by Alice Adams
“Exactly what I—Well, she is, I guess you would say, quixotic?”
They both laugh, tentatively, briefly, neither yet quite sure of the other’s real meanings, or language.
“She reminded me a little of some old American leftists I knew in Jerusalem,” Hilda Daid told Portia. “Emigrés. How they talked! How hopeful and good they were.”
“You’re Israeli?”
A smile. “No. Lebanese. I grew up in Jerusalem, though. One of the niggers.” Another, briefer smile. “And then I went to school in England,” she says.
After a tiny pause, during which Portia has been wondering what to say next, she asks Hilda, “You’ve been here long?”
“Three years. We had some relatives. Here and in England. They were most kind, all of them.”
Should she leave now? Nothing about the conversation and nothing in the demeanor, the body language of Hilda indicates that she should; only Portia’s innate shyness, which is extreme, makes her wonder, Should I go? She says, “I’ve never been to Israel. My father has, though. And he’s an old leftie. But not Jewish. A Texan.”
“Actually I should not have said that Lebanese are niggers,” Hilda Daid contributes. “Actually we are more like Indians. Native Americans.”
“My father’s been involved with Indian movements.” Portia relaxes, a little. Maybe it’s all right to stay and talk? Maybe Hilda enjoys it too, and does not have something else very pressing to do just now?
“Does he know Mrs. Kaltenborn, your father?” Hilda asks.
“No, and he’s not very well, he’s pretty sick now. But I’m sorry, I wish—” I wish I could ask Hilda to dinner, is what Portia is thinking. On the way home I could stop off at Real Food and get some fish and things for salad and cookies and—Good God, this is crazy. I feel crazy. I feel in love with this woman I don’t know at all, I just met her, and she is so beautiful, all that dark skin and so much heavy hair, and her eyes. A woman. So, I am a lesbian? Well, that would explain quite a lot.
“Well—” says Hilda Daid, looking at Portia.
“Well. Oh, I’m sorry. I was really enjoying, I forgot—” Portia feels a humiliating blush on her face, as though all her thoughts were there too, for Hilda to read.
“Oh, I too very much have enjoyed,” Hilda tells her.
By now they both are standing, the two thin young women, quite similar as to height—and perhaps it is that very accidental similarity (so few women she knows are that tall) that encourages Portia to say, “Maybe sometime you could come to the house for dinner? It’s really nice, but of course you must have been there.”
“Actually I have not. She always meant—but not. And I would like that very much.”
“I suppose you’re busy tonight, though.” Bringing out that sentence was for Portia an act of enormous courage. She had to throw out all the words in a rush, with all her breath.
Hilda Daid’s dark skin has darkened, a flush of blood appears in her cheeks. “Tonight would be very nice for me.”
“Oh, really? Well, great! Well, you know where it is? Should I draw you a map?”
“I have in fact this street map that serves me very well. I rely on it always.” A smile. White teeth.
“Well, that’s great. Great! About seven?”
“I shall so much look forward. Thank you.”
“Oh, thank you!”
And Portia, the heiress, walks out of the seedy office and into the bright pure sunlight, the new spring day. How handy that this building is so relatively near Real Food, she can so easily walk. And she does, in that oddly mixed neighborhood, new cheaply built speculation condos, with their unseemly combinations of wood and plaster, juxtaposed with the graceful old Victorians, some quite gaudily restored but others not, left to rot away in their tree- and plant-crowded yards, beds of flaming orange California poppies and broken pots from which hardy geraniums strive, neglected and thriving.
In Real Food, as always, Portia buys much too much. She is irresistibly tempted by tiny new lettuces, small new green spinach leaves, fresh herbs and new potatoes, by whole-grain breads and nourishing cookies, and fish, the most beautiful swordfish. She leaves the store with an almost bursting brown bag. She decides to get a cab on Van Ness, then remembers that her car is parked on Pine Street, near the lawyer’s office. Near Hilda.
