The Stories of Alice Adams Read online

  She tries to imagine an open casket, full of Horace, dead. His finicky little moustache and his long, strong fingers folded together on his chest. But the casket floats off into the recesses of her mind and what she sees is Horace, alive and terrifying.

  A familiar dry smell tells her that she has scorched a sheet, and tears begin to roll slowly down her face.

  “When I went into the kitchen to see how she was, she was standing there with tears rolling down her face,” Jessica reports to Tom—and then is appalled at what she hears as satisfaction in her own voice.

  “I find that hardly surprising,” Tom says, with a questioning raise of his eyebrows.

  Aware that she has lost his attention, Jessica goes on. (Where is he—with whom?) “I just meant, it seems awful to feel a sort of relief when she cries. As though I thought that’s what she ought to do. Maybe she didn’t really care for Horace. He hasn’t been around for years, after all.” (As usual she is making things worse: it is apparent that Tom can barely listen.)

  She says, “I think I’ll take the index cards back to my desk,” and she manages not to cry.

  Picking up the sheets to take upstairs to the linen closet, Verlie decides that she won’t tell Clifton about Horace; dimly she thinks that if she tells anyone, especially Clifton, it won’t be true: Horace, alive, will be waiting for her at her house, as almost every night she is afraid that he will be.

  Sitting at her desk, unseeingly Jessica looks out across the deep valley, where the creek winds down toward the sea, to the further hills that are bright green with spring. Despair slowly fills her blood so that it seems heavy in her veins, and thick, and there is a heavy pressure in her head.

  And she dreams for a moment, as she has sometimes before, of a friend to whom she could say, “I can’t stand anything about my life. My husband either is untrue to me or would like to be—constantly. It comes to the same thing, didn’t St. Paul say that? My daughter’s eyes are beginning to go cold against me, and my son is terrified of everyone. Of me.” But there is no one to whom she could say a word of this; she is known among her friends for dignity and restraint. (Only sometimes her mind explodes, and she breaks out screaming—at Tom, at one of her children, once at Verlie—leaving them all sick and shocked, especially herself sick and shocked, and further apart than ever.)

  Now Verlie comes through the room with an armful of fresh, folded sheets, and for an instant, looking at her, Jessica has the thought that Verlie could be that friend, that listener. That Verlie could understand.

  She dismisses the impulse almost as quickly as it came.

  Lately she has spent a lot of time remembering college, those distant happy years, among friends. Her successes of that time. The two years when she directed the Greek play, on May Day weekend (really better than being in the May Court). Her senior year, elected president of the secret honor society. (And the springs of wisteria, heavily flowering, scented, lavender and white, the heavy vines everywhere.)

  From those college days she still has two friends, to whom she writes, and visits at rarer intervals. Elizabeth, who is visibly happily married to handsome and successful Jackson Stuart (although he is, to Jessica, a shocking racial bigot). And Mary John James, who teaches Latin in a girls’ school, in Richmond—who has never married. Neither of them could be her imagined friend (any more than Verlie could).

  Not wanting to see Jessica’s sad eyes again (the sorrow in that woman’s face, the mourning!), Verlie puts the sheets in the linen closet and goes down the back stairs. She is halfway down, walking slow, when she feels a sudden coolness in her blood, as though from a breeze. She stops, she listens to nothing and then she is flooded with the certain knowledge that Horace is dead, is at that very moment laid away in Memphis (wherever Memphis is). Standing there alone, by the halfway window that looks out to the giant rhododendron, she begins to smile, peacefully and slowly—an interior, pervasive smile.

  Then she goes on down the stairs, through the dining room and into the kitchen.

  Clifton is there.

  Her smile changes; her face becomes brighter and more animated, although she doesn’t say anything—not quite trusting herself not to say everything, as she has promised herself.

  “You looking perky,” Clifton says, by way of a question. He is standing at the sink with a drink of water.

  Her smile broadens, and she lies. “Thinking about the social at the church. Just studying if or not I ought to go.”

  “You do right to go,” he says. And then, “You be surprise, you find me there?”

