by Alice Adams
Which she did. For Portia, there was amazing revelation, and former confusions clarified. For Hilda, the more experienced, there was also revelation, of love. “I find myself astounded,” she said to Portia, with a laugh of disbelief. “My terrible war-torn cynical self. In love.”
And so it is Portia who sits beside Jill’s tight white hospital bed (the same hospital, Presbyterian, that both Molly Blair and then Ralph were in); she sits there longing for Hilda, looking forward to Hilda. Talking, in her secret mind, to Hilda.
As Jill, who is getting better fast, talks more and more. “Needless to say I do feel the most horrendous guilt.” She repeats this sentence, with variations, frequently. “Screwing your sister’s husband, even a half-sister’s, that’s got to be the worst. And the terrible thing is—Portia, you must never tell this to anyone—I really didn’t like him all that much. Oh, at first I was sort of crazy about him, but I never really wanted him for me. I would never have married Noel, he has absolutely no class.” And then, “Oh Jesus, it’s all so horrible. I can’t wait to get into AA.”
Once she asks, “Do you mean you’re really in love with this woman, this Hilda Daid, the lawyer?”
“Well yes, you could put it like that.”
“Tell me something, is it simpler with women? I mean just getting along?”
“I honestly don’t know, I’ve had so little experience with men. Or for that matter with women either.” Portia makes an effort to examine what she is saying. “I wouldn’t say that things with Hilda are exactly simple. Just, uh, very good.”
Jim McAndrew’s visits to his daughter are brief and awkward, so that Portia, who is usually there when he comes, is for the first time aware of what Caroline has sometimes complained of; Jim’s entire capacity for affection and for intimacy is directed toward his patients, has been Caroline’s claim.
Jim and Jill discuss her symptoms, the stiffness and burn pain—since she is not a patient, but just his daughter, Jill’s most frequent sentence to her father is simply, “When am I getting out of here?” Which Portia often takes as a cue to leave.
But Jim in his stiff white lab coat is far more impressive than in the old Brooks garb that Portia has usually seen him wear, on those infrequent occasions when they have met at all. (He must feel quite odd about her, Portia believes; she would be for him the product of his wife’s adulterous love. Or perhaps he does not think in those terms at all.) Portia has never understood Jim’s great attraction for Sage, except in the most rudimentary “Freudian” terms. Nor can she really understand why Caroline was ever sufficiently attracted to marry Jim. In any case, though, Jim as “the doctor” is clearer, more in focus and more confident than in the discarded-husband, uneasy-guest roles in which Portia has seen him before.
“Don’t let me force you out of here, now, please, Portia,” Jim tells her, flashing his doctor smile, which is quick and confident. Then, checking his watch, “I’ve just got a couple of minutes.”
“No, I really have to get home. Dinner,” Portia murmurs. “Okay, Jill. See you tomorrow.”
“Ports, you really don’t have to come every day. But of course I love it when you do,” Jill tells her.
This grateful Jill is quite a new person, to Portia. (Even Caroline has been heard to complain that Jill has never thanked anyone, for anything.) And she still looks quite unlike herself, with her short unwashed hair plastered down to her skull, her staring eyes no longer dark-rimmed, fringed. And Portia wonders, how will Jill be when she really gets all better, and gets into AA, as she insists that her plan is?
“What is it about doctors, really? Why are so many women turned on by them? I wonder if men are.” Portia, at dinner, asks these questions more of herself than as someone expecting an answer. And as soon as she has voiced them she rather wishes that she had not—or, that she had waited until she and Hilda were alone: at the moment they have two guests, Sage and Stevie.
Hilda, though, emerging from the shyness with which she has so far been stricken, takes it up. “I think it has to do with power,” she says. “The old equation of power and sexuality.”
Stevie: “That’s extremely interesting. I bet you’re right. Not, as commonly supposed, so much their access to forbidden body parts.”
Hilda: “That too, but less so, I believe.”
Stevie: “Terrible, isn’t it. An equation of total power over your life, which is far from always benign—with sex.”
Hilda: “Indeed.”
