Alice Adams

by Carol Sklenicka

  Agatha, for so long an earnest and frustrated woman, naturally worried that Alice would fall in love unwisely or go too far with boys. In “Return Trips” the mother “wept and raged, despairing and helpless as she recognized the beginning of [her daughter’s] life as a sensual woman, coinciding as it probably did with the end of her own.” In jottings toward a story in Adams’s 1954 notebook, pale young men who are practice teachers at the high school intrigue her mother with talk of modern poetry, while she, aged thirteen, follows the same men on her bike and longs to tell them that she too writes poetry. With a final Freudian touch, Adams writes that her father “might once have been such a pale, young man.”27 Since Alice was involved with psychoanalysis in 1954, it seems plausible that she had come to believe that she and her mother had been sparring over Nic Adams all along.

  Alice and Judith stayed friends for their two years together at CHHS, even as boys held center stage: “Sometimes we were rivals, though never for the same boy at the same time… each of us was highly aware of how big a ‘rush’ the other got at a dance…” At the same time, Alice and Judith were confederates who said “mean things to each other about the sweet surround of southern girls” and confided the times they’d kissed and been kissed, measured their waists and chests and hips with tape measures, and even snuck into the school files to compare their IQ scores. Alice’s was higher, but neither of them “put much stock in IQ tests.”28

  In their talks on the roof outside Alice’s window, the girlfriends discussed the great mystery of their young lives: “The word sex was rarely used. The act was ‘doing it,’ ” Judith remembered. “Alice told me a boy had told her it made you strong! I think it was one of the Macmillan twins who told her.” They heard other theories too: doing it a lot makes your hips get wide; it hurts women a lot, but Filipinos can do it without hurting; colored people do it more than whites, as do Catholics in Boston. On another hot, humid night they stripped off their clothes and practiced “sex appeal” poses from magazine ads at the edge of the Adams swimming pool. The episode became the first chapter of Adams’s 1974 novel, Families and Survivors.

  Adams wrote candidly and often about breasts. In the voice of Melanctha in A Southern Exposure, Adams complains about how she suffered from them: “Why do I have to get them? They’re sore, and the boys all tease me.” Melanctha’s mother thinks but doesn’t say, as Agatha probably didn’t either: “Because you’re my daughter… having always disliked her own breasts, she can hardly bear to imagine Melanctha’s life, in a body very much like hers.” No doubt Alice’s menstrual periods also commenced early. In the 1930s girls who could afford them relied on disposable napkins attached to ribbon or elastic belts. (Disposable tampons were on the market but deemed unsafe for virgins.) The belts were bulky and showed through clothing, and the lumpy pads made of wood fiber or cotton fit poorly, especially on thin girls, and often leaked. “We called our periods the curse,” Judith remembered. “What an unholy mess that was, awful. Lots of accidents and horrible embarrassment.”

  A girl becoming a woman in modern decades prior to television and formal sex education was beset by confusion. This sudden bleeding that occurred for no apparent reason seemed like a wound. Adolescence threatens a girl, de Beauvoir realized, with a change that is psychic as well as physical, a displacement and limitation of her identity; she “foresees in these changes a finality that rips her from her self; thus hurled into a vital cycle that goes beyond the moment of her own existence, she senses a dependence that dooms her to man, child, and tomb.”29 If Alice could not fight physiology, she nonetheless fought hard against the psychic disruptions that came with it. This meant, for the time being, that her parents, who represented that foreseen doom, were the enemy and her contemporaries were her allies.

