Families and Survivors Read online

  And then (startlingly) Maude changes her mind. “The blue! I don’t want to wear the pink—it’s babyish!”

  (An uncomforting victory.)

  Louisa herself is wearing pale green. It is a new dress, a present from her mother, from Caroline in Virginia, and perhaps for that reason (she has never really trusted Caroline) Louisa is unsure of the color—of how she looks.

  As they say goodbye to each other, Louisa and Michael avoid each other’s eyes, and they no longer kiss—ever. Michael says, “Honey, have a good time!” to both of them, and Louisa grasps her daughter’s hand.

  A familiar but never quite named panic fills her chest, and she holds Maude’s hand hard. (Does Maude feel it, too, her mother’s terror, wherever she goes?)

  The two houses are separated by a rough seven-foot redwood fence which was erected by Louisa and Michael’s landlady, Mrs. Cornwallis, who is a small and violent woman, probably insane. (They put up a political poster, cut and rearranged to spell “Nix—on—Ike,” and she telephoned: “You get that thing down! Get it down! I won’t have my house defaced.” Well, it was her house, wasn’t it? Michael says this; and sick, though separately so, they take it down.) Their house—Mrs. Cornwallis’s house—is redwood, like the fence; it is a cube, new and raw, and the lawn is also new, not doing well. The rent takes exactly half their income from Michael’s instructor job.

  The Chapins’ house is their own, the down payment a present from generous parents. It is five years old, an old house for that neighborhood, in California. It is white, and a small vined porch gives it a friendly look.

  As Louisa and Maude go down the front path to the driveway, down the driveway to the sidewalk, festive smells and sounds drift over the high fence: smoke, and the swish of a garden hose, ice in glasses, flowers and new-mown grass. Spring earth—it is Easter Sunday.

  There are two cars in the Chapins’ driveway: their new Ford station wagon (blue) and an old (1946) Chrysler convertible, with real wood. In perfect condition. It is the Magowans’ car—dazzling and splendid friends of the Chapins, with three marvelous children. Douglas, Allison, and Jennifer.

  Of course they would be there, Louisa had known that; still, their wonderful car further lowers her heart.

  As they approach the house—Louisa and Maude, clutching hands—Andrew comes around a corner, dark Andrew, barefoot, in jeans and a white T-shirt, carrying the hose. He grins a crooked welcome. “What pretty ladies! Say, Lou, that dress matches your eyes.”

  And in that sunstruck instant all Louisa’s dread dissolves. Her blood warms, and she looks at Andrew, her kind old familiar friend, and she thinks: Of course, I am in love with Andrew.

  Her heart in her eyes, she only says, “Michael had to work on his thesis.” She begins to laugh, somewhat hysterically. “He hates Easter parties.”

  Andrew laughs, too; they share an interest in Michael’s Jewishness. It still seems a little exotic to them both. Michael and Andrew (and Louisa) are agreed that the best American writers (now) are either Southern or Jewish, which holds out no hope for poor Andrew—but as they see it, Maude can’t miss, with her dual heritage. (And curiously enough this prophecy or wish turns out remarkably to be true: at an early age Maude begins to write, and she goes on.)

  Maude is smiling; she has always liked Andrew.

  The three of them go around the side of the house, with Maude in front, then Andrew, then Louisa. Andrew holds back a branch of shrubbery for Louisa, and their hands meet briefly. Electric! He smiles at her, and she is incredibly happy.

  All the Magowans are blond—large blond people, three large blond children, and Alex and Grace. Since Sally Chapin is also fair, as are her children, and Maude, the yard seems full of blondness—yellow hair all over, like patches of sunshine. This lightness of complexion is one of the things that ordinarily alienate Louisa—making her feel dark, a stranger. But today she looks at Andrew, who is darker than she, and terribly familiar. (In fact, he looks like someone from the depths of her life, but who?)

  An uneasy hostess, Sally does not come forward to greet Louisa and Maude: well, after all, they live next door; she sees them every day. But even the most welcome guests (she is crazy about the Magowans; Alex and Grace are the most terrific people)—any guests at all—make Sally feel invaded; her tight family group is easily threatened. Now she unenthusiastically says “Hi” to Louisa, and, more warmly (children are easier for her), “Maudie, you’re so pretty in that blue.”

