Alice Adams

by Carol Sklenicka

  In this unspecific, uncommitted way it was decided that Daisy was to have an abortion. Pablo had not had to say the word.

  —Alice Adams, Careless Love

  To get a divorce in California in 1958, one had to make an accusation against one’s spouse, appear in court, and wait a year for the Superior Court’s interlocutory (temporary) judgment to become automatically a decree of divorce. The drawn-out process was intended to encourage reconciliation.

  Alice went to court with her attorney, Ruth Jacobs, in early October, about a month after her return from the East Coast, to charge Mark Linenthal Jr. with “extreme cruelty,” a stock phrase of the era. Although Mark’s parents were prosperous, she did not demand a financial settlement, and she counted on Mark to remain a good father to Peter. The judge granted her custody of Peter and monthly alimony payments of $250. For Peter’s support she received an additional $150 a month.I Mark received “reasonable rights of visitation” and the “right to have said minor child with him for at least a period of one month during the time said minor child is on summer vacation.”

  Peter vividly remembered the weekend when his mother told him about the impending divorce. As the two of them drove south on then two-lane Highway 101 to the Southern California beach city of Santa Barbara, Peter, seven years old, sensed they were doing this unusual trip for a reason. They stayed at the Ming Tree Motor Hotel, a casual but luxurious place for its day. “My mom told me in a not-very-dramatic way,” Peter said. “Something like, your dad and I have decided we are not going to live together, we are getting a divorce. I was upset—I wanted immediately to know, well whose idea was this? Because she had said it with great equanimity and I wanted somebody to get angry at, and she said, no, this was a mutual decision.”

  The weekend was supposed to feel like a vacation. They toured San Ysidro Ranch, where John and Jackie Kennedy had honeymooned, and “an old boyfriend” of Alice’s met them for lunch. Both Alice and Peter worked on suntans by the beach and the motel’s two swimming pools. But a friend named Zoe Kernick Draper, whose history included marriage to the son of designer Dorothy Draper and modeling for Salvador Dalí, gave them bad suntanning advice: using baby oil mixed with iodine as skin lotion, Peter got a severe burn.

  Mark Linenthal had been sleeping in his study in the Locust Street apartment. While Peter and Alice were in Santa Barbara, he moved onto a boat anchored at the marina in Sausalito. The German schooner, called the Wander Bird, had come around Cape Horn in the 1930s. Now deteriorating, it had been converted into apartments. Upstairs in the captain’s cabin lived Frank Werber, a Nazi concentration camp survivor and “swinging hipster” who’d discovered and managed the Kingston Trio.1 Peter loved exploring the boat. He visited his father there on weekends, often bringing friends along for the adventure of sleeping in curtained bunks and fishing from the docks.

  * * *

  Adams’s novel Families and Survivors gives a crisp, dramatic version of Alice’s and Mark’s decision to divorce. In it, Michael approaches Louisa to make love after a long hiatus. She pulls back from his overture and tells him they should get a divorce. He backs out of the bedroom. The novel’s narrator stays with him: “The next day… is bright enough to make the previous night unreal, and all that day Michael tries to tell himself (amazing, how nearly he succeeds in believing) that the night before did not, in fact, occur. Louisa did not say what, in the midst of the midnight storm, he thought he heard her say.”

  In this chapter of the novel, Adams maintains an icy, omniscient point of view that gives the husband’s perspective. Louisa gets a job but continues to serve Michael a good dinner every evening. He believes nothing will change. Finally Louisa and their child take a brief vacation to Lake Tahoe (with Kate, the stand-in character for Judith Adams). She returns, emboldened:

  She clears her throat. “Michael, we have to see about getting a divorce.”

  “But—” But there is nothing for him to say. He looks at her stupidly, quite aware that that is what he is doing. Then he says what is at least half true. “I thought you’d changed your mind.”

  “Michael! How could we go on living together? How could we? There isn’t anything—nothing—.” Almost unconsciously, because he has opened it and it is there, they are sipping their wine.

  He says, “Couldn’t we just—go on?”