  * * *

  Coming to the letters written by Alice Adams when she’s away from home in the summers of 1938 and 1939 is a shock after reading her fiction set in the same era. Whatever may have been in the author’s mind about puberty and breasts and doing it, whatever rage and confusion she had about her parents, these are the words of a very proper and slightly naughty child with careful grammar. And yet, they show a difference in her feelings about her parents. To Agatha, Alice gave minimal information—“I am having a nice time…” To Nic, on the same date, she is complimentary, almost flirtatious: “I like your letter… the paper is lovely. Thank you for going back to mother.” She doesn’t say why he’s been away—at Malcolm Kemp’s sanatorium again?—but he’s apparently been taking care of her “livestock” and one can surmise that the wry term for pets was first used by Nic. In another letter she apologizes for not writing any poetry despite days of rain at camp but says, “Everything is so exquisite here that I feel as though I could not sleep for the weight of unwritten poetry.”30 Or maybe she was just having too much fun with people who did not try to write a poem every day.

  Of course Alice is more direct with Judith. Alone on the train to New York, she sits across from a blond boy who gets off before Alice “could do much more than wiggle [her] eyebrows” and buys a ham sandwich, hot chocolate, and apple pie for eighty cents. Lost briefly in Penn Station, she gets help from a “sweet Red Cap” and is soon “slowly suffocating” from the stiffness and formality of her relatives’ home in White Plains. At camp, she found the other kids “peachy” and “swell” but disliked her counselor as “an awful, sloppy, fat, horsy, drip.” She has “sort of a crush” on a tall girl who has a “ritzy” figure and “the friendliest grin you ever saw.” Her unabashed admission of a “crush” on another girl shows an innocence that would be less possible for several succeeding decades. But the high point of camp, as intended, was a “perfectly perfect” overnight expedition to Emerald Pool and South Baldface Mountain with so much climbing that she was “terribly stiff.” (Even then Adams favored adverbs.)

  Alice asks Judith for gossip about Chapel Hill, especially about one Sammy Andrews: “[He’s] still tops with me but he’s slightly icy or shy or something like that. You didn’t tell him what I said in my last letter, did you? I wouldn’t really mind if you did, if you also told him what I said in this one.” That intricate message to Judith illustrates how a restriction like the one that says a girl must not pursue a boy outright becomes, in de Beauvoir’s view, a defining female characteristic, perhaps an asset: “her interior life develops more deeply… she is more attentive to her heart’s desires that thus become more subtle, more varied; she has more psychological sense than boys turned toward external goals… She tests her situation’s ambiguity on a daily basis.”31

  When she was thirteen, Alice was a young woman with a style that distinguished her from most of the other Southern girls in the CHHS Hillife class picture. Both she and Judith Clark wore simple figure-flattering flared skirts and sweaters, while the others wore cotton dresses. And yet, there’s something vulnerable about Alice: she stands as Judith does with one hip cocked, but her pose looks a bit knock-kneed and uncertain. Alice remained a serious and romantic child, not yet the alluring woman she imagined. Novelist Daphne Athas, then editor of the school’s literary magazine, recalled that Alice brought her a poem in the mimeograph room. “She was beautiful, but kind of shy. And the poem was very good. But to me Alice was a snob because she was a professor’s daughter.”I

  During most of her thirteenth year, Alice’s boyfriend was James Baugham McMullan. At fifteen, tall, dark-haired Jim McMullan lived in a boardinghouse because his parents had moved to another town where his attorney father had a job. He was the youngest child in his family. Maybe he was the boy in Families and Survivors who had “a fantastic collection of records, but not the ordinary ones—Jimmy Lunceford, the Goodman Quintet, Bobby Hackett; Louis Armstrong”—the kind of swing music Alice would favor for years to come. McMullan also, people who knew him later said, loved words, so he and Alice had an affinity there too. “Her first affair or real relationship” was with McMullan, Judith remembered. In love, the woods took on new meaning too, offering her
“romantic shelter and privacy for kissing, touching—whatever forms early love took.”32

  If Alice’s budding sexuality led her away from home, there was, of course, a short circuit in that path that pulled her back into her confusion about her parents’ marriage. Repeatedly Adams writes a version of this scene that evokes “burning rage, a painful, seething shame” in a girl who’s out in the night with a boy. In “Return Trips” it goes like this:

  We saw a car stopped, its headlights on. Guiltily we dropped hands… In [the car] was my father, kissing someone; their bodies were blotted into one silhouette. If he saw and recognized us, there was no sign… I would guess it’s more likely he did see us but pretended to himself that he did not, as he pretended not to see that my mother was miserably unhappy, and that I was growing up given to emotional extremes, and to loneliness.

