Alice Adams

by Carol Sklenicka

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  The deepening economic depression closed Agatha’s and Fanny Crenshaw’s Camp Pukwana, but the two women continued to own property on the southwest shore of Lake Sebago, where the family spent summers throughout Alice’s childhood. As millions suffered unemployment, homelessness, and hunger, Nic kept his salaried job as a professor; he complained only that the university was building a bell tower instead of purchasing books for the new library. The low cost of labor allowed him to continue renovations on their house. Agatha worked as a volunteer at the bookshop. With other faculty couples such as the twins’ parents, Laura and Dougald Macmillan (a Restoration drama expert), Margaret and Urban Holmes (a medieval scholar), and Dollie and Wiley Sanders (a sociologist who did pioneering work in criminology) living nearby, the Adamses’ neighborhood became a circle within precincts of “the Athens of the South,” as Chapel Hill was happy to call itself. When writer Daphne Athas came to Chapel Hill as a sixteen-year-old in 1939, she observed that “most of the highfalutin” lived in the Adamses’ neighborhood, including “three families with three beautiful daughters, the Holmeses with Mollie, the Adamses with Alice… and the Sanderses with Harriett.”2 Highfalutin or not, the message Alice remembered from those depression years was “Take what you are given and be grateful.”3 They had a big vegetable garden near the creek, a tennis court, and a lush flower garden. There was a treehouse for Alice and a separate study where Nic worked. Curiously, Alice never saw her father read a book for pleasure.4

  Nic Adams’s mental health was severely strained as he approached his thirty-fifth birthday. It’s hard to say how much he was affected by the dreadful news that bombarded the nation in 1932. That year unemployment of male workers reached 24 percent (for blacks the number was 50 percent) and suicide rates rose; and, perhaps most poignantly for Nic, the “Bonus Expeditionary Force” of forty-three thousand ragged, hungry World War I veterans and their and supporters encamped in Washington, DC, to demand early payment of promised bonuses was brutally evicted from the city by cavalry and foot soldiers using bayonets and tear gas grenades. On November 8, 1932, voters overwhelmingly elected New York governor Franklin D. Roosevelt, who promised a new deal. He would be president during the next twelve years, virtually all of Alice Adams’s youth.

  Within days of Roosevelt’s election, Nic Adams mailed his overdue manuscript of Brief Spanish Review Grammar and Composition to Tom Wilson at Holt. Then he collapsed. He’d been working at a dead heat since leaving home at the age of seventeen. On December 11 Agatha wrote Wilson to explain that Nic had been in the hospital at Duke for “overtired nerves.” Alice was sent to her grandparents in Fredericksburg for Christmas while Agatha took Nic to an inexpensive resort in Palm Beach, Florida. Ominously, his condition was still so serious in February 1933 that Agatha had to proofread and complete a preface for the Spanish textbook. The banking system had failed and the nation remained in perilous disarray. Many cheered Roosevelt as a savior when he gave his famous “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself” speech and took office on March 4, but more circumspect people understood what First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt meant when she said, “One has the feeling of going it blindly, because we’re in a tremendous stream, and none of us know where we’re going to land.”5

  Nic Adams probably favored FDR, just as he favored the elected Republican government in the Spanish Civil War. Agatha, whether due to patrician noblesse oblige or genuine empathy for the poor, was enthusiastic about FDR. When Prohibition was repealed in December 1933, much of North Carolina, including Chapel Hill and Orange County, remained officially dry. Nonetheless, Nic Adams continued to drink more and more heavily. “It was hard for Nic to be an alcoholic, but he managed,” Tom Wilson’s son recalled.

  Nic had recovered from his breakdown when Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas stopped in Chapel Hill in February 1935 during Stein’s lecture tour. They stayed at the Carolina Inn, visited the Intimate Bookshop (where leftist and rumored communist Ab Abernathy edited a magazine called Contempo),6 and saw “the best collection of Spanish books anywhere in the world and lots of students from everywhere in the world and a nice town and a pleasant spring,” Stein wrote.7 Alice was under the very credible impression that her mother arranged the Toklas-Stein visit; certainly the couple came for cocktails at the Adams house,8 but Alice, confined by the chicken pox, had to settle for Stein’s get-well note addressed to “Alice asleep upstairs” instead of meeting her.9