Driving home, she sobers up a little, even with the heady thought that it is indeed “home” to which she is driving. Her house. And she admonishes herself that she must not confuse the person of Hilda Daid with the fact of home ownership. Hilda Daid is simply a very nice shy intelligent and appealing young woman, who happened, simply happened to be the bearer of great news. And to be very beautiful.
It does, though, make quite a difference to think that she actually owns the house. And a cat, for Pink is now solely hers (the other two have disappeared), as surely as the house is. Thinking this as she walks from room to room, Portia stares fixedly at walls and windows, as though expecting the difference to be manifest there. (Ostensibly, though, she is looking for the cat.) And then, understanding what she is doing, her own nutty expectation of change, Portia further considers the larger sense in which nothing is ever owned, perhaps least of all houses, with their curiously autonomous lives, their ineradicable personal characters. As could be said of cats.
Nevertheless, in immediate, practical terms, she does own this house, and now she goes to the phone to dial Caroline’s number, to tell her about it. To tell Ralph.
Just as she approaches the phone, though, it starts to ring, and the voice that Portia, answering, hears is her mother’s. “Portia, I’ve been calling and calling—”
“Oh, but I was just going to call you! I got such wonderful news—”
“Darling, I can’t talk right now. Could you just come along to the hospital? right away.”
In Ralph’s spare white hospital room, with its narrow, oblique view of the bay, warehouses and dead wharves, Portia finds her mother and two of her half-sisters. Sage and Liza.
And Ralph, who lies there apparently asleep, with his mouth partly open. Breathing hoarsely.
Caroline looks bad, Portia thinks, as she kisses and embraces her mother. Her skin is pale and dull, her eyes surrounded by dark puffy circles, and her whole body seems to sag. She looks old, and Portia has always seen her mother as young, quick and vigorous, intensely alive. “You look sort of tired,” she is unable not to say.
“I really am tired,” admits Caroline.
At Caroline’s elbow, now crowding toward Portia for a kiss, a long hug—Sage looks wonderful, a new person. In blue silk, her yellow-green eyes all wide and alive. Portia’s quick glance takes in new bright-blue shoes, a very New York touch, Portia thinks.
And then Liza. She and Portia exchange a quick embrace, as though they saw each other more often than in fact they do. Liza, like Caroline, looks very tired, and Portia thinks, These two have been the ones doing hospital duty, it’s fallen on them. Where have I been?
Going over to her father, Portia presses her mouth very gently to his cheek; she realizes that she is terrified that he might suddenly wake, as though he were now in some infinitely dangerous realm from which he would only emerge with horrible news. And she senses then a terrible truth, which is that beyond a certain point no one really wants a very sick person to recover. The watchers, who have already begun to cope with the idea of death, albeit unwillingly, do not wish to turn around, so to speak; they are like heavy trucks on a narrow and difficult course. What they are already doing is quite sufficiently demanding, difficult—no more can be asked of them.
All that passes quickly through Portia’s mind, as she stands and stares at her father—who is simply not there any more. And looking over to Caroline, who is barely not weeping, Portia wonders, to what extent will Caroline be able to recover? to be her “old self” without Ralph.
And just what was their connection really like—was it really as good as it looked? Caroline has such a tendency to put a good face on thin
gs, all her daughters know this.
And then Portia thinks, My God! I didn’t call Hilda! Oh! oh dear! She has spoken the last “Oh dear!” aloud, and as Caroline looks over, Portia tries to explain. “I have to phone someone, I forgot.”
“There’s a booth just down the hall. Where I called you. Do you have some quarters?” Caroline, always solicitous. Always a mother, Portia thinks.
“Uh, Hilda, this is Portia Carter. I’m really sorry, you remember I said my father was sick? Well, he’s in the hospital, Presbyterian—”
“I would be so happy to discuss with you but it so happens that I have with me a client.” The somewhat curt voice of Hilda.
“Oh, oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—look, I’ll call you later, Dinner, I can’t, I’m sorry.”
“Of no importance,” says Hilda Daid, and she hangs up the phone.
