Alice Adams

by Booth Tarkington

  Russell had been honest and accurate. But why had it been her instinct to show him an Alice Adams who didn’t exist?

  Almost everything she had said to him was upon spontaneous impulse, springing to her lips on the instant; yet it all seemed to have been founded upon a careful design, as if some hidden self kept such designs in stock and handed them up to her, ready-made, to be used for its own purpose. What appeared to be the desired result was a false-coloured image in Russell’s mind; but if he liked that image he wouldn’t be liking Alice Adams; nor would anything he thought about the image be a thought about her.

  Nevertheless, she knew she would go on with her false, fancy colourings of this nothing as soon as she saw him again; she had just been practicing them. “What’s the idea?” she wondered. “What makes me tell such lies? Why shouldn’t I be just myself?” And then she thought, “But which one is myself?”

  Her eyes dwelt on the solemn eyes in the mirror; and her lips, disquieted by a deepening wonder, parted to whisper:

  “Who in the world are you?”

  The apparition before her had obeyed her like an alert slave, but now, as she subsided to a complete stillness, that aspect changed to the old mockery with which mirrors avenge their wrongs. The nucleus of some queer thing seemed to gather and shape itself behind the nothingness of the reflected eyes until it became almost an actual strange presence. If it could be identified, perhaps the presence was that of the hidden designer who handed up the false, ready-made pictures, and, for unknown purposes, made Alice exhibit them; but whatever it was, she suddenly found it monkey- like and terrifying. In a flutter she jumped up and went to another part of the room.

  A moment or two later she was whistling softly as she hung her light coat over a wooden triangle in her closet, and her musing now was quainter than the experience that led to it; for what she thought was this, “I certainly am a queer girl!” She took a little pride in so much originality, believing herself probably the only person in the world to have such thoughts as had been hers since she entered the room, and the first to be disturbed by a strange presence in the mirror. In fact, the effect of the tiny episode became apparent in that look of preoccupied complacency to be seen for a time upon any girl who has found reason to suspect that she is a being without counterpart.

  This slight glow, still faintly radiant, was observed across the dinner-table by Walter, but he misinterpreted it. “What YOU lookin’ so self-satisfied about?” he inquired, and added in his knowing way, “I saw you, all right, cutie!”

  “Where’d you see me?”

  “Down-town.”

  “This afternoon, you mean, Walter?”

  “Yes, ‘this afternoon, I mean, Walter,’ ” he returned, burlesquing her voice at least happily enough to please himself; for he laughed applausively. “Oh, you never saw me! I passed you close enough to pull a tooth, but you were awful busy. I never did see anybody as busy as you get, Alice, when you’re towin’ a barge. My, but you keep your hands goin’! Looked like the air was full of ‘em! That’s why I’m onto why you look so tickled this evening; I saw you with that big fish.”

  Mrs. Adams laughed benevolently; she was not displeased with this rallying. “Well, what of it, Walter?” she asked. “If you happen to see your sister on the street when some nice young man is being attentive to her–-“

  Walter barked and then cackled. “Whoa, Sal!” he said. “You got the parts mixed. It’s little Alice that was ‘being attentive.’ I know the big fish she was attentive to, all right, too.”

  “Yes,” his sister retorted, quietly. “I should think you might have recognized him, Walter.”

  Walter looked annoyed. “Still harpin’ on THAT!” he complained. “The kind of women I like, if they get sore they just hit you somewhere on the face and then they’re through. By the way, I heard this Russell was supposed to be your dear, old, sweet friend Mildred’s steady. What you doin’ walkin’ as close to him as all that?”

  Mrs. Adams addressed her son in gentle reproof, “Why Walter!”

  “Oh, never mind, mama,” Alice said. “To the horrid all things are horrid.”

  “Get out!” Walter protested, carelessly. “I heard all about this Russell down at the shop. Young Joe Lamb’s such a talker I wonder he don’t ruin his grandfather’s business; he keeps all us cheap help standin’ round listening to him nine-tenths of our time. Well, Joe told me this Russell’s some kin or other to the Palmer family, and he’s got some little money of his own, and he’s puttin’ it into ole Palmer’s trust company and Palmer’s goin’ to make him a vice-president of the company. Sort of a keep- the-money-in-the-family arrangement, Joe Lamb says.”

