by Alice Adams
EXCEPT: one night Don got into the car, and kissed Margaret, as he always did, and then he said, “Gosh, honey, you look tired. Here, let me take Daphne.”
And so that night we drove home through an exceptionally vivid scarlet sunset, with me perched dizzyingly on Don’s strong hard knees. Once he said, with a small indulgent chuckle, “Just relax, Daphne. Try to take it easy.” Words that I was to hear quite often, later in life. Wanting badly to lean back against him, to relax, instead I bounced as hard as I could, up and down, until he cried out, “That’s enough! Daphne, cut it out!”
Did that circumstance ever recur? I cannot remember, but I do recall my wild hopes that it might; on any evening Don might say to Margaret, “Honey, you look tired. I’ll take Daphne.”
And toward that small hope, involving that little possibility of pleasure, I directed all my days, my waking hours.
*
Many years later, as a just-divorced young woman, I was involved with a man who was married, who was rarely free to see me. And it came to me at last, without my consciously thinking of Don and of those meager old hopes, that those few enchanted hours were not really worth the weeks and months of waiting, of waste.
Without exactly knowing how, I was aware of being considered “difficult” that year. The problem may have been that I was living with people who were more than half a century older than I was. In any case, at some point generous Margaret must have said to her mother and father, “You all look just plain exhausted. You let us take Daphne over here for a while.… Why, no, it won’t be the least bit of trouble.”
And that is when I began to be truly terrible.
At dinner I played with my food, staring at Uncle Don, and sometimes, if no one noticed that I wasn’t eating, I would make distorted, ludicrous faces, until helplessly Don would shout, “Daphne, for God’s sake, eat your dinner! We’re almost ready for dessert.”
Or, I wouldn’t be ready when Stuart came to take Don to the factory and me to school.
Once, at dinner, when Don had been urging me somewhat more strongly than usual to finish my chicken and rice, whatever, so that dessert could be served, I said to him, on an uncontrollable sudden impulse, in a loud cold voice, “You shut up, you damn fool.”
Well.
After a literally stunned silence, mild-mannered Don began to shout: “You little brat, you go upstairs this minute!” How often, before, he must have longed to shout exactly that.
And so, terrified of what I had done, and giddily excited by his aroused attention, I went upstairs alone to bed, and quite probably I cried, my melodramatic self-pity at last justified. And later Aunt Margaret came up with a plate of dessert and comforting words, and an admonition that Don worked hard and got very tired. We must all be considerate.
Did Don and Margaret worry that their darling little Peggy would turn out to be like me? Unlikely that they did; such a thing would not have seemed possible to them, and they probably all blamed my bad character on my mother, whose intelligence provoked suspicion among them.
And about Peggy they were quite right, of course: the last time I saw her, in New York, she had made a superb dinner for a dozen people, a Thanksgiving dinner (and how like her to invite me, a stray and disreputable cousin, known for too many love affairs), despite having one arm in a cast from a skiing accident. Despite the demands of three very small children. Even her husband is nice. Needless to say, I rarely see them.
Don found his tiny daughter perfect and beautiful, even when she screamed and spit and made those appalling smells—those were the things that I noticed exclusively: how could he love little Peggy?
And he lovingly helped Margaret with the baby’s care. I used to watch, astounded and deeply agitated, as Don bathed Peggy in her canvas Bathinette, holding her so gently, soaping her everywhere, then rinsing, lifting her from the water and patting the pink flesh dry, powdering her chubby buttocks and between her legs—how could he?
Surprising, I think, that more children are not murdered by other children.
On one bright winter afternoon, Don decided to take us sledding—all of us, Margaret, Peggy and me—out near the Union Cemetery. An endless hill; we left Margaret at the top, with little Peggy in her wicker basket. We sailed down, down, down—I was stretched out on top of Don’s large sturdy back, holding on. Sailing down.
He remarked with some surprise that I was really a good little sport.
How could he have known that it was the best day of my life, so far?
