The Stories of Alice Adams (v5) Read online

  Deborah was given to moments of total panic such as this, when the world seemed to lurch beneath her like the fun-house floor at Playland-at-the-Beach, when she gasped for air and found it hard to breathe. A psychiatrist had explained this tidily to her as a syndrome: she feared abandonment. Her father had gone off to war and been killed (“At three, you would have viewed this as a desertion—a deliberate one”), and it seemed (to the psychiatrist) that she tried to repeat that situation. She readily felt abandoned, and picked people who would abandon her, like Panamanian Juan. But no, she thought, she was at least able to make an effort to think things through in a reasonable way. She controlled her breathing (with Yoga breaths) and remembered that Philip had been talking about having the rug repaired. There was a rip in it that could get larger, or could trip one of them. It made sense—Philip finally took the rug off to be sewn. He had mentioned some people on Union Street who did things with hides and who had the right machines for skins.

  Having decided so rationally on what had happened, Deborah felt better, but not very much better. Some cobweb of fear or anxiety clung to her mind, and she could not brush it off. She knew that she would not feel entirely well and reassured until she spoke to Philip. She concentrated on his phone call, which always came early in the afternoon, though by no stated arrangement. They would say whatever had happened in the day so far, and make some plan for the evening. Or Philip would say that he would see her later—meaning ten or eleven that night.

  Naturally, since she was eager for Philip to call, several other people did instead, and each time her heart jumped as she answered, “Hello?”

  Her mother said, “Darling, how are you? I was wondering if you and Philip are possibly free to come to dinner tomorrow? A couple of my professors from State are coming—you know, the ones who were out on strike—and I thought you might have fun with them.”

  Meaning: her mother thought the professors, who must have been quite young, would have a better time (and think better of her) if they met her hippie daughter with her long-haired, bearded boyfriend.

  “Sure. I’ll check with Philip,” Deborah said, and then listened to her mother’s continuing voice, which was grateful and full of love.

  Once, when she was stoned, Deborah had said to Philip, “My mother’s love comes at me like jelly. I have to be careful and stay back from it, you know? All that total approval I get poured over me. She doesn’t even know who I am.”

  Philip’s mother, in Cincinnati (“She pronounces it with a broad ‘a’—can you imagine? Cincinnahti.” He, too, was a person displaced from the upper middle class), did not approve of him at all—his beard or his long hair, his Goodwill or Army-surplus clothes. Dropping out of Princeton to come to an art school in San Francisco. She had not been told about the commune in Mendocino; nor, presumably, about Deborah. “I don’t mind her,” he said. “She’s sort of abrasive, bracing, like good sandpaper. She does her own thing, and it’s very clear where we’re both at.”

  Philip talked that hip way somewhat ironically, hiding behind it. “I think I’m what those idiot behavioral scientists call a post-hippie,” he once said. “Sounds sort of like a wooden Indian, doesn’t it?” But he had indeed put various things behind him, including drugs, except for an occasional cigarette. For him, Deborah had thrown out all her posters, and with him she had moved from Hesse and Tolkien to Mann and Dostoevski. “Let’s face it, babe, they’ve got more to say. I mean, they’ve really got it all together.”

  After her mother’s call, two friends called (about nothing), and finally there was the call from Philip.

  She said, “Wow, Philip, what are you trying to tell me?” as she had planned to, but she felt no conviction.

  “What?”

  “The desk drawer on the bed.”

  “What drawer?”

  “Did you take the zebra rug to be sewn?”

  “No. Deb, are you trying to tell me that we’ve been ripped off, as they say?”

  Crazily enough, this was a possibility she had not considered, but now she thought, Of course, it happens all the time.

  “Debby,” he was saying, “would you please look around and see what else is gone?”

  As best she could, she did look around; she found her shoe box full of jewelry—the ugly inherited diamonds that she never wore—intact under her sweaters, and the stereo safely in its corner. The books, the records. His pictures. She came back to the phone and told him that.

  “But aside from the stereo what else could they have taken?” she asked. “We don’t have TV and appliances, stuff like that. Who wants our books?” She felt herself babbling, then said, “I’m really sorry about your rug.”

