For his junior and senior years of high school, Peter Linenthal transferred to Washington High School, a public school on the north side of Golden Gate Park. “It was the feeling of the sixties,” Peter said of his decision. “I wanted something bigger. I’d lived in this isolated group of boys. At Washington, there were girls and it was racially mixed. I liked it. The black kids mostly stayed with each other but we were all in that school. Sometimes friends and I skipped school altogether and hitchhiked to Mt. Tamalpais for the day.”
Early in 1968, when the Tet Offensive showed the US war effort to be chaotic and possibly doomed, President Johnson declined to run for reelection. “With rather little enthusiasm,” Alice voted for the antiwar candidate Eugene McCarthy in the 1968 California Democratic primary, hoping, she said, that “he and Bobby [Kennedy] can somehow combine against that lobotomized prostitute (HHH, in case one wonders which one).”15 On the night of the primary, Robert Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles. Hubert H. Humphrey won the party’s nomination and lost the November presidential election to Richard Nixon. Perhaps thinking he’d be safer outside of the country, Peter’s parents let him go to Europe with a Eurail pass for the summer. He flew Icelandic Airlines (a turboprop-plane bargain that took some fifteen hours to cross the Atlantic) to join Stephen Brown in London. “I’ll never understand why our parents let us travel by ourselves,” Brown recalled. “I was sixteen and Peter was seventeen! My mother knew that Peter was a responsible influence. I was wilder.” In London they found a copy of The Fall of Daisy Duke, just published there with a Barbie Doll–ish blonde on its cover, and delivered a portfolio of Peter’s drawings to the Slade School of Fine Art, where he planned to apply. While students rioted in Paris and Czechs challenged the Russian occupation in Prague, Peter and Stephen did the 1960s version of a grand tour—Wales, Scotland, Italy, Austria, France. They carried big green Kelty frame packs—“we looked like we were carrying kitchen cabinets on our backs, Brown said”—and smoked hashish in Paris. Peter nearly blacked out after taking “German No-Doz” that a Vietnam veteran gave him on a train. Still, Brown remembered the trip “as an artistic opening for me—we did go to museums. It has affected my whole life. I think Alice and Mark saw Peter’s artistic talent and wanted him to have this experience.” At a B&B in Fishguard, Wales, Peter heard Otis Redding’s new song about San Francisco Bay. “That made us homesick.”
Dramatic changes awaited them. San Francisco State College students went on strike for five months in support of demands by the Black Students Union and the Third World Liberation Front and against the policies of college president S. I. Hayakawa and Governor Ronald Reagan. The Poetry Center became an organizing office, and Mark Linenthal was one of fifty professors who joined the picket line in support of students. That was “a moment of moral decision for Mark,” according to poet Linda Chown, who worked at the center then.
* * *
After Bob McNie moved into Alice and Peter’s apartment, his three children also entered Alice’s world. Morissa, who was artistic and working, she considered her “adopted” daughter. Robbie, who had dropped out of high school, was less to her liking. He wore his thick, wavy brown hair to his shoulders and was, Peter then thought, “self-confident and dazzlingly good-looking.”
Six teenage boys belonged to the associated Linenthal-Pain-Adams-McNie families, so the military draft was a worry to these parents who believed the war in Vietnam was wrong. “Peter will be some form of objector, but we don’t know how or where,” Alice wrote a friend as her son’s seventeenth birthday neared.16 He met with Quaker counselors to establish his conscientious objection, then with a psychiatrist, Dr. Norman Gottreich, who declared him unsuitable for military service.III After high school, he enrolled as a full-time student at the San Francisco Art Institute. The draft lottery took the pressure off of him in mid-1970, when he was assigned the number 170. Induction orders for his eligibility year, 1971, stopped at 125.