  (They have never arranged any meeting before, much less in another place, at night; they have always pretended that they were in the same place in the yard or orchard by accident.)

  She laughs. “You never find the way.”

  He grins at her, his face brighter than any face that she has ever seen. “I be there,” he says to her.

  A long, hot summer, extending into fall. A hot October, and then there is sudden cold. Splinters of frost on the red clay erosions in the fields. Ice in the shallow edges of the creek.

  For Verlie it has been the happiest summer of her life, but no one of the Todds has remarked on this, nor been consciously aware of unusual feelings, near at hand. They all have preoccupations of their own.

  Clifton has been working for the Macombers, friends and neighbors of the Todds, and it is Irene Macomber who telephones to tell Jessica the sad news that he had a kind of seizure (a hemorrhage) and that when they finally got him to the Negro hospital (twelve miles away) it was too late, and he died.

  Depressing news, on that dark November day. Jessica supposes that the first thing is to tell Verlie. (After all, she and Clifton were friends, and Verlie might know of relatives.)

  She is not prepared for Verlie’s reaction.

  A wail—“Aieeeee”—that goes on and on, from Verlie’s wide mouth, and her wide, wild eyes. “Aieee—”

  Then it stops abruptly, as Verlie claps her hands over her mouth, and bends over and blindly reaches for a chair, her rocker. She pulls herself toward the chair, she falls into it, she bends over double and begins to cough, deep and wrackingly.

  Poor shocked Jessica has no notion what to do. To go over to Verlie and embrace her, to press her own sorrowing face to Verlie’s face? To creep shyly and sadly from the room?

  This last is what she does—is all, perhaps, that she is able to do.

  • • •

  “You know,” says Tom Todd (seriously) to Irene McGinnis, in one of their rare lapses from the steady demands of unconsummated love, “I believe those two people had a real affection for each other.”

  Verlie is sick for a week and more after that, with what is called “misery in the chest.” (No one mentions her heart.)

  Thinking to amuse her children (she is clearly at a loss without Verlie, and she knows this), Jessica takes them for a long walk, on the hard, narrow, white roads that lead up into the hills, the heavy, thick, dark woods of fall, smelling of leaves and earth and woodsmoke. But a melancholy mood settles over them all; it is cold and the children are tired, and Jessica finds that she is thinking of Verlie and Clifton. (Is it possible that they were lovers? She uncomfortably shrugs off this possibility.)

  Dark comes early, and there is a raw, red sunset at the black edge of the horizon, as finally they reach home.

  Verlie comes back the next day, to everyone’s relief. But there is a grayish tinge to the color of her skin that does not go away.

  But on that rare spring day months earlier (the day Horace is dead and laid away in Memphis) Verlie walks the miles home with an exceptional lightness of heart, smiling to herself at all the colors of the bright new flowers, and at the smells of spring, the promises.

  Winter Rain

  Whenever in the final unendurable weeks of winter, I am stricken, as now, to the bone with cold—it is raining, the furnace has somehow failed—I remember that winter of 1947-1948 in Paris, when I was colder than ever in my life, when it always raine
d, when everything broke down. That was the winter of strikes: GRÈVE GÉNÉRALE, in large strange headlines. And everyone struck: Métro, garbage, water, electricity, mail—all these daily necessities were at one time or another with difficulty forgone. Also, that was the first winter of American students—boys on the G.I. bill and girls with money from home, Bennington meeting Princeton in the Montana Bar. There were cellar clubs to which French friends guided one mysteriously: on the Rue Dauphine the Tabu, with a band; the Mephisto, just off the Boulevard Saint-Germain; and further out on Rue Blomet the wicked Bal Nègre, where one danced all night to West Indian music, danced with everyone and drank Pernod. It was a crowded, wild, excited year.

  I think of friends of that time—I have kept up with none of them, certainly not with Bruno, nor Laura, nor Joe, not even with Mme. Frenaye. And it gloomily occurs to me that they may all be dead, Bruno in some violent Italian way, Laura and Joe in Hollywood, and Mme. Frenaye of sheer old age, on the Rue de Courcelles, “tout près,” as she used to say, “du parc Monceau.” Though we parted less than friends, it is she of whom I think most often.