  “Oh, well. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to have it.”

  “Shall I call the cops?”

  “I guess. I’ll be home for dinner, O.K.?”

  Relief made Deborah efficient. Philip had not moved out, and he was coming home for dinner. She began to put together a rather elaborate lamb stew. (She always bought meat on the chance that he would come home, even though sometimes after several days of his absences she would have to throw it out.) She shaved fresh ginger into the lamb, and then she called the police.

  The two officers who arrived perhaps twenty minutes later were something of a surprise. They were young—about her age. (Who of her generation would want to be a cop, she wondered.) One of them was blond and looked a little like a short-haired, clean-shaven Philip. They were quite sympathetic and soft-spoken; they gave sensible advice. “Use the double lock when you go out,” the blond one said. “This one could be picked in a minute. And fix the bolt on the kitchen door.”

  “Do it soon,” said the other. “They could be back for more.”

  “It’s sort of funny they didn’t take the stereo, too,” Deborah said, conversationally.

  “Hippies love those fur rugs,” they told her, unaware that they were not talking to a nice girl from the right side of Russian Hill, and that for her they had just become the enemy.

  “More likely junkies than hippies, don’t you think?” she coldly said.

  For Deborah, the preparation and serving of food were acts of love. She liked to serve Philip; she brought in plates and placed them gently before him, like presents, although her offhand manner denied this.

  “It’s that Indian stuff,” she said of the stew. Then, so that he would not be forced to comment on her cooking, she said, “It’s funny, their moving that drawer from my desk.”

  “Probably thought you kept valuables there—bonds and bank notes and stuff.” He was eating as though he were starved, which was how he always ate; he barely paused to look up and speak.

  She felt herself inwardly crying, “I do! You are infinitely valuable to me. Anything connected with you is valuable—please stay with me!” She managed not to say any of this; instead she blinked. He had been known to read her eyes.

  “This stew is really nice,” he told her. “And the wine—cool! Like wow!”

  They both laughed a little, their eyes briefly meeting.

  She asked, “How’s school? How’s the graphics class?”

  “Pretty good.”

  Philip was thin, with knobby bones at his wrists, protuberant neck bones and tense tendons. He had dark-blue, thoughtful eyes. His fine hair flew about when he moved. He looked frail, as though a strong wind (or a new idea) could carry him off bodily. “I tend to get into head trips” is how he half ironically put it, not saying what kind of trips they were. He seemed to be mainly concerned with his work—drawing, etching, watercolors. Other things (people, weather, days) passed by his cool, untroubled but observant gaze—as someday, Deborah felt, she, too, might pass by.

  At the moment, however, she was experiencing a total, warm contentment. There was Philip, eating and liking the stew she had made, and they had been robbed—ripped off—and nothing of value was gone.

  “What was in the drawer?” he asked.

  “Oh, nothing. Just some stuff I keep around.”


  Again their quick glances met, and they smiled; then both ducked away from prolonged contact. Deborah had to look aside because she had suddenly thought how marvelous it would be if they could have a child, a straw-blond baby that she would nurse (she had heard that breast-feeding made big breasts smaller) and Philip would always love. The intensity of this wish made her dizzy. For concealment, she asked, “You really won’t miss those skins?”

  “Really not. You know I always hated them as much as I liked them. Good luck to whoever took them is how I feel.”

  • • •

  After dinner Deborah cleared and cleaned the kitchen, while Philip read in the living room. Early on in their life together, he had helped or at least offered to, but gradually they both realized that cleaning up was something Deborah did not mind doing. She liked that simple interval of being alone, with nothing demanded of her that she could not accomplish. Her mother said of her that she was a throwback—“my quaint hippie daughter.” Deborah supposed that there was something to that. She liked to polish the wineglasses and to shine the chrome and porcelain on the stove and sink. She did all that tonight, and then went into the living room, where Philip was, and sat near him with a book of her own. With evening, the fog had begun to roll in. Outside, the distant foghorns announced a cold, moist black night. Wind shuddered against the windows, beyond which nothing was visible. The surrounding dark and cold made an island of their room—to Deborah, an enchanted island. She thought, We could live like this forever; this peace is better than any high. She thought, Do I want to get married, is that what I mean that I want? And then, No, I only mean to stay like this, with no change. But someday a baby.

