Caroline's Daughters

by Alice Adams

  “Which would possibly indicate that Stevie is more complex than he looks to be?”

  “Probably. And if he’s not it simply won’t work out.”

  “But it has to. With the baby.”

  “Oh, has to. Hilda, what will I do when you’re gone?”

  Hilda smiles darkly, impenetrably. And then she says, very practical, “You’ll find some work. It’s the only solution, for anything.”

  “Oh, I know you’re right. But what?”

  By the time Sage and Stevie arrive, quite promptly at 7, both Portia and Hilda are very happy to see them.

  “Someone sure has an eye for the greatest roses,” Stevie exclaims as they reach the deck; there, in the continuing warmth, despite the clutter, they plan to have some wine and the now-chilling gravlax. Stevie goes slowly from bush to bush, less as an inspector than as a lover. He looks intently at each clump of blossoms, smiling at them, breathing them in. And then, standing up, he begins to laugh at himself. “I’m sorry, I’m really a rose nut,” he explains. “Honestly, this is hog heaven.”

  “I did work in a nursery for a while.” Portia seems to feel that her superior taste in roses requires explanation. “With, uh, what’s-his-name.”

  None of them can remember the name of Portia’s former co-worker, her semi-lover, until at last Portia comes out with “Harold.”

  “Which reminds me,” Stevie says, “do you all remember Fiona’s old flower purveyors, Lois and Bonnie? Lois was tall and black, Bonnie little and blonde.”

  “Not really,” Sage tells him. “But then I never exactly spent a lot of time hanging out at Fiona’s.”

  “I sort of do remember them, I think,” lies Portia, the truth being that she remembers both those women with excruciating vividness; she used to be so (she finds no other way to put this) so turned on by them, by their persons and by the very idea of them: two forthright, uncloseted and apparently very happy lesbians. She was passionately curious about them, especially about Lois, the very tall, very beautiful black woman.

  “Well, they broke up, remember?” (Portia does very clearly remember, and remembers certain fantasies of her own, concerning Lois). “And Lois, who’s one terrific businesswoman,” says Stevie, “or I guess that’s what she is, Lois has this new nursery business over on Potrero, near where we used to be, the restaurant. And she’s looking for someone. In case you hear of anyone interested in working with her.”

  “Why not in fact for you, Portia?” asks innocent Hilda. Or, is she after all so innocent? Can she have picked up something in the air from Portia, some breath of Portia’s intense interest, and sensed its nature? It is hard to read anything so devious on Hilda’s clear-featured pale-brown face, or in her luminous green-brown eyes.

  And how possibly can she, Portia, even imagine anything with someone else? “Well, I don’t know,” she says. “It’s true that I need to get into some kind of work, and it should be something I know about,” she trails off, weakly.

  Or, does subtle, very wise Hilda actually plan to stay in Lebanon, and does she (altruistically? managerially?) hope to leave Portia on the threshold of a new relationship? Impossible to tell, and certainly impossible at the moment to ask Hilda.

  “Harold might be interested,” says Portia. “He called the other day and sounded sort of at loose ends. Besides, I’ve been thinking that I might go back to school and get a teaching credential. Learn how to teach foreigners. Boat people. Children.” She had in fact thought of this before, but not been sure that she would do it until she spoke—so definitely.

  “Well, that’s a most good idea.” Hilda smiles.

  And Sage, “Yes, good.”

  Sage is wearing a sort of maternity smock, something yellow, embroidered in red. It seems to Portia a little early for such a costume, but she can understand Sage’s need to confirm it. “Are you going to have the test?” she asks Sage.

  “No, I’m not.” Sage is very clear, and defiant. “I know at my age I’m supposed to, but unless you’re prepared to have an abortion, which I’m not, there’s no point.”

  “We plan to take what we get,” adds Stevie, smilingly.

  “And we think our chances are great,” Sage announces, and then she frowns. “I keep having to explain that this doesn’t mean I’m anti-abortion, for God’s sake. I plan to march and do everything I can if those morons overturn Roe v. Wade. It only has to do with this particular kid. Mine and Stevie’s. Also, at my age I’m not all that likely to get pregnant again.”

