Alice Adams

by Carol Sklenicka

  After six nights and five days in the hospital with no diagnosis, Alice insisted on going home. She would see Dr. Botkin the next week and have an MRI of her aortic root on June 9. In the late afternoon Peter arrived to visit and spend the night.

  A reading group discussion of The Father by Strindberg scheduled for that evening had already been canceled. Alice rested in bed, exhausted after the ordeals at the hospital and glad to be home with her cats. Before she fell asleep she called her gardener, Scott Massey, and left him a message to apologize that she hadn’t been able to let him in that morning: “I was in the hospital, I just got out today—I don’t know, a heart attack or atrial fibrillation or some fucking thing… I’m extremely sorry if you came and didn’t know I wasn’t going to be here, but boy am I glad to be out of the hospital. Anyway, talk to you soon.”

  Peter, who’d been out on the water most of the day on a Baykeeper boat cruise with his father, read downstairs for a while and then fell asleep in Alice’s childhood bed in the room next to his mother’s.

  In the morning he came downstairs and did a few things in the kitchen before he realized he hadn’t heard his mother stirring. He went upstairs to check on her. She was lying on the bed with her eyes wide open and the cover thrown off. It was as if she’d tried to get up and then fallen back on the bed. He saw immediately that she was dead. There was no doubt. He touched her once and then covered her body with a blanket and went to the telephone to call first Phil and then 911.

  The rest of the morning was a blur to Peter. Edwina Leggett, one of the first friends to arrive, said, “I’ll never forget the day Alice died. Sydney Goldstein and I were both there before Derek Parmenter arrived. We were going to go up and put Alice in a pretty nightgown or something she’d be proud to be buried in and we lost our nerve. We just couldn’t do it. And when Derek came in he went right upstairs to see her even though she had died. And I thought, ‘That’s very brave of you.’ ”

  The emergency crew confirmed what Peter knew when he first saw Alice awkwardly collapsed on her bed. His mother was dead. They efficiently wheeled her away in a body bag on a folding gurney. Peter requested an autopsy, which would show that Alice had suffered fatal damage to her thoracic aorta. Her pericardium, the sac enclosing the heart, had filled with blood, and the blood compressed the chambers of her heart so they could no longer pump.40

  On May 27, 1999, at the age of seventy-two, Alice Adams died of a broken heart.

  I. The picture was taken by 1947 Harvard alum Paul Southwick, a war photographer who later worked at the White House. (AA to Betty Love White, August 16, 1996.)

  II. Alice Quinn, who was mainly the poetry editor at the New Yorker, continued to offer Adams first-reading contracts every year.

  Epilogue

  If she had felt herself to be dying that last evening, she would not have mentioned it, not wanting to ruin Peter’s visit.

  —Diane Johnson, memorial for Alice Adams, read by her son Kevin Johnson, June 27, 1999

  Before his mother died, Peter Linenthal had been troubled that his beautiful, smart mother lived alone. His own relationship with Philip Anasovich was stronger than ever—they were able to marry in 2008—and he saw how much she needed companionship. As more responsibility for Alice had fallen to him, the two of them had become good friends. But he knew she would like to be with someone. Perhaps that’s why, after the initial shock, Peter felt some relief when Alice died.

  “If I were a self-castigating person,” he said, “I could blame myself for being relieved that this difficult time had ended for her.” The last years had been arduous because of her health and her loneliness. At one point she confided that maybe there comes a time when a person has lived long enough. Peter understood she was talking about herself. But understanding is not acceptance.

  A doctor Peter spoke with later explained that a dissection of the aorta can be very painful but extremely quick. Peter thought he might have heard a sound from his mother’s room on the night she died but he’d never be sure of that. Nor could he ever know if hearing that sound would have allowed him to ease his mother’s death. At a memorial service for his mother, Peter told several hundred of her friends and admirers, “I know that I am very lucky to continue to know my mother through her writing, but I also know that I will miss her forever. I had imagined another twenty years with her.”

