Caroline's Daughters

by Alice Adams

  A pause. “Then perhaps I should come to you there.”

  “I think not, on the whole. Thanks, though.”

  “But, my dear Caroline, I had at least two things of the utmost importance to say to you.”

  But I don’t want you here, Caroline does not say. However, she does manage, “I have to tell you, Roland, that I’m much enjoying being by myself. You know, I’ve had rather little of that in my life, and I value it now.”

  A long, no doubt expensive pause. “In that case I must come to you there.”

  “No, Roland, honestly. Please don’t. Really. Please.”

  Roland arrives about mid-morning of the following day, having taken the Palermo-Naples boat and driven (surely madly) up from Naples.

  Seemingly not wishing to commit themselves to a single place, any venue for what must be a difficult conversation, for an hour or so they simply walk about, Roland and Caroline. Each, perhaps, playing for time.

  It is over Camparis at Caroline’s small café that Roland, as though from the blue, begins to talk about Buck Fister.

  “It is true that we were friends,” Roland tells her, earnestly. “I talked to him, I don’t know, something about him seemed to invite certain conversations. As you have no doubt observed, ordinarily men do not have conversations with each other.”

  “Yes, it seems very sad for them.”

  “Indeed so. In any case I did find myself talking to Buck, we had enjoyable lunches, though not with great frequency. It always seemed that it was I who talked, though. I had not noticed this, I had not thought of it, not giving it much attention. And then—” Roland scowls, as his voice simultaneously deepens and strains, as though he now speaks from great dark depths, with great effort. “And then one day he talked to me,” Roland with difficulty says, “and he told me in some detail of what he was doing. His business—his business with girls.”

  “Girls?” Tired Caroline is not picking up the threads of this conversation.

  “His, uh, traffic. The prostitution.”

  “Oh.” But why are we talking about this, and why now? Caroline would like to know.

  “But not with prostitutes. With nice girls. The prostitution of nice girls.” Roland brings these last words out heavily, large stones on the table between them. Ugly stones, repellent. “I knew already that he had an interest in some houses,” Roland continues, “but the houses were quite another thing from these girls. Girls even from families that you might know, sent out to hotels. Businessmen from wherever, even doctors, of course many lawyers.” Roland pauses, staring across the table at Caroline, almost accusingly. “He mentioned one girl, and then I had to end it. I made a certain phone call. Concerning Buck. To certain people.”

  He is telling me that Jill was involved with acts of prostitution, thinks Caroline, her mind reeling. That Jill went to hotels for money, with strangers, and that for that reason he caused Buck Fister to be murdered. Caroline receives this dizzily, it almost makes her faint. Closing her eyes against it, beginning to deny it, “I am tired,” is all Caroline said.

  A moment later, opening her eyes, revived to a degree perhaps by sheer curiosity, she asks him, “But how did you know—to call—?”

  “How did I come to be involved with such people? My darling, this is a very long Italian story, very Sicilian, commencing with the youngest sister of my grandfather. I will tell you at a later time.”

  It is enough—just for an instant—to make Caroline believe that she might never return to San Francisco, nor to her daughters. How selfish they all are, really—beautiful, selfish, spoiled and greedy girls, San Francisco girls, perfect products of that spoiled and lovely city. She almost wishes that an earthquake might overtake them all, so that San Francisco, like Pompei, like Paestum, would be historical.

  Thirty-two

  “Stevie, I have something to tell you. I’ve fallen in love with you. Really. I’m sorry, but there it is. I love you.”

  “Uh, Stevie, instead of going out why don’t we just take some dope and go up to bed? I’ll cook something later.”

  “Uh, Stevie, have you ever given much thought to how you, uh, feel about me?”

  “Stevie, something really sort of amazing has happened.”

  Sage, who is having considerable trouble getting to work, is saying all that to Stevie, all those nutty sentences, in her mind. They are to have dinner together tonight, and it is true, she is in love with Stevie. Tremendously. She realized it only this morning.

