Roses, Rhododendron

by Alice Adams

  Margot had met and admired Harriet, and Harriet liked her, too—Margot made Harriet laugh, and she praised Harriet’s fine brown hair. But on some instinct (I am not sure whose) the parents had not met. Very likely, Emily, with her Southern social antennae, had somehow sensed that this meeting would be a mistake.

  That morning, Harriet and I were going on a picnic in the woods to the steep rocky side of Laurel Hill, but I forced myself to listen, or half listen, to Margot’s story.

  “Well, it seems that some years ago Lawrence Farr fell absolutely madly in love with a beautiful young girl—in fact, the orphaned daughter of a friend of his. Terribly romantic. Of course, she loved him, too, but he felt so awful and guilty that they never did anything about it.”

  I did not like this story much; it made me obscurely uncomfortable, and I think that at some point both Margot and I wondered why she was telling it. Was she pointing out imperfections in my chosen other family? But I asked, in Harriet’s indifferent voice, “He never kissed her?”

  “Well, maybe. I don’t know. But of course everyone in town knew all about it, including Emily Farr. And with her back! Poor woman,” Margot added somewhat piously but with real feeling, too.

  I forgot the story readily at the time. For one thing, there was something unreal about anyone as old as Lawrence Farr “falling in love.” But looking back to Emily’s face, Emily looking at Lawrence, I can see that pained watchfulness of a woman who has been hurt, and by a man who could always hurt her again.

  In those days, what struck me most about the Farrs was their extreme courtesy to each other—something I had not seen before. Never a harsh word. (Of course, I did not know then about couples who cannot afford a single harsh word.)

  * * *

  —

  Possibly because of the element of danger (very slight—the slope was gentle), the roof over the front porch was one of the places Harriet and I liked to sit on warm summer nights when I was invited to stay over. There was a country silence, invaded at intervals by summer country sounds—the strangled croak of tree frogs from down in the glen; the crazy baying of a distant hound. There, in the heavy scent of roses, on the scratchy shingles, Harriet and I talked about sex.

  “A girl I know told me that if you do it a lot your hips get very wide.”

  “My cousin Duncan says it makes boys strong if they do it.”

  “It hurts women a lot—especially at first. But I knew this girl from Santa Barbara, and she said that out there they say Filipinos can do it without hurting.”

  “Colored people do it a lot more than whites.”

  “Of course, they have all those babies. But in Boston so do Catholics!”

  We are seized with hysteria. We laugh and laugh, so that Emily hears and calls up to us, “Girls, why haven’t you-all gone to bed?” But her voice is warm and amused—she likes having us laughing up there.

  And Emily liked my enthusiasm for lemon cake. She teased me about the amounts of it I could eat, and she continued to keep me supplied. She was not herself much of a cook—their maid, a young black girl named Evelyn, did most of the cooking.

  Once, but only once, I saw the genteel and opaque surface of that family shattered—saw those three people suddenly in violent opposition to each other, like shards of splintered glass. (But what I have forgotten is the cause—what brought about that terrible explosion?)

  The four of us, as so often, were seated at lunch. Emily was at what seemed to be the head of the table. At her right hand was the small silver bell that summoned Evelyn to clear, or to bring a new course. Harriet and I across from each other, Lawrence across from Emily. (There was always a tentativeness about Lawrence’s posture. He could have been an honored guest, or a spoiled and favorite child.) We were talking in an easy way. I have a vivid recollection only of words that began to career and gather momentum, to go out of control. Of voices raised. Then Harriet rushes from the room. Emily’s face reddens dangerously, the corners of her mouth twitch downward and Lawrence, in an exquisitely icy voice, begins to lecture me on the virtues of reading Trollope. I am supposed to help him pretend that nothing has happened, but I can hardly hear what he is saying. I am in shock.

  That sudden unleashing of violence, that exposed depth of terrible emotions might have suggested to me that the Farrs were not quite as I had imagined them, not the impeccable family in my mind—but it did not. I was simply and terribly—and selfishly—upset, and hugely relieved when it all seemed to have passed over.