“Darling, are you all right?” Caroline asks this, as Portia re-enters the room.
And Sage: “Ports, you look ravaged, honestly.”
Liza: “How could you lose weight, you skinny kid?”
Portia tries to explain, a little. “I’m really okay. Honestly. It’s just been such a day. I went to see Mrs. Kaltenborn’s lawyer, in fact that’s who I was trying to call. She’s a Lebanese. It turns out that Mrs. Kaltenborn left me her house, can you imagine?” And then to Portia’s horror the tears that all day for one reason or another have threatened pour slowly down her face. “Oh, I’m just so tired,” she further tries to explain.
“Oh, but Portia, that’s so very nice, no wonder you’re touched, how really sweet of her.” As usual, things make some sort of sense to Caroline.
“Ports, that’s super, you love that house. I like it too, it’s great. God, remember the night we were going to have dinner there, and Noel came along and took over?”
Of course Portia remembers that night, but it is such a bad memory of Noel, she wonders that Sage would bring it up. Unless she and Noel are through? he’s gone? She looks at Sage with that question.
And Sage answers, “We’re splitting. I’ll tell you all about it.” How keyed up Sage looks, Portia thinks. All nerves. Sage could easily cry herself, or she could go back to Noel, Portia thinks.
Very quietly Caroline then says, “I think we should all go now.”
One by one they go over to Ralph, very lightly to kiss his apparently insentient cheek. How small he is, Portia thinks, as she follows her sisters, kissing last, and observing the shape of her father’s white body beneath the sheet—and recalls the giant of her childhood. The gentle, mostly kindly giant.
Caroline goes last. Very quickly she bends to Ralph, and very softly she says to him, “I’m going now, darling. And I think that you could go too.”
By which they all understand that Caroline has given her husband permission to die. She has released him—from herself, from them all. From his life.
Twenty-five
“Well yes, dear Liza, there is considerable relief involved. And no, I don’t feel guilty about feeling relieved. Thank God I’m a simple person, relatively speaking. And I find that I simply follow the good advice that I’ve been giving to widowed or dumped-on friends from time to time over the years. Exercise, keep busy, entertain, try to make new friends. Honestly, darling, I’m really all right. Yes, of course I’m eating properly, what an incredibly silly question.”
This particular conversation was between Caroline and Liza—but it could have been between Caroline and any one of her daughters, all of whom are being as Caroline sees it far too solicitous. Far too concerned about their mother’s widowed condition.
And so for their comfort she gives them this litany of mostly lies, the only truth being that Caroline is quite all right—in her own fairly eccentric way—and that she does not feel guilty about being all right.
She does not do any exercise, because she hates it. All her life, Caroline now believes, she has exercised against, as it were, the naturally large soft shape of her own body, against that body’s natural direction and toward the pleasure of some husband (or, while she was married to Jim McAndrew, those lovers). She has jumped around and stretched and pulled, played tennis and badminton and skied, has even attempted golf. All for those men, essentially; the only exercise that she really enjoys is walking, which she now does quite a lot. She does not think of walking as exercise.
And she does not keep busy, except on specified days when she works as a volunteer cook at the Women’s Shelter, in a church basement a few blocks away. (Horrid work, Caroline thinks: slicing and chopping and clearing up in an ill-equipped, ill-smelling, very small space. The other volunteers seem carried along by a sense of mission. Not so Caroline, who thinks she can hardly stand it, and wonders why she does.) Otherwise she lolls about, which is exactly what she has always told everyone else not to do. She often goes back to bed with a nice cup of tea, a nice book. Not exactly what anyone would call keeping busy.
Nor does Caroline “entertain,” or “see people,” and God knows she does not try for new friends (to the people at the shelter she is polite, never warm or cordial; “Doing good work does not necessarily improve people’s characters,” she has said to Liza).
