The Stories of Alice Adams

by Alice Adams

  Matthew Vann is also a handsome person, with silky white hair and impressive dark eyes, and he, too, wears elegant clothes. His posture is distinguished. Yvonne has never taken his name, not for feminist reasons but because she thinks the combination is unaesthetic: Yvonne Vann? Matthew looks and is considerably more fragile than Yvonne, although they are about the same age: that is to say, among other things, of an age to wonder which of them will outlive the other. The question is impossible, inadmissible and crucially important. Matthew is frailer, but then Yvonne’s illness could recur at any time.

  They have been married for a little over thirty years, and they live, these days, in San Francisco, having decided that the rigors of New England winters and the overstimulation of Cambridge social life were, in combination, far too much for them. Trips to Europe, also, formerly a source of much pleasure, now seem, really, more strenuous than fun. And so Yvonne and Matthew have taken to exploring certain areas of California, beginning with the near at hand: Yosemite, Lake Tahoe and now this extraordinarily beautiful stretch of coast at Mendocino, where rivers empty into the sea between sheer cliffs of rock.

  They are sitting at the far end of the white railed porch that runs the length of the building in which they are lodging. They have had an early dinner, hoping for quiet, and they are tired from a day of exploring the town and the meadows high above the vibrating sea. The other guests are almost all golfing people, since there is a course adjacent to the inn. They are people in late middle age, a little younger than Yvonne and Matthew, mostly overweight, tending to noise and heavy smoking and excessive drink. Not pleasant dinner companions. And Yvonne and Matthew were successful: they finished a quiet dinner of excellent abalone before the boisterous arrival of the golfing group. There was only one other couple in the dining room. That other couple had also been distinctly not a part of the golfing group, and they were as striking, in their way, as Yvonne and Matthew were in theirs. Yvonne had been unable not to stare at them—the girl so young and perfectly controlled in all her gestures, the man much older than the girl, so clearly and happily in love with her. It won’t end well, Yvonne had thought.

  Everything is fine as they sit now on the porch. This place to which they have come is very beautiful. The walks through wild flowers and the views back to the river mouth, the beaches, the opposite banks of green are all marvelous. Everything is fine, except for a nagging area of trouble that has just lodged itself somewhere near Yvonne’s heart. But the trouble is quite irrational, and she is an eminently sensible woman, and so she pushes it aside and begins a conversation with Matthew about something else.

  “A thing that I like about being old,” she observes to him, at the same time as she reflects that many of their conversations have had just this beginning, “is that you go on trips for their own sake, just to see something. Not expecting the trip to change your life.” Not hoping that the man you are with will want to marry you, she is thinking to herself, or that Italy will cure your husband of a girl.

  “Ye-e-es,” drawls Matthew, in his vague New Hampshire way. But he is a good listener; he very much enjoys her conversation. “Yvonne is the least boring person in the world,” he has often said—if not to her, to a great many other people.

  “When you’re young, you really don’t see much beyond yourself,” Yvonne muses.

  Then, perhaps at having spoken the word “young,” thinking of young people, of herself much younger, the trouble increases. It becomes an active heavy pressure on her heart, so that she closes her eyes for a moment. Then she opens them, facing it, admitting to herself: That girl in the dining room reminded me of Susanna, in Cambridge, almost thirty years ago. Not long after we were married, which of course made it worse.

  What happened was this:

  In the late forties, in Cambridge, Yvonne was viewed as a smart, attractive but not really pretty French woman. A widow? Divorced? No one knew for sure. She had heavy dark hair, a husky voice and a way of starting sentences with an “Ah!” that sounded like a tiny bark. Some people were surprised to find her married to Matthew Vann, a glamorous man, admired for having fought in Spain as well as for his great good looks, a man as distinguished as he was rich. Then a beautiful young Radcliffe girl who wanted to become a dancer, and for all anyone knew eventually became one—a golden California girl, Susanna—fell in love with Matthew, and he with her. But Yvonne wouldn’t let him go, and so nothing came of it. That was all.

