opening in New York, is now irrevocably associated with the horrifying hours at Jim’s—of which Sage is still barely able to think. (When she does think back to that afternoon, it seems to her that that was the beginning; that was when everything terrible that she now feels commenced. When she fell into this dark, panic-stricken decline.)

  On the other hand, it still is a beautiful shirt. No one seeing her in that shirt would imagine her to be a woman who would fling herself insanely, sexually upon her stepfather. Former stepfather. Whoever. Drunkenly. Crazily.

  She does not, then, have any idea what to wear to the opening, and for dinner with Calvin Crome. And she sees that packing could take her even longer than the entire afternoon that she has allowed for it. Even longer than the day and a half that remains.

  In the meantime the ferocious rainstorm continues, dark and gray, gathering momentum rather than abating. Sage wonders that her small house can withstand it, that she herself can. And what would they ever do, she and her house, in a major earthquake, which is constantly predicted, which could happen any day.

  Looking westward from her bedroom window, in the direction of the mountains, the Sie
rras, Sage thinks of the snow that must be there by now, covering Donner Summit, relentlessly falling all over Lake Tahoe and the far Nevada slopes.

  When the phone rings it is hard to hear; Sage cannot instantly identify that sound, above all the pounding, incessant sounds of weather, in her house.

  “Hi, sweetheart, it’s me. Your old reliable buddy. Old Crome.”

  “Oh, Calvin. I can hardly hear you, we’re having this rainstorm. Really violent.” Sitting down on her bed, beside the table where the phone is, Sage notes that her heart is beating very hard, and she thinks, He sounds strange, could Calvin be drunk?

  “Well, January. We’ve got a fair amount of snow, but actually I love it. It calms the city down, slows everything. Everything shoddy looks beautiful.”

  “I don’t like snow very much.”

  “Well, pack up your snow boots anyway. It’s supposed to last.” And then he says, “I hope you’re sitting down? I’ve got some news that’s really pretty amazing.”

  “I am sitting down.” And you’re going to tell me the show’s postponed again, or cancelled forever, Sage thinks, and guess what? I don’t even care. As long as I don’t have to fly into snow. Fly through storms, thinks Sage.

  “—your first sale,” is what Calvin is actually saying. “Really funny, in a way. How it came about. Well, I was there in the gallery, setting things up. Your pieces look fabulous in this space by the way, if I do say so. And suddenly, unannounced, in flounced B. B. Hoover, you know, the big real-estate dame, with her entourage, those creeps. Anyway, she fell in love with your Family. Had to have it.”

  “Jesus.” Sage feels that she is listening to a story about someone else, about other, quite unknown people. B. B. Hoover, whom you read about in trashy magazines, could have nothing to do with her, with Sage, and her simple though laboriously achieved small pieces.