  “Go on where? With no sex? I’ve been—unfaithful to you. Often. And I hate being like that.”

  His face has become very hot. “I don’t believe you.” (But, like most pieces of sexual information, this one has always been somewhere within him, a submerged knowledge.) “What do you mean, unfaithful?”

  “Just that. Screwing other people. All kinds.” Her voice runs out of power, trails off. She has made a great effort to say what she is saying. Or perhaps she is lying?

  “I don’t believe you,” Michael says again.

  With her hands she makes a small despairing gesture. “Okay, don’t. But what’s terrible is how little you notice. Anything.”

  He hesitates, knowing that whatever he says will somehow be used against him. He says, “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Exactly.” She sighs, with an infinite and terrible weariness. It is clear that she is most of all tired of Michael.

  That scene is too condensed, too neat to be accurate. But it’s true Alice was “most of all tired” of Mark Linenthal, probably true that she hated the way she’d been sleeping around. We can’t be sure if she had a mean, frightening lover like King in Families and Survivors, who fills Louisa with “terrified anxiety,” but certainly Alice knew she was courting danger if she continued to have secret lovers. Facing the middle years of her life, she felt that marriage and the weight of the conservative 1950s were blocking her way toward fresh experiences and success as a writer.II

  * * *

  The divorce was not easy on Peter. He knew of just one other child with divorced parents in his class at Town School. In a survey of her Smith College classmates in 1957, fifteen years after their graduation, Betty Friedan discovered that only 3 percent had been divorced—though almost all had married.2 The inauthentic calm with which both Alice and Mark discussed the situation confused Peter: “I know now that they thought it was very important not to have me be in the middle of it, not to make accusations. But I thought, if this is such a happy decision, why are you getting a divorce?” Adams herself put it more starkly when she described the child Maude’s feelings in Families and Survivors: “I was too young to have seen many other people, I did not recognize my parents’ marriage as being ‘bad.’ It is only when I remember their faces, how they looked at each other, that I see her unhappiness and his passive but total confusion.” At the time, of course, Peter knew of nothing else: “In pictures from that period I look sort of out of focus to myself. I know psychologists say that children of divorce always think it’s their fault. That doesn’t quite ring true. It was more like there’s something wrong here, something uneasy about this whole thing.”

  “Alice was very very bitter,” Peter’s friend Stephen Brown thought. “Here’s my estimation of that situation: she completely regretted marrying Mark. She thought it took her on a wrong path that she really didn’t want to take at that age. She resented him for her decision. She spoke of being in Europe after the war—swimming in the canals of Venice—but she left Mark out of those stories. As Peter and I got older we did wonder if her bitterness would ever end—and it never did.”

  * * *

  Alice dramatized herself as a newly separated, soon-to-be-divorced woman in the character of Daisy Duke Fabbri in Careless Love: Daisy was “on stage among various groups in San Francisco; to know her was to be summoned to the phone at odd hours, to grip the black receiver as Daisy’s beautiful southern voice told the newest chapter. As Jane, her best friend, once said, ‘If you know Daisy you don’t need a TV set.’ ”

  Exaggeration to be sure, but Alice Adams saw herself as a “bachelorette” on the lip of a brilliant writing career.
San Francisco was then a small city—even a small town. Seeking a more sophisticated social set than she’d enjoyed during her marriage, Alice made forays into several wealthy and artistic groups. Among these new acquaintances was Frederick A. Breier, a stout Viennese-born economics professor, then a bachelor, who consulted for international corporations and was well connected in cultural and diplomatic circles. Probably through Breier, Alice met descendants of the German-Jewish Lilienthal and Haas and Walter families, who, like blue-jeans maker Levi Strauss, shaped San Francisco’s economic and cultural life after the gold rush. Those immigrant merchants established the dry goods, grocery, and liquor businesses that serviced the “instant cities” of the Bay Area. Rapid population growth and lack of an Anglo power structure gave them unprecedented social mobility and influence. With Reform and nonreligious Jews in the majority, by 1880 San Francisco had become the second-largest Jewish center in the United States.3 A favorite friend of Alice’s in this group of descendants was the abstract expressionist painter Nell Walter Sinton, who was both a society matron and an ambitious artist. “My mother coveted friends who were smart, witty, artistic, and not boring,” Sinton’s daughter recalled, “and Alice was one of these.”

