Nic’s psychiatrist, Malcolm Kemp, was a frequent visitor to the Adams home during the months Alice kept her diary. Slightly younger than Nic Adams, Kemp was a tall, slender, handsome, gray-eyed man. He probably noticed that Alice needed a companion. In late February, as Alice was recovering from the flu, Kemp brought a particular gift for Alice: “Mother said I would get a grand surprize [sic] that would fully make up for [the flu]. I guessed and guessed. At about 8:40 P.M. a car drove up holding [two doctors] and a darling Scotty [sic]. He is for me from Dr. Kemp. I love him (I mean the Scotty).” By the next morning, Alice had decided to name her little black dog “Malcome” [sic] after Dr. Kemp. “I can call him Mac. I took care of him most of the morning. He really is a great something to care for.”
Scottie dogs, by the way, were popular during the FDR era, when several of them, including the president’s favorite, Fala, occupied the White House. History tells us that the nation and Nic Adams were still in a depression, but you wouldn’t know it from the photograph of Alice with Mac in front of the hearth in the late 1930s. The fire blazes, the andirons are big and brassy, there’s a sizable pile of logs ready to burn. Alice is achingly preadolescent in a plaid cotton dress from which extend her long, white, slender arms, long legs, and large feet in white socks and patent leather shoes (chosen with her father, as noted in her diary). Her legs are awkwardly splayed under her low footstool; her soft, uncurled brown hair is drawn back from her pretty face by a headband; and her sweet smile is all for the dog, which returns her adoring gaze.
Like many children, especially only children who feel outnumbered by adults, Alice suspected her family was unlike others. In an unpublished story a girl named Jane asks, “Was this the way other people were together? She had been wondering that all her life, since early and appalling scenes with her parents, and she had never found an answer.… In the books of Jane’s childhood, parents and children went on excursions that turned out well, and lived sunnily ever after. How was one to know what was possible?”20
Alice’s mother meant to recognize deficits in Alice’s upbringing when she wrote a Wordsworthian poem called “Legacy” for her. In it she confided that she’d been unable to give her daughter “beauty / Or the glow of charm” and instead offered her the “subtler weapons” of nature’s “loveliness remembered” as “a sanctuary from all hurts and fears.”21 In this Agatha misjudged herself and maligned Alice. The “subtler weapons” she would bequeath to her daughter were courage in the face of disappointment, along with dignity, ambition, and a not-always-endearing pride. Agatha could see that Alice already trembled on the edge of her own beauty and charm and that the freedom she enjoyed outdoors was teaching her not escape but rather a direct and vital sensuality. Arriving in Maine in time for a “flamboyant Sebago sunset” one August, Agatha wrote, “Though I was too tired to express rapture as vigorously as Alice did, by leaps and shouts and hugging trees, I felt it just as much.”22
Alice’s joy in nature also appeared in the poems she wrote. A sapphire-blue notebook labeled “Scriblings” [sic] in one place and “The Poems of Alice Adams by Alice Adams” in another—a contrast that reveals uncertainty about how seriously to take what is obviously quite serious for her—holds dozens of them composed between 1934 and 1939. Most of her verses are about the peace of the woods, sun, and trees. They surpass Agatha’s in their close sensory observations of nature. They’re seldom didactic and abstract, and the images are often striking: “Mortal’s ghosts are white and dull /… the ghost of the sun is the radiant sky /… It glows in lakes and human hearts and harmonizes perfectly.”