  They read for several hours. Absorbed in his book (Doctor Faustus, for the second time), Philip fought off sleep until he and then Deborah went into fits of yawns, and they gave up and went to bed.

  While they were undressing, Deborah opened the drawer where she kept her scarves.

  It was gone—her largest, most beautiful, pale striped silk scarf, all lavenders and mauves and pinks, the only present from her mother that she had ever liked. Wearing any dress at all, she could wrap herself in that scarf and be instantly elegant. Soon after she and Philip had met, she wore it to a party at the Institute, and he thought it was a wonderful scarf. The enormity of its absence had surely summoned her and made her for no reason open that drawer.

  She felt hurt enough to cry, which, with a conscious effort, she did not do. Her second decision was not to tell Philip. This was less rational, and even as she slipped into bed beside him she was not sure why. Obviously, someday he would ask why she never wore it anymore. But at the moment she only knew that she felt diminished, as though without that scarf Philip would love her less, as though their best times together were over.

  Philip turned on his side; having kissed her good night, he quickly fell asleep. She lay there in the dark, listening to the erratic mourning noise of the foghorns. She was thinking that even if she had a child he would grow up and go away. Finally, she couldn’t stand it; all her thoughts were unbearable, and she turned and pressed her body against the length of Philip’s slender warm back, holding him tightly with her arms, as though she could keep him there.

  The Swastika on Our Door

  Normally, Karen Washington took a warmly nostalgic interest in stories about and especially pictures of her husband’s former girls. They had all been pretty, some beautiful. And they reminded her that her very successful and preoccupied lawyer husband had once been a lively bachelor, vigorously engaged in the pursuit of women. But the large glossy picture of Roger and his brother Richard, who was now dead, and a girl, that she found on the top shelf of her husband’s shirt closet disturbed her considerably. Why had Roger put it there? She was not jealous; she did not suspect that he perpetuated an old liaison, but she felt left out. Why had he chosen not to tell her about this particular beautiful girl, in her high-collared coat?

  To the left was fat Roger, grinning and blinking into the flashbulb, having raised his glass of wine to the nightclub camera: a man out on the town, celebrating, having a good time. “The jolly Roger”: with his peculiar private irony Richard had sometimes called his brother that. On the right was skinny tortured Richard, who was staring at his brother with a gaze that was at the same time stern and full of an immoderate love. Between them, recessed into half shadow, was the long-necked beautiful dark girl, who was looking at Richard as though she thought he was either marvelous or crazy. Or perhaps she herself looked crazy. In the bright flat light her collar made an odd shadow on her cheek, and her eyes were a strange shape—very narrow and long, like fish.

  Karen sighed heavily, and then sneezed from the dust. Although of German extraction she was a poor housekeeper, and did not like to be reminded of that fact, of which both the dust and the presence of that picture on an untouched shelf did remind her. Retreating from the closet, she put the picture on her husband’s dressing table, meaning to ask him about it that night. She was a big dark handsome girl, descended from successful generations of Berlin bankers; her father, the last of the line, had come to San Francisco in the twenties, well before Hitler, and had been prominent in the founding of a local bank. Karen had already, in ten years of marriage to Roger, produced five sons, five stalwart big Washingtons who did not remember their difficult doomed Southern uncle, Uncle Richard, cartons of whose books were still unpacked in the basement.

  Karen remembered Richard very well, and she thought of him for a great deal of that day as she moved about the enormous unwieldy and expensive house on Pacific Street, bought when Richard died and they inherited his money. The house from its northern windows had mammoth views of the Bay, and the bridge, Sausalito, the hills of Marin County. That day, that March, there were threatening rain clouds, a shifting kaleidoscope of them, an infinite variety of grays.

