The Stories of Alice Adams Read online

  Hoping for change, Carrie has continued to live at home, seldom admitting why. Her older sister, Linda, of the health-food store, is more severe, or simply fatalistic. “If she wants to drink herself to death she will,” says Linda. “Your being there won’t help, or change a thing.” Of course she’s right, but Carrie sticks around.

  Neither Linda nor Carrie is as lovely as their mother was. They are pretty girls—especially Linda, who is snub-nosed and curly-haired. Carrie has straight dark hair and a nose like that of her father: Clayton Bascombe, former Carolina Deke, former tennis star, former husband of Ardis. His was a nice straight nose—Clayton was an exceptionally handsome boy—but it is too long now for Carrie’s small tender face.

  Clayton, too, had a look of innocence; perhaps it was his innocent look that originally attracted Ardis’s strong instinct for destruction. In any case, after four years of marriage, two daughters, Ardis decided that Clayton was “impossible,” and threw him out—out of the house that her parents had given them, in Winston-Salem. Now Clayton is in real estate in Wilmington, N.C., having ended up where he began, before college and the adventure of marriage to Ardis.

  Ardis has never remarried. For many years, in Winston-Salem, as a young divorcée, she was giddily popular, off to as many parties and weekends out of town as when she was a Carolina coed. Then, after the end of an especially violent love affair, she announced that she was tired of all that and bored with all her friends. With the two girls, Ardis moved to San Francisco, bought the big house on Vallejo Street, had it fashionably decorated and began another round of parties with new people—a hectic pace that gradually slowed to fewer parties, invitations, friends. People became “boring” or “impossible,” as the neglected house decayed. Ardis spent more and more time alone. More time drunk.

  The girls, who from childhood had been used to their mother’s lovers (suitors, beaux) and who by now had some of their own, were at first quite puzzled by their absence: Ardis, without men around? Then Linda said to Carrie, “Well, Lord, who’d want her now? Look at that face. Besides, I think she’d rather drink.”

  In some ways Ardis has been a wonderful mother, though: Carrie sometimes says that to herself. Always there were terrific birthday parties, presents, clothes. And there was the time in Winston-Salem when the real-estate woman came to the door with a petition about Negroes—keeping them out, land values, something like that. Of course Ardis refused to sign, and then she went on: “And in answer to your next question, I sincerely hope that both my daughters marry them. I understand those guys are really great. Not, unfortunately, from personal experience.” Well. What other mother, especially in Winston-Salem, would ever talk like that?

  Ardis dislikes paying bills—especially small ones; for instance, from the garbage collectors, although she loves their name. Sunset Scavenger Company. Thus the parking area is lined with full garbage cans, spilling over among all the expensively imported and dying rhododendrons and magnolia trees, the already dead azaleas in their rusted cans. Seeing none of this, Carrie parks her truck. She gets out and slams the door.

  Five o’clock. Ardis will have had enough drinks to make her want to talk a lot, although she will be just beginning to not make sense.

  Carrie opens the front door and goes in, and she hears her mother’s familiar raucous laugh coming from the kitchen. Good, she is not alone. Carrie walks in that direction, as Ardis’s deep, hoarse voice explains to someone, “That must be my daughter Carrie. You won’t believe—”

  Carrie goes into the kitchen and is introduced to a tall, thin, almost bald, large-nosed man. He is about her mother’s age but in much better shape: rich, successful. (Having inherited some of her mother’s social antennae, Carrie has taken all this in without really thinking.) In Ardis’s dignified slur, his name sounds like Wopple Grin.

  • • •

  “Actually,” Ardis tells Carrie later on, “Walpole Greene is very important in Washington, on the Hill.” This has been said in the heavily nasal accent with which Ardis imitates extreme snobs; like many good mimics, she is aping an unacknowledged part of herself. Ardis is more truly snobbish than anyone, caring deeply about money, family and position. “Although he certainly wasn’t much at Carolina,” she goes on, in the same tone.

  Tonight, Ardis looks a little better than usual, her daughter observes. She did a very good job with her makeup; somehow her eyes look O.K.—not as popped out as they sometimes do. And a gauzy scarf around her throat has made it look less swollen.