  On the morning of May 27, before the news of Alice’s death was published, people kept calling to welcome her home from the hospital. “We were supposed to have dinner on the Saturday of the weekend when she went into the hospital for the last time,” Penelope Rowlands remembered. “Then Peter called me and said, ‘Alice is all right but she won’t be seeing you tonight.’ And he let me know when she came home.” The next morning, Rowlands called and started to leave a lighthearted message. She was saying, “Alice, you’ll do anything not to have dinner with me…,” when Peter picked up and told her, “I found my mother dead at eight this morning. She’s upstairs.” “It was devastating,” Rowlands said.

  Soon Sydney Goldstein and Edwina Evers took over the phones. A friend wanted to bring lunch. The hospital wanted to schedule tests for the following week. Scott Massey wanted to work in the garden. Housekeeper Alice Garrett was coming to clean. Reporters called with questions. The funeral director needed instructions, so Peter was left to guess that his mother would have chosen cremation. Then he found his mother’s address books and began calling those who should hear the news from him before they could read it in a newspaper.

  The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle ran lengthy obituaries.1 “She was a great romantic, with the highest expectations of life. As a writer, she was unfailingly wise,” Frances Kiernan told the New York Times. Victoria Wilson added that Adams’s writing “fused the seductive intimacy of the South, the intellectual sophistication of New England and the sense of adventure and openness to new experiences of the West.” The two-column photograph of her that accompanied that obituary had been taken by the acclaimed civil rights photographer Don Hogan Charles. Nearer home, the Chronicle’s tribute by Sam Whiting and Susan Sward reported that John Leggett called Adams “the center of a literary community here, widely admired and regarded as one of the most distinguished writers in San Francisco.” Ella Leffland mentioned Adams’s “buoyant youthful spirit” and said, “I’ve never known a writer who was less blinded by her success than Alice.” A week later, Chronicle books editor David Kipen proposed that a street in San Francisco be renamed for Alice Adams. It should be a street “in keeping with her refined yet risque sensibility,” one with an uphill grade to commemorate the obstacles Adams had overcome to achieve success in the publishing world. Those obstacles were “never turning her back on the short story”; writing about “the vicissitudes of romance” rather than being a romance novelist; and choosing to live in the West.2 Alas, it turned out that street-renaming had become controversial in San Francisco, especially after Lawrence Ferlinghetti got a dozen downtown lanes and alleys near City Lights bookstore named after luminaries such as Jack Kerouac, William Saroyan, Kenneth Rexroth—and himself. To date, no street has been renamed for Alice Adams.

  Over the next month Alice’s friends huddled and talked together, trying to understand why they’d lost her so suddenly. Some had theories. Could pool chlorine have caused her sinus cancer? Did the radiation treatments for that cancer weaken her heart? Physicians including Diane Johnson’s husband, John Murray, and Millicent Dillon’s son-in-law, a cardiologist, noted that a dissection of the aorta is “very hard to catch.” Still, a CT scan with contrast probably would have revealed the thoracic aneurysm. But would Alice have wanted an aggressive treatment? “She looked very pale to me there in the hospital bed that last day,” Blair Fuller said. “It was clear they hadn’t figured out what was wrong. She was determined to go home. And I said, ‘Maybe you shouldn’t do that, Alice.’ And she replied, ‘Shhh, don’t tell a soul.’ ” Peter could not imagine his mother going throu
gh any more medical procedures, “she would have really really hated it. So she probably died in a way that would have been okay with her.”