  * * *

  —

  During that summer, the Ouija board spoke only gibberish to Margot, or it answered direct questions with repeated evasions:

  “Will I ever see Johnny Kilgore again, in this life?”

  “Yes no perhaps.”

  “Honey, that means you’ve got no further need of the board, not right now. You’ve got to think everything out with your own heart and instincts,” Dolly said.

  Margot seemed to take her advice. She resolutely put the board away, and she wrote to Johnny that she wanted a divorce.

  I had begun to notice that these days, on these sultry August nights, Margot and Dolly were frequently joined on their small excursions by a man named Larry—a jolly, red-faced man who was in real estate and who reminded me considerably of my father.

  I said as much to Margot, and was surprised at her furious reaction. “They could not be more different, they are altogether opposite. Larry is a Southern gentleman. You just don’t pay any attention to anyone but those Farrs.”

  A word about Margot’s quite understandable jealousy of the Farrs. Much later in my life, when I was unreasonably upset at the attachment of one of my own daughters to another family (unreasonable because her chosen group were all talented musicians, as she was), a wise friend told me that we all could use more than one set of parents—our relations with the original set are too intense, and need dissipating. But no one, certainly not silly Dolly, was around to comfort Margot with this wisdom.

  The summer raced on. (“Not without dust and heat,” Lawrence several times remarked, in his private ironic voice.) The roses wilted on the roof and on the banks next to the road. The creek dwindled, and beside it honeysuckle leaves lay limply on the vines. For weeks, there was no rain, and then, one afternoon, there came a dark torrential thunderstorm. Harriet and I sat on the side porch and watched its violent start—the black clouds seeming to rise from the horizon, the cracking, jagged streaks of lightning, the heavy, welcome rain. And, later, the clean smell of leaves and grass and damp earth.

  Knowing that Margot would be frightened, I thought of calling her, and then remembered that she would not talk on the phone during storms. And that night she told me, “The phone rang and rang, but I didn’t think it was you, somehow.”

  “No.”

  “I had the craziest idea that it was Johnny. Be just like him to pick the middle of a storm for a phone call.”

  “There might not have been a storm in New Orleans.”

  But it turned out that Margot was right.

  The next day, when I rode up to the Farrs’ on my bike, Emily was sitting out in the grass where I had first seen her. I went and squatted beside her there. I thought she looked old and sad, and partly to cheer her I said, “You grow the most beautiful flowers I’ve ever seen.”

  She sighed, instead of smiling as she usually did. She said, “I seem to have turned into a gardener. When I was a girl, I imagined that I would grow up to be a writer, a novelist, and that I would have at least four children. Instead, I grow flowers and write book reviews.”

  I was not interested in children. “You never wrote a novel?”

  She smiled unhappily. “No. I think I was afraid that I wouldn’t come up to Trollope. I married rather young, you know.”

  And at that moment Lawrence came out of the house, immaculate in white flannels.

  He greeted me, and s
aid to Emily, “My dear, I find that I have some rather late appointments, in Hillsboro. You won’t wait dinner if I’m a trifle late?”

  (Of course she would; she always did.)

  “No. Have a good time,” she said, and she gave him the anxious look that I had come to recognize as the way she looked at Lawrence.

  * * *

  —

  Soon after that, a lot happened very fast. Margot wrote to Johnny (again) that she wanted a divorce, that she intended to marry Larry. (I wonder if this was ever true.) Johnny telephoned—not once but several times. He told her that she was crazy, that he had a great job with some shipbuilders near San Francisco—a defense contract. He would come to get us, and we would all move out there. Margot agreed. We would make a new life. (Of course, we never knew what happened to the girl.)

  I was not as sad about leaving the Farrs and that house, that town, those woods as I was to be later, looking back. I was excited about San Francisco, and I vaguely imagined that someday I would come back and that we would all see each other again. Like parting lovers, Harriet and I promised to write each other every day.

  And for quite a while we did write several times a week. I wrote about San Francisco—how beautiful it was: the hills and pastel houses, the sea. How I wished that she could see it. She wrote about school and friends. She described solitary bike rides to places we had been. She told me what she was reading.

