Families and Survivors

by Alice Adams

  “Kate’s nice.”

  “Oh, yes, she’s really nice.” (They have both forgotten that last year Richard was madly in pursuit of Kate.)

  “But I don’t know about that Mary Beth,” says Richard. “Seems like she’s—she’s some sort of a type, you know?” Richard is a snob; by “a type” he means “common,” which is the word his mother would have used.

  “Oh, yes!” Louisa says. How could she ever have thought him stupid?

  Lights flood the huge sprawling Calloway house, but there is no one home.

  Louisa and Richard go around to the side of the house, and up the stairs to the porch.

  Actually the night is quite cold, but they don’t notice that. Stars flicker between the leaves of a giant oak that stands next to the porch.

  On the wide cushioned wicker sofa, Louisa and Richard sit several self-conscious inches apart. Still in the spirit of the party (although another mood is now upon them both), Richard laughs and turns to her and says, “You want to make a bet?”

  She is curious. “Sure.”

  “I’ll bet I can kiss you without touching you.”

  Softly, “Oh, really?”

  They turn to face each other. Their arms reach and clasp, their mouths meet. For a long time.

  “I guess I lost the bet,” says Richard, and they both laugh before kissing again.

  The following week, in which November begins, there is an unexpected heavy snow.

  Fall is over, and almost that easily everything has changed. Waking on Monday to a thick silent world of snow, and waking in love with Richard (since she loves to kiss him, she must be in love with him, mustn’t she? Of course she is), Louisa anticipates a beautiful, crystal walk to school through the snow. She telephones Kate, who sounds strange.

  “I’ve got a cold,” Kate explains. Then, hesitantly, “You might tell John that he could call during study hall if he wants to. I mean, I’m pretty much by myself.”

  At school, as though everyone were suddenly ten years younger, the boys lob snowballs at the girls, and the girls squeal and cover their eyes and ears with mittened hands. Louisa watches John throw a couple of snowballs at Mary Beth, whose useless mittens are white Angora (of course), a couple at Snubby, a couple at her—so he distributes his favors. Richard throws snowball after snowball at Louisa. “Hey, blondie, you’ve got snow all over your hair.”

  The lazy sound of his voice excites Louisa—she is in love!

  During study hall, she covertly starts a poem about Richard, about an autumn night. Stars. A breeze. But popular-song words get in the way. This is the story of a starry night. She crumples the paper and stares out the window at the shining snow, the brilliant icicles.

  On the way home that afternoon she stops off at Kate’s house. Kate in her dark blue robe, red hair pulled back, red nose. They go downstairs and put on some records.

  “Getting Sentimental Over You.”

  “Body and Soul.”

  “More Than You Know.”

  Kate laughs. “God,” she says, “no one would guess what’s on your mind.” But her voice is harsh (her cold?). “Did you get a chance to talk to John?”

  “Oh, God, I forgot.”

  “That’s okay. He’ll probably call tonight.”

  “Kate, I’m really sorry.”

  “It’s okay.” Kate looks curiously at her friend. “You really had a good time with Richard?”

  “Well, yes. A lot better than I thought.”

  “That’s terrific!” Then, instantly, Kate’s enthusiasm fades. “But boys are really funny, aren’t they?”

  Tentatively: “How do you mean?”

  “Oh, I don’t know.”

  That night Richard telephones Louisa. Some of the boys have decided to have a sort of sledding party on Friday night, he says. They’ll coast all over the golf course which is notorious for its hills. Could she come—with him?

  Of course, she’d love to.

  A pause, and then his voice, softly, “I wish Friday night was right now, do you?”

  “Oh, yes!”

  On Wednesday another fall of snow has deepened the roadside banks, and Kate is still not back at school. In the afternoon Louisa stops off at her house. Kate answers the door, and Louisa has a curious sense that she is both cured of her cold and seriously ill (of what?). And Kate says, “I’m okay, I just didn’t feel like going to school.” Then her eyes fill with tears and she says, “Come on, let’s go downstairs.”