  Thus went the story that circulated like a lively winter germ through the areas of Cambridge adjacent to Harvard Square, up and down Brattle Street, Linnaean, Garden Street and Massachusetts Avenue, and finally over to Hillside Place, where Yvonne and Matthew then were living.

  But that is not, exactly, how it was. It went more like this:

  “You won’t believe me, but I think a very young girl has fallen in love with me,” Matthew said to Yvonne one night, near the end of their dinner of lapin au moutarde, a specialty of Yvonne’s which she always thenceforward connected unpleasantly with that night, although she continued to make it from time to time. (Silly not to, really.) Then Matthew laughed, a little awkward, embarrassed. “It does seem unlikely.”

  “Not at all.” Yvonne’s tone was light, the words automatic. Her accent was still very French. “You are a most handsome man,” she said.

  “You might remember her. We met her at the Emorys’. Susanna something, from California. I’ve kept seeing her in Widener, and now she says she wants to help me with my research.” He laughed, more embarrassed yet.

  Yvonne experienced a wave of fury, which she quickly brought under control, breathing regularly and taking a small sip of wine. Of course she remembered the girl: long dark-gold hair and sunny, tawny skin; bad clothes, but not needing good clothes with that long lovely neck; a stiff, rather self-conscious dancer’s walk; lovely long hands, beautifully controlled. Anyone would fall in love with her.

  In those days, while Yvonne did her own work at the Fogg, Matthew was combining supervision of the factory he had inherited, in Waltham, with the musicologist’s career that he had chosen. The research he had mentioned was for his book on Boccherini, for which they would later spend a year in Italy. They had married after a wildly passionate affair, during which Yvonne had managed to wrest Matthew away from poor Flossie, his alcoholic first wife, now long since dead in Tennessee.

  And, thinking over the problem of Susanna, one thing that Yvonne said silently to her rival was: You can’t have him; I’ve already been through too much for Matthew. Also, in her exceptionally clearheaded way, Yvonne knew Matthew, in a way that violent love can sometimes preclude. She knew that he would not take Susanna to bed unless he had decided to break with Yvonne—this out of a strong and somewhat aberrant New England sense of honor, and also out of sexual shyness, unusual in so handsome, so sensual a man. Yvonne herself had had to resort to a kind of seduction by force. But a young, proud girl could not know of such tactics.

  Yvonne was right. Matthew did not have an affair with Susanna; he probably never saw her outside of Widener, except for an intense cup of coffee at Hayes-Bickford, where they were noticed together. However, Matthew suffered severely, and that was how Yvonne treated him—like someone with a serious disease. She was affectionate and solicitous, and very slightly distant, as though his illness were something that she didn’t want to catch.

  One March evening, after a bright, harsh day of intermittent sun, rain and wind, Matthew came home for dinner a little late, with a look on his face of total and anguished exhaustion. Handing him his gin—they were in the kitchen; she had been tasting her good lamb stew, a navarin—Yvonne thought, Ah, the girl has broken it off, or has given him an ultimatum; such a mistake. She thought, I hope I won’t have to hear about it.

  All Matthew said during dinner was “The Boccherini project is sort of getting me down. My ideas don’t come together.”

  “Poor darling,” she said carefully, alertly watching his face.

  “I should spend more time
at the factory.”

  “Well, why don’t you?”

  As they settled in the living room for coffee, Yvonne saw that his face had relaxed a little. Perhaps now he would want to talk to her? She said, “There’s a Fred Astaire revival at the U.T. tonight. I know you don’t like them, but would you mind if I go? Ah, dear, it’s almost time.”

  Not saying: You unspeakable fool, how dare you put me through all this? Are you really worth it?

  Alone in the crowded balcony of the University Theatre, as on the screen Fred and Ginger sang to each other about how lovely a day it was to be caught in the rain, Yvonne thought, for a moment, that she would after all go home and tell Matthew to go to his girl, Susanna. She would release him, with as little guilt as possible, since she was indeed fond of Matthew. Je tiens à Matthew.

