The Stories of Alice Adams Read online

  When I heard his car I wanted to run inside, upstairs and away from whatever was about to happen. Instead I sat there, as prim and proper (and as frightened) as I used to be when Dudley came to call. He—Caleb—came around the corner of the house and I got up and went down the stairs to meet him, and in a curious tense way we clasped each other, he a head taller than I—out there in the black sultry flower- and river-smelling night.

  He said, “Let’s go for a walk. I feel like walking.”

  That seemed a strange suggestion; I could have told him of lovely private places to drive to, but he had already started out, nervous and fast, and so I followed.

  And it seemed strange that he should be nervous. “I hadn’t planned to fall in love with anyone,” he later explained. “I never had—just with ideas. I knew you were dangerous,” and he laughed.

  At first I thought that he would want to talk, that this walk was for self-revelations, but it was not like that at all. We just walked, and every now and then he would ask a question, but always an immediate one. What kind of flower makes that very sweet smell? How old is that house? And further down the river, are there places to swim?

  Once a pair of twin black cats came toward us out of the darkness, the country night—two cats thin and sleek and moving as one, long legs interwoven with each other, sometimes almost tripping. At that we laughed and stopped walking and laughed and laughed, both wondering (I suppose) if that was how we looked, although we were so upright.

  Then we walked on, hurrying, like people with a destination, talking less, simply sensing each other, until seemingly we had made a circle, and we were back at my parents’ house. Where, near the camellia bushes, for the first time we kissed. I thought that was a beginning, that our first night would last until sometime near morning, but Caleb meant to kiss me good night.

  He won. Over all my clinging and whispered pleas that he stay, he said that he had an early patient. He had to go; he would come back the next day, and that night. And he was gone.

  He came back the next day just after lunch—I had told him about everyone’s habits of naps.

  It was a humid, hazy day. Everything looked heavier: the Spanish moss on the live oaks beside the river sagged lower toward the ground, wisteria vines hung heavily on their trellis.

  He sat on the front steps, not having much time, my bare leg touching his bleached-out khaki pants. Caleb said, “I just can’t believe this is happening to me. I’m a rational man—this is not my style at all.”

  I laughed, feeling amazingly light in the head and heart, unabashed, in the pounding sunshine. I said, “We have to go to a party this afternoon, but tonight? I’ll see you tonight?”

  We all went to the party, my parents and Simon and I—and there, of course, among the old family friends, were Dudley and his wife. I talked mostly to her; disliking large parties, I “circulate” poorly, tend to stay with one person with whom I can talk. A dark pretty girl, with a soft voice from somewhere further south. I recognized that the quality I had felt in common with her was fear, but whereas I had been nebulously frightened of looming, dangerous people (who had already become somewhat unreal), she was worried about Dudley, simply and specifically. She said, “I really hope you’ll come over and see us while you’re here. Bring Simon, of course. But, until August—” And I said that she mustn’t fuss or worry, feeling as kindly toward her as though she were an oldest friend. In fact I could see the emergence in myself of a calmer, kinder person, and I could feel that person reflected in the eyes of the old people who had known me all my life: they were thinking, Why, for heaven’s sake, she’s nice.

  My father was talking about the Vietnam War, which was still going on at that time. “Well, I’m neither a hawk nor a dove, but a bustard,” he said, as he was to say often over the summer (and I to cringe: my calm kindness had its limits). “Has anyone ever heard of that fabulous old bird? A native of Pakistan, I do believe.”

  That night in his beat-up car Caleb and I drove down the narrow tarred road, down along the river to a small clearing in the tropical tangle of Spanish moss and honeysuckle vines. We got out and in the heavy blackness we found the narrow beach, of coarse river sand, and there, at last, we made love. God knows what we said—I think not much at all.

  That day, and that night began the pattern of my summer: days of walks and swims with Simon, frequent parties with my parents, old friends. Some encounters with Dudley and his wife, less frequently with Mary Sue. Nights with Caleb, plus a few infrequent daylight intervals; he was allowing himself to be overworked at the hospital, for reasons of his own. Also he was worried about his helpless charges. And working on a book.

  I don’t think that Caleb and I needed the excitement of illicitness; we simply wanted privacy, which was not easy in that town. But, “For secret lovers, we spend a lot of time outdoors, don’t we?” Caleb remarked one night, as we lay on our tiny private beach in the dark. “I’m sure it’s terribly healthy for us,” he said, and we laughed like idiots.

  Making love, laughing. That is what we did, that summer, both to excess; in both cases, having once started, we seemed unable to stop. Little talk, no plans—it was marvelous. I thought about Caleb all day; he was always in my mind, but with no anxiety, which I found amazing. Love and fear had always arrived together, for me, before.

  I often forgot what Caleb did, his profession—or, rather, I didn’t think about it. But he said a few things from such extraordinary insight that I thought, What an amazingly good doctor he must be. One thing that he said was “I think you’re going to take a while getting used to being happy.” That was true; it has taken years.

  Sometimes—being already naked, Caleb and I—we slipped into the river and swam about in the warm black almost unmoving water. Remembered, this seems a dangerous thing to have done, for obvious reasons; at the time it seemed natural and easy—the river was there for us, as we were for each other.