  But when they sit down to talk, Kate’s tears are gone, and angrily she says, “Well, I really made an ass of myself that time. I called John and said I wanted to see him; would he come over? Was that such a terrible thing to do? Well, I guess it was.”

  John, with the furtive look of a man accused by a woman, came to see her. Yesterday afternoon. At first he said he didn’t know what she was talking about. Nothing had changed. He had been busy. The snow. Basketball practice. But then he reversed himself and made a speech that sounded long-prepared. They had been getting too serious about each other, for people their age, he said. Of course he still liked her, she was a terrific girl, but shouldn’t they both see other people—sometimes?

  “God,” Kate says to Louisa. “I couldn’t believe it was John, saying all that dumb stuff. John is so intelligent. He sounded like something out of some dumb advice column. Like a Sub-Deb column.” She laughs harshly.

  Kate’s anger makes it harder for Louisa to respond; in her own heightened emotional state she could more readily answer sorrow—she was prepared to weep with Kate. Weakly she says, “That’s too bad.”

  Of course it doesn’t really matter what Louisa says or does not say.

  Kate goes on. “I had this terrible feeling that I was too much for him, you know? And now he’s made me feel all heavy and serious, when we had so much fun.”

  “God, I’m really sorry.”

  “Obviously what he means is that he wants to see that drippy little Mary Beth. You were so right about her.”

  “I guess.” But Louisa is becoming impatient; she wants to be alone, and tosavor her own love affair.

  “I really feel lousy,” Kate says. “Honestly, maybe you’d better go. My cold must be coming back or something.”

  By Friday, even more snow has fallen on the town (miraculously, for so early in November)—on the golf course, everywhere. And Louisa is well embarked on what is to be a lifetime occupation, or preoccupation: the enshrouding of any man at all in veils and layers of her own complexity, so that the love object himself is nearly lost. Who is Richard? By the time he comes to her door, blond and smiling and happy to see her, he is also innumerable other people, with whom she has imaginatively acted out a hundred passionate episodes.

  (It is the following spring, and a new girl has come to school, a more voluptuous Mary Beth, and Richard suddenly abandons Louisa, just as John has left Kate. It is five years later and she and Richard get married. This country gets into the war and Richard is killed. It is many years later, at a party in New York: Louisa is a famous poet-painter-actress and Richard comes up to her at a party and asks if she remembers him. It is any time at all and she and Richard make love in some warm and dark and very private place.)

  Since the country club and golf course border Jack Calloway’s land, Louisa and Richard walk along the narrow shoveled path, between high banks of snow, in the starry crystal dark. As soon as they are out of sight of her parents’ house, he takes her hand and they walk silently, until Richard says, “You know, something funny came up. John told me he’s bringing along that Mary Beth tonight.”

  Louisa’s heart sickens and shrinks, but loyalty prompts her to make as little of this as possible. “Well, Kate’s still home with her cold,” she tells him.

  “She is? Well, that’s different. I guess.”

  Thus, from the beginning, her knowledge of Kate’s pain adds a melancholy depth to Louisa’s love affair, or perhaps Kate’s suffering touches an important chord already present in Louisa. A few minutes later,
when Richard stops at a bend in the path and they kiss, some part of Louisa feels a thrill of pain, and she thinks of Kate and John, who also kissed, perhaps at that very bend, before the snow.

  “God,” Richard says. “You’re fun to kiss.”

  She dimly feels that this is not quite what he should have said, but at that moment his presence is stronger, more powerful, than the dark workings of her own mind.

  In the distance, then, they see the pillared, well-lit country club, and the white smooth undulations of the golf course, the bluish snow. Their friends are there with sleds, all gathered near the club’s front steps. Mary Beth with John, Snubby with someone tall but indistinguishable. Other couples.

  Tightening his grip on her hand, Richard says, “God, this should really be fun.”

  “Oh, yes!” Louisa says.