  Walpole Greene, who is indeed important in Washington, although, as the head of a news bureau, not exactly in Ardis’s sense “on the Hill,” thinks how odd it is that Ardis should have such a funny-looking kid.

  Carrie, reading some of that in his face, thinks, What a creep. She excuses herself to go upstairs. She smiles privately as she leaves, repeating, silently, “Wopple Grin.”

  In Chapel Hill, all those years ago, in the days when Walpole Greene was certainly not much—he was too young, too skinny and tall; with his big nose he looked like a bird—he was always acutely and enragedly aware of Ardis. So small and bright, so admired, so universally lusted after, so often photographed in the Daily Tarheel and Carolina Magazine, with her half-inviting, half-disdainful smile; she was everywhere. One summer, during a session of summer school, Walpole felt that he saw Ardis every time he left his dorm: Ardis saying “Hey, Walpole” (Wopple? was she teasing him?) in the same voice in which she said “Hey” to everyone.

  He saw her dancing in front of the Y, between classes, in the morning—smiling, mocking the dance. He glimpsed her through the windows of Harry’s, drinking beer, in the late afternoon. She was dressed always in immaculate pale clothes: flowered cottons, cashmere cardigans. And at night he would see her anywhere at all: coming out of the show, at record concerts in Kenan Stadium (“Music Under the Stars”), emerging from the Arboretum, with some guy. Usually she was laughing, which made even then a surprisingly loud noise from such a small thin girl. Her laugh and her walk were out of scale; she strode, like someone very tall and important.

  Keeping track of her, Walpole, who had an orderly mind, began to observe a curious pattern in the escorts of Ardis: midmornings at the Y, evenings at the show, or at Harry’s, she was apt to be with Gifford Gwathmey, a well-known S.A.E., a handsome blond Southern boy. But if he saw her in some more dubious place, like the Arboretum, late at night, she would be with Henry Mallory, a Delta Psi from Philadelphia.

  Ardis always looked as if she were at a party, having a very good time but at the same time observing carefully and feeling just slightly superior to it all. And since his sense of himself and of his presence at Carolina was precisely opposite to that, Walpole sometimes dreamed of doing violence to Ardis. He hated her almost as much as he hated the dean of men, who in a conference had suggested that Walpole should “get out more,” should “try to mix in.”

  It was a melancholy time for Walpole, all around.

  One August night, in a stronger than usual mood of self-pity, Walpole determined to do what he had all summer considered doing: he would stay up all night and then go out to Gimghoul Castle (the Gimghouls were an undergraduate secret society) and watch the dawn from the lookout bench there. He did just that, drinking coffee and reading from The Federalist Papers, and then riding on his bike, past the Arboretum and Battle Park, to the Castle. The lookout bench was some distance from the main building, and as he approached it Walpole noted that a group of people, probably Gimghouls and their dates, were out there drinking still, on one of the terraces.

  He settled on the hard stone circular bench, in the dewy pre-dawn air, and focused his attention on the eastern horizon. And then suddenly, soundlessly—and drunkenly: she was plastered—Ardis appeared. Weaving toward him, she sat down on the bench beside him, though not too near.

  “You came out here to look at the sunrise?” she slurred, conversationally. “God, Wopple, that’s wonderful.” Wunnerful.

  Tears of hatred sprang to W
alpole’s eyes—fortunately invisible. He choked; in a minute he would hit her, very hard.

  Unaware that she was in danger, Ardis got stiffly to her feet; she bent awkwardly toward him and placed a cool bourbon-tasting kiss on Walpole’s mouth. “I love you, Wopple,” Ardis said. “I truly and purely do.” The sun came up.

  He didn’t hate her anymore—of course he would not hit her. How could he hit a girl who had kissed him and spoken of love? And although after that night nothing between them changed overtly, he now watched her as a lover would. With love.

  “Lord, you’re lucky I didn’t rape you there and then,” says Ardis now, having heard this romantic story. She is exaggerating the slur of her speech, imitating someone even drunker than she is.