  * * *

  Teenage Jim and Alice spoke of plans to marry on December 20, 1949, ten years to the day after their first date. He wrote it in her yearbook and mentioned it again later. Judith believed that Jim and Alice loved each other “dearly.” Jim still spoke fondly of Alice to his late-in-life second wife.33 Genuine as her feeling for Jim was, Alice in love was also enjoying a new form of play with dolls, as does Louisa in Families and Survivors: “And Louisa is well embarked on what is to be a lifetime occupation, or preoccupation: the enshrouding of any man at all in veils and layers of her own complexity, so that the love object himself is nearly lost… By the time he comes to her door, blond and smiling and happy to see her, he is also innumerable other people, with whom she has imaginatively acted out a hundred passionate episodes.”

  In the meantime, Jim was going to boarding school at Porter Military Academy in Charleston, South Carolina. They made a date for Christmas vacation, December 20, 1940.

  By then Alice would be a thousand miles away in Madison, Wisconsin—where her father went as a visiting professor at the university for the academic year of 1940–41. Alice’s wish not to be a Southerner was coming true. Her father thought spending the year at the University of Wisconsin would better his position at UNC: “One is more appreciated at home if it is seen that outsiders are interested.” Wisconsin considered Nic “one of the leading Hispanic scholars in the United States” and “an authority on Romanticism” and offered him $4,750 for ten months, a thousand more than his UNC salary. The invitation was less welcome to Agatha, who was just embarking on her paid career with the library in Chapel Hill. She gave up more salary than Nic gained.34

  Alice would never spend another full year in Chapel Hill but the South was part of her. When she and Judith Clark met, they were thrilled to discover that they both cherished the same line from North Carolinian Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel:

  Oh Lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again!

  Ghosts of Chapel Hill and its people would return to Alice in story after story, year after year, for the rest of her life.

  I. Athas’s father, an eccentric Greek intellectual, brought his family south from Gloucester, Massachusetts, to survive the Depression. Athas tells that story in her extraordinary novel Entering Ephesus, published by Viking in 1971.

  PART II

  PREPARATION

  CHAPTER SIX

  North and South

  — 1940–1943 —

  Hitler must be stopped. The urgency of it possessed her, what Hitler was doing to the Jews, the horror of it always in her mind.… There in the isolationist Midwest she was excoriated as a warmonger.

  —Alice Adams, “1940: Fall,” After You’ve Gone

  “Madison that year burst glamorously upon her,” Adams wrote of her arrival in Wisconsin late in the summer of 1940. In an unpublished sketch, she describes her first impressions of the place through the eyes of a classmate who observes her, the new girl from the South: “The color of the urban college crowds, dash of convertibles and football sweaters and chrysanthemums worn on fur—even we, the high school crowd, struck her as vivid, daring—we wore lipstick and high heels to parties, the boys drove cars; violent romances were felt in the sunlit air.”1

  Alice was invited into a popular crowd at Wisconsin High School. They found her bright and self-confident and barely noticed that she had just turned fourteen while most of them were sixteen. In “The Nice Girl”—written some thirty years later—Adams describes a girl like herself who has just moved to Madison from the South: “She observed the complex patterns of the admired, the sought-after, the loved, the popular—the shunned, the derided. She watched couples who went steady… watched the prettiest girls flock across the street to Rennebohm’s for Cokes after school. All heightened and intensified it came through to her romantic mind.”