  Tenir à. I hold to Matthew, Yvonne thought then. And she also thought, No, it would not work out well at all. Matthew is much too vulnerable for a girl like that. He is better off with me.

  Of course she was right, as Matthew himself must have come to realize, and over the summer he seemed to recover from his affliction. Yvonne saw his recovery, but she also understood that she had been seriously wounded by that episode, coming as it did so early in their life together. Afterward she was able to think more sensibly, Well, much better early than later on, when he could have felt more free.

  That fall they left for Italy, where, curiously, neither of them had been before—Yvonne because her Anglophile parents had always taken her to the Devon coast on holidays, or sometimes to Scotland, Matthew because with drunken Flossie any travel was impossible.

  They settled in a small hotel in Rome, in a large romantically alcoved room that overlooked the Borghese Gardens. They went on trips: north to Orvieto, Todi, Spoleto, Gubbio; south to Salerno, Positano, Ravello. They were dazed, dizzy with pleasure at the landscape, the vistas of olive orchards, of pines and flowers and stones, the ancient buildings, the paintings and statuary. The food and wine. They shared a mania for pasta.

  A perfect trip, except that from time to time Yvonne was jolted sharply by a thought of that girl, Susanna. And, looking at Matthew, she wondered if he, too, thought of her—with sadness, regret? The question hurt.

  She would have to ask Matthew, and deliberately she chose a moment of pure happiness. They were seated on a vine-covered terrace, at Orvieto, across the square from the gorgeously striped cathedral, drinking cool white wine, having made love early that morning, when Yvonne asked, “Do you ever wonder what happened to that girl, Susanna?”

  Genuine puzzlement appeared on Matthew’s distinguished face, and then he said, “I almost never think of her. I don’t have time.”

  Knowing Matthew, Yvonne was sure that he spoke the truth, and she wryly thought, I undoubtedly think more often of that girl, that episode, than Matthew does.

  And so she, too, stopped thinking of Susanna—or almost, except for an occasional reminder.

  Leaving Rome, they traveled up to Florence, then Venice, Innsbruck, and Vienna.

  That was the first of a succession of great trips.

  Yvonne and Matthew remained, for the most part, very happy with each other, and over the years their sexual life declined only slightly. Then, in her late fifties, Yvonne became terribly sick, at first undiagnosably so. Surgery was indicated. On being told the probable nature of her illness—she had insisted on that—Yvonne remarked to her doctor, one of the chief surgeons at Massachusetts General, “Well, my chances are not exactly marvelous, then, are they?”

  He looked embarrassed, and gazed in the direction of the Charles, just visible from his high office window. “No, not marvelous,” he admitted.

  After surgery, oppressively drugged, Yvonne was mainly aware of pain, which surged in heavy waves toward her, almost overwhelming her, and very gradually receding. She was aware, too, of being handled a great deal, not always gently, of needles inserted, and tubes, of strong hands manipulating her small body.

  Sometimes, half conscious, she would wonder if she was dreaming. But at least she knew that she was alive: dead people don’t wonder about anything, she was sure of that.

  The first face that she was aware of was her surgeon’s: humorless, stern, seeming always to be saying, No, not marvelous. Then there was the face of a black nurse, kind and sad, a gentle, mourning face. At last she saw Matthew, so gaunt and stricken that she knew she had to live. It was that simple: dying was something she could not do to Matthew.

  “She’s got to be the strongest woman I’ve ever seen, basically,” the dubious surgeon remarked later on to Matthew, who by then could beamingly agree.

  Chemotherapy worked; it took most of her hair but fortunately did not make her sick. Yvonne very gradually regained strength, and some health, and with a great effort she put back on a few of the many lost pounds. Matthew learned to make a superior fettuccine, and he served it to her often.