  Mrs. Adams looked thoughtful. “I don’t see–-” she began.

  “Why, this Russell’s supposed to be tied up to Mildred,” her son explained. “When ole Palmer dies this Russell will be his son-in-law, and all he’ll haf’ to do’ll be to barely lift his feet and step into the ole man’s shoes. It’s certainly a mighty fat hand-me- out for this Russell! You better lay off o’ there, Alice. Pick somebody that’s got less to lose and you’ll make better showing.”

  Mrs. Adams’s air of thoughtfulness had not departed. “But you say this Mr. Russell is well off on his own account, Walter.”

  “Oh, Joe Lamb says he’s got some little of his own. Didn’t know how much.”

  “Well, then–-“

  Walter laughed his laugh. “Cut it out,” he bade her. “Alice wouldn’t run in fourth place.”

  Alice had been looking at him in a detached way, as though estimating the value of a specimen in a collection not her own. “Yes,” she said, indifferently. “You REALLY are vulgar, Walter.”

  He had finished his meal; and, rising, he came round the table to her and patted her good-naturedly on the shoulder. “Good ole Allie!” he said. “HONEST, you wouldn’t run in fourth place. If I was you I’d never even start in the class. That frozen-face; gang will rule you off the track soon as they see your colours.”

  “Walter!” his mother said again.

  “Well, ain’t I her brother?” he returned, seeming to be entirely serious and direct, for the moment, at least. “I like the ole girl all right. Fact is, sometimes I’m kind of sorry for her.”

  “But what’s it all ABOUT?” Alice cried. “Simply because you met me down-town with a man I never saw but once before and just barely know! Why all this palaver?”

  “‘Why?’” he repeated, grinning. “Well, I’ve seen you start before, you know!” He went to the door, and paused. “I got no date to-night. Take you to the movies, you care to go.”

  She declined crisply. “No, thanks!”

  “Come on,” he said, as pleasantly as he knew how.

  “Give me a chance to show you a better time than we had up at that frozen-face joint. I’ll get you some chop suey afterward.”

  “No, thanks!”

  “All right,” he responded and waved a flippant adieu. “As the barber says, ‘The better the advice, the worse it’s wasted!’ Good-night!”

  Alice shrugged her shoulders; but a moment or two later, as the jar of the carelessly slammed front door went through the house, she shook her head, reconsidering. “Perhaps I ought to have gone with him. It might have kept him away from whatever dreadful people are his friends—at least for one night.”

  “Oh, I’m sure Walter’s a GOOD boy,” Mrs. Adams said, soothingly; and this was what she almost always said when either her husband or Alice expressed such misgivings. “He’s odd, and he’s picked up right queer manners; but that’s only because we haven’t given him advantages like the other young men. But I’m sure he’s a GOOD boy.”

  She reverted to the subject a little later, while she washed the dishes and Alice wiped them. “Of course Walter could take his place with the other nice boys of the town even yet,” she said. “I mean, if we could afford to help him financially. They all belong to the country clubs and have cars and–-“

  “Let’s don’t go into that any
more, mama,” the daughter begged her. “What’s the use?”

  “It COULD be of use,” Mrs. Adams insisted. “It could if your father–-“

  “But papa CAN’T.”

  “Yes, he can.”

  “But how can he? He told me a man of his age CAN’T give up a business he’s been in practically all his life, and just go groping about for something that might never turn up at all. I think he’s right about it, too, of course!”

  Mrs. Adams splashed among the plates with a new vigour heightened by an old bitterness. “Oh, yes,” she said. “He talks that way; but he knows better.”

  “How could he ‘know better,’ mama?”

  “HE knows how!”

  “But what does he know?”

  Mrs. Adams tossed her head. “You don’t suppose I’m such a fool I’d be urging him to give up something for nothing, do you, Alice? Do you suppose I’d want him to just go ‘groping around’ like he was telling you? That would be crazy, of course. Little as his work at Lamb’s brings in, I wouldn’t be so silly as to ask him to give it up just on a CHANCE he could find something else. Good gracious, Alice, you must give me credit for a little intelligence once in a while!”