  Simon, too, thrived during that summer. He got taller, his hair lighter and his skin dark brown; and no one told him to be quiet or to finish his hamburger. With neighboring children he waded in the river and played with boats, his unaccented California voice mingling with their slower, softer speech.

  I wrote to my husband and said that since this was, in fact, a separation, and it seemed to be working out (I cited Simon, his height and his happiness), perhaps we should consider a divorce. I had no clear plans involving Caleb, whose own life was obscure to me (it was one of the things we did not talk about), and I knew that in any case I would have to go back to San Francisco in the fall to straighten things out, as Caleb would have to go back to Boston. I wrote about a divorce simply to have it stated, to have something begun. My most definite plan was to move from that flat, with the live-in downstairs landlady. I would find a place with a wooded open setting, in a quiet neighborhood, perhaps on Twin Peaks or Potrero Hill, where Simon and I would feel at home. That seemed most important.

  “We don’t talk much, do we?” Caleb one night remarked, as, uncharacteristically, we sat in a booth in the New Athens, braving public opinion. Drinking beer. “Considering how much I think about us,” he added.

  “Do we have to? I love our not talking,” I truthfully told him.

  “I guess not.” And then he said, “You know, sometimes you’re so beautiful it hurts.”

  My husband responded rather tersely that he would talk to me when I got back to San Francisco; like so many lawyers, he hates to commit himself to the written word.

  Looking back, I suppose it is surprising that I did not mention this exchange to Caleb; at the time it did not occur to me to do so.

  And then without warning the summer began to rush toward fall. Even in that warm Southern air there was a hint of cooler days to come. It was almost the end of August, time for me to make reservations to go back (not “home”) to San Francisco.

  It was time for Dudley Farmer’s operation.

  The operation went well; Caleb called me from the hospital to tell me that
. The surgeon was pleased. Of course Dudley would be in Intensive Care for a couple of days, but then I could go to see him.

  I called the airline office and made our reservations. Twelve more days, which at the time seemed both infinite, a treasure, and like no time at all, like nothing.

  Ten more days.

  Because it is very late at night, Caleb and I are going for a walk instead of driving down to our beach. There is a light warm breeze that ruffles the dried-out, end-of-summer grasses at the edge of the road. And suddenly through the grasses come those two black cats—they are somewhat larger but they must be the same ones; surely no other two cats have this impossible way of walking, their legs weaving together.

  Caleb and I stop walking and we begin to laugh, laughing softly, chokingly, in the black stirring night, until we are weak and we sit down in the field beside the road, and after a while, because it is so dark and we are lying there, we make love where we are.

  Seven more days, a week. Over her third lunchtime sherry my mother has said that I may pick all the flowers I can find in the wilting garden, and I do just that; I make an enormous bouquet of overblown roses and crape myrtle and gardenias and camellias and I surround it all with magnolia leaves, and I take it to the hospital, to Dudley.

  Walking through those greenish corridors, through swinging steel doors and forbidding alien smells, I am irrationally frightened, and I feel a lurch of sympathy for poor Dudley, incarcerated here, at the mercy of those brisk and stiffly uniformed people.

  At the desk, on his floor, I am told that he cannot have visitors, not that day. My flowers are taken, will be given to him. I do not see his wife.

  Six more days. Something has gone wrong, Caleb tells me. Dudley is bleeding internally. A hemorrhage.

  Simon would like to write to all his new friends from San Francisco. He would like to send them cards of the Golden Gate Bridge, the cable cars, things like that. Will I help him? Could he learn to write? I say yes to both questions, and I note to myself that he is making more detailed plans for the winter than I am.

  Dudley died two days before I was to fly West. Caleb came early in the afternoon to tell me that. Everyone was asleep and I was sitting on the steps, and it could have been the start of summer, except that it was not.

  “It was one of those inexplicable medical horrors,” Caleb said. “Why doctors feel basically helpless, or they should. A sudden infection, from nowhere.”

  I had begun to cry, for too many reasons. Caleb put his arms around me; if anyone passed and saw us we no longer cared. (I have since learned that everyone in town knew all—or almost all—about us anyway, of course.)

  To me almost the worst of it was that Dudley had had to spend his last months so fat and frightened, dreading what he must darkly have known would happen.

  Caleb had a staff meeting that night, and I a dinner party. Impossible to meet, although I had a dim sense that earlier in our heady, impetuous summer we would have worked it out.

  “Reality has hit us,” Caleb said, unhappily. “Christ, why can’t we run backwards to June?”

  In a brief exhausted way we talked about what to do the following night, our last; we even considered my saying, “I’m going out to dinner with Caleb Jones.” But the prospect of saying those words was jarring; we would have felt invaded. And then there was the problem of Simon, whom (significantly) Caleb had never met.

  We decided to do what we always did, to meet at ten.

  And so the next night I had dinner with my parents, who got a little drunker than usual, I suppose out of a feeling that this was a festive occasion, and with Simon, who (I thought) was curiously callous about the end of his good summer, among new friends. He was excited about San Francisco.

