Families and Survivors

by Alice Adams

  Three / 1947

  “Jews are not welcome there,” says Mrs. Wasserman, Michael’s mother and Louisa’s mother-in-law to be, with one of her massively self-pitying sighs. She is speaking of a resort in New Hampshire which one of her two non-Jewish guests has just mentioned—guests, actually, of her two sons. Since this is in the mid-forties, her sentence has nightmare echoes of Hitler and Nazi camps, as she has intended that it should. Also, everyone is embarrassed.

  And her remark has other, unintended results. Barbara Spaulding, the guest of Mrs. Wasserman’s thin, elegant, and homosexual son Martin, is confirmed in the prevailing, if fairly gentle, distaste for Jews of her social class, which is fringe-upper. Barbara is blond and stylish. “Wasserman,” such an ugly name with its suggestion of urine specimens, and Mrs. Wasserman’s considerable ugliness, and the bad dinner which Barbara is being served (a dinner lavishly praised by the family) all combine with that embarrassing remark to make her acutely uncomfortable. Much later in life, when her style has rather hardened, Barbara will be known to say, “Unfortunately the first Jews I ever met were horrible. Absolutely revolting people, gross, except for Martin. I certainly can’t blame him for changing that name, poor thing.”

  Chewing at her overdone roast beef, Barbara tries not to look accusingly at Martin. She is married; her husband, Eliot, is overseas in the Navy. She has some money and a small apartment on the wrong side of Beacon Hill, and not much to do. Idle and lonely, she has chosen to take some courses at the Fogg Museum, at Harvard, where Martin is working. Martin—aesthetic, and safe—is a satisfactory friend, as she is for him. They share a taste for Henry James over innumerable cups of coffee at St. Clair’s, and in nice weather they bicycle around Cambridge. In speaking of his family Martin has emphasized their Russian rather than their Jewish character; Barbara has imagined a rather gentle, Turgenev atmosphere, with backgrounds of pleasant music, and a pervasive tone of warmth and generosity, and perhaps an interestingly exotic taste as to décor. And of course exceptional food. At that instant in her life Barbara welcomes novelty; she is to become more rigid in her tastes.

  The other guest is pale dark Louisa Calloway, who has mentioned the resort and who now blushes terribly and decides that somehow she must become Jewish; she must marry Michael, the fat asthmatic son with whom she has been quarreling all afternoon. She wants to bear that name. Also, in her confusion, she thinks that if Michael would love her enough to marry her, he would be less critical of her, and that his acceptance will somehow erase those defects he perpetually criticizes: her tastes in books and music and movies, her clothes, her small breasts.

  “My wife has always been an exceptional cook,” says Mr. Wasserman in his courtly way to Barbara, whose perfectly stitched shoes and trim ankles he appreciates.

  “Well, anyway, it’s not at all nice there,” babbles Louisa, of the New Hampshire resort. “The lake is shallow and icky on the bottom. We had an awful time there. I wouldn’t want to go back.”

  “Michael, do me a favor—have some more peas,” says Michael’s mother. She is informed by her instincts that Louisa is dangerous but that if sufficiently ignored she will dissolve, which in time turns out to be quite true: Louisa dissolves into colitis. Mrs. Wasserman is a stupid, childish, completely selfish, and very powerful woman. Her ugliness accuses everyone: her big bulbous nose and small stingy mouth, her pigeon-fat body, her impossible thinning gray hair. She even has a wandering left eye, inherited by her elder son, by Martin, who otherwise ironically resembles his masculine father.

  But Michael has turned on Louisa. “Then why were you just saying you wanted to go there?” he asks. He is at M.I.T., studying psychology. He has an excellent, if somewhat laborious, intelligence. He is extremely ambivalent about Louisa, almost as ambivalent as she is about herself.

  “I just said the name—it just came to me.” She defends herself in her smallest voice. Her instincts impossibly war; she wants to hit Michael in the face, to run away by herself and cry; she wants to be loved by and married to Michael, and accepted as a Jew by all Jews.

  In contrast to Barbara, Louisa at this period dresses badly. To conceal, she hopes, inadequate breasts, she buys too large clothes. Tonight she wears a shapeless blue wool that is particularly bad in that pale blue dining room.