  “You can’t tell, this may be the first of many.” Stevie laughs.

  “Don’t count on me for more,” Sage tells him.

  “It’s certainly no one’s business but yours,” Portia tells her sister.

  “Exactly, that’s how I see it. Anyway, I really don’t want to know its sex.”

  Hilda asks, “When does Caroline get home, exactly?”

  Sage tells them, “Next week. Thursday morning. We should have a party for her, don’t you think?”

  “No, I don’t think.” Portia is thoughtful. “Really, can you imagine all of us together in a festive way? I mean, now?”

  “Well, I guess not. You’re right.”

  By now the fog has come in, obscuring the hills of the Mission, and cooling the air on the deck where they all still sit, among all those rusty cans of beautiful roses. Behind one of those cans the old cat, Pink, is hiding; from time to time she looks out malevolently, hating guests.

  “In Lebanon—” Hilda begins, and then interrupts herself to say, “But I’ve already told you, I repeat myself. The roses of Lebanon are famous too.” Her smile is gentle, mildly ironic.

  “Caroline will tell us how to deal with all the roses,” says Portia. “Is anyone cold now? Isn’t it maybe time to go in?” And then she asks, “Where’s Pink? Has anyone seen her?”

  Thirty-seven

  “The thing is, I’m rather tired of my daughters,” says Caroline to the woman on the bed, in a strange and creaky, dingy old hotel, in Seattle. “Not Sage and Portia,” says Caroline, “and really not Liza, although she is awfully self-absorbed these days, going on and on about her writing. But I am terrifically tired of both Fiona and Jill, is the truth of it. I don’t even want to hear about this new sort of inn in the Napa Valley. I’m sure there’s something fishy about the whole operation, and I just don’t want to know.”

  “Five daughters is quite a lot,” says the woman on the bed, who has long yellow-white hair and strange light eyes.

  “Yes, and I’m sure they’ll do much better without me around. They’re all much too old to have a mother so actively in their lives. I’ve been so present.”

  “Five daughters would have driven me crazy.” The woman laughs, a soft, rusty sound, an old rocker of a laugh. She is very fat, a huge sausage mound in the tight white bed. “Not to mention all those husbands,” she adds. “Four, did you say?”

  “No, just three. But you’re right, it was quite a lot. But I didn’t set out that way. I only—”

  “You’re probably over-sexed.”

  “I guess. I could be.”

  “Always hated it myself, which kept me out of considerable trouble, is how I see it. Your daughters seem to have a lot the same problem, from the sound of it.”

  Not much wanting to go on in that way about her daughters, nor about sex generally, Caroline remarks, as she has several times before, on the several successive days that she has visited, “Your view is marvellous.”

  “I know, see it all the time.” Again the creaky, gentle laugh.

  This room is on the top floor of a building a few blocks from the Pike Place Market. From its long wide windows is the view, first, of water—Elliott Bay, Bainbridge Island. To the north, more water, and, eventually, the mysterious dark San Juans. Southward, water and more islands and, on very clear days, the mountains of the Olympic range. Just now there is a streaky, tattered sunset, bright remnants of color, mauves and faded pinks against an old ash-blue sky, reflected in all that dark smooth wa
ter.

  On one of the streets below this hotel, down closer to the water, there is a newish building, lots of glass and steel, what look to be condominiums. What views they would have! Constantly, there would be those views. Caroline plans to go by and have a look at one the following day. Well, why not? She could easily sell her house and move to Seattle. Maybe that’s what she most needs, a move. A real change.

  To leave San Francisco.

  A week or so earlier, in San Francisco, the following conversation took place:

  “Caroline, please try to understand. Bayard Lord did everything in the world to get that woman off the streets. It wasn’t just you who saw her and recognized her. Several people did and called Bayard about her.”

  “Jim dear, you sound as though that were the worst of it.”

  “Caroline—God in heaven. I did not mean that. You are always so determined—But you must admit, she made a point of choosing the neighborhoods—Well, the point is, Bayard sent a whole team of professionals—”

  “What sort of ‘professionals’ do you mean?”