  That night Caleb and I talked far too much, and I especially said all the wild and impossible things that all summer I had managed not to say: I said that I had never loved anyone else, I never would, et cetera. Caleb responded reasonably enough that I was too young to predict my future feelings, that he could not accept such promises. Besides, he said, he was almost totally involved in his work, to an extent that I had not understood; also, he was basically not a terribly emotional person. Personal relationships were not, or had not been, of prime importance to him.

  I wept, feeling abandoned and feeling too that I had managed to wreck the whole summer. In any case, that was our worst, our only bad time together. So that by the time we stopped talking and made love we were half asleep.

  Back in San Francisco, not hearing from Caleb (I wrote him all the time, somewhat hysterically, trying to re-create our summer) and missing him, at first I was depressed; I felt almost as beaten down and helpless as before I had left.

  But the weather that fall was cool and clear and lovely, and I seemed, somehow, to have acquired over the summer a more positive view, and some strength: I told my husband that I wanted a divorce, that I was going to find a new place to live, and a job.

  And then, like a reward, a letter came from Caleb. Not at all a crazy impassioned one, as mine had been, but one that was rational and friendly, kind. He said that he had been too depressed to write before, and that sometimes, even, our summer seemed unreal to him. But I felt wonderful; reading his letter restored me. And, interestingly, the next day I found an apartment on a quiet wooded street, on the western slope of Twin Peaks.

  My divorce, also, went astoundingly well; my husband made none of the trouble that I would have expected of him. (It later turned out that he wanted to marry his secretary—such an original man!)

  Simon and I moved into our good new place; he went to a new school and I got a part-time job in a doctor’s office. And I began to “go out,” to have a good time.

  Caleb and I continued to write to each other, I much more frequently than he, but that was all right; I assumed that he was busier, and in a curious way I did not expect certain things from Caleb. He did not say that he was living with his wife and children, but I assumed that to be the case. Why not? is how he would think of it.

  Even when I eventually fell in love with someone else I continued to write to Caleb, not telling him about the other man (although somehow I felt that he would know, and not mind).

  One night—I think in February: a cold swirling fog-bound night—during a lonely rift with the other man, I again wrote to Caleb, somewhat in my old tone. In part, I said to him, “I think you saved my life last summer, I will really always love you.”

  And, the next morning, which was a cleared spring-suggesting day, I reread that letter and was surprisingly unembarrassed by it. I sent it off.

  Caleb’s book was successful. He became famous.

  And later I married the other man, and later still I almost got used to being happy.

  A Pale and Perfectly Oval Moon

  Dying, for a time Penelope Moore behaved atrociously. To her husband, Van, who loved her (in his way), both the fact of her dying and her continuous, ferociously whispered accusations were intolerable.

  She was supposed to have died early in the summer. “To be quite honest, old man, I’m surprised she lasted through the spring,” the friendly internist whose charge she was had said to Van in June. But June had passed, July, August, September; and in the middle of October still she “lingered on,” as the false old phrase would have it. As Penelope herself cried out, “My God, I’m lingering on—is that what malingering comes from, do you suppose? Have you thought of that? God, why am I still here?”

  “Here,” practically speaking, was the Moores’ country weekend house, on a bend in a river, in California’s High Sierras. It was a house that a local contractor had thrown together, somewhat hastily, on speculation—and which the Moores had bought on a hasty impulse. It was not well planned: some rooms, the master bedroom and the kitchen, were impractically large and drafty; the dining-living room was small and cramped. But outside the shingles had weathered beautifully, turning silver in the strong clear air, at that altitude, and Penelope had always loved the house’s many-windowed
openness, its proximity to the outdoors, and to the seasons. A New Englander, Penelope had remarked often before they bought this house that she literally could not bear the California lack of seasons. Windows gave either onto the meadow or the river, so that the house was full of rushing river sounds.

  And now that she was so sick the too large bedroom did not seem an inconvenience: the table that held her drugs and other terrible accoutrements of her illness could be screened off, and a cot for Van had been placed beside the large old double bed, and on the other side a big comfortable chair. Although, should she “linger” through the winter, Van wondered how he could keep the house warm enough, could defend it against windows packed with snow. A neighbor, Miss Bird, a former nurse, had moved into the guest room to help with the care of Penelope. The local hospital was excellent, and near. (Everything might have been planned.)

  Van was a lawyer with a small office in San Francisco—two partners, one harassed secretary. Therefore it was necessary for him to return to the city at intervals to keep things going, or to try to. Sometimes he drove the three hours there and back in a day; at other, less frequent times he stayed overnight in their Twin Peaks flat.

  “Of course you have to spend the night,” Penelope hissed on these occasions. “You have to get laid, and who would expect a man of your age to arise from some floozy’s bed and drive for hours up into the mountains with a sick and thankless wife at the end of the trip?”

  “Now, Pen, come on—”

  Always pale, her pallor now had a cast that was almost blue—like moonlight on snow, Van uncharacteristically thought, but was unhappily not able to say, although he dimly knew that it was a thing she would like to have heard.

  He also liked the floating pale scarves she wore, to hide the terribly thinning patchy hair, and he did not say that either.