  Alice was puzzled. “But what else could there be except a chance? I don’t see–-“

  “Well, I do,” her mother interrupted, decisively. “That man could make us all well off right now if he wanted to. We could have been rich long ago if he’d ever really felt as he ought to about his family.”

  “What! Why, how could–-“

  “You know how as well as I do,” Mrs. Adams said, crossly. “I guess you haven’t forgotten how he treated me about it the Sunday before he got sick.”

  She went on with her work, putting into it a sudden violence inspired by the recollection; but Alice, enlightened, gave utterance to a laugh of lugubrious derision. “Oh, the GLUE factory again!” she cried. “How silly!” And she renewed her laughter.

  So often do the great projects of parents appear ignominious to their children. Mrs. Adams’s conception of a glue factory as a fairy godmother of this family was an absurd old story which Alice had never taken seriously. She remembered that when she was about fifteen her mother began now and then to say something to Adams about a “glue factory,” rather timidly, and as a vague suggestion, but never without irritating him. Then, for years, the preposterous subject had not been mentioned; possibly because of some explosion on the part of Adams, when his daughter had not been present. But during the last year Mrs. Adams had quietly gone back to these old hints, reviving them at intervals and also reviving her husband’s irritation. Alice’s bored impression was that her mother wanted him to found, or buy, or do something, or other, about a glue factory; and that he considered the proposal so impracticable as to be insulting. The parental conversations took place when neither Alice nor Walter was at hand, but sometimes Alice had come in upon the conclusion of one, to find her father in a shouting mood, and shocking the air behind him with profane monosyllables as he departed. Mrs. Adams would be left quiet and troubled; and when Alice, sympathizing with the goaded man, inquired of her mother why these tiresome bickerings had been renewed, she always got the brooding and cryptic answer, “He COULD do it—if he wanted to.” Alice failed to comprehend the desirability of a glue factory—to her mind a father engaged in a glue factory lacked impressiveness; had no advantage over a father employed by Lamb and Company; and she supposed that Adams knew better than her mother whether such an enterprise would be profitable or not. Emphatically, he thought it would not, for she had heard him shouting at the end of one of these painful interviews, “You can keep up your dang talk till YOU die and I die, but I’ll never make one God’s cent that way!”

  There had been a culmination. Returning from church on the Sunday preceding the collapse with which Adams’s illness had begun, Alice found her mother downstairs, weeping and intimidated, while her father’s stamping footsteps were loudly audible as he strode up and down his room overhead. So were his endless repetitions of invective loudly audible: “That woman! Oh, that woman; Oh, that danged woman!”

  Mrs. Adams admitted to her daughter that it was “the old glue factory” and that her husband’s wildness had frightened her into a “solemn promise” never to mention the subject again so long as she had breath. Alice laughed. The “glue factory” idea was not only a bore, but ridiculous, and her mother’s evident seriousness about it one of those inexplicable vagaries we sometimes discover in the people we know best. But this Sunday rampage appeared to be the end of it, and when Adams came down to dinner, an hour later, he was unusually cheerful. Alice was glad he had gone wild enough to settle the glue factory once and for all; and she had ceased to think of the episode long before Friday of that week, when Adams was brought home in the middle of the afternoon by his old employer, the “great J. A. Lamb,” in the latter’s car.

  During the long illness the “glue factory” was completely forgotten, by Alice at least; and her laugh was rueful as well as derisive now, in the kitchen, when she realized that her mother’s mind again dwelt upon this abandoned nuisance. “I thought you’d got over all that nonsense, mama,” she said.

  Mrs. Adams smiled, pathetically. “Of course you think it’s nonsense, dearie. Young people think everything’s nonsense that they don’t know anything about.”

  “Good gracious!” Alice cried. “I should think I used to hear enough about that horrible old glue factory to know something about it!”

  “No,” her mother returned patiently. “You’ve never heard anything about it at all.”

  “I haven’t?”

