by Alice Adams
She has got to go through and get rid of most of that stuff, but is this the moment? She is very tired but she knows that she won’t be able to go to sleep. Not yet.
But—no. No, no.
She cannot go through letters and pictures now, any more than she can make any more long-drawn-out phone calls. She is waiting for Bill to call. And my God, thinks Celeste, to be doing that—at my age.
Sitting down abruptly on her bed, she even smiles a little to herself at this truly frightful irony, that she should spend her old age waiting for a handsome man (looking very much like a younger Charles, is the truth of it)—for a much younger man to call. She, who as a young woman never waited for anyone, never for a minute. Well, thinks Celeste, with a small involuntary lift of her chin, I never had to. Then.
At that very moment, though, the phone begins to ring. Her heart jolted, Celeste breathes deeply, for peace; she allows three rings before she answers. “Hello?”
At the other end is silence, but it is the whirring silence that signifies long distance, and signifies, to Celeste, not Bill.
“Hello?” she says again. To nothing.
After a minute or two she hangs up; she is shivering, although she is now less cold than she is tired, most terribly tired. Perversely, though, she begins again to walk about, to stalk.
From their bedroom she walks through her dressing room, through what was Charles’s study (more photographs, chronicling Charles’s long, highly public career: studies of Charles with important people, Roosevelt, Einstein, de Gaulle. But none of course of Charles with former wives). Celeste stalks on through the dining room and into the guest room, slated now for Sara.
Very quickly she passes through all these rooms, all unseeingly. And then back to her own room. Their room.
Outside, the night is very cold. And dark, and still. All the winds have died.
Celeste thinks, New Year’s Day. She thinks, 1985.
And then with no warning at all a great scream comes up from her throat. A small woman, old and thin and most elegantly erect, in a dark blue, heavy silk robe. She stands there in her beautiful bedroom, stands screaming. One syllable: CHARLES!
She screams, and screams.
THE PAST
1945
6
Dudley, at that time Spaulding, née Frothingham, and Celeste, then Finnerty, became friends in a very gradual way, beginning sometime in the early forties, in New York. And their friendship was unusual in having its origins at cocktail parties, at a time when at parties young women were not supposed to talk to each other at all, not ever. Received opinion then held that women in the presence of men became instant enemies, as wholly dedicated to rivalries with each other as they were to pleasing men.
But Dudley and Celeste kept meeting at upper East Side parties, during those lavish wartime years of fashionable complaints over rationing, restrictions. They seemed to be on all the same guest lists, those two; and, for whatever reasons, they were drawn to each other in the way that those destined to be permanent friends sometimes are. And they did talk, breaking the rule.
One source of mutual attraction may have been sheer oppositeness: red-haired California Celeste; and tall, very Bostonian Dudley, with her thick short curly dark hair, and sea-blue eyes. Her Back Bay voice.
Dudley’s first husband, Hammond Spaulding, was killed soon after the outbreak of the war, not in combat but in a frightful (partly because so avoidable) training accident at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina: a defective cannon backfired, killing Hammond, a marine lieutenant, just out of Yale. That “incident” was hardly mentioned in the newspapers (only the Yale Alumni Magazine made much of it) in those days of unadulterated marine heroics.
Dudley remained in shock, or nearly, for almost a year, shock darkly tinged with rage.
And then she picked up and went down to New York; she got a receptionist job with some friends of her father’s, a job she did not much like, but still a job, on lower Park Avenue. And she began to go out.
Meeting Celeste, Dudley thought Celeste was the most beautiful woman she had ever seen, with her pale red hair, pale skin, her impressive sculptured nose and her huge dark, dark eyes. Celeste, coming into parties, would have been conspicuous even had she not learned that trick of the momentary pause just at her entrance. But she had learned that trick, and she almost always wore black—although one of her most successful dresses of that time was a green so dark that it too looked black, a fine green silk. She was highly visible.
She looked very shy, though, almost frightened, and Dudley, observing her, began to suspect that the pause at the entrance to parties was as much for retrenchment, for self-assurance, as for display.
