Families and Survivors

by Alice Adams

  “You know what he really wants to do? You won’t tell anyone?”

  “No. What?”

  “He wants to join the Navy soon. Or maybe the merchant marine, and go all around the world. Don’t you think he looks eighteen?”

  “Sure. But suppose we get into the war?”

  “John doesn’t think we will.”

  “God, I certainly do.” Louisa is rubbing Noxema into her flawless (and unappreciated) skin.

  Kate’s magic lotion is Calomine, which gives her the look of a clown. “Well, he’s really fascinating to talk to,” she says.

  Having been braced for high romance with glimmerings of sex, Louisa finds this intellectual enthusiasm almost unbearable. God, this is probably the way Kate talks about her. Why does she need another friend?

  Heedless, Kate goes on: “I don’t see why boys can’t be friends with girls, do you? I mean without all that silly stuff, sex and all that. John asked me to go for a walk with him tomorrow.”

  “Oh, really?”

  Kate and John Jeffreys walk all through that spring, through warm pine woods where pink or white dogwood suddenly flowered, past the small waterfall that tumbled over dark smooth rocks with anemones in the crevices—down the stream lined with thick caves of blossoming honeysuckle, down to the swollen creek. They walk and they talk about everything that has ever been in either of their minds: books they have read, music (one of the things that John would like to be is a musician in a band), God, their parents, their friends, school, the future, the meaning of life. They are friends, with none of that silly stuff.

  And Louisa and Kate remain good friends, too, except that Kate understands that Louisa does not want to hear much about John. They see each other somewhat less, because of the time that John takes up with Kate. Left more to herself, Louisa writes more poetry; she does small intricate drawings of flowers.

  Then, one hot night in May, John and Kate, who have never on purpose touched each other, meet in a kiss, and everything changes. They have been to the movies, and they walk home. The night sky is dark blue, and hung with huge dim clouds, and dim white shrubbery blooms beside the highway, smelling thin and sweet. John and Kate loiter, idly talking. Then, in a grove of flowering quince, at the edge of Kate’s yard, they stop—stop walking and talking, too—and they look at each other. Simultaneously they move toward each other, and their closed mouths softly meet, and they stay together for incredible moments.

  Parting, they are speechless, out of breath. Their blood races.

  John says, “I don’t want to sound silly or anything, but I like you very much.”

  “John, I love you!”

  “I love you, too.”

  Another kiss. Kate feels her whole being focused in her mouth—nothing else of her exists, only her mouth that is pressed against John’s mouth.

  After that they kiss a lot. On their walks they stop in a stand of pines, and kiss. Certain places along their roads become landmarks: here we stopped (and now stop) to kiss. Beside a grapevine swing, near the waterfall—at a blind bend on the road to Morgan’s Bend. (Later, when her heart is broken, Kate will go back to those places by herself, making desperate magic wishes.)

  “Louisa, I really should tell you something important: John and I are madly in love with each other.”

  “Oh, really?” But Louisa is interested; she sees mad love as a change for the better.

  It is another hot night. The two girls are sitting on the edge of Louisa’s pool again, but this time they are wearing their bathing suits (The night they discovered “sex appeal” was the last time they went in without suits—but why?)

  “When he kisses me—I just—I don’t know!” Kate exclaims, and she laughs a little breathlessly.

  “Is that all you do, just kiss?”

  “Well, yes. What do you mean?”

  “Don’t you want to—you know—go all the way?” Lacking words, Louisa made this last ironic, and now they both laugh.

  “God, I don’t know!” Kate gasps at what is almost a new idea.

  Louisa goes away for the summer to a girls’ camp in New Hampshire, while Jack and Caroline take a cruise to Mexico.

  The two girls write to each other often.

  Kate to Louisa: “It’s been so hot, hot hot and hotter, and the town is empty and dusty, and I miss you! John is at Myrtle Beach with his parents and I have no one to talk to at all, or walk or anything. Damn!”

  Louisa to Kate: “Camp is really boring this year. Everyone seems so young, but sailing is really quite a lot of fun.”