Nic and Agatha enjoyed their daughter’s literary precocity—“writing sonnets at all was considered both virtuous and unusual, by everyone, including myself”—but as an adult and a fiction writer, Adams dismissed her poems as “an exceptionally pleasant pastime, all those nice words tidily arranged.” She’d relished the attention that her poems garnered but came to believe that such praise as “Oh, what a darling little poem, and Alice is only six. Isn’t she just the smartest little thing?” from her parents’ friends was patronizing. Well-brought-up Southern women were expected to be pretty, charming, and agreeable. If they were smart, as of course many were, they were not to display it: “To be smart, in Polite Southern Conversation, meant to be out of line, somehow; if you were a woman, it meant that you were being most unwomanly.”23
Poems and good spelling marks weren’t enough to offset Agatha’s melancholy and criticism or Nic’s emotional absence. No matter how beautifully Alice dressed her dolls, how many words she memorized, or how many sonnets she wrote, she felt alone in her family’s house. With a curious inversion of importance and description, her essay “My First and Only House” devotes pages to describing the surrounding gardens and woods. There, life abounded: “What I most remember is flowers—everywhere. Roses, pink and white ones, climbed up a trellis and over the roof of the porch, entangled there with thick wisteria vines, rose petals and heavy lavender blossoms brushed the roof’s green shingles and the ground.”III
Adams flinches from describing daily life inside of the house: “[It] was splendid for parties, for bringing people home to. Everyone admired its impressive size and the splendid view. And we three difficult, isolated people got along much better when there were others around. Even Verlie… liked cooking for parties more than for just us three. So my parents entertained a lot.” But other people were not enough to fill the void. Summer parties that stretched into the night terrified Alice as she lay alone in her room: “They sang a lot, her parents and their friends, as the night wore on… they sounded like the cannibals in Tarzan movies.”24
The house on the hilltop south of Chapel Hill where Alice felt that she’d slept too far away from her parents held iconic power in Alice’s imagination, a symbol of something missing from her childhood. She was, she said, haunted by “the irretrievableness” of her past and a longing to “revise that past and make it different.”25 Alice never named the missing thing in her childhood. But her essay about the house tells us: “Below us, in a small house down the hill… lived a family of six: two parents, four small children. Very likely they were truly needy people. I somehow learned, or heard, that they all slept together in one bed. And I felt the most passionate envy of that condition, that bodily family warmth. As I imagined it, they would all lie, cuddled like puppies, with the mother and father on the outside edges, protectively.”26
To find “bodily family warmth” would be one of Alice Adams’s quests for the rest of her life. In 1937, she found some comfort in her little Scottie: “Mac sleeps on my bed. He is nice and warm,” she told her diary. As she approached her eleventh birthday, as her breasts first developed, Adams recalled, Robert Macmillan (he of the marvelous penis) suddenly took new interest in her. While they did “nothing significant like holding hands” (certainly nothing involving the erogenous zones), they “somehow arrived at a point of writing intense love letters” when Alice went to camp in Maine. She “loved writing to him” and getting letters in return, though she later quipped, “What I did not know then was that I simply loved to write.”27
I. Adams based Jones on Walter Carroll, a rural Chapel Hill classmate who first married Mary Smith, daughter of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn author Betty Smith, who lived in Chapel Hill. Carroll became a playwright. In 1977, Adams was prompted to write her story by news that Carroll had become the third husband of actress Julie Harris.
II. To critic Richard Poirier in 1974, Adams explained that “Are You in Love?” was “about a woman at some extreme of very specifically sexual frustration, so that any hint of sexuality, especially of course from her daughter, would be unbearable.”
III. Although it’s collected with short stories, the piece first appeared as nonfiction in Geo magazine in 1984.
CHAPTER FIVE
Girls
— 1937–1940 —
There in the heavy scent of roses on the scratchy shingles, Harriet and I talked about sex.
At Camp Wabunaki in Cumberland County, Maine, for a month before her family’s annual sojourn at Sebago Lake, Alice shared a “tenthouse” with six girls her age and a counselor. She acquired a nickname—Timmie—and learned to sail, ride horseback, and hike—activities that distanced her from her sedentary parents. The camp had vague lesbian overtones. “ ‘Crushes’ on counselors… were openly acknowledged, teased about, and thus encouraged, as ‘romances’ with boys were not,” Alice wrote later. She was made to feel “somewhat aberrant, if not downright sleazy,” for maintaining her crush on Robert Macmillan.1 Experiencing the quick loyalties and jealousies, giggly secrets and confessions of girldom as well as the joy of feeling connected to the deep lake and mountains, Alice began to know and enjoy herself as an independent being outside of Nic and Agatha’s sphere of influence.
