The Stories of Alice Adams

by Alice Adams

  The summer raced on. (“Not without dust and heat,” Lawrence several times remarked, in his private ironic voice.) The roses wilted on the roof and on the banks next to the road. The creek dwindled, and beside it honeysuckle leaves lay limply on the vines. For weeks, there was no rain, and then, one afternoon, there came a dark torrential thunderstorm. Harriet and I sat on the side porch and watched its violent start—the black clouds seeming to rise from the horizon, the cracking, jagged streaks of lightning, the heavy, welcome rain. And, later, the clean smell of leaves and grass and damp earth.

  Knowing that Margot would be frightened, I thought of calling her, and then remembered that she would not talk on the phone during storms. And that night she told me, “The phone rang and rang, but I didn’t think it was you, somehow.”

  “No.”

  “I had the craziest idea that it was Johnny. Be just like him to pick the middle of a storm for a phone call.”

  “There might not have been a storm in New Orleans.”

  But it turned out that Margot was right.

  The next day, when I rode up to the Farrs’ on my bike, Emily was sitting out in the grass where I had first seen her. I went and squatted beside her there. I thought she looked old and sad, and partly to cheer her I said, “You grow the most beautiful flowers I’ve ever seen.”

  She sighed, instead of smiling as she usually did. She said, “I seem to have turned into a gardener. When I was a girl, I imagined that I would grow up to be a writer, a novelist, and that I would have at least four children. Instead, I grow flowers and write book reviews.”

  I was not interested in children. “You never wrote a novel?”

  She smiled unhappily. “No. I think I was afraid that I wouldn’t come up to Trollope. I married rather young, you know.”

  And at that moment Lawrence came out of the house, immaculate in white flannels.

  He greeted me, and said to Emily, “My dear, I find that I have some rather late appointments, in Hillsboro. You won’t wait dinner if I’m a trifle late?”

  (Of course she would; she always did.)

  “No. Have a good time,” she said, and she gave him the anxious look that I had come to recognize as the way she looked at Lawrence.

  Soon after that, a lot happened very fast. Margot wrote to Johnny (again) that she wanted a divorce, that she intended to marry Larry. (I wonder if this was ever true.) Johnny telephoned—not once but several times. He told her that she was crazy, that he had a great job with some shipbuilders near San Francisco—a defense contract. He would come to get us, and we would all move out there. Margot agreed. We would make a new life. (Of course, we never knew what happened to the girl.)

  I was not as sad about leaving the Farrs and that house, that town, those woods as I was to be later, looking back. I was excited about San Francisco, and I vaguely imagined that someday I would come back and that we would all see each other again. Like parting lovers, Harriet and I promised to write each other every day.

  And for quite a while we did write several times a week. I wrote about San Francisco—how beautiful it was: the hills and pastel houses, the sea. How I wished that she could see it. She wrote about school and friends. She described solitary bike rides to places we had been. She told me what she was reading.

  In high school, our correspondence became more generalized, Responding perhaps to the adolescent mores of the early nineteen-forties, we wrote about boys and parties; we even competed in making ourselves sound “popular.” The truth (my truth) was that I was sometimes popular, often not. I had, in fact, a stormy adolescence. And at that time I developed what was to be a long-lasting habit. As I reviewed a situation in which I had been ill-advised or impulsive, I would re-enact the whole scene in my mind with Harriet in my own role—Harriet, cool and controlled, more intelligent, prettier. Even more than I wanted to see her again, I wanted to be Harriet.

  Johnny and Margot fought a lot and stayed together, and gradually a sort of comradeship developed between them in our small house on Russian Hill.

  I went to Stanford, where I half-heartedly studied history. Harriet was at Radcliffe, studying American literature, writing poetry.

  We lost touch with each other.

  Margot, however, kept up with her old friend Dolly, by means of Christmas cards and Easter notes, and Margot thus heard a remarkable piece of news about Emily Farr. Emily “up and left Lawrence without so much as a by-your-leave,” said Dolly, and went to Washington, D.C., to work in the Folger Library. This news made me smile all day. I was so proud of Emily. And I imagined that Lawrence would amuse himself, that they would both be happier apart.