  Nic lost both of his parents in 1935. Belle, who had enrolled young Alice in an organization called Children of the Confederacy, died in June of 1935, aged sixty-six, followed in August of that year by her husband. During that same grief-ridden summer, another distressful event challenged Nic and Agatha’s marriage when the Adams and Wilson families spent a vacation together at Lake Sebago. It was there, according to Tom Wilson Jr. (“Tombo”), that Nic Adams fell in love with Dorothy Stearns Wilson, a vivacious brunette ten years younger than he. The attraction between Nic and Dotsie, as she was called, was evident to all and discussed later by their grown-up children. It became the subject of several of Adams’s stories. In “Alternatives,” Jessica “feels the currents between Babs and Tom but she accepts what she senses with melancholy resignation.… Nothing more will happen with Babs. It is only mildly depressing for Jessica, a further reminder that she is an aging, not physically attractive woman, that her excellent mind is not compelling to Tom. But she is used to all that.” Nonetheless, Agatha watched Nic with a feeling Adams describes in “Roses, Rhododendron”: “that pained watchfulness of a woman who has been hurt, and by a man who could always hurt her again.”

  Tombo learned to swim in the Maine lake and begged impatiently to return there, but the visits ceased after 1935. After his parents divorced in the late 1940s, he recalled: “My father told me, ‘Your mother will probably get married again, but don’t let her marry that Nic Adams.’ He had no room to be jealous nor had he kept his part of the marriage vows, but he resented Dotsie’s attraction to Nic.”

  The strong feelings that stopped the Wilsons from vacationing in Maine with the Adamses did not interfere with their more distant cordiality. In the wake of falling in love with Dotsie, Nic had another mental breakdown early in 1936. This time he was an inpatient under the care of Dr. Malcolm Kemp, a psychiatrist who had returned to his native state to establish Pinebluff Sanitarium in Pinebluff, North Carolina. What embarrassment it probably cost Agatha to write the following letter to Tom Wilson:

  Chapel Hill, May 4, 1936

  Dear Tommie,

  I’m sorry to bother you about this, but I wonder if it would be possible for Nic to receive the balance of his royalties now instead of later. It would be a great convenience to me since of course all the expenses of his illness have to be met with cash. But if it will upset the system too much or embarrass you in any way, just forget it.

  Nic continues to improve, but is not yet well enough to leave—and I try not to think too far ahead.…

  Tell Dotsie I want to write to her, but I’ve been very busy lately. I hope she is keeping well. My love to her and Tombo—and many many thanks to you.

  Most cordially,

  Agatha10

  Two days later, Wilson sent Agatha a check for just over $100, the unpaid royalties on Nic’s Holt books for 1935. He wrote, “[It is] a real pleasure to accommodate you and we shall be very glad to co-operate similarly in the future.” Nic Adams’s Spanish textbooks continued in print for several more decades.

  Two novels that Alice Adams admired, The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen and What Maisie Knew by Henry James, investigated the effect of parental affairs on a child’s consciousness. In her own fiction Adams turned similar themes every which way—experimenting with the figures in her life as she’d once played with her dolls. In the short story “At First Sight,” for instance, a young boy named Walker Conway falls in love with a small, blond woman named Posey whose flirtatious femininity and light blue dress—a contrast to his large, somber mo
ther—entrances him just as Dotsie probably once entranced Alice. The couples in the story, like the Adamses and Wilsons, maintain a lively friendship, “animated, of course, by the strong attraction between Posey and John.” In the end both Posey’s husband and Walker’s mother commit suicide, leaving Walker to feel punished when Posey becomes his stepmother. By then he is an adult and openly gay. With Walker, we are left to feel that women are emotionally threatening.11

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  Nic’s depressions—Alice considered him a manic-depressive, though a stress disorder rooted in his war experiences, marital unhappiness, or grief for his son, all of it exacerbated by alcohol, also seems possible—recurred through much of his life. In the early summer of 1937, he was too ill to leave his doctors to go to Lake Sebago, so Agatha stayed with him in Chapel Hill and wrote Tom Wilson to request an extension of the due date of the history of Spanish literature for which Nic was contracted. Wilson’s reply indicates that she was doing “spade work” for the book, and he encouraged her to go beyond that: “We ourselves will be just as glad and proud to publish a book by Adams and Adams as we would be to handle a work by only one Adams.” Understanding that Agatha might need to support herself, Wilson also agreed to send her occasional freelance editorial work.12