  “Oh, a couple of social workers and an intern from Children’s, I believe he was from Children’s. Caroline, just a minute—”

  This early-morning talk between Caroline and her former husband was interrupted then as Jim seemed to muffle the phone with his hand—as Caroline heard in the background an impatient, young and feminine voice: “Jim, for Christ’s sake, come on—”

  “Honey, I am—”

  And then Jim’s voice, back to her. “Professionals,” he said again. “Honestly, Caroline, I appreciate your concern but you weren’t exactly friends, as I remember you were pretty hard on old Higgsie in fact. Look, I really have to go—”

  “I know, I know you do. But where is she now? Did they ever find her, these professionals?”

  “Yes, they found her but after that I don’t know. Caroline—”

  “Jim, as a terrific favor, could you call Bayard? I honestly don’t want to.”

  “Sure thing. I’ll get back to you soon.”

  That last was what he always said to patients, Caroline reflected, hanging up. “I’ll get back to you soon.” As though that would cure everything. Cure Mary Higgins Lord of her madness, and now cure Caroline of all her uneasiness, her guilt and deep concern over the fate of this almost unknown woman.

  However, Jim did in fact get back to her. Two days later a tiny note came from his office, in his own small cramped hand, which through long training Caroline can read. “Higgsie Lord okay and in Seattle.”

  Almost, though not quite content with that resolution, Caroline tries to put it from her mind, and to concentrate, metaphorically as well as actually, on tending her own garden. The girls, as she sometimes thinks of them, seem more or less “in place” (Ralph’s old phrase for the rare times of peace among the daughters); she sees all of them somewhat less than usual. Instead she spends time with some long-neglected friends.

  When she does think of Mary Higgins Lord, in either or both incarnations, the black-and-pearls doctor’s wife, and the wild chanting street woman (“Three hundred sixty-five days a week, fire from dung”—Caroline will never forget her song), when she thinks of Mary Lord, Caroline almost rebukes herself for so much attention paid to a single woman. With the world so visibly coming apart, with every day more homeless, more AIDS, more pollution, more carcinogenic everything—how could she have worried in that obsessive way about one single damaged, maddened woman, terrible and deeply pitiable though her story was?

  However.

  However, one morning Sage calls to say that she is not feeling well. Nothing serious, nothing to do with her pregnancy, just a silly summer cold. But she does not feel like going up to Seattle with Stevie, as they were going to do, to see his parents. Would Caroline—possibly? Stevie knows a nice inn up there, right next to the Pike Place Market, which at least used to be wonderful.

  And so Caroline took the plane to Seattle with Stevie. Well, why not? She has never been there, had always vaguely wanted to see the great Northwest. She checked into a small and pretty hotel, near the market. Into a room with a large view of water and islands.

  The phone book yielded up no Mary Higgins Lord, in any form. There was, however, an M. Higgins, at a number which, after some hesitation, Caroline called; she got what seemed to be a hotel switchboard, operated by an Oriental-sounding elderly woman who seemed to understand very little, to grasp none of the names that Caroline mentioned until she said the magic: “Higgsie?” and then was volubly told, “Oh yes, our friend Higgsie. In Room 804. I think she sick today, not come down, maybe you come see her? Oh yes, all our guests like visitors, very much! More merrier!”

  The hotel turned out to be only a couple of blocks from Caroline’s hotel, but those blocks brought Caroline into a very different, menacing neighborhood. She walked down a wide, dirty street on which winos, druggy-looking people lounged about, or whispered on corners to each other. Some of them looked to be Indians, she thought; all looked desperately poor. She gave what change she had and a bill to a heavy dark woman on a blanket, with a very small cat—and she entered the hotel, a black massive structure, very dingy and old.

  The lobby was bleak and bare: a few upright chairs, a decrepit, off-green sofa. Several very old, rather shabby people sitting there, all staring as she passed. Finding her way to what looked to be a reception desk, Caroline saw, indeed, an extremely wizened Chinese woman, with incongruously beautiful long gray hair, who grinned happily, and called up to “Higgsie” to announce a visitor. Who said again, “More merrier!”