Strangely, perhaps, I do not remember the arrival of my mother, come to take me home, nor what must have been a somewhat strained family reunion. What I do remember is that the night she arrived one of my front teeth, baby teeth, came out—for me a wonderful, significant event. I thought I looked terrific; I looked like Uncle Don.
I spent the whole trip up to Madison giggling at my reflection in the dashboard, a reflection that distorted the oval shape of my head, making it round. I kept saying, “Look at my teeth! Don’t I look like Uncle Don?”
At last my mother could not stand it, my coldhearted, unwelcoming silliness, and she cried out, “No! Of course you don’t look like Don, you little fool. What’s the matter with you, anyway?”
How could I have told her, even had I known, that I was in love?
9
One morning, out shopping for fish on Clement Street, in a Chinese market, I recognized an almost familiar sweater: crude wool, variegated colors. I then saw that it was Caroline Houston, in the sweater that she had worn to her parents’ party, that crazy Sunday. She greeted me pleasantly enough, though without effusion, real or otherwise. I was a little surprised when she said, “I live just a block from here. Would you want to come by? I could make some tea.”
I accepted, we both finished our fish transactions and together we walked a block down Clement Street.
Caroline’s studio was a huge bare room, one flight up above a grocery store. At one end there was a wide mattress on the floor, covered with something bright, woven wool. And along the walls there were big woolen sculptures, almost obscured by giant ferns. At the other end of the room was a kitchen area, a table and a couple of chairs, small refrigerator, stove. A wall telephone.
We were sitting at her kitchen table, drinking fragrant and very hot tea, when she abruptly told me about her parents: they had just split up, she said.
“So dumb, the way she left” was how Caroline put it to me. “Sneaking out in the middle of the night, after one of their parties.” Her face and her voice showed total exasperation; she had had it with crazy grown-ups, with her parents. Caroline, about twenty-two.
“Sneaked out in the middle of the night” did seem a strange way to end a marriage. I asked, “She left a note?”
“No, no note. Dad was really upset. Of course he saw her car was gone, but Jesus, she could have driven over a cliff. Or jumped off the bridge.”
That was quite true, I thought, remembering Ruth’s desperate face, her slightly crazy delivery. And I thought, Well, this will make things easier for Royce and Stacy, and I felt a little envious: how nice for lovers when people just move out of their way, and how infrequently that happens. And how unfair that it should happen to Stacy, already so gifted with beauty, and with money.
However, I next thought, maybe Stacy would not be entirely pleased? Maybe Royce was not quite rich enough to be acceptable as an unmarried man? Maybe he was only as rich as her former husband had been, which wouldn’t do.
“Finally Dad called her office,” Caroline went on, “and there she was. She’s living there, on Pine Street. She told him that she’d never been happier in her life.”
“Couldn’t that be true?”
“Oh, sure, I guess. Actually I don’t see why he’s so shook up about it. He keeps going on and on about the terrible neighborhood. How she’ll get beaten up, or shot, or something.”
“Well, that can happen anywhere.” And I told her about the woman on my street out walking her dog and her husband get
ting shot, my first week in San Francisco. Caroline seemed not to have read about it, and I gave her points, at least, for avoiding the local papers.
In fact, she couldn’t seem to focus on anything other than her parents’ splitting up, although their story obviously irritated and depressed her. To my account of the murdered man, his wife and the dog, she merely said, “Oh, wow,” which I already knew was not the way she talked.
Then, “Let’s leave this mess,” she said, gesturing at the cups and saucers, the teapot. Not my idea of much of a mess, but Caroline was a tidy person; the whole room showed that she was.
We went down to the other end of the room, and we both sat—or, rather, sprawled—on the piles of pillows there, beneath the long windows, at that hour filled with strong western sunlight streaming in. In that illumination I saw for the first time that Caroline’s brown hair was really a combination of yellows and golds, like her sweater. I told her how pretty I thought it was, her hair. “It’s the liveliest brown I’ve ever seen,” I said—which was true.
“Oh, it’s just clean,” she said. “I’m a clean-hair freak.” But she was pleased. I think women of her age don’t compliment each other much, or not on things like pretty hair; in their way they are much more serious than we were.