“I’ve seen people, most of the people I know, quite recently. All those parties when we first got back, I saw everyone we knew, several times. And now everyone’s been so terrifically nice and kind, honestly, it’s obscene, all those flowers. But it just doesn’t seem to me that I have to see the people themselves. All that business of going out to dinner. The truth is, I don’t feel much like talking about Ralph, or being careful not to talk about him, if you see what I mean.” Again, to Liza.
The only untrue part of that statement is minor, concerning the flowers: Caroline actually does not find their abundance obscene, she adores having all those flowers. She carefully attends to their needs for fresh water, for trimmed or mashed stems, in some cases liquid food. Of course she recognizes that the amount of money spent on such an abundant floral display might have done more human good, spent otherwise; however, it was not, and so she might as well enjoy the flowers. Which she does, and she does all she can to make them flourish, and last.
“My daughters are not only terrifically solicitous, it seems to me quite hysterically so, they are also most wildly anxious to tell me all about themselves. I suppose in fact they always have been, but these days it does seem more pronounced, they go on and on. And on.”
Caroline does not literally speak those words to anyone; she has no present friend with whom she is on such terms. Nor does she have the sort of sentimentality that would encourage conversations with a dead husband. It is perhaps to some ideal, imagined friend (as a child might have, as Caroline as an only child undoubtedly did have) that she voices these semi-complaints about the confessions of her daughters.
And in the meantime she goes on listening.
Sage says, “It’s all so curiously depressing. I had no idea, I always thought I wanted to be successful, and now I am, I guess, but this doesn’t feel like success. It’s more like being hit by something on the street, some terrific burden that I don’t know what to do with. Cal’s been a big help, and in another way Stevie too, but still, I don’t know, I keep thinking that this is not what I meant to do. Do you see what I mean at all?”
Liza’s problem, very curiously, is somewhat similar: she has just sold a short story, her first, to a very trashy magazine. For three thousand dollars. Initially she sent it off to The New Yorker, from whom (from a pleasant-sounding woman) she got an encouraging letter. Another first: she is used to printed rejections. And then in her dentist’s office she happened to read the trashy magazine, simply called You, and there was a story by a good writer, one she has long admired. And so rather whimsically she sent off her own story, and to her vast surprise they took it. For all that money.
Liza, though, is considerably more lighthearted than Sage about this strange success, as well as more objective.
“It’s too funny, really,” she tells her moth
er. “How it all happened, I mean how I came to write it. But at some point I guess I was getting a little down on motherhood and life in the park. Anyway, I sat there in J.K. and I thought about all the guys I used to see around there, you know, old Sixties pals, and I thought it might be a kick to see some of them again. So I wrote a few notes, just saying I’d like to see them, if they were ever around. I don’t think I was really up to anything, but maybe I was.” She looks at her mother in a speculative way.
Caroline has remained impassive—although somewhat tempted to “share” her own experiences of maternal boredom, she does not do so. “Perhaps,” is all she says.
“Well, the funny part was that no one showed up. Not one answer,” Liza continues. “So, I began to think about how it might have been if a couple of them had. And that was my story. Honestly, it’s not as crappy as that sounds, though. You’ll see. And I have to admit, I was excited about the New Yorker letter, that woman really liked it, I think. Why does everyone venerate that magazine so? STILL. But they can’t write letters to everyone who sends them stories, I know they don’t. I do have mixed feelings about being in You, though. Maybe I should have tried somewhere else too. On the other hand, all that money is nice, I’m working on persuading Saul to take off for a week in Mexico. He still feels guilty about the time we were supposed to go away, the time we almost made it to Carmel.”
“Liza, that’s terrific, and I can’t wait to read your story.”
“It’ll look even better in print, I can’t wait for that. Even wedged among all the singles-condom advice and brand-new diets. But it is encouraging. I’m going to put myself on a schedule somehow, try to write every day.”
“You should, you know. You could use the money for help. Sitters, so you can work.”
“I’ve thought of that, in fact I know it’s exactly what I should do. You know I’ll never get Saul to Mexico.” But Liza laughs as she says this, as though referring to an amiable weakness.