  And how wonderful, really, to fall in love with an old and trusted friend, good kind smart dear Stevie. It struck her like a whirlwind, as, at breakfast, she began to think of the coming night. Of seeing Stevie. And then the feeling went on and on, as she tried to work.

  How very surprised he will be to hear this, though. But since they are indeed friends, Sage feels a clear compulsion to tell him of her feelings, just as she would if she were in some way angry at him. The problem is how to put it so that Stevie will not be embarrassed. He is such a gentle, on-the-whole quiet person.

  Strong mid-afternoon sunlight, strained through the streaky windowpanes, illuminates all the comforts of Sage’s studio: the broken-down but still comfortable leather sofa; the small bookcase, holding some favorite poetry (what Sage reads when she really cannot work): Neruda, D. Levertov, Auden, Chaucer, Yeats. A. Rich. A Bible, and several green Michelin guides. Two bentwood chairs, her worktable, the radio—turned always to the classical music station, which is just now playing some Brahms, familiar, stirringly melodic, undoubtedly contributing to Sage’s mood, all that lavish lonely love. The haunting cello, tremulous violins. Enough to make anyone believe herself in love.

  But despite the support of such surroundings, the sunlight and the music, Sage is getting nowhere with her work.

  Her fingers dig into the clay, and her delving, shaping tools form and re-form and shift its small mass, but whatever she had in mind does not come forth. (She had Stevie in mind actually: not literally Stevie but a tall heavy man like Stevie with a group of less defined small children. Very interesting, she thought—and whatever is that all about?)

  Sometime later, though, an hour, maybe two, there on Sage’s table is a small intricately and delicately fashioned naked man, far more detailed than most of her figures: she had shaped his shoulder blades, rib cage, loins, penis and long muscled legs. He stands in repose, his head just bent, his hair too long. And Sage sees that it is Noel. It is far more clearly Noel than if she had meant to portray him. With a painful accuracy she has re-created Noel, strong and intense and very beautiful.

  All she has heard from him is a postcard from Grass Valley: “Burned out. (Joke.) Divorce me. I’ll sign.” And a box number.

  Sometimes, unexpectedly, she has wept for Noel. His lost beauty, the sheer waste of their life together. She does so now, there in the sunny studio that he made for her, as from her radio still come the lovely rippling trembling piano runs. More Brahms.

  Sage weeps until she realizes that she is enjoying the tears, along with the music—and then she stops, and gets back to work.

  “We celebrate today the birthday of Johannes Brahms,” says that unctuous voice. “Over a hundred and fifty years ago today, in Frankfurt, Germany. His mother, already in her early forties, his much younger, by seventeen years, father—” (Which explains what all that Brahms was about.)

  As Sage thinks, Amazing! And, That’s not a bad life plan, marry a much younger man when you’re in your forties, and then produce a genius.

  “I wonder what on earth my mother’s doing in Italy,” Sage muses aloud to Stevie, that night, as she not very successfully tries to grate fresh ginger into a marinade. They are both in her kitchen, which, since Noel, Sage has tried to finish up: with a butcherblock table, a Cuisinart and a microwave, all attesting to considerable money spent (“My nouveau riche cuisine,” Sage has earlier remarked to Stevie). Plus some blue-and-white toile curtains, and a Barcelona chair, in which Stevie now comfortably lounges.

  �
��What she says is most likely the truth,” he tells Sage. “I’d imagine she’s having a very good time, like she says. And probably not really wishing you all were with her.”

  “I guess. Oh shit!” Sage has just grated her thumb, which she now protectively sucks.

  Getting up, unwinding, “Here, let me do that,” Stevie tells her. “I must say, for a sculptor—”

  “I know, clumsy fingers. Noel always said that.”

  “Which I did not. Give me credit.”

  “Dear Stevie, I do. Well, I hope she’s just having a good time. Caroline.”

  “What on earth else would she be doing? Why are you so suspicious of your mother? An unusually nice woman, as you know.”

  “I do know. She’s so nice that I get suspicious. And she is staying a lot longer than she said.”

  “A good sign, I’d think.”