  “Hi, Louisa, great to see you. Old Michael hitting the books?” This is the language of the Magowans, both of them.

  “Yes, still on his thesis.”

  They are relieved that Michael has not come. Sensing this, though dimly, Louisa feels a rare instant of affection for her husband: poor Michael, who makes so many people uncomfortable, and never knows.

  Normally shy and hesitant, Maude runs off to a corner of the garden where the other children have clustered. Looking after her, Louisa is struck (as she is repeatedly, still) at the oddity of her, Louisa, having a blond daughter. Despite the fact that Michael is blond, and that she herself was a blond little girl, before it all went dark. In fact today, this Easter, all those seven children—three Magowans, three Chapins, one Wasserman—might be themselves a family, an interrelated California tribe.

  “Lou, what’ll you have to drink?” Andrew has put out some bottles and a bowl of ice under a trellis of wisteria that he finished last weekend. Louisa has noticed this: the Chapins work at the quality of their life, at improving it; they make large and small efforts at having a better time together, whereas she and Michael make none at all. (But if they did?)

  “A gin? Gin and tonic?”

  “Great. How do you feel about limes?”

  “I’m mad for limes.” She laughs.

  “Terrific.”

  He hands her a tall cold glass and they exchange a look—does he feel it, too?

  Then Louisa goes over to sit on the grass with Sally and Alex and Grace.

  It is a marvelous balmy April day. The softly petaled fruit trees are in bloom at the end of the garden, and Sally’s thick sweet peas, all lovely pastel shades, climb with their tiny tentacles to almost cover the Chapin side of the fence. In the back of this row of houses—the Chapins’, Mrs. Cornwallis’s—the tawny California hills lie sloping gently under the sun, here and there darkened with the shadow of a cloud, and darkly patched at intervals with live oaks, spreading green. (Hills that within the next few years are to be raped by subdivisions.)

  The other families on that street where the Wassermans and Chapins live have more money (much) than Michael and Louisa do, but they are uneducated people, white-collar workers, whose houses and whose children are kept immaculate, the children not allowed to run naked through hoses in the summer, children sent to Sunday School on Sundays. Although she knows better (she thinks), Louisa is made uncomfortable by those people, those Ike-supporters who are later to be called Middle Americans—she is made to feel that she is a disgrace. Thank God the Chapins are there—but somehow they are less disgraceful than she is.

  The Magowan children, though uniformly blond, are otherwise remarkably unlike. Douglas, the oldest, is tall and erect, and an absolutely fearless child: no swing too high for him, no dog too large. Allison, the middle child, is so far the “difficult” one. Nervous and a little shy, much too thin, with scabbed knees, today she runs over from the other children to cling to her mother’s arm.

  “Mommy, I don’t feel like hiding eggs.” The children have all been given baskets of eggs to hide; later in the afternoon, in theory, they will all go hunting for the ones the others hid.

  “Darling, please don’t whine. I can’t stand the sound.”

  She says it so pleasantly, and yet with such certainty. Grace knows her own mind. And Louisa hopelessly envies that confident, smooth motherhood. Maude’s whines affect her own stomach, so that she tends to respond angrily; Maude’s tantrums make her physically sick. But today Maude is fine. (Why?)
/>   Jennifer, the youngest Magowan, is placid and plump. (And she is to remain so, despite family disasters and her own troubled first love affair.)

  “But I don’t know where to put any eggs!” Allison complains.

  Grace laughs. “You don’t? Not in the whole big garden?” Then she whispers, but so that they all can hear: “I bet you never thought of a high-up place. You see those plum trees? Where the branches spread out?”

  And Allison runs off.

  No wonder Sally Chapin admires Grace so much. (“She’s really the neatest girl.”) Grace can do anything, and does: she bakes all their bread, plus cakes and pies and cookies; she upholsters furniture—marvelous junk that she and Alex have refinished themselves; she makes all the clothes that her daughters wear, and sometimes shirts for Alex and Douglas. She also plays the piano, a funny sort of honky-tonk that she picked up somewhere in her New Hampshire girlhood, and she is very good at charades. Today she is wearing a yellow halter dress, exhibiting terrific breasts. It is true that Grace has everything.