  In high school, our correspondence became more generalized, Responding perhaps to the adolescent mores of the early nineteen-forties, we wrote about boys and parties; we even competed in making ourselves sound “popular.” The truth (my truth) was that I was sometimes popular, often not. I had, in fact, a stormy adolescence. And at that time I developed what was to be a long-lasting habit. As I reviewed a situation in which I had been ill-advised or impulsive, I would re-enact the whole scene in my mind with Harriet in my own role—Harriet, cool and controlled, more intelligent, prettier. Even more than I wanted to see her again, I wanted to be Harriet.

  Johnny and Margot fought a lot and stayed together, and gradually a sort of comradeship developed between them in our small house on Russian Hill.

  I went to Stanford, where I half-heartedly studied history. Harriet was at Radcliffe, studying American literature, writing poetry.

  We lost touch with each other.

  Margot, however, kept up with her old friend Dolly, by means of Christmas cards and Easter notes, and Margot thus heard a remarkable piece of news about Emily Farr. Emily “up and left Lawrence without so much as a by-your-leave,” said Dolly, and went to Washington, D.C., to work in the Folger Library. This news made me smile all day. I was so proud of Emily. And I imagined that Lawrence would amuse himself, that they would both be happier apart.

  By accident, I married well—that is to say, a man whom I still like and enjoy. Four daughters came at uncalculated intervals, and each is remarkably unlike her sisters. I named one Harriet, although she seems to have my untidy character.

  From time to time, over the years, I would see a poem by Harriet Farr, and I always thought it was marvelous, and I meant to write her. But I distrusted my reaction. I had been (I was) so deeply fond of Harriet (Emily, Lawrence, that house and land) and besides, what would I say—“I think your poem is marvelous”? (I have since learned that this is neither an inadequate nor in unwelcome thing to say to writers.) Of course, the true reason for not writing was that there was too much to say.

  Dolly wrote to Margot that Lawrence was drinking “all over the place.” He was not happier without Emily. Harriet, Dolly said, was traveling a lot. She married several times and had no children. Lawrence developed emphysema, and was in such bad shape that Emily quit her job and came back to take care of him—whether because of feelings of guilt or duty or possibly affection, I didn’t know. He died, lingeringly and miserably, and Emily, too, died, a few years later—at least partly from exhaustion, I would imagine.

  * * *

  —

  Then, at last, I did write Harriet, in care of the magazine in which I had last seen a poem of hers. I wrote a clumsy, gusty letter, much too long, about shared pasts, landscapes, the creek. All that. And as soon as I had mailed it I began mentally rewriting, seeking more elegant prose.

  When for a long time I didn’t hear from Harriet, I felt worse and worse, cumbersome, misplaced—as too often in life I had felt before. It did not occur to me that an infrequently staffed magazine could be at fault.

  Months later, her letter came—from Rome, where she was then living. Alone, I gathered. She said that she was writing it at the moment of receiving mine. It was a long, emotional and very moving letter, out of character for the Harriet that I remembered (or had invented).

  She said, in part: “It was really strange, all that time when Lawrence was dying, and God! so long! and as though ‘dying’ were all that he was doing—Emily, too, although we didn’t know that—all that time the picture that moved me most, in my mind, that moved me to tears, was not of Lawrence and Emily but of you and me. On our bikes at the top of the hill outside our house. Going somewhere. And I first thought that that picture simply symbolized something irretrievable, the lost and irrecoverable past, as Lawrence and Emily would be lost. And I’m sure that was partly it.

  “But they were so extremely fond of you—in fact, you were a rare area of agreement. They missed you, and they talked about you for years. It’s a wonder that I wasn’t jealous, and I think I wasn’t only because I felt included in their affection for you. They liked me best with you.

  “Another way to say this would be to say that we were all three a little less crazy and isolated with you around, and, God knows, happier.”

  An amazing letter, I thought. It was enough to make me take a long look at my whole life, and to find some new colors there.

  * * *

  —

  A postscript: I showed Harriet’s letter to my husband and he said, “How odd. She sounds so much like you.”

  Discover more at PenguinRandomHouse.com

  What’s next on

  your reading list?

  Discover your next

  great read!

  Get personalized book picks and up-to-date news about this author.

  Sign up now.