  By accident, I married well—that is to say, a man whom I still like and enjoy. Four daughters came at uncalculated intervals, and each is remarkably unlike her sisters. I named one Harriet, although she seems to have my untidy character.

  From time to time, over the years, I would see a poem by Harriet Farr, and I always thought it was marvelous, and I meant to write her. But I distrusted my reaction. I had been (I was) so deeply fond of Harriet (Emily, Lawrence, that house and land) and besides, what would I say—“I think your poem is marvelous”? (I have since learned that this is neither an inadequate nor in unwelcome thing to say to writers.) Of course, the true reason for not writing was that there was too much to say.

  Dolly wrote to Margot that Lawrence was drinking “all over the place.” He was not happier without Emily. Harriet, Dolly said, was traveling a lot. She married several times and had no children. Lawrence developed emphysema, and was in such bad shape that Emily quit her job and came back to take care of him—whether because of feelings of guilt or duty or possibly affection, I didn’t know. He died, lingeringly and miserably, and Emily, too, died, a few years later—at least partly from exhaustion, I would imagine.

  Then, at last, I did write Harriet, in care of the magazine in which I had last seen a poem of hers. I wrote a clumsy, gusty letter, much too long, about shared pasts, landscapes, the creek. All that. And as soon as I had mailed it I began mentally rewriting, seeking more elegant prose.

  When for a long time I didn’t hear from Harriet, I felt worse and worse, cumbersome, misplaced—as too often in life I had felt before. It did not occur to me that an infrequently staffed magazine could be at fault.

  Months later, her letter came—from Rome, where she was then living. Alone, I gathered. She said that she was writing it at the moment of receiving mine. It was a long, emotional and very moving letter, out of character for the Harriet that I remembered (or had invented).

  She said, in part: “It was really strange, all that time when Lawrence was dying, and God! so long! and as though ‘dying’ were all that he was doing—Emily, too, although we didn’t know that—all that time the picture that moved me most, in my mind, that moved me to tears, was not of Lawrence and Emily but of you and me. On our bikes at the top of the hill outside our house. Going somewhere. And I first thought that that picture simply symbolized something irretrievable, the lost and irrecoverable past, as Lawrence and Emily would be lost. And I’m sure that was partly it.

  “But they were so extremely fond of you—in fact, you were a rare area of agreement. They missed you, and they talked about you for years. It’s a wonder that I wasn’t jealous, and I think I wasn’t only because I felt included in their affection for you. They liked me best with you.

  “Another way to say this would be to say that we were all three a little less crazy and isolated with you around, and, God knows, happier.”

  An amazing letter, I thought. It was enough to make me take a long look at my whole life, and to find some new colors there.

  A postscript: I showed Harriet’s letter to my husband and he said, “How odd. She sounds so much like you.”

  For Good

  “How I hate California! God, no one will ever know how much I hate it here,” cries out Pauline Field, a once-famous abstract-expressionist painter. It is lunchtime on a ferociously cold Sunday late in June—in a b
each house near San Francisco: Pauline’s house—and her lunch party that is assembled there in her enclosed patio, drinking sangrias. Almost no one (in fact only one person) pays any attention to Pauline, who tends to speak in an exaggerated way. She is a huge strong woman, dressed outrageously in pink; she has wild white hair and consuming dark-brown eyes. It is possible that she has made this impassioned complaint before.

  The house is some three or four years old; those years (the years, incidentally, of Pauline’s most recent marriage) and the relentless wind have almost silvered the shingled walls, and beach grass has grown up through the slats of the planked-over patio, where now all those guests, twenty or so, are standing with their cold fruity drinks, their backs to the wind and to the sea. The drive home, over steep winding hills and beside great wooded canyons, will be somewhat dangerous even for a sober driver; these weak drinks are the inspiration of Pauline’s (third) husband, Stephen, a cautious former alcoholic.