  But today Louisa doesn’t really mind. She is in love with Andrew, and it seems just barely possible that he might love her, or perhaps sometime kiss her: at a party they could go out together for more ice, or hot dogs. Something.

  And, looking over at Andrew, Louisa is suddenly struck, so that she cries out, “Andrew, it’s just come to me: you look so much like a boy I grew up with. John Jeffreys.”

  Sally laughs a little; she looks curiously at Louisa. “Some old boyfriend out of your Southern past?”

  “Well, no.” She laughs. “I should have been so lucky.” (She has picked up a lot of Yiddishisms from Michael, which, characteristically, she overdoes.) “Every girl in town was crazy about John.” This last is said directly to Andrew: “I am crazy about you” is in her eyes. “In fact he broke my best friend’s heart.”

  “Oh, he sounds terrible,” Sally says.

  And Alex Magowan. “Bad news, from the sound of it.” He chuckles.

  Andrew is interested. “Your best friend? You mean that girl we met at your house a few years ago? With dark red hair?”

  (Andrew was disturbingly attracted to Kate, so much so that he called her once when he had gone up to San Francisco to get a new suit at Brooks. He asked her to have lunch with him, telling himself that that was all he meant, but it somehow got out of hand: he had made what they both knew was a pass.)

  Louisa is astonished. “Kate—you met Kate?” And then she remembers. “Oh, of course, four years ago. Sally and I were both pregnant.”

  “She was awfully attractive,” Sally says (doubtfully). “Whatever happened to her—did her husband get back from Korea? I remember she told us she was ‘frustrated.’ ” Sally giggles at this boldness.

  “We’ve sort of lost touch,” Louisa admits. Then she says, “It’s terrible, I’ll call her tomorrow.” And she believes that she will do this.

  The truth is she has been too depressed, and unwilling for Kate to see her in still another furnished house, Michael with a still-unfinished degree, and a baby who cries so much, who is so often sick.

  Then, suddenly, all the children begin to scream at once.

  “Mother, look at Douglas!”

  “Look, there’s Douglas on the fence!”

  “Hey, Mom, look at me!”

  All the grownups look, and there, unbelievably, is small Douglas against the April sky; he is standing on top of the fence, balanced there.

  None of them knows what to do. Then Alex springs up and heads toward his son. “Stay there, old man. I’ll help you down.”

  But with a wild pirate’s grin Douglas has leapt down, to fall on the spring earth as softly as a bird might plummet down—to fall in a heap from which he quickly arises, dirty and triumphant. Alex reaches the boy; he grasps him, picks him up under the arms, and holds him out in the air (but not as high as Douglas by himself just was); Alex is quietly domineering, saying, “Look, that was a pretty dangerous thing to do.”

  Grace laughs permissively, although for a moment she makes a gesture of clutching at her throat. (Is that where her anxiety lives? Louisa’s is in her gut.) “You know, everyone says it’s terrific to have such a fearless child,” says Grace. “But I can tell you—sometimes—” and she laughs again. Her long hair is caught up in a smooth low knot, and she now pushes back a stray lock.

  “Well, how about lunch?” says Sally, and she and Louisa go into the cozy Chapin kitchen to bring things out. Often, both Louisa and Michael make Sally nervous; they are so intelligent, so Eastern, so critical. They and Andrew talk so much. (Andrew who is also Eastern and intelligent. And critical.)

  But today Sally and Louisa are in a mood of warmer rapport than usual.

  “Having the Magowans over always makes me a little nervous,” Sally confides. “You know, she’s such a fantastic cook, and everything.”

  “Well, you’re awfully good. That’s how I sometimes feel about you—nervous,” Louisa says, and they both laugh wildly at that, because it is less than half true.

  Louisa’s cooking is as erratic as everything else about her at this time. Often barely able to get a mediocre meal on the table, she occasionally emerges to near greatness: a truly superb single dish; less frequently, a great dinner. Once, after too many martinis, she underdid a pot roast in the pressure cooker, and produced a roast that was marvelously tender and succulent.

  Now Sally says, “Remember your pot roast? Andrew still talks about that.”