Stevie: “Of course, to be totally fair, I have to say that we’re ignoring the helping aspect of doctors.”
Hilda: “Yes, there is that, but I don’t think that’s what’s sexy.”
Pleased that the guests are getting along, and rather surprised at this dialogue which she herself seems to have instigated, Portia for the moment simply listens. She is also pleased that the whole implication of her remark was not apparent: she was speaking of course of Jim McAndrew, and she could just as well have said, Just what does anyone see in Jim McAndrew?
“Sometimes I think I only like gay men,” is Sage’s contribution. And then, with a small ambiguous laugh in the direction of her friend, “No offense, Stevie.”
Good-naturedly he tells her, “Well, actually me too. At least half my friends are gay, which can be more than a little sad these days. Four lost already this year.”
At which they all say yes, fervently, and then are quiet for a while.
“And the other half are women,” Stevie next says, successfully breaking that moment of mourning. “I really like women friends.”
This is visibly true, if the present moment is a sample of how Stevie “relates” to women. In the company of this somewhat heterogeneous trio, he is clearly much at ease. His plump soft body even seems to enlarge, to expand, as he sits so relaxed in Portia’s (Mrs. Kaltenborn’s) largest shabby leather chair, which creaks a little as he shifts his considerable weight.
They are having coffee, after an extremely good if slightly eccentric dinner—combined efforts by Portia and Hilda, their Middle Eastern-Texas-California cuisine.
“I really could not have got through the last few weeks without Calvin Crome,” says Sage. “What a kind and really magic person in my life.”
“You’re forgiving him for making you so rich?” Stevie asks this with great affection, as though the question were familiar, one often repeated between them. And then he says, more or less to everyone, “Sage and I are the perfect example of what happens to old hippies. We get rich. If not conservative.”
“Yes, but we really didn’t mean to,” Sage tells him. “You didn’t know that Fiona would ever sell Fiona’s.”
“No, not really. But I saw to it that I had a very clever contract, so maybe in some sense I did know.”
“You’re too hard on yourself, you know that?”
“Unlike you.” He laughs at her.
Sage then says, “Ports, I guess I do have to go and see Jill?” This was actually a question.
“Well, not necessarily,” Portia tells her, somewhat guardedly.
“You think not? You’re probably right, she could be dreading it too. Dreading me.”
“Well, sure.”
“And I have to admit, I am pretty angry. Which I might as well not say to Jill,” Sage continues. “But of all the sleaze, getting it on with your sister’s husband.”
Stevie asks, “Did it ever come out what her connection was with that Buck Fister?”
“Not really,” Sage tells him. “I suppose it might have if he hadn’t got himself offed. By the Mafia, probably. And probably Jill was one of his girls, turning tricks for him.”
“Oh, Sage.”
“Sage, really.”
“Sage, you’re too harsh, really.”
“Well, I’ve got some reason to be mad at her, don’t you think? And even if she wasn’t turning tricks, Fister is a very suspect person to have as a friend. I think Jill is basically dreadful!” Sage cries out, suddenly unleashed. “I’ve really had it with her
, with her hundred-dollar panty hose—”
“How on earth do you know that?”
“She told me once. Actually boasting. And twice a week a masseur and three times comb-outs and every other day a manicure. Jesus, I hate yuppies. They’re immoral. Hundred-dollar panty hose is immoral.” In her passion Sage’s voice trembles, edged with tears.
Stevie pours some red wine into her glass—a beautiful Mexican swirled blue, Mrs. Kaltenborn’s glasses. “Baby, we all hate yuppies,” he tells her. “Even yuppies hate yuppies. But you’re right, they consort with the enemy, they’re bad.”
Sage is crying now, tears streaming down, and her voice is uncontrolled, but still she is trying to talk, to say something. “Well, you can see that my going to visit Jill is not such a great idea,” she gets out. Her laugh is a croak. “I must be drunk, I think. Stevie, take me home?”
“Would you say that Stevie is gay? Is that what Sage meant?” Hilda asks this of Portia as together they try to clean up their disordered kitchen. Lively Hilda and sleepy, failing Portia.