  Walpole, who believes that in a way he has loved her all his life, laughs sadly, and he wonders if at any point in her life Ardis could have been—he backs off from “saved” and settles on “retrieved.” Such a waste: such beauty gone, and brains and wit. Walpole himself has just married again, for the fourth time: a young woman who, he has already begun to recognize, is not very nice, or bright. He has little luck with love. It is not necessarily true that Ardis would have been better off with him.

  She is clearly in no shape to go out to dinner, and Walpole wonders if he shouldn’t cook something for the two of them to eat. Scrambled eggs? He looks around the impossibly disordered kitchen, at stacks of dishes, piled-up newspapers, a smelly cat box in one corner, although he has seen no cat.

  He reaches and pours some more vodka into his own glass, then glances over at Ardis, whose eyes have begun to close.

  By way of testing her, he asks, “Something I always wondered. That summer, I used to see you around with Gifford Gwathmey, and then later you’d be with Henry Mallory. Weren’t you pinned to Gifford?”

  Ardis abruptly comes awake, and emits her laugh. “Of course I was pinned to Giff,” she chortles. “But he and all those S.A.E.s were almost as boring as Dekes, although he did come from one of the oldest and richest families in Charleston.” (This last in her nasal snob-imitating voice.) “So I used to late-date on him all the time, mainly with Henry, who didn’t have a dime. But the Delta Psis were fun—they had style—a lot of boys from New York and Philadelphia.” She laughs again. “Between dates, I’d rush back to the House and brush my teeth—talk about your basic fastidious coed. Henry teased me about always tasting of Pepsodent.” For a moment Ardis looks extremely happy, and almost young; then she falls slowly forward until her head rests on the table in front of her, and she begins to snore.

  Carrie, who has recently discovered jazz, is upstairs listening to old Louis Armstrong records, smoking a joint. “Pale moon shining on the fields below …”

  She is thinking, as she often does, of how much she would like to get out of this house for a while. She would like to drop out of school for a term or two, maybe next spring, and just get into her truck with a few clothes and some money, and maybe a dog, and drive around the country. There is a huge circular route that she has often imagined: up to Seattle, maybe Canada, Vancouver, down into Wyoming, across the northern plains to Chicago—she knows someone there—New England, New York and down the coast to her father, in Wilmington, N.C.; Charleston, New Orleans, Texas, Mexico, the Southwest, L.A.; then home, by way of Big Sur. Months of driving, with the dog and the CB radio for company.

  In the meantime, halfway through her second joint, she sighs deeply and realizes that she is extremely hungry, ravenous. She carefully stubs out the joint and goes downstairs.

  Walpole Greene, whose presence she had forgotten, is standing in the pantry, looking lost. Ardis has passed out. Having also forgotten that she thought he was a creep, Carrie experiences a rush of sympathy for the poor guy. “Don’t worry,” she tells him. “She’ll be O.K.”

  “She sure as hell doesn’t look O.K.,” says Walpole Greene. “She’s not O.K. No one who drinks that much—”

  “Oh, well, in the long run you’re right,” says Carrie, as airily as though she had never worried about her mother’s health. “But I mean for now she’s O.K.”

  “Well. I’d meant to take her out to dinner.”

  “Why bother? She doesn’t eat. But aren’t you hungry? I’m starved.”

  “Well, sort of.” Walpole looks dubiously around the kitchen. He watches Carrie as she goes over to the mammoth refrigerator and extracts a small covered saucepan from its incredibly crowded, murky interior.

  “She likes to make soup,” says Carrie. “Lately she’s been on some Southern kick. Nostalgia, I guess. This is white beans and pork. Just made yesterday, so it ought to be all right.”

  The soup, which Carrie has heated and ladled into bowls, is good but too spicy for Walpole’s ulcer; the next day he will feel really terrible. Now he and Carrie whisper to each other, like conspirators, above the sound of Ardis’s heavy breathing.

  “Does she do this often?” asks Walpole.

  “Pretty often. Well—like, every day.”

  “That’s not good.”

  “No.”

