by Alice Adams
One problem, of course, was that I still saw him all the time; there he was in my house—in Agatha’s house—at work, attractively lithe and brown, in his tight clean jeans. He had one of the prettiest asses I had ever seen, so high and round, smooth, hard—or so I imagined it would be.
I was not only depressed about Tony, I was depressed about being depressed about him, which was quite an emotional setback, as I saw it. And at Christmas, as we rushed toward the bottom of the year.
Once Jacob, who although a junkie was probably my wisest lover ever—I haven’t yet been able to think of Jean-Paul in terms of wisdom—Jacob said, “You really put a double-whammy on yourself: you worry, and then you worry about worrying. Daphne, you are hopeless.” Well, Jake was certainly in a position to know a lot about double-whammies.
In any event, I felt that Tony and I were at an impasse. And I don’t think it would ever have been resolved if he had not been the one to tell me about Caroline.
I had been out shopping, one balmy dry December afternoon, looking for sheets and towels, all that bedroom-bathroom stuff which I normally don’t concern myself with for clients—in the trade it is called “accessorizing.” But Agatha had said so despairingly, “Please, Daph. It’s just something I can’t do, or think about.” I think she had been having a lot of trouble with Royce, of one sort or another.
Actually the rooms involved were not quite that far along, but since we had settled on the carpeting and fabrics, I thought I might as well see what was around. Also, in those days I was staying out as much as I could. Thinking that Tony was avoiding me, I decided I could at least make it easier for him, as well as for myself.
I believe now that I had really forgotten what season it was, which is easy enough to do in California. But there it was: Christmas, Christmas shoppers, tinsel decorations across the streets—what a terrible surprise. And perhaps because my own spirits were somewhat low to begin with, everyone I saw looked harassed and anxious, tired. I watched two women, possibly mother and daughter, fingering and then holding up a flowered sports shirt, for a man. It was expensive-looking, and quite terrible, and I imagined the scene that would take place on Christmas morning: the husband-father opening his present, pretending to like it but not going so far as to put it on and wear it, ever; the mother and daughter opening their similarly expensive and disappointing presents. And the rest of the spring, all of them working to pay off their bills, and those ruinous interest charges, 18 percent.
I stood it as long as I could, that Christmas-shopping scene, among the unbecoming, unseasonal fur coats, the crazy-looking tinsel in the sun, and then, before noon, I bolted away as fast as I could. I raced back to the relative safety and sanity of Pacific Heights, Agatha’s house.
There in the kitchen was Tony, standing up and drinking a cup of coffee, frowning nervously. He had been waiting for me to come home, that was clear, and with bad news: the gravity of it was written all over his face.
He walked toward me. I thought he meant to put his arms around me, some friendly gesture, and maybe that had been his intention, but then he stopped short and blurted out at me, “Caroline’s been beat up.”
Sometimes my reactions are nuttily slow. I asked him several questions before I really took in what had happened. I asked: When? Who did it? Where is she? How is she?
It happened sometime last night, Tony said. Thomas found her on the steps leading up to her apartment; whether she was going in or coming out was not clear. No one knew who had beat her up, nor where, she was just lying there. Now she was at Mount Zion Hospital.
In the midst of hearing all this, I suddenly felt a jolt of cold terror, horror, fear. Lovely Caroline. Beat up.
I sat down at the table where Tony had put his cup of coffee, and in a dumb automatic way I sipped at it.
He asked, “Do you want me to make you some?”
“What? Oh, no. Thanks, Tony.”
Outside, the unnatural sun shone on the glossy green leaves of a giant rhododendron, and on the new wood of the deck that Tony was making. I could even smell the fresh-cut wood, I thought, and it seemed a summer smell—all wrong.
Caroline. Beat up.
I stood up, and started toward the door. “I’ll go over there, to the hospital.”
“You want me to come with you?”
“Oh, Tony—yes.”