The telephone in the kitchen area rang just then, a long turned-down sound that Caroline seemed attuned to. She got up, excusing herself, and went back to that corner of the room.
During her monosyllabic but rather prolonged conversation, I looked around—having tendencies to snoopiness. However, Caroline was so orderly, everything put away, that there was not much to see. Therefore, the pair of earrings on top of her bookcase struck my attention for several reasons: most obviously, because they were duplicates of the ones ripped off from me; secondly, that seemed a funny place for them to be, as though Caroline had for some reason not known what to do with them; and third, I could not imagine her wearing them. With so much long hair, big earrings wouldn’t work; they were not in her style at all.
And looking at those earrings made me nervous, perhaps foolishly; I next concentrated on her books. A sympathetic, if not distinguished library, it was at least eclectic: Jane Austen, Colette, some Dickens, too much Anaïs Nin; Forster’s Howards End—somehow this last was the most unlikely inclusion; odd to see a copy of my old favorite book in young Caroline’s library. Eldridge Cleaver, H. Rap Brown, Marcuse, Tolkien, Jung.
I looked up at the earrings again. Most likely she had got them at Magnin’s, I decided; maybe a present from her father, Royce?
Or may be Caroline had been the thief?
That thought, as irrational as it was unavoidable, flooded me with a sudden extreme embarrassment at having entertained it for even a second. And as soon as the thought had gone, I thought, How crazy, untrue, impossible. And then I forgave myself.
Coming back, Caroline said, “That was a friend of mine. He’s a carpenter, in fact, and I said he could come over for a minute. You don’t mind? If you’re still looking for someone—”
Then she looked over at where the earrings lay, and she said, “Someone just gave me those. I really don’t like them very much,” and she blushed.
It was Whitey who ripped off, burglarized my house. And he gave the earrings to Caroline. Those two sentences raced through my mind with the steel-cold ring of truth, and I too blushed.
However, a minute later I decided that he of course would not have told Caroline where they came from. If she knew or guessed that he had stolen them, she would certainly not know from where, or whom. And so I was able to look up and face Caroline, who had begun to talk about her parents—again.
She said, “You know, in her crazy way I think my mom is still crazy about my father.”
She had spoken so unhappily; for that and every other reason I decided against mentioning Stacy, and offered, instead: “But even if that’s true, couldn’t they possibly be better off not together?”
Caroline looked sadder yet. “I just don’t think so. I don’t know; I’m sure it’s all going to get a lot worse.”
She was very convincing, and certainly her unhappiness was real. From some comforting impulse I asked her, “Have you thought about moving away somewhere? Mightn’t it be easier for you if you weren’t around all this?”
This seemed to strike Caroline as quite an aberrant suggestion. “But where would I go?” she asked. “I’ve been to New York a couple of times, and I really hated it there.”
Later I came to understand that this was a very San Franciscan attitude. Where else could you live? was the usual position. As a stance I found it quite hard to imagine, always wanting to stay in the place where you were born, and where you had grown up. I liked Madison, my native place, very much indeed; I still feel nostalgic, sometimes, about the lakes, the pink twilight winter vistas of snow in the hills that surround the town. But that nostalgia is rather for my adolescence, which was spent among those scenes. Unlike most people I know, I loved the years from about thirteen to twenty, except for time out at St. Margaret’s; I disliked my earliest childhood years, and those that began with my marriage but I have wonderful memories of dances and necking in steamy parked cars. I loved all that. But I couldn’t wait to get away from Madison; I was always led on by visions of New York or London, Paris. And I sensed that Caroline would not even be tempted by those places. They were too far from San Francisco.
In fact, their mania for their city could be seen as a sort of trap for San Franciscans; they are caught and bound in civic affection. And as I think of this, there comes to mind a picture that undoubtedly originates in Forties newsreels: people are leaving a besieged or ruined city; they walk in groups along a highway, carrying their pitiful possessions. In the case of a bombed-out San Francisco, this march would take place across one or both of the bridges, or down a superhighway to the Peninsula, the south. And with these visions came my notion that the city was a trap, as beautiful as it was confining.