  Having drunk quite a bit more than he usually does, Walpole feels that his perceptions are enlarged. Looking at Carrie, he has a sudden and certain vision of her future: in ten or so years, in her late twenties, early thirties, she will be more beautiful than even Ardis ever was. She will be an exceptional beauty, a beautiful woman, whereas Ardis was just a beautiful girl. Should he tell Carrie that? He decides not to; she wouldn’t believe him, although he is absolutely sure of his perception. Besides, even a little drunk he is too shy.

  Instead, in an inspired burst, he says, “Listen, she’s got to go somewhere. You know, dry out. There’s a place in Connecticut. Senators’ wives—”

  Carrie’s bright young eyes shine, beautifully. “That would be neat,” she says.

  “You’d be O.K. by yourself for a while?”

  “I really would. I’m thinking about getting a dog—our cat just disappeared. And there’s this trip. But how would you get her there?”

  “Leave that to me,” says Walpole, with somewhat dizzy confidence.

  Carrie clears the table—without, Walpole notices, washing any dishes.

  Carrie goes back upstairs, her heart high and light.

  She considers calling her sister, Linda, saying that Walpole Greene is taking their mother to Connecticut. But Linda would say something negative, unpleasant.

  Instead, she puts on another record, and hears the rich pure liquid sound of Louis’s horn, and then his voice. “Beale Street Blues,” “Muskrat Ramble,” “A Son of the South.” She listens, blows more joints.

  Downstairs, seated at the table, Walpole is talking softly and persuasively, he hopes, to Ardis’s ear (her small pink ears are still pretty, he has noticed), although she is “asleep.”

  “This lovely place in Connecticut,” he is saying. “A wonderful place. You’ll like it. You’ll rest, and eat good food, and you’ll feel better than you’ve felt for years. You’ll see. I want you to be my beautiful girl again—”

  Suddenly aroused, Ardis raises her head and stares at Walpole. “I am a beautiful girl,” she rasps out, furiously.

  Home Is Where

  In San Francisco there is apt to be no spring at all. During one such season of grayness, cold and wind, when everything else in my life was also terrible, I felt that I would die of longing for home—“home” being in my case a small Southern river town, not far inland from the Atlantic coast.

  My problems were more serious than I could cope with or even think about: a husband, a lover and a landlady, all of whom I was terrified of, and a son for whose future, in those conditions, I greatly feared. And so, instead, I thought about hot river smells, jasmine and hyacinth and gardenias, caves of honeysuckle and live oaks festooned with Spanish moss.

  And finally, in June (there was still no summer, no remission of cold and fog), against some better judgment, with my son I rushed back there—rushed toward what, in another frame of mind, I might have considered a
n origin of my troubles: alcoholic parents, a disapproving, narrow small town that still (probably) contained several former lovers (I had been a wild young girl) and some inimical former friends.

  Exhilarated by a remembrance of steamy river afternoons, canoe trips down to small white beaches and summer night dances, I went and bought some light new clothes—cotton shorts, flouncy pastel dresses—such as out in San Francisco I hadn’t needed for years. My married life had made me feel ugly—drained and discolored, old; and with the unerringly poor judgment of a depressed person I had found a lover who disliked me, who in fact was a little crazy, mean. Perhaps as much as anything else I needed to return to a place where I had been young and, if never beautiful, at least sought after.

  And once my plans were made, my problems seemed somewhat to abate: the landlady herself went away on vacation, so that for a time there were no more of those harrowing, repeated phone calls about the noise of my son’s running footsteps (Simon, at four, not a heavy or clumsy child); my lover was sympathetic (possibly relieved, since we had chosen each other out of angry needs?); my husband took Simon and me out for a pleasant, noncritical parting dinner, at a good Italian restaurant. He only said, “You won’t be eating food like this for a while, will you, Claire,” and I said that I supposed not.

  Perhaps I did not have to go home after all? But by then I was committed. Letters written, tickets bought. And those clothes.

  Only on the plane did some of the drawbacks inherent in my plan occur to me: my selfish parents’ total indifference to children; the extreme heat, to which neither Simon nor I (now) was used; and the embarrassment (fear) of seeing certain people there—Mary Sue, my girlhood rival-friend-enemy; Dudley Farmer, with whom I had once had a violent and badly ending love; other friends.