  Even during this awkward time, as Agatha faced reversals of love and fortune, Nic Adams pursued Tom Wilson’s wife until, upon receiving a gift from him late in 1937, Dotsie replied, “Thank you so much for the powder—I like it—but getting a present from you has caused me a considerable amount of worry—the point is this—you absolutely must not write me or send me anything again.… The only thing to do is to completely forget me and all of us.…”13

  Alice escaped the emotional uncertainties of home at the “formidable brick square” public school on Franklin Street that housed all eleven grades of Chapel Hill’s white student body. Even the youngest pupils were conscious of the town’s “three, and only three, distinct social classes. (Negroes could possibly make four, but they were so separate, even from the poorest whites, as not to seem part of the social system at all; they were in effect invisible.)”14 As a professor’s child, Alice was part of the top stratum, above the children of townspeople and far above those who rode in from the country on yellow trucks. She excelled at school, where she had skipped a grade, and looked the part of a good, normal Southern girl. Nonetheless, she saw herself as an outsider: “I was a dark[-haired] little girl and the two girls across the street who were very beautiful were blonde, so I think of blondness as a kind of impossible, forbidden condition.”15 Feeling herself to be different, Alice was intrigued by the uncouth, often overaged “truck children” who represent “forces that [are] dark and strange” in her story “Truth or Consequences.” Her narrator describes Carstairs Jones: “Helplessly I turned around to stare at the back of the room, where the tallest boys sprawled in their too small desks.… There was Car, the tallest of all, the most bored, the least contained. Our eyes met, and even at that distance I saw that his were not black, as I had thought, but a dark slate blue; stormy eyes, even when, as he rarely did, Car smiled.”I

  For Alice Adams, as for Emily in the story, this “different” and “abnormal” male outsider becomes a violent sexual force. Given a choice of “being covered with honey and eaten alive by ants” or kissing Carstairs Jones, Emily, who has a literal mind, chooses kissing. When word gets out to Car, he tells her she is “the prettiest one of the girls” and summons her to meet him alone: “He stared at me, stormily, with what looked like infinite scorn… was I less pretty, seen close up?… Car reached for my hair and pulled me toward him; he bent down to my face and for an instant our mouths were mashed together. (Christ, my first kiss!) Then, so suddenly that I almost fell backward, Car let go of me. With a last look of pure rage he was out of the trellis and striding across the field, toward town, away from the school.”16 Unclear about what this boy-man wants of her, the girl is gripped by confusion. “Car was mad, no doubt about that, but did he really hate me? In that case, why a kiss?”

  Agatha Adams called her daughter “my obstreperous one” and noted that she could be “extremely sweet at times!”17 Alice was probably thinking of herself with approval when she described SallyJane in A Southern Exposure as a “rude, aggressive, assertive little girl. Never ‘sweet’ like all the other daughters of their friends.” When Alice’s six-months-younger cousin, Mary Elizabeth Jervey, who stayed with the Adams family in Maine one summer, had had enough of Alice’s bossiness, she threatened to write her mother. Alice retorted, “You can’t because I control the mail!” which was true in that Alice usually went to the post office. Mary got the last word by telling Alice, “I’ll write it in my heart and my mother will know.” Years later, Mary heard that Alice had told the incident to her psychiatrist: “It bugged her that my mother was so close with me that she would know if I was upset. Alice didn’t get along with her mother because Agatha didn’t understand Alice’s artistic bent. She was more literal and bookish. Alice adored Nic. They were all very bright, but Nic was charming. He was my mother’s favorite cousin.”

  Another episode Alice never forgot occurred when she stayed with the Jerveys in Washington, DC. Tired of what he considered Alice’s overproud intelligence, Mary’s father (once a football star at Clemson University, then a disabled World War I veteran who worked for the Pentagon) set up a rigged spelling bee. He asked his daughter to spell “cat” but demanded “Constantinople” of Alice. In the story she wrote about the incident forty years later, Adams describes herself as “a dark sharply skinny child, with large melancholy eyes and a staggering vocabulary,” who envies a “plump and pretty and blond” cousin who “could just smile to get love and not have to spell Constantinople.” Associating her uncle’s nonvaluation of her intelligence with his Southernness, Adams called the story “A Southern Spelling Bee.”18 Ironically, it was published by the Virginia Quarterly Review.