  “I guess.” Sage frowns dubiously, and then she says, “But, Stevie, you haven’t said what you’re up to now. You were going to tell me.”

  Dextrously chopping—he too has had to give up grating the very moist and fibrous root—Stevie pauses before he tells her, “I do have a plan. I don’t know why I feel a little silly telling you about it.”

  “It’s not a silly plan?”

  “Well, no.”

  Stevie’s plan, which he at first somewhat ironically refers to as his free-food place, has actually been worked out in considerable detail. He describes it to Sage over dinner, their gingered swordfish, and wine.

  “You remember Tony Navarro? That nice Mexican kid we knew in the Movement, came to all the sit-ins and stuff, from Mission High? I ran into him again in the restaurant business, we used some of the same people. His folks had a place out on Mission that he inherited, which has put him more or less in the same position that I’m in now. Some dough to use, and a lot of experience in food. Purveyors, storage, all that. Plus our sentimental Sixties good intentions.”

  He and Sage exchange a look, a wry smile. And then Stevie goes on and on, describing a plan that basically combines restaurant food overloads, the goodwill (and a few other emotions) of restaurant owners—and human need. The needs of the homeless, people with AIDS, the impoverished old.

  “Anyway, that’s what I’m mostly up to now,” he says, as they come to the end of dinner, and apparently of his recital. “Plus a not-so-good relationship that’s winding down, I think,” he adds.

  “Oh really?” Sage, her spirits suddenly and considerably lowered, does not ask, as she would like to, Who? Why winding down?

  “I don’t know,” Stevie tells her, “it just seems really hard to work things out these days. The women I meet are so terrifically distrustful. Not that I blame them, but they are.”

  “I guess so. I mean, I guess we are.” Sage still feels a certain apprehension about the direction that this talk is taking.

  “I meet two kinds of women,” says Stevie, with a little sigh. “The first ones had a really bad experience, sometimes it’s a marriage—have you noticed how many people our age have already been married, some of them more than once?—and the bad time was a few years back, but they still don’t really want to get into anything. And the second group wants to get married tomorrow and have a lot of children the following week.”

  Sage laughs, as she knows Stevie meant her to, but she feels her own laugh as a little dishonest: she would like to get married next week, to Stevie, and have children as soon as they could. “Your current friend must be in the second group,” she says.

  “No, actually in the first, the bad-marriage group. The trouble is, she seems to be changing her mind at the same time that I’m changing mine. I know, it sounds a lot funnier than it is. I feel like I’ve been not quite honest with her, I mean I didn’t really want her all that much, it turns out. But maybe I should have known that in the first place.”

  Sage cannot prevent or control the small wave of relief that rises within her. “It’s mostly that you care about women much more than most men do,” she tells him. “You’re responsible.”

  “I do? I am? Well, I guess. It seems a problem for me. The energy involved in just not hurting, or getting hurt.”

  How lucky that she did not at any earlier point in the evening declare her great new love for Stevie! That would have been so entirely wrong, Sage now sees. And possibly it is not even really true. It even seems a little crazy, those violent emotions applied to Stevie. Slightly hysterical (a version of that terrible, still-embarrassing scene with Jim McAndrew).

  Perhaps after all what she does feel for Stevie is the most affectionate friendship, the sort that never needs a declaration.

  “Well, if I ever decide that I’m dying to have children next week you’ll be the first to know,” she tells him.

  And they both laugh. Good old friends.

  Thirty-three

  Simojoval de Allende, high in the mountains of Chiapas, near the border that separates Mexico from Guatemala, is not what Liza ever envisioned when she thought the word “Mexico.” She had, rather, pictured some aspect of Mexico City, the Anthropology Museum, or teeming, exotic streets, and crowds, and wild-colored flowers. Or, a tropical beach, a slick-magazine scene of sexy smooth white sand, and green clear shallow water, gently rippling. A stand of palms.

  Not an almost new but already showing wear, one-story California-ranch-style motel. Rutted, muddy, unpaved streets, and a restaurant that serves burned beans and tepid beer. And not much else. Nevertheless, that is where they are, she and Saul, for their Mexican reunion—where, as he has reminded her once too often, she always wanted to go.