  “I felt so empty, so awful after Alice died,” Rowlands remembered. “I went out to dinner with Edwina Leggett so we could talk about Alice. And Edwina said to me, ‘For someone who didn’t like people, Alice sure had a lot of people.’ ” Most of them came to the memorial celebration Peter hosted at the Presidio of San Francisco on the afternoon of June 27, 1999, in the Golden Gate Club, overlooking the great orange bridge. They celebrated a woman who was “just the right person to have written Alice Adams’s fiction,” Orville Schell wittily noted. The event was, like Alice Adams herself, both private and public, announced in the newspapers and broadcast afterward on the radio by the City Arts & Lectures program. People who hadn’t spoken to Adams in years attended. Peter worked closely with Sydney Goldstein to plan this afternoon. The stage was adorned with huge bouquets of blue and white flowers. A pianist performed selections from Debussy, Mozart, and Schubert. The voices of twenty-two people who spoke from a podium next to a vase of bright nasturtiums from Peter’s garden offered a biography in miniature, threads for a tapestry of her life.3 Aside from Alice Garrett, who said that Ms. Adams always gave her a hug when she arrived to clean her house, and artist Theophilus (Bill) Brown, who choked up and apologized because he hated to speak in public, most of these eulogists read composed, practiced essays that were as graceful and lively as the woman they attempted to describe. The words most used were “beautiful,” “elegant,” “fierce,” and “generous.”I Sheila Ballantyne, Anne Lamott, Leonard Michaels, and Mary Gaitskill all praised Alice as an inspiring and generous colleague. “I’d read Alice Adams’s work for years before I actually met her, and I had been inspired by it primarily for the directness and elegance of the prose,” Gaitskill remembered. “I was also inspired by the way she portrayed women. In my early twenties, which was when I was reading her, it was wonderful to read about women in their forties and fifties, which was ancient as far as I was concerned, who were still out there in the world, falling in love, having affairs, being really pissed, working, traveling, just doing something.… This was not something I saw reflected in my world.” Lamott added, “Alice was the only person I ever knew who closed her voice mails with “Love, Alice” or “Much Love.”

  Carolyn See described Adams as “an elegant, old-fashioned sexpot” and “a wild, a great beauty” who “drove men nuts—some of whom are in this room.” Among those were Derek Parmenter, Daniel Simon, Robert McNie, Max Steele, and Mark Linenthal. Peter asked his friend Christy Rocca to sit with his father because he had a tendency to speak his mind and do so loudly. As he listened to people talk about how wonderful Alice was, Mark interjected, “What are they talking about? I did not know that person!” and Rocca struggled to get him to whisper his comments in her ear. “He just could not get over the personal affection people had for her,” she said. But afterward Peter’s father told him, “You know, I don’t hate her anymore.” Debilitated by emphysema, Mark Linenthal held a weekly salon of former students and poetry lovers at his home until his death in 2010.

  Shortly before the memorial, Peter and Phil had dinner with Robert McNie, partly to gauge how he would behave at the service. At the Golden Gate Club Bob looked gaunt and intense, bearded and with dark circles under his eyes, as if he had worn himself out. He approached Mark Linenthal, whom he hadn’t seen for years; shook his hand; and rather dourly gave his name. “I know who you are,” Linenthal said with a suggestion of double entendre. Fran Kiernan introduced Bob to Dan Simon, then quickly withdrew because she knew that Bob could be as alarmingly volatile as Dan could be obtuse. Before Dan Simon left that day, he approached Peter and said, “Tell me, how did she die?”

  Max Steele, who’d made the trip to San Francisco from Chapel Hill, came to the podium last. In his deep voice he told a funny, much-embellished old family yarn he’d heard from Alice’s father. He began with a wealth of the delaying, made-up details that Southerners love, in this case a long, poetic description of the gracious life Nic’s aunt enjoyed “before the Hitler war.” Her husband was a doctor and none of his patients had money to pay him during the Depression. Then he died, Max said, leaving the aunt with nothing but debts. She learned to type sixty-five words a minute and took a government job in Washington. Alice’s parents traveled to Washington “to see if they could help her find an easier way of life in a more congenial place, perhaps even in Chapel Hill.

  “But,” Max continued, “the aunt said, ‘Agatha, I like Washington. And I like the Census Bureau. And I like most of the people who work here. But I want you to know there is one girl in this department who went down to the Mayflower Hotel last weekend and spent the night with two Marines. [Pause.] As hot as it is!’ ” Max’s story drew a burst of laughter from his audience. “How good to end with laughter a love that began over forty years ago with laughter,” Steele continued. “Laughter was our language of love and a protection against its dangerous depths.”

  When Peter returned to the stage, he read part of a poem he’d found in the drawer by his mother’s bed. “Letter from San Francisco” speaks of “A wild bright day, splendid, sun-split,” that turns summer fog from gray to white, makes the sea blue, and fills the air with scents of eucalyptus and lemon. “This day should not have come—as grief / Comes back, that should be dead. Recalled, / You pierce my cool grey days with light.”4

  And so it was that through grief, Alice’s friends remembered her.