When she came back from Maine to begin seventh grade, eleven-year-old Alice’s high forehead, finely arched brows, straight nose, hazel eyes, and full lips were framed by thick brunette hair cut shoulder length and softly waved. She returned to the same brick school on Franklin Street where she’d attended the elementary grades, but her changing body and emotions transformed her perception of this world.
Adolescence is nothing if not desperately self-conscious. It was especially so for Alice.
At camp Alice had dropped her Southern accent for a “very Bostonian manner of speech, with an emphasis on broad A’s,” symbolically rejecting Southernness: “I thought anyone who talked like that, with that accent, was stupid and ignorant, and unkind and unfair to Negroes. I disliked southern girls especially, and generally did not feel liked by them.”2 Her North Carolina girlfriends with their cute double names and nicknames—Betty Sue, Snooky, and the like—their belle-in-training talk and flouncy dresses, now bothered Alice. She saw her mother’s unhappiness in her role as a Southern wife and sensed few alternatives for herself. If Agatha, whom everyone conceded was brilliant, could not find her way out of the morass, how could Alice? Like feminist mothers in later eras, Agatha probably wanted to teach her daughter to rely on her mind more than on her beauty. As parental good intentions are wont to do, this one misfired. Years later, Adams put a bit of dialogue in her notebook about a mother whose daughter (Cary) has been praised for being pretty: “ ‘You mustn’t take things people say too seriously—it’s what’s inside that counts,’ from which Cary concluded that she was not pretty, inside or out.”3
* * *
While sitting on the window seat in her living room on a bright fall day in 1937, Alice saw an unfamiliar girl with long blond braids striding along Old Pittsboro Road. The girl moved along the red-clay road like a Yankee, Alice thought. The next day Alice saw the girl again, riding toward town on a blue bicycle. When the girl returned, Alice was standing by the road with her own bike, which happened to be identical. “We exclaimed at the coincidence of bikes, and I pointed up at my house. ‘That’s where I live,’ I told her.” The other girl declared, “God, what a wonderful house!” in a voice Alice found serious and emphatic. More pleasing to Alice than the girl’s opinion of the house were her Northern accent and manner. “Nice southern girls… did not say ‘God’ in that way.” Moved more to action than talk, Alice told the girl she knew a really good bike ride, and off they rode.4
So began six decades of friendship between Alice and Judith Walker Clark. At least that’s one way Alice wrote the story of a meeting that changed her youth, and possibly the rest of her life. Judith later recalled that their parents met first and brought the girls together, which sounds accurate but less true to Alice’s desire for this crucial friendship to begin outside of Agatha and Nic’s realm. Judith saw in Alice “this astonishingly beautiful, brilliant, difficult, sensual girl.”5 The two girls liked to read “the same odd mix of children’s and ‘grownup’ books”; no one restricted their reading and they could get all the books they wanted from the Bull’s Head, where Agatha “presided over genteel teas” for guests and authors.6 They both read Look Homeward, Angel and The Grapes of Wrath. Steinbeck’s novel about the Dust Bowl thrilled Alice with its forbidden words and allusions to sex—“the freedom to say exactly what you wanted to say”—and disturbed her because “he was writing about appalling conditions that existed even at the moment of my reading about them.”7
Many decades later, Judith asked Alice, “You were totally un-Southern. How do you suppose you managed to escape that, Alice? You were absolutely unlike Kitty, Snooky, Betsy, and the rest of them—how come? Brains alone? I think we became such good friends because we were both pretty damn direct and had such passions for words and woods!”8
Judith Clark came to North Carolina from Wisconsin by way of Connecticut with her parents, James G. and Dorothy Funk Clark, and older sister, Jane, so that her father, an engineer in his forties, could pursue his dream of getting a PhD in Civil War history. Living on income from Iowa farmland and the sale of a family business to the OshKosh B’gosh overalls company, the Clarks took advantage of North Carolina’s low cost of living and an introduction to Chapel Hill by their friend Johnsie Burnham, who had been the first female violinist in the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, to sit out the Depression in Chapel Hill. If this was a sensible and frugal plan, the Clarks carried it out with style. They arrived in a café-au-lait Cadillac convertible bought from a friend in distress and, like the Baird family in Adams’s novel A Southern Exposure, moved into a suite in a local inn.