  Nearby there is marvellous scenery, deep gorges and waterfalls; and in several neighboring towns and small cities, most notably San Cristóbal de las Casas, there is architecture of a Baroque beauty almost unsurpassed in colonial Mexico. But this is the rainy season, and although it only rains in the afternoons the roads are very slick, almost impassable. There was a horrifying bus accident the week before, thirty-nine people over a cliff, no survivors. A Third Class bus: “Naturally,” Saul and Liza muttered to each other, in an infrequent moment of agreement, on this trip.

  Also (“to make everything quite perfect,” as Liza puts it to herself), Saul has crab lice, and not only that but he has run out of the DDT powder that would have controlled their incursions into the deepest follicle of each hair on his body. Saul is not an exceptionally hairy person, he has none on his back (he now thanks God), only in the ordinary male places for hair, but he now feels himself most horrendously hirsute. Everywhere itches, he feels dirty and disgusting, asexual and full of guilt—and a guilt that will not let him speak its name. Because Liza insists on his innocence.

  “Darling, I’ve had crabs too, once I picked them up or, rather, they picked me up in jail, that time in Santa Rita. I know how easily you can get them,” she tells him affably. “And it’s not as easy to get rid of them as they say. Easier for women, I guess, with less hair.”

  “You’ll get them from me.”

  “Sweetie, of course I will. But isn’t that what reunions are all about? Funny sex? Things not quite working out?”

  Saul has not been in jail, but he has been living in “substandard” conditions, huts and slapped-up dirt-floored shacks, mostly along the coast of Honduras. However, he did not get crabs from those anonymous conditions but from a nurse, fervent skinny Lorna Cassidy, from Michigan. With whom Saul has been fornicating (that is the word that comes to his mind; he could also say that they had been fucking their socks off) at every available opportunity.

  Liza in her cheerful way seems to assume that no such thing could ever be possible. And it is not possible: Saul, the good doctor, the good Jewish son and husband, quite passionately and permanently in love with his wife, with lovely blonde Liza, he could never do such a thing. But that is just what he has been doing, fucking Lorna, whom he does not even love, he just likes her. Doing it every time they have found ten minutes of privacy, or less, anywhere at all. Several times standing in a closet. In improvi
sed bathrooms.

  In a way Saul would like to tell Liza all this; for one thing she would find it very interesting. She likes stories that involve a lot of sexual goings-on. But Saul admits to himself that telling Liza, for whatever reasons, ostensibly moral and honest, would in fact be a cruel sort of boasting, and so he does not.

  In any case there they are, drinking too much tasteless beer, and talking in more or less opposite directions.

  Liza is in fact grappling with a moral problem (she sees its essence as moral) of quite a different sort from that which so distracts and disturbs poor faithless Saul. What obsesses Liza is the fact that she sent a story to the largest and reputedly the richest of the so-called women’s magazines, and they have called to say that they “love” the story, it is “wonderful.” So much strong feeling, they say, which is so rare these days. They would love to publish it—if only. If only she could make things a little more clear, here and there. And perhaps the lover need not after all be Polish? They mean, why Polish? And the scene in bed, well, just a little too long? And then there’s the ending: possibly a little more explanation, a little what you might call lightening up?

  “In other words, totally change my original story. To meet their specifications,” Liza concludes her recital. “I’m surprised they didn’t want me to put everyone in Ralph Lauren clothes.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “No, I’m not sure. Some other inner voice is saying they could be right, you know, they’re not all dummies. They could be really improving the story. And then it all gets more confused because of the money. Of course I’d like it, even if I know we don’t need it. But, you know, trips?”

  At that word they both smile feebly; in their present hot, damp and dubiously clean surroundings the word “trip” is not exactly magic.

  “So I don’t know quite what to do.” About anything, Liza could continue, including us. How terrifically lonely I feel, now that we’re together. How much closer, really, I felt when I was in San Francisco and you in Honduras, or wherever. Thinking of you, I felt much closer than I do now.