“That’s the most beautiful dress.” Dudley to Celeste, in a floral powder room, on East Seventy-second Street, just off Park.
“I like it too, thank you.” Wide-eyed Celeste. “But I think I wear it too often.”
“Oh, no, I don’t think so. You’re a friend of the Bradfords?”
“I must be, they keep inviting me here.” Celeste’s edgy laugh. “Actually I think they’re mostly grateful. I found this place for them.”
Dudley: “I’d imagine they are.” Her own edgy laugh. “In this day. However did you?”
“Well, that’s what I do now. Apartments.” Shy dark eyes, now somewhat evasive.
“Oh.” Unasked, Dudley volunteers, “I’m a sort of receptionist. Apartments sound better, I must say. You’d be out and around.”
“Oh, not really. Or maybe too much out and around. I should try staying home.”
They both laugh.
Another powder room, this one boldly striped French wallpaper, on lower Fifth Avenue.
Celeste: “Oh dear. I have on the dress again. I seem to always, when I run into you.”
“No, actually you don’t. Last week you had on that black, with the ruffles. At the Ameses’. How’s the apartment business?”
“Slow.” Again powdering her nose, Celeste then remarks, half to Dudley, “Oh, if only I had somewhat less nose, you know?” A look from the huge black-brown eyes.
Wanting to say, But you’re so beautiful, your nose is beautiful, Dudley did not say that (although she may have conveyed that message to highly intuitive Celeste). She only observed, “We all seem to think we have something wrong, have you noticed?”
Celeste, thoughtfully: “Yes, women do. I don’t think men worry in just that way, do you?”
“No, they don’t seem to.” Hammond Spaulding was a confidently handsome young man, generally untroubled. (And uninteresting, Dudley has almost admitted to herself.)
“My husband worried that he was small. Not tall, I mean.” Celeste hurries over this, then asks, “You’re not married either?”
“No. I was, but he died,” and now Dudley too hurries. “It seems like years ago by now.” She adds, “Thank God.”
At still another party, this time near Gramercy Park, at a corner of the buffet table the two young women, Dudley and Celeste, exchange information as to where they live: Celeste, on Park Avenue, near Eighty-ninth. “It’s tiny, really minute, but so quiet, and all my own.” And Dudley: “Mine’s pretty far uptown, near the end of the A train line. It’s called Isham Park. A funny sort of enclave. Some professor friends of a Socialist aunt of mine were there. Oddly enough I have more space than I need, and it’s so cheap I can’t afford to leave.”
“You must make up for it with cab fare.” Quick practical Celeste.
“Oh, I do.”
Tacitly acknowledging whatever affinity has drawn them into so much conversation, they further exchange phone numbers, along with proper names. They mention meeting for lunch, maybe some Saturday, at one or the other’s apartment. Maybe.
* * *
Not quite luckily, the day that Celeste is to come up to Dudley’s apartment for lunch is the day after the night that Dudley and Sam Venable first met—and spent the night together, which was not a usual occurrence in those days.
Quantities of bourb
on, much love and no sleep have produced in Dudley a high, emptied trance-like state. Very slowly, before the arrival of Celeste, she straightened up her apartment; fortunately she had had it all cleaned the day before, for Sam, her “blind date.” And she and Sam really did not make much of a mess, only their two glasses and two sheets, which, with a slight blush at their condition, Dudley thrust into the hamper before remaking the bed. Two coffee cups and saucers, which she washes along with the glasses. Sam had a downtown appointment at ten this morning, in some ways a stroke of luck. But dear God, how drunk they got! What quantities of booze.
Having done all the cleaning in slow motion, Dudley commenced the peeling and cutting up of fruit for salad, reflecting that fruit salad is really the last thing she would choose to have today. She would really like—oh, she would love!—a strong, spicy Bloody Mary, and then maybe a piece of cheese. But from observation she has gathered that Celeste does not drink.