  The one person who paid attention to Pauline is also the only person who is looking out to the churning gray sea: a young girl, about twelve, Nell Ashbury, from New York; she is visiting her father and her stepmother. She listened to Pauline because her hostess has come across to her more vividly than any of the other adults present (discounting her father, Jason Ashbury, the writer, about whom she has the most passionate curiosity, not knowing him well at all). Pauline, to Nell, is more present than anyone else there. Her mother’s Village circle includes a lot of writers, editors, agents; Nell is tired of literary people, who all talk too much. Perhaps she herself will be a painter, like Pauline? And Pauline listens; so many grown-ups (her mother’s writers) ask questions and then don’t wait to hear the answer. Pauline is kind; she has in fact wrapped reed-thin Nell in an old Irish sweater of her own, in which the girl now sits, enveloped—it comes down to her knees—looking out across a grass-tufted rise of sand to the turbulent sea, and thinking, Pacific?

  But at Pauline’s words—“I hate California”—Nell has turned to listen, and it occurs to her that she does not like it here much either; it is terribly windy and cold, not at all like a summer day at a real beach, not like Crane’s Beach, at Ipswich, where she and her mother go for the month of August every summer. Nell has a tendency to take people at their word (she believes that Pauline hates California), and partly because she is so young, she believes that what is said is meant, for good.

  Nell also (half-consciously) understands Pauline to mean that she does not like her party, her guests—and possibly she does not like her husband, the blond man, rather short, who is pouring out the reddish drinks.

  “It’s not a place that’s fit for human beings,” declaims Pauline, who has not had a show of her paintings for years, although she still works, if spasmodically, and who has unhappily become used to inattention. “Perhaps mountain lions,” she continues. “Feel that wind, in June.”

  Pauline’s size is a further reason for Nell’s instinct about her not liking her husband. “Women who hate their husbands always put on weight,” Nell’s mother has said, herself purposefully thin (and unremarried), and Nell has as yet found no evidence against this theory. Her stepmother, who visibly “adores” her father, is even trimmer than Nell’s mother is. Given the ten years or so difference in their ages, they look rather alike, Nell thinks—and would of course not say to either of them. Brown-skinned blondes, blue-eyed, rather athletic. What her father likes?

  In fact Nell has seen rather few fat women among the friends of either parent, and this too gives Pauline a certain interest: what nerve, to be so large. And her size is somehow sexy, all that energetic flesh. The other guests look vaguely alike and are dressed quite similarly: they are in stylishly good shape; they wear pants and expensive old sweaters.

  Nell herself is physically a curious replica of her father: sandy-haired, with light-gray eyes. Everyone has remarked on the likeness, and Nell has sometimes wondered if this is one thing that makes him uneasy with her: it must be strange for Jason to see his coloring, his own long nose and impossibly high brow on a girl, a thin young girl. Sometimes Nell catches him staring at her in an unnerved way, and he seems not to know what to say to her. The phrase “pale imitation” has unfortunately stuck in her mind. They were divorced so long ago, Jason and her mother, when Nell was a baby and Jason a hugely successful novelist. On the heels of his greatest success—that rarity, a book that six or eight superior critics praised and that several hundred thousand people bought—he stopped writing entirely. He has lived a lot in Italy, in southern France and Greece.

  Although she is the one complaining about the weather, Pauline has not dressed to defend herself from it: the long-sleeved pink cotton smock from which her spatulate-fingered, muscular brown hands extend is thin (“Fat women always love bright colors,” Nell’s mother has said, safe in navy or black); she is barefoot, and sand adheres to her large brown feet. She says, “I can’t bear this wind!”

  “Well, Pauline,” says Jason, in his glancing, nonserious way that no one seems to know how to take (is he serious?), “you could chuck it all and run off to some warmer clime.”

  So, Nell thinks, he too has been listening to Pauline?

  Pauline’s great eyes flash across him; she says, “I just may.”