  Kate: “John is back, thank God! I have been thinking about something you asked me last spring, but you probably don’t remember. And Louisa, yesterday some of the girls and I were talking and we decided to start a Sub-Deb Club. You know, have meetings and give parties and we can invite boys. And we want you to be a member. Guess who won’t be invited to join, you get one guess. Hint hint—her initials are S. MacD.”

  Louisa: “Thank God, only two more weeks. Sub-Deb Club? Doesn’t that imply later being a deb? But okay, I’ll join. We’re all so bored here that some of us have put peroxide in our hair. Miss Welch is furious.”

  Kate’s parents, Jane and Charles Flickinger, are frantically stylish people, originally from Milwaukee. They both have small incomes from sources that they do not care to mention (a brewery, some cornfields in Iowa). From time to time, Charles works as a designer, and Jane collects and refinishes antiques. Charles designed their remodeled house in Hilton, the old Hemenway house. Where there had been a dank but not very deep cellar, he put in a “game room” that led out to a flagstone terrace. The bar is there, of course, and sometimes Jane and Charles entertain down there, with sophisticated after-dinner drinks made from dark liqueurs.

  Kate keeps her record collection in that room, and some of her books. Sometimes on rainy or even unbearably hot afternoons (the game room has kept some of the cellar’s cool), Louisa and Kate spend long hours down there, leafing through Jane Flickinger’s old New Yorkers or Vogues.

  In the first days of her friendship with John Jeffreys, sometimes they, too, spend hours in that room, talking and listening to records. And after they kiss and fall in love, Kate imagines that they will spend even more time there, alone, dancing together in the private dark, kissing on the broad soft corduroy-covered sofa.

  But after dancing for a while, slowly, pressed together (“Mood Indigo”), John pulls away from her, and he says, “Come on, how about a walk? We could go into Bowman’s for Cokes.”

  “There’re Cokes upstairs in the icebox.”

  “But it’s really pretty out. Come on.”

  Then, on an August night when John and Kate had planned to go to the movies, there comes a crashing thunderstorm. Sheets of water flail against the windows, and Kate’s parents call from a party twenty miles away to say that they’re staying overnight.

  “You’ll be all right, ducks?”

  “Of course. Have a good time.”

  John says, “Maybe I’d better go on home, then.”

  “In this rain? God, are you crazy? Come on, let’s go down and put on some records.”

  “In the Mood.”

  “Tuxedo Junction.”

  “Little Brown Jug.”

  “Flying Home.”

  John chooses these records; he puts them on, and they dance their own practiced, graceful jitterbug. Back and forth, toward and away from each other, twirling apart and then together again. But not very close together; the music is too fast for that. They clown around, burlesquing the steps and laughing a lot.

  Then, “God!” Kate cries out. “I’m exhausted. Can’t we have something soothing now?” And she flops onto the broad sofa. She throws off her shoes (brown sandals) and draws up bare smooth brown legs beneath her full red-and-white checked skirt.

  “Moonlight Serenade.”

  John comes and sits beside her.

  She lies back on the sofa. When John turns, he sees that her breasts have slipped sideways, so that the
hard nipples point out. He leans down to her and they kiss—for the first time horizontal.

  The kiss lasts and their bodies press together. Then Kate’s frantic whisper in his ear: “John, let’s take our clothes off and—do everything.”

  He pulls back violently, roughly, away from her. “You’re crazy, you don’t know what you’re saying—”

  “But I love you!”

  “Love—you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  (Of course he is right: how can she know anything about the wild instincts and the stronger repressions in a fifteen-year-old small-town Southern white Protestant boy in 1941? She only knows that his dark brown eyes are beautiful, knows the tender back of his neck as a place to kiss, and her body knows that they want each other.)

  Adjusting his clothes, John gets up and goes into the bathroom.

  Kate smooths her skirt and sits up. Fortunately she is better able to say what she feels than would a more repressed and emotionally convoluted girl (Louisa).

  “You make me feel awful,” she tells John when he comes back. “Like I’d said some terrible thing.”