Led by Lincoln Pain, who worked actively against the war and counseled men about ways to avoid the draft, all three of Frances Linenthal’s sons avoided induction. Winky McNie had psychotic symptoms that disqualified him, while his older brother, Robbie, took a more dramatic route. He received a notice to appear for a physical shortly after he turned eighteen in 1968. Having already decided that “the war seemed an error—[he] wasn’t concerned about being killed,” he set out to prove his unsuitability by performing a classic San Francisco caper: climbing the Golden Gate Bridge—and making sure he got caught. A friend dropped him off and headed to a pay phone to report sighting a climber; Robbie ascended through the fog on the nonskid surface of the main cable toward the north tower. As he told the tale:
The fog cleared when I was above the last crosshatch on the tower. I saw the traffic lane blocked off and news media arriving. Two painters came out of the tower elevator and started down the cable toward me. I stepped outside the handrail, but I got a tremor in my legs. The painters were saying things like, “Don’t jump, come on over for spaghetti tonight.” If I’d been suicidal, they would have influenced me not to jump. But now we’re at a standstill. I’m looking down four hundred feet at the water and the news media are fighting each other for the best angle.
Two older jarhead cops came up. I feared they might try to grab me. I stepped back in. The painters snapped a safety belt on me and we all walked down the cable with them in control of my line to a Highway Patrol car. The guy in shotgun was talking about me in third person—do you think he’s on PCP? I didn’t speak a word for three and a half days to anyone about anything.
I arrived at the County General Psych Ward as the local evening news was coming on and I was the lead story. They called me a young carpenter—well, I’m imposing that, the Christ thing, but I’d hit the nail right on top of the head, absolutely perfect. The psychiatric staff had no clue after they checked my blood for amphetamines. A young volunteer from Pacific Heights said to me, “Did you do this to get out of the draft?” I almost dropped my teeth but kept my composure. I wanted to tell her yes because she, the weakest link in the whole psychology team, was the only one with enough perception to see that.
After seven days Robbie McNie was released. When he next received a notice from his draft board, he sent it back marked “LAST KNOWN ADDRESS COUNTY GENERAL PSYCHIATRIC WARD.” He also went to see a well-known pacifist psychiatrist:
I told this psychiatrist my story, and he said, “I could kiss you, man!” He got my records from County General and wrote a cover letter that basically said, “I dare you to take him. This guy has a problem with authority. And he’ll turn at some point. You want him, you can have him.” I got a 1-Y, meaning they might call me up in a national emergency or if borders were attacked.17
* * *
To support himself Robbie sold marijuana in the Haight, as much as two kilos a night at ten dollars an ounce. He and a partner “would pay $60 for a kilo and take in $340 in retail sales,” he said. They also rolled joints by the hundred that they served to friends from an old Chinese box. Robbie hung out with Peter and the Pain brothers in the attic room of the Linenthals’ house on Jordan Avenue—“a bunch of people all kind of lived upstairs in the big attic. Anybody that came over got their own joint.” Neither of Peter’s parents, having used it themselves, objected to marijuana but they tried to set limits. One morning, Alice saw Peter and Stephen Brown smoking on the front porch as she left for work. She shook a finger at them, as if to say, “Come on, Peter, wise up—don’t smoke on your way to school.”
Adams encapsulated her keen sense of the 1960s generational and cultural divide in “Gift of Grass,” which appeared in the New Yorker in 1969.IV Her sympathy is clearly with her teenage protagonist, Cathy, who lacks interest in school, money, and marriage. Cathy is far more observant than the adults give her credit for, but she’s most herself when relaxing in the park, smoking a joint and watching the clouds: “Cathy concentrated on their changes, their slow and formal shifts in shape and pattern.” Back home
, Cathy watches her mother and stepfather managing a fragile marriage with tired repartee and a lot of alcohol. At the end of the evening, Bill, the stepfather, cracks a bit and tells Cathy about the confusion and difficulty he feels. He confides his opinion that the psychiatrist that Cathy’s mother has insisted she see is a jackass. Before she goes to bed, Cathy leaves two pristine joints on Bill’s desk.
Bill tries to analyze Cathy’s gesture: “Nothing rational came to his mind. Or, rather, reasonable explanations approached but then as quickly dissolved, like clouds or shadows. Instead, salty and unmasculine tears stung at his eyes, and then he fell asleep in his chair, having just decided not to think at all.” The story ends with a surrender of reason and responsibility to the “clouds” of associative feeling that marijuana represents. In this quiet story, Adams put herself on the side of the Children’s Crusade against materialism and war. “I was very excited in the Sixties by genuine hope for our society and by the prospect of a personal connection to a country and culture I could be proud of,” Adams told an interviewer.