  Another family myth, along with that of the great cooking, is the myth of Mrs. Wasserman’s marvelous “taste.” Martin has sustained her in this, as in most things, with an effort far more than he can afford. “She used to do some really nice little watercolors,” he has told Barbara, who now looks rather snobbishly around that dreary room. A kinder judgment than hers would have described it as understated. All the furniture is good but none of it superior—those cautious English reproduction antiques—and Barbara has grown up in a family collection of real American antiques. Carefully framed Piranesi prints ornament the walls. On the sideboard are two large silver (reproduction) Paul Revere bowls and a cut-glass decanter that is never used. (Barbara’s grandmother has an original Revere pewter bowl, which Barbara is to inherit.) “Handsome” is the favorite family word for describing approved objects. Martin and his mother shop together. “Mm, they’re handsome,” they murmur of the Federal sconces in an antique-store window.

  Michael’s version of his mother is that she is “earthy.” “It’s her saving grace,” he has told Louisa, who knows that she herself is not earthy. “She really likes a good dirty joke, you know? She really gets it.” Michael underlines words in order to take possession of them, to insure that they take on his and only his sense of them. Thus his mother’s “getting” dirty jokes becomes a unique act.

  Now Mrs. Wasserman gives what Louisa supposes to be her earthy laugh. “Martin had a good time one summer at a camp in New Hampshire, didn’t you, Marty?”

  Both sons laugh, Martin nervously, with a sort of giggle, and Michael with his usual high wheezing cackle.

  “Sarah!” says Mr. Wasserman.

  Laughter subsides slowly, Mrs. Wasserman’s last. She wipes a tear of laughter from one fat cheek, and sighs again.

  Louisa has been told in some detail about the summer when Martin was seduced by a counselor at a camp in New Hampshire; Michael finds his brother’s homosexuality an absorbing topic. But Louisa has not been told that it is a family joke, and she is not quite sure how to react. She smiles weakly and earns a look of violent reproof from Mr. Wasserman, who turns again to Barbara.

  “It must be hard for you, Mrs. Spaulding,” he says in his mellifluous Edwardian voice that almost disguises his innate authoritarianism, as well as his furtive lusts. “Living all alone, with your husband overseas.”

  Confronted with Martin’s homosexuality (Martin, in a fit of exhibitionistic despair, had once brought a sailor home to bed), Mr. Wasserman had said, “I understand from your mother that you are homosexual. In that case I expect you to be continent.” Thus he Edwardianly removed himself from the situation—his wife, not he, had made the discovery—and from his son. He likes to read lurid detective magazines but he always tears the covers off.

  Coldly Barbara says what they all know, that she is studying at the Fogg, and everyone, including Mr. Wasserman, respects her the more for her hauteur.

  “I’m writing my thesis on T. S. Eliot,” Louisa—unasked—announces. “It’s really exciting. I’m almost done.”

  “T. S. Eliot is an anti-Semite,” says Mrs. Wasserman, who passes as an intellectual among her friends, as well as in her family.

  “Well, yes, but not in all the poems, and he is sort of a great poet anyway, sort of,” says Louisa. “Actually I wanted to write about Karl Shapiro but they wouldn’t let me.”

  “An anti-Semite and a great poet is a contradiction in terms,” states Mr. Wasserman.

  “Now, Daddy,” wheezes Michael. “Most people think that Pound is, and Cummings and Yeats. Don’t you have to make a dichotomy—or, rather, an affective—not effective, affective—distinction between—”

  “No,” says his father.r />
  The Irish maid comes in to clear and to bring the dessert. Traditionally the family does not talk when she is in the room, partly because anti-Catholicism is a staple of conversation: to be anti-Catholic is to be “liberal” and intellectual. And also they regard her as a somewhat retarded child; they speak to her as one would to a child. “Now, Nellie, you help yourself to some of that roast beef—take all you want!” proffers Nellie’s mistress.

  “No, mum, I’m not hungry,” sniffs Nellie, who hates the food served in this house.

  Martin’s acute sensibilities exaggerate everything, rather like those of Henry James. Now he imagines that Barbara is having a worse time and reacting much more negatively than she actually is, and for this he is furious at her: how dare she judge his mother? What did she expect, the Princess Casamassima? And, if it came to that, she isn’t always so perfectly elegant herself, Mrs. Spaulding from the wrong side of Beacon Hill. He gives her furious looks, his wild eye wandering like his mother’s.