  “No.” In control of himself now, he is still terribly conflicted. Wars rage in his mind, and in his blood. As an escape, he chooses Southern charm, a thing that all his life he has watched men do. “You Yankee girls are just too much for me,” he says.

  This is an old joke between them, but it is almost too appropriate for the present occasion, and Kate’s smile is a little wan.

  Outside the storm has passed, and John soon goes on home.

  Fall. First a long Indian summer of warm deep blue days and gently cool nights, succeeded by a brilliant October: the blue air electrified, and the leaves crimson and gold on oaks and maples and grapevines out in the woods, and blue smoke rising straight up from Negro cabins out in the country.

  Louisa has come home from camp with a deep New Hampshire tan and a white-blond streak in her hair, which seem to make her hazel eyes lighter, too; they are pale green against her dark skin.

  “Louisa’s got downright pretty,” some of the girls who have known her all her life (Snubby to Betty Sue) now say to each other.

  “She has always been very pretty,” says loyal Kate.

  The boys tease Louisa. “Hey, blondie—hey, dizzy blonde! Hey, Louisa, what’s your secret formula?”

  Louisa laughs and blushes and feigns annoyance. She is confused and exhilarated by so much attention.

  …

  The Sub-Deb Club meets at Kate’s house, in the game room (where she still sometimes comes with John, but not for long, and they don’t kiss there). The girls play records and drink Cokes and R.C.’s, and giggle and try to decide what to do with themselves.

  At last someone says, “This would be a terrific room for a party,” and they all seize on that. It becomes instantly apparent that a party is what they had wanted all along.

  After some discussion, rules are established: each girl will invite one and only one boy; therefore there will be no stags and no cutting in. Couples can double-break on each other, if anyone wants to do that. They will all chip in on the punch and cookies.

  Louisa stays on after the other girls go; she helps Kate carry bottles and crumby plates upstairs. Often left alone by her servantless and partygoing parents, Kate is very domestic; she made all the brownies for that meeting, and now she cleans up the kitchen until it is shining. (“Kate is going to make some man a marvelous wife,” her mother sometimes sighs.)

  They go back downstairs, and Kate puts on a record.

  “Deep Purple.”

  “The trouble is,” Louisa brings out, “I really don’t know who to ask.”

  Passionately thinking of John, who should have called her last night and did not, Kate still ponders her friend’s problem. “How about Richard?”

  “Richard Trowbridge? But I’ve known him all my life. He’d think I’d gone crazy.”

  “No. I think he likes you.”

  “But I’d feel so silly. Calling him up.”

  Kate muses. “Give it a while. It might somehow work out that you don’t have to call. Like sometime at school.” She looks out the back windows, past the terrace to a cluster of scarlet maples, young and very straight. “God, what a fall,” she says. “A real Thomas Wolfe October. ‘The singing and the gold’?”

  “Yes.” But Louisa is in one of her least poetic moods. “Wait till Snubby hears about the party.” And she laughs.

  Kate is right. One gaudy afternoon in late October, as Louisa is leaving school, walking down the wide front steps, Richard appears from nowhere at her side. “Hey, blondie, you walking home?”

  “Yes—”

  “Okay if I join you?”

  “Okay—sure.”

  “I need to stretch my legs before basketball season,” he somewhat unconvincingly explains, as though, since he lives in the opposite direction, his walking home with her required an explanation.

  In a rather desultory way they talk about school (how boring), the teachers (how stupid), and he tells her that when he is old enough to drive next year his parents are buying him a car, but he isn’t quite sure what kind he wants. “I was thinking about a little coupe with, you know, a rumble seat?”

  “Oh, they’re cute!” Louisa hears this uncharacteristic word (and tone) issue from her own lips, but she doesn’t pay much attention.

  Arrived at her house, they do not go inside; instead they walk slowly in a direction away from the house. Neither of them mentions the fact that as children they often played together here, and also at Richard’s house—children of friends, brought unwillingly together for the convenience of parents.

  “Do you ride much?” asks Richard as they pass the stable.

  “No, not really.”

  “Why not? Don’t you like to?”