Even before she met Judith, Alice had free run of her surroundings. Though her mother or Verlie sometimes scolded her for mussing her clothes, for Alice the outdoors was a realm of contentment and beauty. Citing novelists, including Emily Brontë and Colette, who wrote boldly about female experience, Simone de Beauvoir notes that they turned to nature when they felt trapped between the restrictions of childhood and the limitations of adult womanhood: “In the paternal house reign mother, laws, custom, and routine… in the midst of plants and animals she is a human being… freed both from her family and from males. She finds an image of the solitude of her soul in the secrecy of forests.” When such a girl “takes possession of [nature], she also proudly takes possession of herself,” de Beauvoir concludes.9
Alice asserts just such possession in her 1936 poem “When I Was Queen.” Placing herself among honeysuckle-covered trees, she declares, “My blood seemed made of joy and love… The wind in the trees seemed mine / The brook sang only for me.” With a moss-cushioned stone for a throne, she “was queen for the day.”
The more athletic and adventurous Judith introduced Alice to all-day vagabonding by foot or by bicycle. “Nobody worried about us. It was a great gift. We could have hurt ourselves but we didn’t,” Judith said of their wanderings along Morgan Creek and through the woods with her black English setter named Cinder. “The great thing about the woods from a child’s point of view,” Adams wrote decades later, “was that parents almost never came along; the woods were quite safe then, and there was a lot to do.”10
These “woods as dense and as alien as a jungle would have been—thick pines with low sweeping branches, young leafed-out maples, peeling tall poplars, elms, brambles, green masses of honeysuckle,” twine throughout Adams’s fiction. Judith remembers, “We discovered that waterfall together that Alice writes about over and over—she was really crazy about that waterfall.” Another place was Laurel Hill. Judith’s long, vivid memory corroborates what Adams wrote in stories: “We came to a small beach, next to a place where the creek widened and ran over some shallow rapids. On the other side, large gray rocks rose steeply. Among the stones grew isolated, twisted trees, and huge bushes with thick green leaves. The laurel of Laurel Hill.”11 In Adams’s psychic geography the woods take on a symbolism that’s familiar in American literature—in Washington Irving and Nathaniel Hawthorne, for instance—opposite the domesticated and gardened world, a place of privacy and intimacy and fecundity that’s also dangerous.
But Adams’
s woods lack the dark forces that torment Hawthorne’s Puritans. When Judith and Alice bragged about going to Laurel Hill, boys told them the area was full of snakes. But, Judith said, “We never thought about it! In those years we spent wandering around those woods, we never saw a tramp, we never saw anybody. We saw one cottonmouth snake which scared us to death but we’d been wading in the creek and we decided, well, we’d better not do that anymore. I think we had the grace of innocence. It was just gorgeous, really beautiful.”
The girls’ ramblings allowed Alice to stop being the “skinny and nervous” version of herself who expresses her frustrations in “Child’s Play” with a “long-worded, show-off way of talking.” In the woods no one else heard what she and Judith said or cared if they sat like ladies or dirtied their dresses. Outdoors, de Beauvoir exclaims, “having a body no longer seems like a shameful failing… flesh is no longer filth: it is joy and beauty.”12 In a short story called “An Unscheduled Stop,” Adams’s protagonist, a writer named Claire who is flying across the South, “bursts into violent tears” at the sight of the lush pinewoods where she spent “her true childhood.… Claire’s excess of feeling is like a secret life exposed.”
In her friendship with Judith, Alice enjoyed a specifically female intermission between her solitary childhood spent in an adult society and the adolescence that even then bore down upon her. Her fiction shows that freedom to wander the woods and creeks of the Carolina Piedmont was a counterpoint to the confusion and shame that girls usually feel about the new protuberances and discharges of their bodies. The fullness of Alice and Judith’s friendship affirms Mary McCarthy’s belief that friendship is “the growth hormone the mind requires as it begins its activity of producing and exchanging ideas. You can date the evolving mind, like the age of a tree, by the rings friendship formed by the expanding central trunk. In the course of my history, not love or marriage so much as friendship has promoted growth.”13
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