I drove fast and silently the short distance to the hospital. Once or twice I glanced over in Tony’s direction, and he took my hand and patted it.
He told me where there was a parking lot off Post Street, and how to get there.
Within minutes after leaving the car we were inside the hospital, then inside an elevator, pneumatically borne upward. We got out at the appointed floor and began to walk toward the number of Caroline’s room. A pale woman in a fur coat was walking in our direction, a full-length mink. The woman’s face was pasty, wild-eyed, crazy; she could have been about to scream. And as we passed each other I recognized her: Ruth Houston. She did not even see us, I am sure.
This scared me badly, though: I wasn’t sure that we should go in to see Caroline if seeing her had so deranged Ruth, her mother. I stopped and asked Tony, “Do you really think we should go in? Did you see her mother?”
“Oh, sure. Whitey told me a couple of weeks ago that he thought his old lady was flipping out.”
So we knocked lightly at a door, and a soft voice answered, “Come in?” A question; it meant, who were we?
We pushed open the door and went it.
There were two white beds, two women in them, both with long brown hair. For a minute I was uncertain which was Caroline, and then my mind cleared somewhat, and I saw that the hair in the first bed was dyed and the face that of a very old woman, painfully lined. I started toward the second bed, the one beside the window, where Caroline lay.
She said, “Oh, hi,” in an unfamiliar voice—sluggish, faraway. And then she said, more familiarly, “Fuck, I was afraid you were my mother coming back. All I’d need.”
She looked ghastly. Purple, and outlandishly swollen. Her eyes were terrible slits and her mouth puffy and red, cracked, distorted. Nearly most shocking of all was her hair; it looked dead, a single dull drab shade of brown. What before had been so vivid and lively, bright.
I could easily have cried, just then, and so I concentrated on not doing so, on keeping control, keeping cool.
It was Tony who, in a choked voice, asked her how she was feeling.
“Shitty, actually,” she said. “And my mother, Jesus: she comes to the fucking hospital to tell me that I’ve got to tell my father to take her back.”
Across the street, glaringly visible from Caroline’s window, was a funeral parlor. A blatantly tasteless, eminently practical juxtaposition, I guess. But how horrifying for someone seriously, perhaps terminally ill.
“She’s gone crazy, she really bugs me,” Caroline said, of her mother. She spoke in a far-off voice, and must have been heavily drugged, God knows with what. I could not help thinking how good it would be, in the long run, for Agatha if Ruth and Royce did in fact get back together.
I managed to ask, “Caroline, can I bring you something, anything?”
“No, just get me out of here.” She twisted her mouth; she could have been about to cry, but she did not.
Tony went over and patted her hair; gently he kissed her cheek. And that day, in one of his oldest, most bleached-out brown work shirts and faded khaki jeans, he was as beautiful as a deer.
The woman on the other bed groaned and stirred; she groped about for something, something to grasp and hold, and then I saw the light flash on over her bed.
Becoming aware of her, this miserably sick woman, I thought too of certain absent people who were connected to this room, to Caroline: where were Whitey, and Royce, and Thomas?
Caroline said, “You guys really better go. I have to deal with this myself.”
Tony asked, “Thomas coming by?”
“Yes. Later. Daphne, thanks for coming over.”
She turned her face to the window, and we tiptoed out, almost bumping into the nurse who was just coming through the door.
*
Back at Agatha’s house, Tony and I sat across from each other at the table, over mugs of tomato soup, canned, which I had heated up. Into which we were both nervously breaking soda crackers.
We hadn’t talked at all while I was opening the can, lighting the stove. And at last I asked the question that hung so heavily between us. “Well, who do you think did it? Someone she knew?” For myself, I already thought I knew who had so violently hurt her.
Tony looked miserably uncomfortable, but he faced me fully, heavy dark brown eyes raised to mine. “I don’t know. I couldn’t say,” he said.
“I wonder where the rest of her family was today. Royce—and Whitey?”