The “anti-affluence” of the sixties reminded Alice of the “idealism of the postwar Forties.”18 But rather than retreating into nostalgia for the experiences of the Greatest Generation, she allowed her idealism to pique her interest in the culture emerging around her. Facing the future in this way opened new directions for her work as she became middle-aged but remained young at heart.
I. Just before Christmas 1970, David I. Segal, who by then had moved to Knopf, died of a heart attack at age forty-two.
II. It’s unlikely that Adams read every story she wrote aloud to McNie, but she knew the value of giving him some credit for her success. She also told Max Steele that his story “Where She Brushed Her Hair” helped by reminding her to get “everything out of a scene.”
III. “He wrote a letter that would get me out and I assumed it said I was gay but I don’t think I ever saw the letter,” Peter said. “I’m so lucky I was in a world where alternatives existed. At the Art Institute I knew guys who’d gone [to war] and had a terrible time, but had no idea they could figure out a way not to go.”
IV. The New Yorker purchased “Gift of Grass” after “The Swastika on Our Door” but published it sooner, making “Gift of Grass” Adams’s first appearance in the magazine.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Disinherited
— 1969–1973 —
The deaths of parents, dreadful and sad as they are, to an extent free writers.
—Alice Adams, comment on “Roses, Rhododendron”1
Nic Adams, the original source of his daughter’s fascination and difficulty with men, had been much on the move since his retirement and remarriage to Dotsie Wilson. He summered in Maine, traveled in Europe, and worked as a visiting professor in Chicago, Arizona, and Kentucky. But since returning home to Chapel Hill in 1969, Nic had frustrated Alice by not answering any of her letters. He was seventy-two.
In August of that year, Max Steele wrote from Chapel Hill that a local doctor thought Nic was in “bad looking shape” and that Dotsie was “denying all,” but there was “general agreement about his not being in pain.”2 Denial, it seems, was a necessary pillar of Nic and Dotsie’s fifteen-year marriage. Both drank heavily and insisted upon their happiness, an approach that generally worked out better for both of them than Agatha’s attempts to manage Nic’s behavior had done earlier in his life.
Alice kept her distance. For her the South remained fraught territory. She and Bob vacationed annually in Mexico, and they made their first trip to Europe together that fall. For news of Nic, she relied on reports from Steele and Lucie Jessner (who lived in Washington, DC, but kept up her Chapel Hill connections). Thus Alice learned that her father had felt “a little better” during a visit with his sister, Virginia Adams Dare, before Dotsie drove him to Lake Sebago for the summer of 1970. The first week in Maine was “grim” but when friends came to stay Nic “cooked spontaneously, brought wood in, all apparently in good spirits”—which led Lucie to declare, “It is not as deep as some of his former depressions have been.”3
Alice responded by wondering if marijuana might be used to treat depression. She and Bob used it privately, as a Sunday-morning scene in her later novel about older people, Second Chances, suggests: Sam and Dudley Venable “laughing, in their tousled, floral-sheeted bed, now redolent of sea smells, stained with love.” Two empty champagne glasses and the ends of two joints are the residue of Dudley’s “happy stoned morning with Sam, whom today she truly loves.” The sixties were over, but Alice was fascinated by the resulting changes in American culture and read avidly such books as The Making of a Counter Culture by Theodore Roszak and The Greening of America by Charles Reich.
Peter Linenthal remained Alice’s personal window on the culture of the young. He’d grown what his mother called “a handsome beard” and lived with friends in a three-bedroom house on Van Ness near Lombard while he attended classes at the San Francisco Art Institute. “He loves the whole thing and in my head I do too but otherwise I hate his not living with us,” Alice said. “The bathroom stays tidier now but unfortunately I find that no compensation at all.”4 Peter’s close friend Phillip Galgiani and Bob McNie’s sons Winky and Robbie were sometimes part of the fluid Van Ness ménage. Stephen Brown’s mother refused to let him move in because she thought the group was too wild. The women, Nancy Oakes (later a James Beard Foundation Award–winning chef and restaurateur) and Joy Holbrook (whose baby lived there too), oversaw a kitchen that turned out copious meals to a changing cast of residents and friends. Parents were sometimes invited to dinner. To one of these meals, Alice brought beef bourguignon and sour cream pie to serve fourteen.