  Michael has been enormously interested in his own reactions to Louisa’s argument with his parents over Mr. Eliot. He is always very interested in how he feels about things; for this he is studying psychology. He masturbates a great deal. He now finds himself very much wanting Louisa to defy them further, and to win. He considers this, running it back and forth, wondering what to make of it. In any case he recognizes that he is very pleased with Louisa. He reaches beneath the table for her leg, so that she jumps and flushes.

  Mrs. Wasserman sees everything. “Michael, you’re hurting Louisa’s leg.” It has never once in her life occurred to her not to say what comes into her mind.

  Louisa in a tiny voice says, “No, he’s not.”

  “Well, if you like it, do it somewhere else,” triumphantly brings out Mrs. Wasserman, with her earthy “saving” laugh.

  Dessert, at least, is extremely good. Pale crisp delicately fashioned blintzes with sour cream and strawberry jam. This time everyone is enthusiastic but Mrs. Wasserman, who takes tiny critical bites from her fork. “They’re just not right,” she sighs.

  “Now, Sarah,” says her husband.

  Barbara looks with considerable sympathy at Louisa—not, one hopes, because Louisa is the only other gentile in the room, Nellie having disappeared. Louisa could have been beautiful if she had only known who she was, and it is at this shadow of beauty that Barbara looks. She imagines Louisa with shorter hair, a little dark pencil on her eyelids, a pale green silk dress.

  Mr. Wasserman clears his throat in a jovial way; he is about to announce an amusing occurrence. “Well,” he says, “Abrams’s wife called in to say that he’s having a nervous collapse.” He laughs. “One more.”

  Both guests look puzzled and smile faintly at each other as the family joins his laughter; was this funny?

  Laughing richly, Mrs. Wasserman explains. Her husband is head of a large electrical contracting firm. They hire bright young men fresh out of M.I.T., many of whom have nervous breakdowns or lapse into alcoholism. This seems, to the family, a judgment on M.I.T. It is an ancient family joke, unquestionably funny.

  “Anyway,” concludes Mrs. Wasserman, “I always did think Max Abrams was sort of kikey.”

  That word sends a literal and violent shock down all Louisa’s nerves, so that she cries out, “Don’t!”

  Everyone looks at her.

  “How can you use that word?” she blazes out.

  Mrs. Wasserman sniffs. “It’s a perfectly good word to describe a certain kind of person,” she says, and she repeats the word.

  “I can’t bear that word!” Louisa gasps out. “How can you? When the most horrible people—when Hitler—”

  Michael is thrilled. Mistaking Louisa’s hysteria for strength, he imagines that she will ultimately protect him from his mother.

  And indeed Mrs. Wasserman is for the moment reduced to a mutter. “I know just as much about Hitler as certain people in this room.”

  Louisa subsides almost as quickly as she has flared. She sits silently, in panic, having glimpsed herself so out of control, having forgotten the cause. Her stomach clenches and her hands shake. She and Mrs. Wasserman avoid looking at each other for the rest of the meal.

  “These pancakes are absolutely divine,” says Barbara.

  “We call them blintzes,” sighs her hostess.

  That night, in Louisa’s furnished room, she and Michael rather breathlessly decide to get married, and immediately fall to discussing parental reactions.

  “God, mother will die!” gasps Michael.

  “And mine!”

  Also, that night, on Louisa’s lumpy brown couch, Michael fails utterly in the act of love.

  Enthusiastically she massages his flaccid member. To no avail.

  With truly maternal solicitude, he asks, “Do you feel very sexy?”

  Once more accused, Louisa bursts into tears.

  A few weeks later, over coffee at St. Clair’s, Martin tells Barbara that Michael and Louisa are married.

  “They simply did it,” he says. “We were presented with a fait accompli. I must say that Daddy behaved very handsomely. Took everyone out to Locke-Ober’s for dinner. Not that it was much fun. Naturally Louisa drank too much and got sick.” He makes a vivid sound of disgust.

  Barbara has reacted in a variety of ways to the story. Sketchy as it is, his description has forced her presence at a scene that she finds very unattractive. Distaste makes her withdraw from Martin; she looks hopefully about the restaurant. There might always be someone she knows. Her eyes search among the pretty girls, the good-looking officers who are not Eliot.