  Two / 1945

  Now Louisa’s father is in Virginia; he is in a sanatorium, being treated with electric shock for a depression. She is not; she is in Cambridge with Norm Goldman, on a corduroy sofa. They have just fallen in love. She has been crying because she is upset about her father’s shock treatment, which her mother has just written a long letter to tell her about. So far (she and Norm do not know each other very well), he finds her tears both touching and attractive. “It really upsets you, doesn’t it,” he says, and he strokes her long just-curled brown hair.

  Norm is the first of a series of those very intelligent, affectionate, and mildly but interestingly evasive Jewish boys who imagine that being gentile makes Louisa stronger than their mothers (she eventually marries Michael, to whom Norman introduces her—Michael with the worst of all possible mothers); they imagine that she will protect them with her Episcopal magic.

  They are in Cambridge; it is April, 1945. Norm’s room in Lowell House, at Harvard. A soft April by the Charles heightened by tremors from the war. Norm’s touch is soft. He is a thin, dark boy, in khaki pants and a crisp seersucker coat. He is 4-F because of a bad ear. He has taken off his tie, and some thin black hair shows at his neck. He wears horn-rimmed glasses. The curtains on his window are in five shades of gray, light to dark, and there are reproductions of Cézanne, Dufy, and Klee on his walls. He is studying architecture at the School of Design. He is right; the idea of her father having shock treatment upsets Louisa very much, although she is not sure what electric shock is.

  And she is not sure why she is so upset; she would have said that she did not like her father, Jack, who owns vast acres of tobacco fields, who drinks too much and makes loud awful jokes about Jews and Negroes and Yankees. She does not remember liking him at all since she was very young and he taught her to swim, one summer at Virginia Beach, before they built the pool at home. She wonders if it is an idea, the idea called Father, that moves her to tears. (She does not like her mother much, either, not yet—poor languid Caroline.)

  She has stopped crying and she and Norm begin to kiss. His mouth tastes of tobacco.

  Norm believes that Louisa is what she presents herself as: a pretty, tall girl, walking across the Yard in loafers and white athletic socks, a pleated gray flannel skirt and a large pink sweater, pearls—a girl who laughs a lot, who knows a lot of people and says “Hi” as she walks from Widener to Emerson Hall, where he is waiting before the class on the English lyric, 4-B. He does not know that she is really in love with the professor, himself a poet, a tall blond man in very English clothes, an English voice. The professor reminds Louisa a great deal of her father’s psychiatrist, Kenneth Mills, a great family friend.

  One night (also at Virginia Beach) Louisa went swimming alone with the psychiatrist. (Who on earth allowed that? A nubile eighteen-year-old girl and a forty-one-year-old thickening man.) And in the hot black night, on the hard sand, she revealed to him (since he was a psychiatrist) what was ruining her with guilt and confusion: she had been making love (is that the word she used?—no matter) with a young doctor in Boston, an intern at Mass. General, whom she thinks does not really like her very much, certainly is not in love with her. With that confession she and the doctor fell upon each other wildly. Their passion was not consummated, so to speak, that night—in fact, not until much later (during, in fact, her love affair with Norm Goldman), when he (the psychiatrist) came to Boston and in his room at the Ritz there was a violent hurried collision of their flesh, if anyone calls that a consummation—hurried because he expected his wife back from shopping, and she did come back, just after his zipping up and Louisa’s smoothing down of clothes. The wife and Louisa never liked each other, but they were strongly linked as enemies. “Hey, there, Louisa, you’re looking mighty pretty. You young girls are so cute without any lipstick. I could never get away with it—not that I’d want to try.”

  Norm knows none of this, not about the intern and certainly not about her father’s psychiatrist. In fact, he thinks she is a virgin, and all spring they go on necking on his sofa, squirming against each other. Once, during a Fête Charrette for architectural students at which they got drunk, they necked for a long time on the back steps of the Fogg Museum. Now near the steps of Emerson they hold hands, in the April sun, in front of everyone. Norm says, “How about tonight? Want to catch a flick?”

  “I’m really sorry. I promised to have dinner with some people from home. My father’s doctor, in fact.”

  “Oh.” He wonders: is she not asking him along because he is Jewish?

  “At least I’ll find out how he is—my father,” she says, meaning that it is to be a private conversation. “His wife is awful. A real Southern bitch.”