“Well, I don’t know. She could have meant that, I guess.”
“Or is he possibly one of those men who are quite at peace with their feminine natures? Their animas. Often such men seem to be gay but are not, in all ways they are deeply fond of women.”
“Well, I guess. Hilda, don’t you think we could get a dishwasher? Everyone has them.”
“Would not Sage then accuse us of yuppiness? My darling, for this night you have a dishwasher, who is myself. And now would you please go up to bed?”
Thirty-one
Waking in Ravello, an hour or so south of Naples, on the morning after a very late and somewhat problematic arrival at this inaccessible, mountaintop hotel, Caroline sees the slits of sunlight between the louvers, in the long wide windows. She sees and feels that indeed it must be morning, and so she gets up, she goes to open a shutter, and she sees what she never could have imagined: a bright vista of small steep olive fields, bordered by gray stone fences; tiny houses with sloping red-tiled roofs, gardens, everywhere trees and flowers; a miniature woman, blue-aproned, in her doorway; a man with a wheelbarrow; a horse and a goat; and far off in the shimmering pale-blue silver distance the sea, the Mediterranean. Caroline gasps and almost laughs with the sheer surprise of it all, of what she sees, the amazing beauty. A painter’s dream of a morning, she thinks to herself.
She arrived the night before at a darkened entrance: a gate, a terrace, steps and a massive, barely illuminated door with a big brass plate. Bearing a name. A bellboy mysteriously appeared, opened her car door and took in her bags—there seemed no question as to her destination.
Quite punchy with fatigue, Caroline stood beside her pile of luggage in the entrance hall, on a black-and-white marble floor, noting a broad carpeted staircase with intricately carved banisters—leading upstairs? to beds?—as she watched the bellboy in some sort of conference, or argument, with a sleekly white-haired, rather corpulent person behind the desk. They both were gesturing, scowling, as Caroline was acutely aware of a longing to be in any bed at all.
She was allowed, though, only to wash up (in a surprisingly institutional, utilitarian, large bathroom, on the ground floor) before being ushered into what she could dimly make out to be a magnificent dining room: deep-drawn draperies, presumably over windows that looked out to some sort of view. And a dozen or so small round white-clothed tables, above one and only one of which a delicate crystal-hung chandelier shone down.
Seated alone in such splendor, she was soon served by a young blond white-coated waiter, who brought her a chilled green bottle of wine. Then cold chicken, a plate of sliced tomatoes. Some cheese and bread and butter.
Feeling drunk from her first sip of wine, which was dry and delicious, heady, Caroline said to the white-haired owner, “This is the most elegant supper I’ve ever had.” He had appeared discreetly to inquire.
He bowed and smiled, reminding her suddenly but imprecisely of someone, someone—and then, as the smile receded, she saw that it was Roland. For a single exhausted and quite unnerving moment Caroline felt that Roland had followed her there—disguised, in a white wig, an affable innkeeper manner.
In the morning, though, waking to that view, and to no Roland, to her own wide restful private bed, Caroline thinks, How ridiculous, how very silly I do get, sometimes when I’m tired. Roland Gallo has undoubtedly propositioned at least several women since me, and no doubt with large success, his turn-downs must be as rare as hen’s teeth.
“How brave you are, going all the way off to Italy by yourself.” Almost everyone said that to Caroline, with a few individual variations. Even her daughters said it. And Saul, the favorite, reliable son-in-law, surprised her by asking, privately and highly seriously, “Caroline, are you really sure you want to do this?”
“It’s actually much easier and much less brave than staying at home.” That is what Caroline would have liked to say, and what she felt to be true. But she did not say that. Staying at home was indeed far harder to do; there were whole lists of simple and highly complicated demands, from people and from the house itself, enough to fill all her time.
And there at home was where she missed Ralph most. At many times, in many corners—in bed—at times intolerably.
