Families and Survivors

by Alice Adams

  Kate says, “God, what a marvelous smell! I never get enough garlic.”

  Louisa laughs with affection. “Kate, you sound so exactly like yourself,” she says.

  Michael brings in a bottle of bourbon. “I’m afraid this is all we have,” he beams.

  “Marvelous—I’m dying for a drink.” Kate doesn’t like bourbon, but she thinks that perhaps this is just as well; she will drink less.

  “You came down by train?” Michael asks, making it sound interesting. “How was it? We always drive, when we go. The Bayshore is my idea of what hell must look like—actualized.”

  “Of course we almost never hear from my parents,” Louisa, who must have been thinking about this in the kitchen, comes in with glasses and ice and water.

  Knowing Jack Calloway, Kate can well imagine: a handsome, charming, ultra-Southern man (though not from a very “good” family), who daily rides one of his mares, who talks well, telling stories with a flourish, and who loves parties and pretty ladies and strong drink. He is occasionally hospitalized for what are called nervous breakdowns, and is given electric shock, which calms him down. It has never been clear how he feels about his daughter, but Kate can too easily imagine how he would feel about Louisa’s marriage. (Can that be partly why—Kate represses this half-formed question.)

  “Even when I was so sick in Boston—I had colitis,” Louisa says.

  “They gave her cortisone, which precipitated a psychotic break. It happens fairly often,” Michael gently explains.

  “Jack never wrote. Caroline did, but such cold guilty letters—rather literary letters, actually. But at least I got the money for an analysis out of them. Not that it’s doing any good.”

  “Now, honey—”

  “And I hate those drives to the city.”

  Wholly confused, Kate merely notes that Louisa has taken to referring to her parents by their first names—to remove herself from them?

  Michael laughs, but without much mirth. “It’s hard to tell what’s worse, the smothering attentions of my parents or the coldness of Louisa’s. But of course smothering is exactly what they would like to do to Louisa. I think they had a great deal to do with her breakdown.”

  “Well, what are David’s parents like?” Louisa asks, smiling but rather challenging.

  “Uh, actually they’re quite nice. They’re divorced, but they’ve both remarried and the new marriages seem to be working out.”

  “Maybe that’s the answer.” Michael laughs again.

  Louisa looks at him, stricken, so that he says, “Honey, of course I didn’t mean us,” and coming to stand behind her, pulling her back he kisses her.

  Louisa’s stomach is enormous. Kate tries (and fails) to imagine how that would be. A living child inside one? Instead she is struck with a pang of missing David, a pang that is vivid and sexual. “Louisa,” she says quickly, “what about your work—do you still write poems and draw? Louisa is the most talented person I’ve ever known,” Kate says, smiling to Michael.

  “It’s called ‘too many minor talents.’ ” Louisa laughs, wry and self-deprecating. “No, I got tired of all that. Besides, I have so little time.”

  “But that’s terrible—you did marvelous things.”

  “Marvelous for a thirteen-year-old, maybe. I’m afraid ‘precocious’ is the word.” She frowns. “When I was crazy, I wrote a lot of poems. Poetry is Caroline, Caroline crying. I won’t do that again.”

  Confused Kate tells her, “I still have the drawing you did of John.”

  “Really, you do?”

  “Of course; it’s a treasure. Every time I move, I’m careful to take it with me.”

  “I’ll make more drinks,” says Michael, and he does.

  “I wonder where John is,” Louisa says. “I think Caroline wrote that he married some fabulous New York beauty, an heiress or a model or something. John would marry someone mythic.”

  The two girls laugh, almost easily.

  “The boy who broke my heart,” Kate says. “God, how serious I was. But you know, that was a very bad thing for me. I did suffer.”

  “Really?” Louisa looks at her curiously. It is hard for her to believe that her attractive friend has been scarred—or perhaps she is too concentrated on her own scarring. Looking at Michael, she says that she had better see about dinner.

  The quality of their connection, Michael’s with Louisa, is still quite obscure to Kate. She sees only that it is very unlike hers with David, and she thinks: David and I are noisier and more open, but then Louisa has always been more complicated than I am. She has a dim sense that Michael is controlling Louisa in some subtle way, although on the surface he is agreeable, somewhat passive.

  They have dinner on the square maple table. Michael eats ravenously, breaking and buttering his bread while Louisa serves the coq au vin, and rice.

  “Louisa, how marvelous this is,” Kate says. “And the rice!”

  “I have some sort of atavistic thing with rice,” Louisa says.

  “My mother is an appalling cook,” says Michael, “but she’s somehow perpetrated a myth that she’s terrific. God, the years of dry roast chicken and overdone beef, and everyone sitting around saying how great it is.”

  This speech makes Kate uncomfortable; she is not sure why. She says, “I like to cook,” hoping for a change of subject. And she adds, “I’m not terribly good—yet.”

  But Michael goes on. “And she sends me clothes, embarrassing big packages from Brooks. God! My brother still lives at home—of course he’s gay.”

  This is an unfamiliar word to Kate, but she senses what he must mean, and does not want to hear about it. She turns to Louisa, and speaks in her old forthright way. “But I think you should go on doing those things you used to do. You were good—everyone thought so, and I know you were.”