  But her husband, blond Stephen, has spoken much more loudly than she. “Pauline would rather stick around and make dramatic complaints,” he says, sounding smug with his knowledge (and possession?) of Pauline.

  Obviously these two men, Nell’s father and Stephen, do not like each other much, and Nell begins to regard the party with slightly more interest. Just possibly something could happen? In general, her parents’ friends do not make scenes, just talk, and she had sometimes thought that it would be more fun if they did.

  “In fact I might join you there, wherever,” Jason continues, as though Stephen had not spoken. “It is awfully goddam cold.” He turns to his small blond wife. “And how would you like that, my love?”

  Neither what he said nor his look has been clear: did he mean that he would take his wife or leave her there in the California cold? Nell’s stepmother visibly does not know, but in a calm, controlled way she says, “Well, in the meantime I think I’ll go inside. It is terribly cold.” She starts in, and everyone begins to follow her, as though an excuse or perhaps a leader was needed.

  Jason laughs, as Nell wonders why: At what private joke?

  “I need help!” wildly says Pauline as people are trooping past her into the house, and then, in a more rational way, she addresses Nell—who has taken her seriously and is staring in dismay. “Nell, do come in the kitchen with me. You look as though you were good at sorting things out.”

  The kitchen is farther away and thus more separate from the living room than is usual in the houses Nell has known. She and Pauline walk down a hall, past bedrooms, to what is the largest room in the house: a huge square, two stories high, with a backward-looking view of steep, ravined hills, all shades and shapes and varieties of green, here and there patched with sunlight, in other areas cloud-darkened, almost black. “There’s only one painter out here who can do that,” says Pauline (sadly? enviously? Nell can’t tell). “I’ve never tried. Perhaps I should? This is my favorite room,” she says. “I like to be alone here. I can’t bear people who come out to try to help me—I can’t be helped.” She laughs, a short harsh definite sound. “Of course I don’t mean you, little Nell—I asked you in.” And Nell is then given a large handful of silver which, for a moment, she is afraid that she is supposed to polish; this has not been done for some time.

  “Just sort it out into little piles,” instructs Pauline. “You know, to be wrapped in a napkin. Something for everyone. And now tell me all about your mother.”

  “She’s fine,” Nell automatically says, and then asks, “Did you know her?”

  “Oh, yes,” says Pauline, sounding bored. “We all used to know each other. But that was terribly long ago. In the forties, in fact. Of course we were terribly young.”
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  The forties. Wanting to know more (what was everyone like then? what was her father like?), Nell has understood that Pauline does not want to answer questions—she will talk more or less to herself.

  Pauline is drinking vodka from a wineglass. “God, how I hate sangria,” she abruptly says, in much her tone of hating California. And then she asks, “Are you very tired of conversations about why your father doesn’t write anymore?”

  Nell hesitates, at a loss. “No, we don’t talk about that much,” she honestly says, at last.

  “Oh, I suppose not. Your mother would have lost interest, lucky for her. Out here it’s quite a favorite topic, among his friends. That’s partly what I mean about California. It’s as vacuous as it is windy, in fact it’s a chilly windbag of a place.” And she laughs, in a pleased way—she will clearly say this again. “The truth is,” she then continues, “Jason is scared. His last book was so good that it scared him to death, almost.”

  Nell smiles politely. She is the sort of child to whom adults often talk, perhaps in some (erroneous) belief that innocence prevents her understanding. She is by now used to nearly incomprehensible remarks that later make considerable sense, and so now she tucks away this notion of California, and of her father’s work. And she wonders: Is Pauline talking about herself?

  The salad that Pauline is making, in a huge wooden bowl on the large butcher-block table, also looks (at first) familiar to Nell: several kinds of lettuce, thinly sliced onion, parsley. But then other things from dishes in the giant refrigerator are added: fish-smelling things, pink, and indistinguishable in shape. “Mussels and clams,” Pauline says. “Fruits de mer. They’ll absolutely hate it. Everyone except your father. He loves all this stuff too.”