Someone knocked at the door. Caroline went to open it, and she came back with what I can only describe as the loveliest young man I had ever seen. A beautiful brown boy, at first he looked; on second glance, he was a little older, maybe thirty. Blackish soft curly hair, long-lashed dark eyes, a curving mouth. Tall and graceful, lithe, with brown-gold skin. God knows what ethnic mix produced him: Tony Brown. Caroline introduced him, and he shook my hand formally. His hands were smaller than mine, but hard and strong.
Tony Brown was not only beautiful, but he was nice; his niceness and gentleness were instantly clear. And if I have made him sound effeminate, I didn’t mean to. He was just beautiful to look at, and clearly of a gentle disposition. I was as drawn to him in a positive, human way—okay, also attracted—as I was turned off by Whitey.
He had brought some drawings of an interior, a living room. Caroline later told me that he had drawn them himself; they were beautifully, delicately done.
He spread them out on the floor, and we all peered down as Tony pointed to a fireplace and to the broad blank hood above it, surrounded by an intricate splaying of beams. He said, “That’s all brass, the whole hood. Lord, the money they’re throwing into this place. But I thought maybe something of yours could go right there, Caroline. If you felt like doing it.”
Tony’s voice was soft, his accent lilting and vaguely “foreign”; Jamaican? Balinese? His tone, as he spoke to Caroline, was tentative, somewhat shy.
She said, “I don’t know, it’s a little too rich for my blood. I just can’t see anything of mine hung up there. And all those fucking beams. It’s really pretentious as hell.”
“Well, it’s totally up to you,” Tony told her. “I just said I’d ask you. And they’re really loaded.” This last was a hesitant afterthought.
“So I see. And I could use the dough.” She sighed. “Well, I’ll see.”
Tony Brown, the tasteful, scrupulous carpenter. I was not quite so rash as to hire him on sight, but I almost did.
He was saying to Caroline, “And later
we could check out what’s happening at the Boarding House, if you felt like it.”
She seemed to consider, and then she said, “I’ll think about it. I’ll call you later on.”
He smiled, accepting this answer as though used to it. Caroline did not quite smile back.
Whereas to me that small exchange had been amazing. Always with men I had said such an emphatic “Yes,” or “No.” Never a cool “I’ll think about it.” And certainly never “I’ll call you.” That was what they said.
I also thought that it was time for me to go, but just then beautiful Tony Brown got up and said that he had to go and meet someone, something about a job. We shook hands again, as formally as before; we said how nice to have met. Tony didn’t shake hands with Caroline, nor for that matter did they kiss goodbye. They just vaguely waved at each other, and Tony walked across the room and out the door.
I asked Caroline if he was really a good carpenter.
“Oh, he’s really good,” she said. “He and Whitey used to work together but they fell out. I think now they’re not even speaking to each other. Well, I have to admit it, Whitey isn’t the easiest person in the world to get along with,” and she sighed, as she often seemed to do when talking about her family.
What she had said struck me as confirmation of my own judgment: a nice and beautiful boy who had fallen out with Whitey could not be all bad.
And in that way I found the carpenter for Agatha’s house.
10
By mid-November of that year there had been no rain in northern California, nor snow up in the Sierras, two hundred miles away. A dangerous situation: potential drought, water shortages. Still, it was hard not to enjoy the balmy, golden weather, the vistas of sunlight out on the Bay, the clear skies, the dry yellow sycamore leaves that crackled in any light breeze and scudded along the gutters, reminding me of Paris, other falls. Reminding me of Jean-Paul, for whom I still pined.
Mainly, though, that fall I was absorbed in doing Agatha’s house. I had indeed called Tony Brown, and together we had worked out a remodeling plan: a wide deck off the kitchen, with space for pots of flowers, maybe a couple of lemon trees, some herbs and a broad bench for sitting in the sun. And above that deck there was to be a narrower one, just off the largest bedroom, which would be Agatha’s. The bedroom in which I was now more or less camped out.