“Oh, Whitey’s gone up to Alaska,” Tony said quickly. Too quickly? Had he read my mind? “He was going to go last week,” he said.
Well, so much for my intuitive flash. I had of course been sure that it was Whitey, dead sure. I had almost been able to see and hear their quarrel, violent shouts about nothing, mounting rage—sexual in its intensity—until Whitey exploded, slapped her, hit her. Beat her up.
But if Whitey was in Alaska I was wrong, and probably I had just thought of him because I didn’t like him.
With a small bleak laugh, Tony said, “Thomas. Mr. Houston’s sure it’s him that beat her up.”
“Thomas? But he’d never—” Fucking racist is what I was thinking, meaning Royce. But I didn’t talk like that to Tony; it might have scared him, I thought. “Stupid bastard” was all I said.
“I never saw a person look so sad as Caroline did,” mused Tony. “She is brought down.”
“She is. She really is.”
It was true; Caroline’s sadness went far beyond physical pain. She must have known the person who beat her up, and if it wasn’t Whitey, who? I absolutely ruled out Thomas; he would no more have beat her up than Tony would. I asked him again, “Do you think it was someone she knew?”
He frowned. “It sure looks that way. But you know, it could be some guy was a friend of hers three years ago.”
Of course that was perfectly plausible, but I felt that Tony was holding back, not saying what he really thought, or not all of it. And as I looked at him, his smooth lovely brown face, I strongly felt that he too had immediately thought of Whitey, that he still did. Whitey said he was leaving for Alaska, that was all.
But I couldn’t ask Tony anything further about Whitey; I’m not sure why—maybe because I was so sure that he shared my suspicion, and the idea was so terrible. Also, conversation with Tony had never been easy; words made him nervous, I thought.
However, I couldn’t help saying, just then, “Tony, you are such a nice man.”
I shouldn’t have; he looked terribly sad, and he turned half away from me as he said, “No, I’m not so nice.”
20
The Christmas season, having begun badly, got worse, and worse.
On Christmas morning, Agatha telephoned to tell me that “Betty Smith” had been killed in the underpass of a freeway, her car forced into an abutment by another car on Christmas Eve, the night before. This happened near Fredericksburg, Virginia, which was where she was then living. An accident: it was being investigated, an attempt made to round up and question other motorists who were on the road that night, who might have noticed something—but how to investigate something that happened between two large blind machines, on a dark cold night of alternating rain and sleet?
In any case Betty Smith was dead. She was no longer contesting the General’s will, nor would her heirs, some distant cousins in Ohio; the lawyer had already made certain of that. The cousins, reached by phone, had said they “certainly didn’t want to get involved in anything like that.”
And so the sources of the General’s money could not be investigated.
It was a crazily warm day, that California Christmas. It was as hard to imagine dark and cold, rain, sleet as it was to believe that Betty Smith’s death was accidental. As Agatha and I talked about it, I was strongly reminded of the week before, when I had talked to Tony after we went to see Caroline in the hospital. Neither Tony nor I had really believed that Whitey was in Alaska; we both believed he was the one who had beat up Caroline, which was what I still believed. And so too both Agatha and I had strong and unexpressed fears about the fate of Betty Smith.
All this proliferation of violence was as frightening as cancer statistics were, and as out of control; it was as though the wars of the Sixties had continued into the Seventies, on another, hidden level.
How much better it would have been if the General had simply done what he seemed to have promised, and left all his bloody money to Betty Smith, maybe just a few thousand to Agatha—enough for a nice trip or, more likely, a sizable gift to some charity—instead of this cumbersome inheritance, her unwieldy house.
Even Royce seemed somehow, maybe illogically, a part of her legacy: an idle, rich and handsome man, who seemed to breed violence all around him.
“Well,” I said to Agatha, over the phone, after we had discussed most of those things, “Merry Christmas.”