  Max Steele continued to write Alice from the French Quarter in New Orleans, where he moved in November. He said he might make another leap westward if he sold a story. “I sound like a constipated frog,” he joked. But stories did not sell and his next move would be to Mexico, where he thought he could live on $100 a month. At one point he asked Alice to send him the classified ads from a San Francisco paper so he could calculate the cost of living there. When Alice apologized for not writing, he replied, “You kept me going in Tampa when I really needed to hear from you, and looking back it seems that you saved me from a real despair last summer and certainly made it a happy, delightful time; and I like us and the way we’ve been, with no demands, no expectations, and it’s a real joy to me just to know you exist.”4

  Alice saved dozens of letters and postcards from Max. (She seems to have written him equally often, but little of her side of their early correspondence survived his many moves.) He told long, funny stories about himself, asked about Peter, and arranged for her to meet his good friend Evan Connell Jr., author of Mrs. Bridge, because he’d “discovered the more people two people know in common the longer the two people know each other. N’est-Café?” Often he advised her to keep turning out stories so she’d have a deep drawer of them ready when requests poured in after her first one came out in Charm.

  That day was postponed. For months Alice and her friends surreptitiously paged through new issues of Charm on the newsstand and failed to find Adams in the table of contents. During this waiting period Max amused Alice with letters about his quest to find the magazine. His epistolary style—not to mention some homophobia and anxiety—is richly displayed in this episode from New Orleans:

  I stop in twice a day at the big newsstand and the boy there who wears pants suspiciously too tight around his little hips and waist which are suspiciously too trim is beginning to think: “Well!” Yesterday when I asked him was the new “Charm” in he said no but that the new Vogue was and that it was featuring some really “kicky” hats. I wanted to tell him if he used that expression again he’d have a kicky bottom. So he said he thought just surely it would be in this morning at the very very latest. So I trotted down this morning and it isn’t. He said, “If you don’t mind would you tell me why you are so anxious to see it.” Well, he’s not the person I’d want to talk to about your story because I know I’ll want to roll it up under my arm and walk close to the buildings as though it may be taken from me, back home, and fix a cup of coffee and read it and think and not talk. So I said, no I didn’t mind telling him: “My wife’s picture is going to be on the cover.” Now, Alice, why did I do that? You know what’s going to happen: they’ll have a picture of Van Johnson saying he sleeps in nothing but a cashmere sweater… I agree: it is terrible to be a writer. It’s worse knowing writers and waiting for their stories to appear.5

  * * *

  The issue of Charm: For the Exciting Woman with a Job (a revised subtitle) with Adams’s story finally appeared in July 1959. In her author photograph by Pirkle Jones (assistant to Ansel Adams and collaborator with Dorothea Lange), Alice looks thin, sexy, and mentally intense. She wears that summer dress she bought in Chapel Hill. It’s slipped off of one shoulder; the cords of her neck, wrapped in three strands of pearls, stand out because of the way she is posed. Compared to the “softly controlled” hairdos and alluring smiles of the models on Charm’s pages, Alice looked all too real and a bit nervous. Perhaps readers of this magazine could identify with the feeling she projected—it was not easy to be an “exciting woman with a job” and with the required mix of sex appeal, domestic competence, and intelligence.

  Creating that image also required money, not just for paying bills but for dressing in style. From the large apartment she’d shared with Mark, Alice wrote Max Steele that she was “broke in gold brocade with an expensive view.” He urged her to move to a new apartment when her lease expired: “Make up your mind within the next ten hours,” he urged. “Last summer I saw that indecision is as bad for you as it is for me and that once you knew what you were going to do you were totally capable of doing it.”6 She moved three blocks west to 3904 Clay Street. The downstairs flat in a substantial, south-facing duplex had a distinctive bay window facing the street, two bedrooms, and just one bathroom. Peter’s friend Stephen Brown recalled, “Alice had a desk in the living room near the bay window, and when I came home from school with Peter, I saw her at that desk writing. That is my childhood image of her. When we were little boys, that was it. She kept this huge fern that covered an entire table in the bay window—four feet wide at least.”