But mostly she is longing to hear from Sam—she is dying to hear from him. She cannot wait for more of Sam. Although for much of the evening they were so drunk that she is not entirely sure just who he is.
Sam Venable. A good-looking, not very tall painter, from somewhere in the South. Who works in advertising, which he hates. A dark man, with slant green eyes.
Isham Park indeed is, or was, a small, rather pleasant space of grass and trees, up above the clamor and dirt of upper Broadway. A park surrounded by a modest group of two- or three-story apartment buildings. Where Dudley lives.
Where now, coming up through the trees, beautifully picking her way in what must be very high heels, Celeste arrives. Celeste in pale gray, something soft, a long fringed scarf. To Dudley, watching, Celeste is a vast surprise, although expected; she simply looks so unlikely in that place.
Nimble Celeste, slightly hurrying, no pauses for any audience, soon disappears into the building’s entrance as, up above, Dudley has the odd thought that it must be difficult to be so extremely beautiful. Many people would dislike you just for that, your beauty; they might even assume you were stupid, or mean, and certainly that you were self-centered, a narcissist.
And Dudley further thinks: This is the worst hangover and at the same time the best one I have ever had. My head could go anywhere. It could fly!
Celeste, greeted and made welcome, then announces, “What I’d really like—for some reason I was thinking of it walking across your park, which I must say is charming—what I’d love would be a Bloody Mary, but without the vodka. Is that called Bloodless?”
“I’m afraid it’s called a Virgin Mary.” Wonderful, Dudley is thinking. She can have her Virgin and I’ll just slosh some vodka into mine.
But just at that instant the telephone in the front hall rings, and Dudley runs for it.
Sam’s laughing voice. “I just had to check on you. Are you real? In my mind you feel like some woman I made up.”
Gesturing to Celeste: Please, go in, sit down—Dudley’s throat constricts. “Very real,” she manages to say. “How are you?”
She hears his laugh.
Sam says, “I’m fine. The most peculiar hangover of my long mostly hungover life.”
“Oh, me too.”
“What I really need—well, mostly I need to see you. Tonight? The other thing I think I need is a Bloody Mary. I wish we could—”
“Oh, so do I! In fact a friend is here for lunch, and we’re just—”
“Oh.” He has understood. “Well, then. But he won’t hang around? I’ll get to see you later?” His voice has gone stiff, as though rebuked.
“She.” Dudley laughs, a little hysterically, from sheer nerves. “In fact a beautiful woman named Celeste. And yes, tonight, I want to see you—”
Confidence restored, Sam too laughs. “Baby, I can’t wait. I really can’t.”
But actually I was supposed to have dinner with an old friend, Edward Crane, Dudley does not say. Instead, “Shall I meet you down there again?” she asks.
“No, I want to come up to you.”
Disjointedly, they say goodbye to each other. If voices can be said to cling, theirs do—they longingly cling to each other.
“Well,” says Dudley, now back in her living room. To Celeste, her beautiful guest.
Something in her face, her voice, in her whole demeanor, has made Celeste laugh. She laughs, and she echoes Dudley’s “Well.”
Which allows and even encourages Dudley to explain. “I went out with a new man last night. One of the lawyers I work for knew him, and decided to fix us up. God knows why.”
“You liked him.” Celeste is highly serious now.
“Oh, yes. But we drank so much. Oh dear.”
“Well, a drink now should help you. And do put the tiniest splash of vodka in mine. I’m sort of celebrating too. My really closest friend had a baby yesterday, out in California. What’s your friend’s name?”
“Sam Venable.”
Celeste frowns, concentrating. “I think I met him somewhere, maybe. Once. A painter, Southern, good-looking? Sort of rumpled? Green eyes?”
This description of Sam is a thrust to Dudley’s heart, as is the fact that Celeste has met him “somewhere.” (A fact that Celeste seems later to forget, and Sam never to admit, giving rise to Dudley’s fantasies: had they actually known each other, and if so how well?)