“Yes.” She made a small, despairing sound. “Uh—what are you doing today?”
I had been going over to Caroline’s for lunch, but it was a loose invitation—“Oh, come anytime.” She was out of the hospital, and she said that she felt great; she seemed almost to be pretending that nothing had happened, she had not been beat up, badly hurt.
Agatha’s taut voice told me that she very much wanted to see me, and so I said, “Nothing, really. Why don’t I come over?”
“Oh, I’d like that a lot. Actually, Royce was coming for lunch, but now he can’t.”
“Okay, swell, I’ll be there in an hour or so.”
I called Caroline, who said, almost exactly as I had imagined she would, “Okay, no sweat. Why don’t you pretend it’s dinner instead, and come by about six? Thomas and I are just sitting around.”
“Good, terrific. I’ll bring some wine.”
The first thing I noticed about Agatha was that she had started smoking again. I was shocked: as young women we had both been heavy smokers, beginning with sneaked cigarettes in the basement of St. Margaret’s. Then about ten years ago we had simultaneously given it up. At that time we used to exchange notes about how tough it was, what a hard time we were having without nicotine, and later we talked about how rewarding it was not to smoke, how strong-minded we both were. So it was a considerable shock to see Agatha walking around her small apartment smoking.
She said, “I know, I feel terrible about it. But things just got so difficult, complicated. And Royce smokes all the time.”
“Still—”
“Daphne, please don’t scold me. I’m going to give it up again next week.”
That day I don’t believe Agatha sat down, in anything resembling a state of repose, for the whole time I was there. She walked, she smoked, she fussed at preparing lunch, she spoke in fragments. I had never seen her so nervous—so unstrung, actually—and it was deeply upsetting.
We mainly talked about two people, about Betty Smith and then about Royce, but the sequence was always confused, and more confusing when Ruth came into it too.
“I just feel so sorry for her,” Agatha said, and at first I did not get the identity of “her.” “He said the newest wrinkle was some suggestion that she’d been drinking. Some office party, Christmas Eve.” Then “her” meant Betty Smith, and “he” was the lawyer. Oh. “You know, even if she had been drinking, that doesn’t mean that someone didn’t shove her off the road.”
“Of course not. But, Agatha, just because she was suing the estate doesn’t mean that someone did shove her off the road.” But actually I did not believe what I was saying for a minute: I was sure that the General, even dead, generated and perpetuated violence.
Agatha did not believe me either, but she was too distracted to argue. She said, “I’
m so torn. In a way I really wanted there to be an investigation. If they’d really been able to find out where he got all his money, we’d know a lot, I think.” And then, “Oh, Lord, I’m forgetting lunch.” She rushed out of the room.
I too had very much wanted to find out how the General got so rich. I had even been afraid that it would turn out to be something relatively harmless, like clever investments. It would have been so deeply satisfying to have the General, though dead, publicly denounced as having been involved in the murder of Allende, in Chile, or involved in Korean bribery; having been an influence in the sale of arms to some big oil country. I fully believed—I still do—that his money came from one or several of those or similar sources. And now there was the probably innocent victim Betty Smith as dead as the General was.
I tried—again—to imagine in what terms anyone would tell someone else to get rid of a person, to see that Betty Smith had an “accident.” But I could not imagine it, despite all my years of TV and movies and mysteries. I could not find the words for the actual conversation, which after all may not have really happened. But I am sure it did, and I wish I knew just what they said—not to mention who was saying it.
The lunch that Agatha had made convinced me, as nothing else could have, of the extent of her mania for Royce. She has always been a non-cook, not even trying very hard. But that day, that Christmas, she had made: oysters Rockefeller (on another day we might have laughed at the irony in that, the General having had at least two Rockefeller pals, about which he boasted), tournedos Rossini, artichoke hearts and endive salad. For dessert, some peaches with a raspberry sauce. “Royce really loves elaborate food,” said Agatha unnecessarily.