  Louisa laughs. “So does Michael.” (What Michael says is “That time you got drunk and we had the good pot roast.”)

  They have cold sliced ham and potato salad and garlic bread and corn on the cob and cold fried chicken. Sally’s menus tend to be a little odd. For dessert there is chocolate ice cream and strawberries.

  The children eat on an old plaid steamer rug (from Andrew’s parents) at the end of the garden, the grownups at the table beneath the wisteria trellis. From time to time Louisa glances over to where Maude sits among the others, half expecting her to be doing something terrible—hitting, pulling someone’s hair—and to feel her own stomach clutch with panic, as though it were she who had struck out at the world. But Maude is fine; today she is an attractive child, in a group of attractive children.

  As, today, Louisa is an attractive woman. Sometimes with the Chapins, especially Sally (or worse, Grace Magowan), she has felt a dark alienation, an impossible division: she is not a woman (her breasts are too small). Dutifully she says the same things that the other women say; she speaks with affection of Michael, with tender love of Maude. And sometimes she believes what she is saying. (It does not occur to her that other women could also be acting out parts.)

  Alex Magowan is a generally pleasant but silent young man, an engineer who will eventually become extremely successful. (Indeed, he will change the skyline of San Francisco.) Aside from an occasional small comment, these days he appears to have very little to say to anyone but Grace. As a couple, they project extraordinary self-sufficiency (which makes their later history all the more remarkable).

  Now he addresses Louisa, rather formally. “Louisa, I really wanted to talk to you. Grace and I have a sort of—uh—proposition to make to you.”

  Looking at Andrew, Louisa laughs. “Well, God knows I’m open to propositions.” (As though this were untrue.)

  “Sally showed us some of the sketches you made of her kids—”

  Sally: “I hope you won’t mind, Lou.”

  “And Grace and I were wondering if maybe you could do something with our group.”

  Grace: “Of course, we want to pay you.”

  Alex: “You could think about it.”

  “Well, that’s really nice of you.” Louisa is so pleased that she doesn’t know how to respond. “They’re great looking kids,” she flounders.

  “Nothing fancy, like a portrait,” Alex says. “Just sketches. You think about it and let us know. About the money.”

  “Well, I’ve never really been paid, I wouldn
’t know—any idea—” But she is already thinking greedily: Enough money for a new dress, black, for Andrew to see her in, the next time there’s a party? Or maybe some velvet pants.

  “You have to charge for what you do,” says Grace decisively.

  Elation makes Louisa’s mind whirl about, directionless. She is thinking that Andrew isn’t actually like John Jeffreys at all. Andrew is Eastern, Northeastern; there are Atlantic generations behind him. Seaboard summers of sun and fine blown sand, billowing waves and sand dunes, have set the tone of his voice and the lights in his eyes. Whereas John’s summers were as Southern as Louisa’s own: wide muddy rivers hung with moss, turgid honeysuckle caves and dim sweet flowering shrubs beside country roads at night, where young lovers stop to kiss. And that is what Louisa wants with Andrew: just to kiss, their mouths to meet, their arms to hold each other, as sweetly as she and Richard used to kiss. Not sex: not the terrible naked writhings that she and Michael go through, the harsh mechanical touching, the nervous hot embarrassment. Not that. Just kissing.

  “You’d better let me be your agent,” Andrew says. “I can see you don’t have much of a head for business.”

  Has he understood? What message has he caught from her? Louisa’s heart is as light as a bird.

  “Well, honey,” Michael says, “I’m just not sure.” His voice is high and tight, a constipated voice, which by now has a physical effect on Louisa: she experiences a familiar pain in her lower intestine, along with a sodden weight in her heart.

  “I don’t know,” Michael continues—he has no notion of his effect on Louisa. “It just seems a funny sort of offer to make to someone as talented as you are. I mean, commercial art—and portraiture is pretty commercial, isn’t it?—commercial art just isn’t your thing.”

  “I don’t want any supper,” says Maude.

  What would Grace Magowan do with a child who said that? Insist, or let it go? Either way, she would instantly know (Louisa imagines); she would do just the right thing. Torn, not knowing anything, Louisa compromises. “Couldn’t you try?”