  Madame and I really parted, as from the first I should have known we would, over money. And, more than I regret the loss of our connection, I regret the sordidness of its demise. But I should have known; the process was gradual but clear. As was the fact that I, and not she, would lose face in any conflict.

  • • •

  To begin with, she extracted from me an enormous amount of money for permission to live at the cold end of the long drafty hall in her flat. Of course I didn’t have to take the room, or to accept the arrangement at all, but from the first I was seduced. I had heard, from friends, that a Mme. Frenaye might be willing to take a nice American girl student into her charming home. I inquired further, and was invited to tea. It was raining dreadfully, even in September, and I wore, all wet and shivering, a yellow summer coat and summer dress since, probably owing to a strike somewhere, my trunk of winter clothes had not arrived. The street seemed impossibly gray, chilled and forbidding, but the central room of the flat into which I was ushered by Madame was warm and graceful. There were exquisite white Louis XVI chairs, a marvelous muted blue Persian rug, a mantel lined with marble above a fireplace in which a small fire blazed prettily.

  Mme. Frenaye was a great goddess of a woman. She must have been sixty, or even seventy—I was never sure—but she was very tall and she held herself high; she was Junoesque indeed. She still mourned her husband, dead five years, and wore only black, but her effect was vivid. Her hair was bright gold and she wore it in a thick crowning braid across the waves that rose from her brow. Her eyes were very blue, capable of a great spectacle of innocence or charming guile, and she wore mascara heavily on her long lashes. She had dimples and perfect white teeth.

  We took tea from a beautiful table before the fire, and we talked about Antibes, where I had spent the summer. Mme. Frenaye poured a little rum from a pretty porcelain jug into the tea, and said, “I would not have thought of going to the Riviera in the summer. So crowded then. But of course you are so young, you have not been to France before.”

  She seemed prepared to forgive, and I did not want to protest that I had had a very good time.

  She went on, “But a winter in Paris, there you have chosen wisely, this time you will not regret your choice. Theatre, opera, it is all here for you, the best in the world. And of course the Sorbonne, since you have chosen to study.” She was vastly amused to learn that the name of my course at the Sorbonne was Cours de la civilisation française. “But you will spend the rest of your life—” she said, and I agreed.

  We talked, and drank our tea, and ate small delicious cakes, until it occurred to me that I had perhaps stayed too long and so rose to leave. I think I had really forgotten that I had come about a room, or perhaps such a crass consideration seemed inappropriate in Louis XVI surroundings. Instead, on the way out I admired a painting. Mme. Frenaye said, “Ah, yes, and it has a gross value.” I translate literally to give the precise effect of her words on me. My French was not good, and I thought I had misheard her, or not known an idiom. I would not be warned.

  Then, at the door, while helping me with my still damp yellow coat, she said that she had heard that I needed a pleasant place to live, that she would be willing to let me live there, that she would serve me breakfast and dinner, and she named an outrageous number of francs. Even translated into dollars it was high. I was so stunned by her whole method that I accepted on the spot, and it was agreed that I would bring my things on the following Monday. That I did not even ask to see the room is evidence of my stupor; I must have thought it would be exactly like the salon.

  And sometimes now I wonder whether she had any idea that I would accept; or made up that ridiculous figure simply to let me off. And I wonder too if I did not want to prove that I could do better than yellow coats and summer dresses in a cold September rain; behind me there were sound American dollars, and, as my father would have said, more where they came from. So, from our combined dubious motives, we were joined, to live and eat and talk together throughout those difficult historic months from September until February, until our private war became visible and manifest, and I left.

  The room was actually not as bad as it might have been, taken on such dazzled faith. It was not large, nor warm, nor did it contain a desk or a bookcase; however, the bed was regally gilded and huge and soft, and I slept under comforting layers of down, between pink linen sheets. Madame sighed, her beautiful eyes misted as she showed the bed to me and I felt badly about so depriving her until I realized that her own small bed-sitting room had been astutely chosen as the warmest room in the house. And the grand bed would not fit into it.