Peter’s room in the attic held a “noisy cage of finches” and a plethora of art projects. During these years he was experimenting with drugs (mostly marijuana, plus LSD acquired from Robbie McNie, “just twice—it was too much”) and sexuality. He saw Dr. Gottreich again, who assured him that confusion about sexual identity was part of growing up.
“Peter really hasn’t decided on his sexuality,” Alice told a writer friend named Sandy Boucher. “He’s just exploring so he has some girlfriends but he also has some attractions to men.” A sexual experience with a man he met in a Pacific Heights park had shown him that his attraction to men was undeniable. Yet he was also reluctant to declare himself bisexual: “Bisexuality? What does that mean? Theoretically it increases your options, but in everyday life—how is this going to work? In the sixties there was a lot of ‘Oh, we’re not possessive,’ but I saw it didn’t work out that well.” Meanwhile, he enjoyed great freedom in the house on Van Ness: “I think it was healthy to experiment within reason. I sympathize with my mom having affairs. In more recent decades things have become so scary and moralistic for some kids.”
Peter’s somewhat communal house became the setting for the final chapter of Adams’s novel Families and Survivors, which she’d been working on under various titles since 1965: “The great rooms with distant dusky ceilings and narrow mullioned windows are somewhat overwhelming, resistant to change. But the kids have done their best. A shawl draped here, another there—posters, driftwood sculpture. And for their party they have made a great effort at tidying up.” She scrambles the identities of the young people who live there: her alter ego Louisa’s child is a girl named Maude—but there are boys with aspects of Peter too: “a tall somewhat frail-looking boy” and “a dark sturdy bearded boy.” On New Year’s Eve, the adults are “spectators at the party. They stand together, apart from the rest, in a tentative position near the door… smile in an appreciative way, but they do not have a lot to say to most of ‘the children’… with Maude or with others of her age, Louisa has begun to feel that she overdoes what she is saying, that her style is over emphatic. They say so little, these children. They so steadfastly refuse effusion.”
* * *
Nic Adams may have risen from bed to cook for guests in Maine, but he deteriorated rapidly when they left. Jau
ndiced and bedridden, he was flown on a stretcher to North Carolina in early July, accompanied by Dotsie and a nurse. “Of course you are right, that it sounds hopeless,” Jessner wrote Alice, “but the diagnosis may have been wrong.” Surgery the next week revealed cancer of the left lung and of the pancreas. Hopeless indeed.
Still, Alice stayed home. “Cancer grows slowly in old age,” Jessner offered. Cobalt treatments would prolong his life. After a long conversation with Dotsie on September 23, Alice wrote Jessner, “Poor lady, what an unimaginably bad time she’s had.… Nic sounds ghastly. How cruel for him to go like this.… Dotsie wanted to know what to do with him, and I said I didn’t know and that anything she decided was right, also to ask you. This prolongation seems horrifying.”
Nicholson Barney Adams died October 2, 1970. Dotsie chose to have him buried in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery alongside Agatha and baby Joel. Alice did not attend the graveside service conducted by the retired Community Church minister Charles Miles Jones.I Max sent her a description: “It all had a rather silent film quality to it like parts of Blow-Up. Maybe because I could see from where I stood the tennis courts and through the scrim-lined fences to marvelous players and they hit such perfect rhythm during the service and prayer: the ball bounced with the rhythm of a heartbeat and then was silent and that was the saddest part of the whole service.”5
* * *
Nic Adams persisted as a nightmare of unrequited love in Alice’s unconscious mind and in her writing. She could not see him as the beloved professor and respected scholar that others admired. In her fiction, Adams caricatures Southern men of Nic’s generation. Louisa’s father in Families and Survivors is a bigot who owns “vast acres of tobacco fields, who drinks too much and makes loud awful jokes about Jews and Negroes and Yankees.”
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