  A hundred and forty people signed the guest book. Peter wasn’t sure how many curious observers attended but didn’t sign. Adams “breathed in the attention of men as if it were pure oxygen” and yet “gathered other beautiful women around her too… to encourage their talents, to teach them, and to be taught,” Stephanie Salter wrote in her article about the memorial celebration for the San Francisco Examiner.

  * * *

  After the public memorial, Peter hosted a private buffet dinner at his mother’s house. He invited the guests to choose something they liked from among his mother’s personal things. Victoria Wilson selected a bronze rose that lay on the desk where Alice wrote the books that Vicky edited; she keeps it still in her office at Knopf. Although Edwina Leggett worried that in going through Alice’s things they were like “those rapacious women in Zorba the Greek,” friends treasured Alice’s jewelry and scarves. Several wore them when they were interviewed for this biography. Peter sent a selection of photographs and one of Alice’s favorite rings to Judith Clark Adams in Washington, DC. “The ring is one I’ve seen many times,” she replied. “I put it on immediately and heard her laughing at me. Never mind. While not on such a distinguished hand, it still looks good!” Now in her nineties, Judith continues to wear it with pride.

  Shortly after the memorial, Peter called Stephen Brown, his friend since his school days. “After listening to all those eulogies, he needed to talk to someone who knew his mother in another way, who knew she could be a real bitch,” Brown said. “She was a tough woman. She did not suffer fools at all. She let her opinion be known and she could be pretty severe. She had a hard side. Mark Linenthal was an ever-present figure, but you did not bring up anything about him in front of Alice.”

  In the will she had made in 1988, Adams made bequests to Sydney Goldstein and Charles Breyer’s children and left most of what she owned to Peter. She designated Breyer as executor of her estate. Since Breyer had been appointed by President Clinton as a senior United States District Court judge in 1997, Goldstein and a different attorney took care of the details. Later in the summer, when Peter was preparing his mother’s house for sale, he invited Bob over to take some items that had been his. By then Bob lived with Linda Hogan in a house virtually across the street from where he’d first lived with Alice. Bob worked for hours prying the huge mirrors off the walls at Alice’s; those that didn’t shatter he piled on top of his station wagon. “As onerous and sad as the overall project was,” Bob wr
ote Peter afterward, “it was quite nice to be in harness, so to speak, with you.”II

  Alice’s papers and correspondence, a selection of her childhood books, and some of her wardrobe, including the Helga Howie green crocheted dress she wore at the PEN/Faulkner Awards ceremony in 1986, went to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas. The rest of her library fills a space under the eaves in Peter and Phil’s attic. In the fall Alice’s house sold for $1.7 million, about three times what she’d paid for it twelve years earlier. After the mortgage and hefty estate taxes were paid, Peter still received a windfall he’d never expected. He surprised several writer and artist friends of Alice’s with generous checks.

  * * *

  Peter buried some of his mother’s cremated remains at the top of Mount Vision in Point Reyes National Seashore where she’d loved to hike. With him were Phil Anasovich, Millicent Dillon, Judith Rascoe, Derek Parmenter, and Derek’s black dog, Pepper. The rest of Alice’s ashes Peter placed in a handmade paper box and mailed to Max Steele for his writers’ corner in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery.

  On behalf of Knopf, Victoria Wilson hosted another memorial gathering at the Kiernans’ apartment in New York in December 1999. Peter attended, along with friends who hadn’t come to the San Francisco service. Among these was the distinguished critic Richard Poirier, who reminisced about time spent in restaurants with Alice. For her, he said, “food wasn’t the most important part of going out to dinner… Talk was what mattered most—gossipy, playful, bright talk.” He told an anecdote about Alice’s indignation at a man who was making an “utterly stupid” argument that San Francisco’s restaurants were superior to those in Paris or New York. Trying to calm Alice, Poirier said the man might be right. “ ‘So what if he’s right?’ ” she retorted. “In essence she was saying, ‘Why ask such a question? We go to dinner with one another for joy, the fun of doing so—and that’s that. Ask a stupid question, she was saying, and you get a stupid answer. It’s what Lear is all about.”5