But in Italy, and especially in Rome, Caroline walked all day, savoring the crowds and sheer foreignness, the frenetic bustle of streets, the rare shadowed peace of gardens. She was not thinking at all, she believed—she was simply enjoying the privilege, rare in her life, of being all alone.
At night, alone, she went out to restaurants, dressed up in her best (each night a new restaurant, but the same fairly old best dress). She held her head high, and shamelessly eavesdropped on all possible conversations. She ate pasta and marvellous veal and beautiful fruits and cheeses—and did not gain weight. She drank a lot of wine.
One day, in the Villa Julia, at a distance, Caroline noticed a smartly dressed American woman, navy silk with big white polka dots, who strongly reminded her of someone, somewhere—or was she only a type, from the mold of upper-class women everywhere—especially during the Fifties, all those women in their silks and hats and gloves, seemingly going underground or elsewhere in the Sixties and most of the Seventies, to resurface with bells on, so to speak, in the super-rich Eighties. And then Caroline thought, It is Mary Higgins Lord, who did not, after all, become a homeless, chanting bag lady.
On closer viewing, though, the polka-dot woman is far too young to be Higgsie Lord, and her eyes are dark, not pale yellow. She is neither a type nor a recognized person, then, but a very young, very proper, slightly overdressed young woman, whose moist upper lip betrays some crucial error: she has worn too much silk for the day, which is very hot.
She will have to call Jim McAndrew as soon as she gets home, Caroline determines. Perhaps Caroline can find Higgsie herself.
In the meantime she simply wanders about Ravello, through gardens with sudden, breathtaking views of the sea, past courtyards of white stone statuary, sometimes stopping at a small open café for coffee, or an apéritif. A woman alone, testing waters—though Caroline herself would probably describe her activities as resting.
Tomaso, her white-haired host, remains discreetly, availably helpful. Would she like a trip to Capri, to Paestum or to Pompei? Any or all of those could be most easily arranged. But Caroline thinks not, actually (she has been to all those places with Ralph, on one of their Italian tours—though not to Ravello, which was one fact that brought her here). Caroline has the sense too that should she show the slightest interest Tomaso would also make himself available to her, a very temporary, probably very thoughtful lover. But she lacks that interest—entirely.
It is Tomaso, though, who wakes her from a longer-than-usual siesta—to announce, of all things, a phone call. (No room phones: she must come downstairs to take it.)
“From the States?” Caroline has thought first, of course, of her daughters, of some possible new disaster in any of thei
r lives.
“No, it comes in fact from Palermo. Much less far.” Tomaso smiles, secretly.
Hurrying toward the phone, Caroline is thinking, Roland, of course, but however did he—? And then in an instant she decides that since he could only have got her number from one of her daughters, with all of whom she leaves itineraries, she does not want to know which daughter, how, why.
“Well, here I am in Palermo,” Roland tells her, quite as though from the next room. “I’ve tracked you down!”
Sensing that he would like to be asked how he did so, Caroline again decides not to ask, and only comments, “You sound much closer.”
A laugh. “Well, actually I could be, but I’m not quite as tricky as all that. Palermo is absolutely marvellous, though.” He pauses, lightly clears his throat. “In fact I have high hopes of persuading you to join me here.”
“Roland, really—”
“What you would do, my dear Caroline, is to go down to Naples, easy enough by car, Tomaso could handle it for you, and from Naples a most pleasant overnight boat to Palermo, where, in the morning, I greet you. You see? It is almost all arranged.”
But I don’t want to come to Palermo, is what Caroline would have liked to say. Instead she temporizes, “How nice of you to have thought it all out.”
“It’s as good as done,” Roland tells her, somewhat too emphatically. “I have the hotel reservation for you, can you stay a week, two weeks?”
“My dear Roland, actually I can’t come to Palermo at all, nice as it sounds. I’m meeting a friend in Madrid next week. An old school friend.”
“You fly to Madrid from Naples?”
“Uh, yes.” Can one fly to Madrid from Naples? Caroline very much hopes so.
“Well, in that case, a slight detour to Palermo. Perfecto.”
“Roland, I’m sorry, but I honestly cannot come to Palermo.”