  Terrible news came from the war in Europe that summer when the Adams family moved north. The Nazi army occupied Paris in June. Two million French soldiers and eleven thousand British soldiers became prisoners of war. The port cities of southern France were crowded with Spanish Civil War veterans and Jews from every nation who were now desperate to escape the occupied continent. Just twenty-three years after American troops—Nic Adams among them—had fought the first world war to liberate France from Germany, all had been lost again. Americans were anxiously uncertain about joining another European war. The economy at home was still depressed, the extent of the Nazi genocide was yet unrevealed, and many simply did not want to sacrifice American lives in a foreign war. In July 1940, after newly elected British prime minister Winston Churchill refused to negotiate with Hitler, the German bombing of Britain—the Battle of Britain—commenced. It had taken the Nazis only two and a half months to conquer western Europe. It appeared that Britain stood alone to prevent an invasion of North America.

  At first the possibility of America’s entry into the war had little effect on Alice. Like Shelley Carter in “The Nice Girl,” in “the exhilarating alien air” of Madison she was wondering, “What will the boys here be like?” If Alice had discovered boys in Chapel Hill, in Madison she encountered the complicated landscape of teenage dating and sex. September in her Southern hometown, Shelley remembers, is a “bleached-out, wilted time,” but in the new town streets are lined with “monumental poplars, elms already yellow, almost gold. The sky is a brighter, more intense blue than the tranquil Southern skies.” Like Shelley, on her first day of high school Alice wore no lipstick but carried a tube of a modest pink shade in her pocketbook “just in case.” Seeing that her peers’ lips were colored blood red or plum, she applied the pink to her pretty, full lips at the first recess. After school, she bought a darker shade.

  Alice’s best friend that year would be Jean Salter, a leader in student government. Jean’s mother, Katharine Shepard Hayden, was a well-known poet and political activist in Madison, and her father, John T. (Jack) Salter, was a professor of political science. Jean recalled that Alice was “very bright, but most of all she was fun—one of the best friends I ever had. We two really loved each other. It was delightful.”

  Madison had a town-and-gown social structure like Chapel Hill’s, but its differences from that Southern village were critical for Alice in 1940. When the Adamses moved there Madison was a thriving city and state capital of 67,000 that had suffered little in the Depression. The town boasted seven movie theaters and two radio stations. With 11,400 students, the University of Wisconsin was about three times the size of UNC. The Adams family rented a one-story bungalow at 301 Highland Avenue, southwest of the university campus where Nic worked and Alice went to school.

  Wisconsin High School, operated by the university for teacher training, was small and selective, with moderate fees. Students who couldn’t compete there were diverted to the city’s public high schools. On a California Test of Mental Maturity early in the fall, Alice achieved an IQ score of 131, which broke down into 141 for language factors and 116 for nonlanguage factors. She earned A’s in most of her classes, which included English, geometry, third-year Latin, and first-year French.

  Alice’s Carolina accent, which she’d tr
ied to shed at camp, was immediately apparent to her fellow students in Madison, who teased her in their flat Midwestern voices about her difficulty in pronouncing a Northern R. Every weekend Alice had dates for movies or dances, followed by pie or French fries and malts at a diner. On December 13, 1940, she began dating Bobby Walker, a tall senior with blue eyes and brown wavy hair, “one of the three smoothest guys in school.” Bobby owned a black Ford coupe of which, according to Alice, he was a “marvelous driver” who “usually [went] about 70…” To Judith, she excused his driving—“It’s all very gay”—but came closer to truth later when she noted that “Bobby was known to drive wildly.”2

  “The Nice Girl” condenses much of what Adams learned about love during her heady romantic year in Madison. Driving through snowy hills under a full moon that made “patterns of brightness and shade on the smooth, inviolate and endless snow,” with a boy named Frank Matthiessen (a stand-in for Bobby), Shelley “wishes that they could drive all night, forever into the white enchanted silence.” In Wisconsin, going steady meant an exclusive relationship with ill-defined sexual privileges. The aching anticipations of “All the Things You Are,” sung by Helen Forrest with Artie Shaw’s band, became their song: “I’ll know that moment divine / When all the things you are, are mine.”