  • • •

  When I said such things to Laura and Joe, later to Bruno, as we hunched over beers in the steamy Café de Flore or the Deux Magots, they reasonably exclaimed, “But why on earth do you stay there?” (Laura and Joe were Marxists, and I was acceptable to them partly because my arrangement with Mme. Frenaye left me with virtually no money at all.) In any case I did not think that they would feel the charm of Mme. Frenaye, and so I would say to them, “But the food is fantastic, and see how my French is improving.”

  Both of these things were quite true. I have never since tasted anything to compare with her poisson normand, that beautifully flaking fat white fish baked with tiny mushrooms, tiny shrimps and mussels in white wine. I have the most vivid sensual memories of her crisp green salads. I would arrive cold and usually wet from my long Métro trek, and hurriedly unwrap myself from my coat just in time to enter that small warm room where she had placed the white-clothed table. The room was full of marvelous delicate smells of hot food, and Madame in passage from the kitchen would greet me. “Bon soir, Patience. Mais vous avez froid. Asseyez-vous, je viens tout de suite. Oh, mais j’ai oublié l’essentiel—” and she was off to fetch the decanter of wine.

  And my French did improve. She knew no English, and we talked animatedly throughout those months of dinners. She was endlessly curious about America, though she pretended to disbelieve half of what I told her. “But, Patience, surely you exaggerate,” she would chide, in a tone of amused tolerance. Sometimes, fresh from Joe’s lectures, I became heavily sociological. She listened intently, nodded appropriately. Only when I hit on American anti-Semitism did I strike some chord in her—she found it absolutely incomprehensible. She adored American Jews. Her husband had been a cotton merchant, and in his business the only Americans he met were Jewish or from Texas. And the Texans, according to Madame, were appalling: they ordered the most expensive champagne or cognac and then got drunk on it. The Jewish families whom she met were quite another story. “Tellement cultivées, tellement sensibles.” Her most admired American friends, the Berkowitzes (“Ah, les Berkowitz”), went to museums daily, to the theatre and the opera; the Texans never. She felt that “les Berkowitz” too squandered their money but in less visible and offensive ways. One of her most loved stories w
as of going shopping for a brassière, a soutien-gorge, with Marion Berkowitz. “C’était tout, tout petit,” she would say, with her thumb and forefinger gesturing a pinch of nothing, “et ça coûtait tellement cher!” This contradiction never ceased to amaze and delight her.

  The truth was that I liked Mme. Frenaye. I admired her beauty and her charm; and her scorn, her assumption of superiority to the world, comforted me since I felt that she counted me on her side. Moreover, I simply could not imagine a scene in which I told her that I was going to leave. I think that if I had not met Bruno, near Christmas, during one long night in the Bal Nègre, where I had reluctantly gone with Laura and Joe, I would have lived on the Rue de Courcelles until June, when I took that huge and final boat for New York.

  My memory of Bruno is also involved with the cold: I see the two of us clinging together in a garish white-lit Métro entrance, because it was too cold outside, and our partings were endless and all unendurable. We walked together. I remember my ungloved hand pressing against his, together jammed deeply into his shabby tweed pocket, as we walked past steamed bright windows in the iron cold, stopping to kiss.

  Even Bruno seems legendary to me now; both our romantic intensity and the facts of his life sound mythic. His father was an Italian anti-Fascist who had left Italy in the twenties. Bruno was born in Toulouse, and spent his fifteenth birthday in a Vichy concentration camp, his sixteenth in a similar camp in Italy. He had fought with the Maquis, and with guerrilla fighters in the Italian Alps. He had no scars nor any limp to show for all of this; he was tall and sturdy, smooth-skinned, clear-eyed as any innocent American boy—in fact he was often taken for a G.I., which amused him and privately annoyed me. He studied law in Paris, and lived with relatives out in the 14th arrondissement. Thus in the cold we had no place to go, and between partings we dreamed of a furnished room, warm and light, anywhere in Paris. I can no longer remember the substance of our quarrels, nor of our talk, but both went on forever, punctuating each other, and all the time our eyes held together, our hands touched.