  After her illness and surgery, they did not make love anymore; they just did not. Yvonne missed it, in a dim sad way, but on the other hand she could sometimes smile at the very idea of such a ludicrous human activity, to which she herself had once devoted so much time. She was on the whole amused and a little skeptical of accounts of very sexually active seventy- and eighty-year-olds: why did they bother, really?

  While she was recuperating, Yvonne finished a study of Marie Laurencin that she had been working on for years, and her book had considerable acclaim, even reasonably good sales. Matthew did not finish his Boccherini study, but from time to time he published articles in places like the Hudson Review, the Harvard Magazine.

  A year ago, they left Cambridge and moved to the pleasant flat on Green Street, in San Francisco.

  Now, on the porch in Mendocino, thinking of the girl across the room at dinner, and remembering Susanna, all that pain, Yvonne has a vivid insight as to how it would have been if she had abandoned Matthew to Susanna all those years ago. Matthew would, of course, have married the girl—that is how he is—and they would have been quite happy for a while. He would have gazed dotingly upon her in restaurants, like the man in the dining room, with his Susanna. And then somehow it would all have gone bad, with a sad old age for Matthew, the girl bored and irritable, Matthew worn out, not understanding anything.

  But what of herself? What would have happened to her? The strange part is that Yvonne has never inquired into this before. Now, with perfect logic, she suddenly, jarringly sees just what would have happened: for a while, considerable unhappiness for her, a slow recovery. And then she would have been quite herself again, maybe a little improved. She would have remarried—amazing, she can almost see him! He is no one she knows, but a man much younger than herself, very dark. In fact, he is French; they have many intimate things in common. He might be a painter. He is very unlike Matthew. Would she still have had her great illness? She is not sure; her vision ends with that man, her marriage to him.

  Something in her expression, probably, has made Matthew ask a question never asked between them, a question, in fact, for adolescent lovers: “What were you thinking about, just now?”

  And he is given, by Yvonne, the requisite response: “I was thinking, my darling, of you. At least in part.”

  The air on the porch is perceptibly chillier than when they first came out from dinner. Time to go in, and yet they are both reluctant to move: it is so beautiful where they are. In the distance, gray-white lines of foam cross the sea, beneath a calm pale evening sky; closer to hand are the surrounding, sheltering pines and cypresses.

  Then, from whatever uncharacteristic moment of strong emotion, Matthew says another thing that he has not said before. “I was thinking,” he says, “that without you I would not have had much of a life at all.”

  Does he mean if they had never met? Or does he mean if he had left her for that girl, for fair Susanna? Or if she had died? It is impossible to ask, and so Yvonne frowns, unseen, in the gathering dusk—both at the ambiguity and at the surprise of it. And she, too, says something
new: “Ah, Matthew, what an absolute fool you are.” But she has said it lightly, and she adds, “You would have got along perfectly well without me.” She knows that out of her true fondness for Matthew she has lied, and that it is still necessary for her to survive him.

  Lost Luggage

  I can only explain my genuine lack of concern, when I first realized that my suitcase was missing, not coming up with the others off the plane, by saying that at that moment I was in a mood of more than usual self-approval; you could call it pride, or maybe hubris, even: I had just managed to enjoy a vacation alone—to come out unscathed, anyway—at a Mexican resort where I had often gone with my recently dead husband, a trip warned against by my children and well-meaning friends, of course. But it had been all right; I was glad that I had gone there. My other source of pride was sillier but forgivable, I think; it was simply that I was looking very well. I was tan, and the warm, gentle green Mexican water had been kind to my hair. I was brown and silver, like a weathering country house, and I did not mind the thought of myself as aging wood.

  In any case, I watched the procession of luggage as it erupted from the maw of the baggage area in the San Francisco terminal, up from the Toltec Airlines plane that I had just got off; I watched each piece as it was claimed and lifted off the treadmill and taken away. With no sinking of my heart (that came much later), I waited until all the other bags were gone, as the empty treadmill moved in its creaking circle, and I realized that that was it: no more bags. An official-looking person confirmed that view: my suitcase was somewhere else, or lost, or irreparably smashed. And I was not at all upset.