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  “They all drank like fish,” Avery Russell, daughter of Phillips Russell and playwright Paul Green’s sister, Caro Mae Green Russell, said of her parents’ generation in Chapel Hill. “Their parties began at five and ended at three in the morning.” To Russell, Agatha and Nic were a striking couple: “She wore her prematurely gray hair cut short, kind of butch style. She was a handsome woman and Nic was a powerfully attractive man, a great entertainer. He played classical guitar and sang at the parties. When he recited Garcia Lorca’s poetry in Spanish in a deep sonorous voice, everybody just swooned. My mother adored Nic.”

  At one of those parties, Alice pushed her classmate Sandy McClamroch, later a mayor of Chapel Hill, into the swimming pool: “I was wearing all my clothes,” he recalled. “She was aggressive.” After that incident, as Adams tells it in “Are You in Love?,” everyone at the party screams except the girl who did the pushing. Her “face is terrified, appalled.” The girl’s mother then shouts at her, “loudly, terribly, ‘What’s the matter with you, are you in love with Harry McGinnis? Are you in love?’ ”II

  Love and terror, it would seem, were thoroughly entwined in Agatha’s mind. Because of the criticism inflicted by her mother, Alice, like SallyJane in A Southern Exposure, found that “thinking of her parents… literally fill[ed] her, with a heavy, familiar, hard-to-name, and quite intolerable emotion. ‘Terror’ and ‘guilt’ are the words that come closest…” In Avery Phillips’s opinion, “those women who had come of age in the 1920s, the flapper era, were just terrible mothers. They were feminists and rebels, and Chapel Hill was very much a matriarchal society—the women ruled—the men kind of sat back and were quite passive. Agatha fit right in there.”

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  And yet, because her parents were both busy, and because Chapel Hill was a small, safe town, Alice was quite free in her personal movements, though required to be in bed by eight-thirty on school nights. Given a lockable diary at Christmastime 1936, she kept up daily entries for three months of her eleventh year.19 The range of references gives a tender,
prescient sketch of a girl poised to leap from childhood to adolescence: she calls her father “Daddy” or “Pop” and complains (often) when he arrives late to pick her up after school or Girl Scouts; she makes clothes for her doll and tries to write a poem every night; she meets her father’s friends and renders quick judgments on them: “Met Mr. Crofts. Like him a lot.” She prides herself on winning at Monopoly and memorizing 207 new words and has “loads of fun” making colors with Craig, who has a chemistry set. For a Scout project, the troop leader made a Negro puppet; at choir practice, “Mr. Lawrence told [them] about slaves. When he talked about breaking up family’s [sic] tears were rolling down Margaret Neal’s cheeks.” Alice doesn’t say if she then saw any connection between historic slavery and Verlie Jones, who’s mentioned as having provided a “swell supper” or “being very mean.”

  Names of both boy and girl classmates populate the diary, but Alice’s best friend is still Josephine MacMillan, who often spends the night. As spring approaches, Alice writes less often in her diary. Her social life is busy with chapel, dancing lessons, choir practice, a Girl Scout flower hike, and a game of Truth or Consequences played with boys—“that wasn’t as much fun but it was okay.” There are boys who like her that she can’t stand and a favorite, Craig, with whom she’s building a double teepee in the woods; but, she says, “Craig is lazy so I did most of the work.” A few days later, teepee finished, she and Craig “played on the other side of the creek,” “had a whole lot of fun,” and found “good hiking places in the honeysuckle vines.” The children acted out comic strips, and Alice would later tell her own son how she’d hated being assigned the role of an Amazonian “Alice the Goon” from Popeye—understandably, because that Alice is a bald bruiser whose nose resembles a flaccid penis. When her cousin Sally Boyd visits from Richmond, the two girls organize an Easter egg hunt for “little children,” including “Tombo” Wilson, who is visiting from New York with his mother, Dotsie. Behind the busy girl’s days lap the tides of her parents’ lives, increasingly distant as she peoples her world with her own friends.