  Max Steele found his copy of Charm with “Winter Rain” on a newsstand in Cuernavaca, Mexico, where he’d moved after Easter in 1959. He and Alice had made no serious efforts to get together again, but their long-distance friendship deepened and he became a sincere fan of her writing. After reading “Winter Rain” in print, he wrote, “I was jolted out of the story because I could see you so clearly and hear you so clearly. At other times I was jolted out by the words so surprisingly right and unexpect[ed] nevertheless: ‘that huge and final boat for New York’… ‘I wanted to hear of no other love’… ‘too realistic and too economical for any emotional waste.’ ” He noticed too how Adams’s scenes “keep adding up so that one doesn’t get the true sum until the very last paragraph.” After reading the story, Jessie Rehder, Alice’s parents’ and Max’s friend who taught writing at UNC but could not get her new novel published, asked Steele, “What if Alice turns out to be the genius?”7

  Steele compared Adams’s fiction to that of the French novelist Colette (Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, famed as the author of Gigi): “I kept thinking of Colette because the story is so intensely feminine (stopping without stopping but racing really) telling what dress one had on which of course…”8 One day Adams would be celebrated as “America’s Colette.” For now, she was an American woman writing stories for other women. Such writers sometimes sold but were never taken seriously by the literary establishment that she had been educated to respect. It was a quandary she could not sort out on her own.III

  * * *

  Postdivorce, Alice was entering the world described by Helen Gurley Brown in her 1962 book, Sex and the Single Girl—with one important difference. In 1958 the birth control pill had not yet been released in the United States. The most reliable contraceptive method was a diaphragm. (Peter thought Alice’s was a shower cap for a doll when he came across it in their bathroom.) Nonetheless, Brown’s book, following upon Alfred Kinsey’s 1953 book, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, publicized changes in attitudes about women’s sexuality that began in the 1920s, increased following World War II, and proliferated widely during and after the 1960s. As Brown summarized when her book was republished four decades later, “Sex is enjoyed by
single women who participate not to please a man as might have been the case in olden times but to please themselves.”9

  Not that it has ever been that simple. Like Daisy in Careless Love, Alice became “tired of screwing; she wanted to make love.” And she wanted to fall passionately in love. She wanted to fall in love because she wanted to be loved in all the ways she believed she had not been loved by her parents. She wanted, as she wrote in her journal, “to be out of breath at a voice heard over the phone, at a face—to give all her breath to her love, to say it.”

  * * *

  That voice and face appeared to Alice in May of her first year of single life when she met Vasco Luís Caldeira Coelho Futscher Pereira, the Portuguese consul general in San Francisco. “All of his character was in his walk,” Adams wrote of the stocky, bespectacled, dark-haired man who turned her life upside down. Pereira was not conventionally good-looking, but he “seemed to her extraordinarily quick… intelligence and sexuality were linked.… [She could be] seduced by a vigorous mind, by style… he was in all ways an extraordinarily vigorous man.”

  Alice probably met Pereira at a reception celebrating Portuguese wine that she attended with Fred Breier in the spring of 1959, or perhaps at the Grete Williams Gallery on Union Street, where she began working part-time in May. She and Pereira had a literary conversation and Alice, most likely, mentioned her story forthcoming in Charm. He departed without saying goodbye and called the next day to apologize for that. In her story “The Edge of the Water,” she writes that “the Consul” later confessed that the departure had been intentional, a way to create an excuse to telephone her. This complex, self-conscious Latin gallantry charmed Alice. In Careless Love, where Adams has transformed Vasco Pereira into Pablo Valdespina, the Spanish consul (reversing his initials), the seducer is a man “extraordinarily attractive to women, though clearly in no stereotypical American way… He had the authority of a king, or a pirate. Or an actor.” Alice was, perhaps, a latter-day Isabel Archer meeting her Gilbert Osmond.