  The elevator was very large, all dingy brass, and it mounted with an incredible slowness. To the eighth floor, the top.

  Caroline walked down a broad and barely illuminated hall, peering at numbers until she came to it. 804. She knocked, and a soft old voice told her to come right in.

  And there, propped up among fancy pastel satin pillows, among boxes of Kleenex, cookie cartons, a few slick magazines—there lay a woman, huge and soft and fat, with long white hair, a woman who never in a million years could have been Higgsie the street woman, the woman who chanted so desperately about dung, and fire, and days. (Who never, probably, appeared at expensive parties in black and pearls, intimidatingly.) Despite her light-yellow eyes.

  Caroline’s heart irrationally plunged, and she understood then how much she had looked forward to seeing Higgsie well: that would have meant that everything was all right, after all, or would get better, somehow.

  Much afraid that her disappointment and confusion would show, Caroline began to chatter: “I’m terribly sorry—I’m from San Francisco. And someone told me—another woman named Higgsie. I’m so sorry—”

  The woman turned. Her whole massive body moved as those eyes came to rest on Caroline. Turning, she looked somehow powerful, very strong. But the voice that emerged was creaky as she said, “I guess you expected my sister, Mrs. Lord.”

  “Oh! Well yes, I did. Mary Higgins Lord. We used to call her Higgsie too.” A pause. “Is she here in Seattle? I heard that her former husband, Bayard—”

  “Yes indeed. He found her and threw her up here. Got her off the streets, all right.”

  “But what happened?”

  “She died, of course. My name’s Mavis, but you can call me Higgsie too, if you want to.”

  “Died?”

  “Day she got here. Her heart gave out. Her and her ‘escort’ got off the plane and he brought her here, room next to mine here all ready for Mary. But I took one look and I knew it would be no go. Too far gone, she was, for retrieving.”

  All this information, this infinitely sad story lies there between them. Caroline would like to ask more, much more about Mary Higgins Lord, she would like the whole story of her life from this odd unlikely older sister, but at least for the moment she does not.

  “Well, it’s nice that you came to see me, dear,” says this Higgsie. “Would you like a cookie? As they say downstairs, more merrier.”

  “Yes.
Thanks.” She might as well visit her every day while she’s here, Caroline decides, this amiable, lonely and slightly loony woman with whom she has so accidentally become connected, and in a gradual way they can start to talk.

  Between these visits, which are brief—Mavis’s attention falters, she falls into light naps after half an hour or so—Caroline walks about the city, very much liking it. And comparing it, inevitably, with San Francisco.

  The air is cleaner here, she thinks, and the architecture more straightforward, less pretentious. The people plainer, and also more straightforward. She finds, off Pioneer Square, a wonderful bookstore, one that has, apparently, everything, including a nice bricked-in downstairs café.

  But it is mostly the air that she likes, its freshness, its cool. It seems new air, unused. And she loves the views of the dark smooth water, and islands.

  She thinks, I could easily sell my house. I could buy a house up here for less than half the proceeds, and live on the rest. I might even be able to find some sort of job.

  It is on her third visit to Mavis Higgins that the two women discuss Caroline’s daughters.

  “They all seem embarked on some definite course at the moment,” is how Caroline sums it up. “But I seem to have said that before about them, and was wrong. In fact, I’m often wrong about my daughters.”

  “We’ll all be better once the awful Eighties are over,” Mavis tells her. “I’m just eighty-one myself. Friend of mine said the Nineties are going to be lots better.”

  Hearing this somewhat confusing sentence, Caroline wonders, Is Mavis referring to the age of the century—the coming decade—or to her own great age? Either supposition could turn out to be true, she thinks. Caroline hopes that the Nineties of Mavis Higgins and those of the century will be a vast improvement, but she is not at all sure they will be.

  But Caroline herself has suddenly been struck with a new concern, having to do with the beautiful clay birdbath that Sage made for her, which now ornaments her deck in San Francisco. However could she pack it, Caroline wonders, to keep it safe?