In any case, that day was both the day that Dudley and Sam Venable met and the day that Sara was born. And on that day Celeste became for better or worse quite closely involved with Dudley and Sam. For the first years of that love affair’s unsteady and at times calamitous progress, Celeste was to hear a lot about it. She was to be the sole witness of their City Hall marriage, some ten years later. And Dudley was always to have a particular, slightly odd regard for Sara, whom she did not actually meet until the fifties. But Dudley always remembered hearing of her birth, on that particular day.
Now the two women, new friends, simply toast each other with their drinks, along with the absent Sam and the infant Sara.
“It’s very brave of Emma, really, I think,” Celeste tells Dudley. “Having a child all alone. Brave or nuts, I’m not sure.”
“Probably both?” Dudley is thinking that if Sam should leave her, would she want a child? But then instantly she dismisses this half-formed thought. She does not even want children; at twenty-five she is already much too old, she thinks. (Although on that day much of her mind could be a sixteen-year-old’s.)
She asks Celeste, “There’s no chance of their getting married?” as she wonders: Do I want to marry Sam Venable? And what a crazy speculation that is! To be thinking of children, marriage, after one single night in bed with a handsome, drunk man.
“His wife has some sort of stranglehold on him, I gather,” Celeste explains, of Emma, her California friend. “You know, generally they do. Especially when the husbands involved are prone to affairs with young women. But I must say, I do feel very aunt-like toward this baby Sara.”
“Oh, that’s so nice!”
“Well, it’s surely easier than being a mother.”
They smile at each other.
One of Dudley’s several strict rules of life is that engagements of any sort whatsoever once made are never to be broken. In her view this is both moral and pragmatic; it saves on indecision. However, today, as she talks in a pleasant, if slightly keyed-up way while she serves their lunch, she is also thinking that it is very important that she see Sam tonight—she must. It is not simply that she wants to see him—oh, violently! There is also an emblematic significance: to see him the night after their meeting is crucial.
And so, both because she already likes Celeste very much, and also because she senses Celeste as a person of authority, in all ways a definite person (Dudley’s sense of herself is often somewhat amorphous), she asks her, “This is probably a silly question, but tell me, do you ever break dates? I mean, if something you’d much rather do comes up?”
Celeste laughs. “Well, almost never.” She then adds, “You were supposed to
see someone tonight, and now—”
“Exactly. I was supposed to have dinner with an oldest friend—not even a beau, I mean. In fact, I think he’s, uh, queer.”
“I always seem to like those men too,” Celeste comments. “And they love me. But they make me feel good. They’re fun, most of them.”
“Actually Edward’s the only one I know, but I’ve known him so long. And he’s so sensitive. Oh dear.”
One of the pleasantest features of Dudley’s apartment is its outlook onto trees, the oaks and maples of Isham Park, just now all feathered out in soft pale green. Which is where Celeste’s gaze is directed as Dudley observes her profile.
It is very severe, that profile. Celeste’s nose determines her whole expression, and it is such a strong, high-boned, authoritative nose. Dudley considers that nose, and hopes it does not mean that Celeste is going to scold her.
“Such a divine view” is what Celeste first says, turning back to Dudley. “Such lovely trees.” And then in a very serious way she asks, “Suppose you simply told your friend what happened? Just said that you’d met someone you think you really care a lot about.” She smiles. “I have a sort of motto. Well, actually a lot of them. But this one goes: When in doubt, tell the truth.”
“Well, that’s right,” agrees Dudley. “In a way I do that too, and it works.” But even as she is saying this she is thinking, But no, it would never do with Edward. For one thing we never discuss our love affairs with each other, we don’t even mention the fact that we have them. I suppose because Edward can’t, or he feels that he can’t. And maybe he really doesn’t. Oh dear, poor Edward.
At that instant, though, from down the hall the phone again rings, and Dudley goes to answer.
And it is Edward, sounding terrible. “Sweetie, I am so sorry to do this to you, but I woke up with the most frightful cold, which I simply could not bring myself to inflict on you. I feel dreadful.”