  His tone is kindly, and she tells him the truth, but she tells it with art. “The truth is”—and she looks at him (artfully)—“actually I’m afraid of horses.”

  “Oh? I sort of like that.” He chuckles.

  “You do?”

  “Yes, I think it’s sort of nice, in a girl. I’d hate a really horsy girl.” He laughs.

  Arrived at the pool, they sit on the edge. Some yellow oak leaves have drifted down to the water; slowly they sail across the dark surface with no ripples.

  Offhandedly (very) Louisa says, “Oh, I don’t know if you’d want to come, but some of us have this club—”

  A new girl in school. A tiny, mouse-haired girl named Mary Beth Williamson, from South Carolina. She seems shy, she speaks almost inaudibly, in the longest drawl, and her wide gray eyes look scared. She wears flouncy, tight-waisted dresses that have an old-fashioned look.

  “God, the poor little thing!” Kate says.

  “I don’t know—I think she looks dishonest,” says Louisa quite unreasonably.

  “Louisa, you are crazy.”

  “There are certain kinds of Southern-girl bitchiness that you still don’t understand,” says Louisa, in her superior way.

  “Well, I think she looks pitiful. I think we ought to ask her to join the club. Think what a blow that would be to Snubby,” she cleverly adds.

  Kate’s kind intentions and reasoning prevail; even Louisa guiltily votes to let Mary Beth in.

  “You all are so nice!” says Mary Beth when told about the club and the forthcoming party. “But who-all would I ask? I don’t know any of these here boys.” (She drags out “boys” tenderly, adding several vowels.) She says, “Maybe I’ll just ask that little old Burton Knowles. He’s the one closest to my size.” And she giggles softly (and Louisa thinks: Uh-huh).

  “Burton’s very bright,” Louisa tells Mary Beth.

  “I always did like smart boys.”

  Mary Beth at the party is something of a surprise. A pink angora sweater, cinched in at the waist with a wide patent belt, and pink lipstick (the other girls don’t wear lipstick yet) combine to make her look a great deal less mousy.

  Louisa is getting along
well with Richard. On the way to the party, in the back seat of his father’s Buick, he took her hand and held it. That touch mysteriously stirred her, so that she is still excited, and she laughs a lot.

  And how nice it is to have no stags at the dance—no extra boys to smile at, hoping that they’ll cut in.

  “There’s a French song called ‘Auprès de ma blonde,’ ” Richard tells Louisa. “My mother has it on a record. But I won’t tell you the rest of it.” He laughs.

  “Why not?” She laughs, too, looking up at him, at his blond head near hers.

  “Oh, maybe sometime, My blonde. I like that,” he says. “The way it sounds.”

  Of course he isn’t stupid!

  Louisa watches John and Kate double-break on Burton Knowles and Mary Beth. (Whose idea was that—kindly Kate’s or John’s?) She watches as John begins to dance with Mary Beth, spinning her out on the floor. Louisa watches John watching Mary Beth, and she knows when she last saw that look on John’s face, that amused curiosity: at last year’s dance, John watching Kate.

  As the dance ends, John’s hands clasp Mary Beth’s small waist, easily spanning it, and Louisa hears him say, “Aren’t you afraid you’ll break off in two pieces?”

  (God, and she used to think John was intelligent!)

  The wide scared-rabbit eyes. “No, I’m not scared. Not scared of breaking, anyway.”

  Because Louisa and Kate live so close to each other, Richard walks Louisa home. Exhilarated, in the crisp and vibrant dark, they hurry along, still talking, still animated from the dance.

  “That room is really super,” Richard says. “I’d like to have a house with a room like that sometime, wouldn’t you?”

  Is he asking her to marry him? “Oh, yes!”

  (And later will he kiss her? Should she let him, or is it too soon? Does it count that she has known him a long time? These are good Sub-Deb questions, for which she has no answers.)

  “Who’s that new girl?” Richard asks.

  Warily: “Her name’s Mary Beth Williamson. She’s from South Carolina.”

  “How come she was there?”

  “Oh, Kate felt sorry for her, and thought she ought to be invited.”