  Louisa has reason to believe that her father is having an affair (unconsummated?) with the wife. She wonders: Is she upset about his shock treatments?

  At dinner, in the big white Ritz dining room, they do not talk much about Louisa’s father. In those elegant surroundings the subject suddenly seems tasteless. Also (and with good reason) they are all too nervous with each other for intimate conversation. Once the wife says, “I do think your daddy’s getting a whole lot better.” The doctor murmurs but does not comment; after all, he is the one who has sent Jack to the sanatorium for shock. They ask Louisa how she likes school, and how she likes living up here among all these Yankees. She answers, more or less, but by now she is thinking about Norm.

  (Much later, in San Francisco, she tries to tell her own doctor about all this, but it becomes literary. “It’s all so Southern, right out of Faulkner, all this incest stuff. Screwing my father’s psychiatrist instead of him. Jews instead of Negroes, do you suppose?” By then Louisa is having an affair with a white Southern bigot, betraying her husband, good Michael, and her daughter Maude for a man whom in most ways she loathes. She does not tell her doctor about that man. The doctor is a liberal.)

  Louisa’s mother is an intellectual, of sorts. Caroline. She explains in her long typed letters that shock treatment is a great help to her father, that he even asks for it. “It alleviates some of that awful Presbyterian guilt,” she tells Louisa. (She is an Episcopalian who secretly believes that she has married beneath her.) She is usually quite depressed herself, is Caroline, what with one thing and another. Louisa has reason to believe that her mother has a sort of crush on the psychiatrist. But Louisa’s father is the one who is getting the shocks. After he has been in Boston, Louisa telephones the doctor, weeping with despair and what she calls love, across all those miles, and he tries to explain to her what electric shock is. Electrodes are placed. Convulsions. Her father asks for this? Jack?

  One afternoon in Cambridge some old friends come to see Norm: Michael Wasserman and his girl. Michael is blond, with a broad Slavic face and a wide loose mouth. The girl is small and dark, voluptuous, assured. It is clear that they are sleeping together—they are having an affair; this fact, and their contrasting looks, makes them strongly attractive to Louisa. Michael says “fuck” a lot (as though he were very sexy) and this, too, seems exotic; it is not a word that Norm would use, and God knows not any of the nice Southern boys at home.

  Michael talks a great
deal about his parents. (Such a bad sign! Later Louisa recognizes how much was contained in that first meeting.)

  “My mother went up to the attic where I was supposedly sleeping,” Michael says. “With blankets or some goddam thing. Actually she’s very prurient. And guess what? I’m not there. Her logical conclusion was that I was in my own room, where my house guest was supposedly sleeping.” He laughs, and the girl smiles self-consciously: she is not quite assured enough for this intimate exposure.

  “I guess I’m not supposed to get laid at home,” says Michael, with satisfaction (smiling his false-sexy smile).

  “Get laid” is another new phrase.

  Louisa thinks he is interesting.

  Michael likes her, too. “Did anyone ever tell you that you’ve got terrifically sexy legs?” he asks.

  As a matter of fact, no one has.

  (In San Francisco, later, she and her own psychiatrist also wonder if she would have been “happier” if she had married Norm Goldman. But she at least knows that she is too crazy to be married to anyone, except of course to her analyst. If he loved her, all her problems would be solved; that would prove that she is not crazy. As it is, she amuses him with the Yiddish words that she has learned over the years—why is it always so funny for non-Jews to speak Yiddish?—and with what he takes to be jokes. When he asked why she thought she needed analysis, she said because she hated her father and she thought about hating him all the time. He asked why, and she said she supposed because she was in love with him. He laughed, reassuring them both that Louisa is not insane, making them both think the doctor can help her. If he knew how really crazy she is, he would not like her at all.)

  “Michael liked you a lot,” Norman tells her.

  “Oh, really?” Cool Louisa.

  “Yes, I could tell. I’ll bet he calls you.”

  (Why should she be upset about her father being shocked? Why again and again? He is a manic-depressive; her mother has explained that it is cyclic.)