  “No. Your father and I didn’t discuss it before you children. All you ever heard was when he’d get in such a rage, after we’d been speaking of it, that he couldn’t control himself when you came in. Wasn’t I always quiet? Did I ever go on talking about it?”

  “No; perhaps not. But you’re talking about it now, mama, after you promised never to mention it again.”

  “I promised not to mention it to your father,” said Mrs. Adams, gently. “I haven’t mentioned it to him, have I?”

  “Ah, but if you mention it to me I’m afraid you WILL mention it to him. You always do speak of things that you have on your mind, and you might get papa all stirred up again about—” Alice paused, a light of divination flickering in her eyes. “Oh!” she cried. “I SEE!”

  “What do you see?”

  “You HAVE been at him about it!”

  “Not one single word!”

  “No!” Alice cried. “Not a WORD, but that’s what you’ve meant all along! You haven’t spoken the words to him, but all this urging him to change, to ‘find something better to go into’—it’s all been about nothing on earth but your foolish old glue factory that you know upsets him, and you gave your solemn word never to speak to him about again! You didn’t say it, but you meant it—and he KNOWS that’s what you meant! Oh, mama!”

  Mrs. Adams, with her hands still automatically at work in the flooded dishpan, turned to face her daughter. “Alice,” she said, tremulously, “what do I ask for myself?”

  “What?”

  “I say, What do I ask for myself? Do you suppose I want anything? Don’t you know I’d be perfectly content on your father’s present income if I were the only person to be considered? What do I care about any pleasure for myself? I’d be willing never to have a maid again; I don’t mind doing the work. If we didn’t have any children I’d be glad to do your father’s cooking and the housework and the washing and ironing, too, for the rest of my life. I wouldn’t care. I’m a poor cook and a poor housekeeper; I don’t do anything well; but it would be good enough for just him and me. I wouldn’t ever utter one word of com–-“

  “Oh, goodness!” Alice lamented. “What IS it all about?”

  “It’s about this,” said Mrs. Adams, swallowing. “You and Walter are a new generation and you ought to have the same as the rest of the new generation get. Poor Walter—asking you to go to th
e movies and a Chinese restaurant: the best he had to offer! Don’t you suppose I see how the poor boy is deteriorating? Don’t you suppose I know what YOU have to go through, Alice? And when I think of that man upstairs–-” The agitated voice grew louder. “When I think of him and know that nothing in the world but his STUBBORNNESS keeps my children from having all they want and what they OUGHT to have, do you suppose I’m going to hold myself bound to keep to the absolute letter of a silly promise he got from me by behaving like a crazy man? I can’t! I can’t do it! No mother could sit by and see him lock up a horn of plenty like that in his closet when the children were starving!”

  “Oh, goodness, goodness me!” Alice protested. “We aren’t precisely ‘starving,’ are we?”

  Mrs. Adams began to weep. “It’s just the same. Didn’t I see how flushed and pretty you looked, this afternoon, after you’d been walking with this young man that’s come here? Do you suppose he’d LOOK at a girl like Mildred Palmer if you had what you ought to have? Do you suppose he’d be going into business with her father if YOUR father–-“

  “Good heavens, mama; you’re worse than Walter: I just barely know the man! DON’T be so absurd!”

  “Yes, I’m always ‘absurd,’ ” Mrs. Adams moaned. “All I can do is cry, while your father sits upstairs, and his horn of plenty–-“

  But Alice interrupted with a peal of desperate laughter. “Oh, that ‘horn of plenty!’ Do come down to earth, mama. How can you call a GLUE factory, that doesn’t exist except in your mind, a ‘horn of plenty’? Do let’s be a little rational!”

  “It COULD be a horn of plenty,” the tearful Mrs, Adams insisted. “It could! You don’t understand a thing about it.”

  “Well, I’m willing,” Alice said, with tired skepticism. “Make me understand, then. Where’d you ever get the idea?”

  Mrs. Adams withdrew her hands from the water, dried them on a towel, and then wiped her eyes with a handkerchief. “Your father could make a fortune if he wanted to,” she said, quietly. “At least, I don’t say a fortune, but anyhow a great deal more than he does make.”