  Martin’s wild need for affection and approval has produced in him a sort of talent; he is not only acutely sensitive to others’ reactions, but he is also able to beautifully recreate people for themselves; he gives them his version of their persons as presents. Now, sensing Barbara’s distaste, he has the sensitivity not to pursue her. He also senses what she herself is not quite aware of: that she misses Eliot too much to be able to hear of any other love affair or marriage, even a sordid one like Michael’s and Louisa’s. The very gaudiness of postwar Cambridge is making her lonely.

  So, after a little interval of quiet, he says, “You know, you really ought to have some pictures made to send to Eliot. That suit is really smashing on you. Why don’t you call John Brook?”

  He does not normally resort to such obvious ruses, but along with his parents he has been very upset about Michael and Louisa. Evenings at home are passed in heavy gloom, among ponderous sighs and dark predictions.

  Also, Martin is being blackmailed by a cabdriver whom he has tried to make on the way home from a movie. Martin hates fags; he likes big brutal men—bullies (reminiscent of his father, he later understands). Blackmail is something he has always expected; it is in the cards. But now he does not know what to do about these threats, in very clear and ugly scrawls. Threats to tell the Boston cops, who do not like Jews, or homosexuals.

  Returned to him, Barbara smiles, narrowing hazel eyes, showing perfect, if rather large, teeth.

  And that for the moment is all she hears about the marriage.

  “You know what would be fun?” says Martin. “Let’s bike out to Mt. Auburn Cemetery and find Henry James’s tomb. He is there, isn’t he?”

  Then, a few weeks later, quite by accident and God knows unwelcomely, Barbara overhears a conversation—or, rather, a confrontation—between Michael Wasserman and his mother. Barbara is in the poetry corner of the Harvard Co-op; they are behind her, looking at fiction.

  “With no rubbers!” says Mrs. Wasserman, evidently by way of greeting to her son.

  “It wasn’t raining when I went out this morning.” But Michael coughs, as though to agree that she was right, after all; he did need rubbers.

  “Michael, I’m telling you, from now on if you don’t take care of yourself no one else will.”

  This heavy innuendo could be a description of Louisa; the “no one,” at least for Barbara, conjures up that sad pale pre
sence. Unwilling to hear more of what seems to her extremely low comedy, she turns around.

  She is recognized with enthusiasm, perhaps relief, by Michael—with reluctance by his mother.

  “You look terrific!” Michael enthuses.

  “It’s nice to see you again,” sniffs Mrs. Wasserman, and then, to her son, “Don’t you think this new edition of James Henry stories would be a handsome gift for Martin’s birthday?”

  “Mother, it’s Henry James.”

  “James Henry, Henry James—” She makes it clear that she prefers the former combination. Then, “Handsome,” she repeats, fingering the leather binding.

  She is wearing a black seal coat that Barbara recognizes as being very expensive. But her hair is barely pulled together with big ugly gray pins, her fingernails are dirty and cracked, and there is no powder on her nose. Her unmitigated ugliness is felt as a hostile assault (by Barbara). If she had made the slightest effort—combed her hair, for example—her terrible face might have elicited some compassion.

  Boldly Barbara congratulates Michael on his marriage.

  “Thanks!” he says vehemently. “And we have a great new apartment. You’ve got to come up and see it. Say, how about now? Some coffee?”

  He is urgent, and uncharacteristically Barbara is carried along, perhaps partly out of a feeling that she is needed as a buffer.

  Mrs. Wasserman refuses to come. “No, I have to be getting on home. Nellie needs me,” she says, achieving another loaded innuendo: Nellie needs her even if no one else does.

  “Oh, Mother, come on. You haven’t been up since Louisa put up the curtains.”

  “I’ll come another time. Maybe when Louisa invites me.” She laughs with no humor whatsoever.

  “Oh, Mother.”

  “Sunday dinner. You’ll remember to come?”

  And she is gone, leaving most of the weight of her presence behind her, leaving Barbara and Michael to plod along gray crowded rainy Brattle Street together.

  Separated from his mother, Michael can be quite articulate about her deficiencies of character. “She’s really been appalling about Louisa,” he confides. “Do you know what she said? She said to Louisa, ‘We’ve tried to love you,’ ” and he perfectly imitates his mother’s self-pitying tone, her massive ensuing sigh. “Tried to love her,” he repeats. “Can you imagine anything worse? To try to love?”