  Karen had felt and still did feel an uncomfortable mixture of emotions in regard to Richard, one of which was certainly the guilty impatience of the healthy with the sick. Richard had been born with a defective heart, ten months after Roger’s healthy and very normal birth, and had suffered greatly during his lifetime. But beyond his irremediable physical pain he had seemed, somehow, to choose to be lonely and miserable. He lived in a strange hotel even after he got his money; he was given to isolated, hopeless love affairs, generally with crazy girls. (“Affairs with psychopaths are a marvelous substitute for intimacy,” he had been heard to say.) He only bought books and records; his clothes were impossible.

  Like many very secure and contented people, Karen tended to be somewhat unimaginative about the needs, emotional and otherwise, of those who were not content, of those who were in fact miserable. To her credit she knew this, and so she sighed as she moved incompetently about her house with the vacuum cleaner; she sighed for Richard and for her own failure to have understood or in any way to have helped him.

  Karen’s deficiencies as a housekeeper were more than made up for by her abilities as a cook, or so her greedy husband and most of their greedy friends thought. That afternoon, as heavy dark rains enshrouded the city and the Bay, Karen made a superior moussaka, which was one of Roger’s favorites. It had also been a favorite of Richard’s, and she was pleased to remember that she had at least done that for him.

  Then, just as she had finished, from upstairs she heard the youngest child begin to whimper, waking up from his nap, and she went up to get him, to bathe and dress him before the older boys all tumbled home from school.

  The maid would come at three and stay until after dinner, since Roger liked a formal evening meal.

  Karen was dressing, and lost in a long skirt that she tried to pull down over big breasts, down over her increasing thighs, when Roger came in and asked her about the picture.

  “What’s that doing out here?” “Here” was “heah”; Roger had kept his Southern voice, though less strongly than Richard had.

  Her head came out of the dress, and she bridled at the annoyance in his tone. “Why not? It
was up on your top shirt shelf.” At worst, in some atavistic Germanic way, Karen became coy. “Some old girl friend you haven’t told me about?” she said.

  Roger was holding the picture, blinking at it in the harsh light from Karen’s makeup lamp, holding it closer and closer to the bulb as though he would burn it if the picture did not reveal all that he wanted to know. He was not thinking about Karen.

  “She’s beautiful,” said Karen. She came to look over his shoulder, and pressed her cheek against his arm. She knew that he loved her.

  “She was Richard’s girl. Ellen. After that.” He pointed unnecessarily at the picture. “We were celebrating his money, after he finally sold his land. That was the night he met her.”

  Karen was quiet, looking at the peculiar girl, and at Richard, whom no large sums of money had cheered, and at jolly Roger.

  “What a creepy girl,” Roger said. “Richard’s worst. She finally had to be locked up. Probably still is.”

  “Oh.” Karen shuddered.

  Roger put the picture down with a heavy sigh. He was fatter now than when it was taken; his neck was deeply creased with fat, and his big cheeks drooped.

  Then abruptly he turned around and embraced Karen with unaccustomed vigor. “What’s for dinner?” he asked. “Did I smell what I think I did?”

  • • •

  Because Richard had been sick so much and had been tutored, he and Roger ended by finishing high school in the same June of 1943, and that July they entered Harvard together, two Southern 4-F’s in giddy wartime Cambridge, fat Roger, who also had a punctured eardrum, and thin sick Richard. They both reacted to that scene with an immediate and violent loneliness. Together they were completely isolated from all those uniforms, from the desperately gay urgency of that war, that bright New England climate.

  Roger’s fat and Richard’s illnesses had also isolated them in childhood; they were unpopular boys who spent most of their afternoons at home, reading or devising private games. But to be isolated and unpopular in a small town where everyone knows you is also to be surrounded—if not with warmth at least with a knowledge of your history. There is always the old lady approaching on the sidewalk who says, “Aren’t you Sophie Washington’s boys? I declare, the fat one is the living spit of your grandfather.” Or the mean little girl in the corner grocery store who chants softly, “Skinny and fat, skinny and fat, I never saw two brothers like that.”