  “Louisa is very ambivalent about what might be intellectual competition.” Michael explains. “She’s afraid I might slap her down, the way her father always did. Isn’t that true, honey?”

  Louisa sounds tired. “I suppose so,” she says. “Or afraid I wouldn’t do anything really good. I think it’s more that.”

  A terrible sense of strangeness suddenly overwhelms Kate; what is she doing there with those two people? She feels lonely, lost, with her old friend who has become a mumbling stranger. (Louisa is still in some way very sick. Miserable. Her eyes are desperate.) Why are she and Louisa here at all, thousands of miles from home? Why this husband, this Michael, whose heavy presence dominates the room?

  But then the doorbell rings, and Michael gets up to let other people in.

  A couple, young and good-looking, obviously “Eastern” in their style. Kate is at least momentarily reassured; she sees these people as landmarks. Sally and Andrew Chapin. Sally is hugely pregnant with their third child. Andrew is a graduate student in English; he has just got a new book by Lionel Trilling, which has several essays on Freud, on psychoanalysis, and he wonders what Michael thinks about it.

  Michael hasn’t seen the Trilling book, but he says what he imagines it will be like; he uses words like “eclectic” and “neo-”(attached to a variety of names). Andrew and Louisa both listen to this as though it were extraordinary stuff, and for all Kate knows it is.

  But then, as she listens (or half listens) to the two men, a sort of bell sounds in Kate’s mind, and she repeats the name: “Andrew Chapin?”

  Interrupted, they both turn to her—both with (dissimilar) slight frowns.

  Andrew says, “You’re thinking of my father. A writer. He was very popular for a while. A brief career, poor guy,” he adds.

  “Oh, of course. My mother was mad for him.”

  “He was an unusual talent,” Michael announces, frowning more intensely and giving Kate the impression that he would prefer not to share the talents of “Andrew Chapin” with Kate’s mother. (Poor Jane Flickinger: Kate smiles involuntarily at this summoning of her mother, for whom she feels a kind of tolerant affection.)

  Michael is, in fact, fa
scinated by the elder Andrew Chapin (who wrote delicately of exacerbated New England consciences, who hinted at wild sexual distortions; it was Martin who first gave Michael those books). And Michael is impressed with knowing the writer’s son—as Andrew is fascinated by Michael. And given the perversity of human attractions it is perhaps not odd that they are drawn to qualities in the other that each man himself could have done without: a famous father, Jewishness. Andrew also envies Michael’s laziness (he castigates his own compulsive habits of work); Michael’s unbridled appetite (Andrew has ulcers and a generally difficult stomach).

  Much later in life Louisa is to decide that to love Michael is to hate oneself.

  Andrew is a trim dark boy, with interesting heavy eyebrows, who reminds Kate very slightly of David, except that David’s face is witty, wry, whereas this boy is very serious. (In fact he is desperate: he wants to write, to be a writer, and he cannot write.) He is also very rich; the first Andrew invested his meteoric twenties’ earnings very astutely. Sally, his wife, is a small neat blonde, with soft peach fuzz on her chin (later to bristle), who “adores” her husband. She is a bright girl in her own right, but she is brainwashed by currently popular ideas about the functions of wives. Also, her own parents divorced and frequently remarried—she won’t do that (she is only to marry twice).

  Kate has just been struck with an idea—or, rather, a perception so startling that she thinks she must be drunk, although she knows that she is not: looking at Michael, at his broad Slavic brow and arrogant nose, she sees that beneath his soft flesh and fair hair is the skull of Jack Calloway. Not that they look alike—Jack’s skin is florid and his hair quite dark—but the bones are the same. What can this mean? Has Louisa noticed? Why didn’t someone stop this marriage?

  Michael has gone back to lecturing Andrew on Trilling. “Also,” he winds up, “I always thought that story of his—what was the name? Time or something.”

  “ ‘Of This Time, Of That Place,’ ” Kate surprisingly (to Michael) fills in for him. It happens to be a favorite story of hers.

  “Yes, I think you’re right,” Michael says. “Anyway, I always thought it was a very homosexual story.”

  “What on earth do you mean by that?” Kate bursts out. “I don’t think you mean anything at all.” She hopes that this is the worst that she is going to say, and fears that it is not.

  Michael takes on a patient tone. “Naturally I don’t mean literally homosexual, but the central concern is with relationships between men. One might in the same way say that Hemingway is a homosexual writer.”

  “God,” says Kate, who is beginning to feel that she has had more than she can stand. This is the intellectual world? She repeats, “I don’t think you mean anything at all.”

  Michael is enjoying this exchange. Attracted to Kate, and very self-absorbed, he has a poor sense of audience—of how he is coming across. He believes that Kate is enjoying the conversation, too (or that she should). He says, “I mean homosexual in the sense that I might describe your relationship with Louisa as homosexual, in that it was most intense in your prepuberty days, wasn’t it? A sort or preadolescent love affair.”

  “NO!” Kate cries out, meaning no to everything he says.

  At last Michael understands that she is irritated, and he does not help by saying, “I think you’re being a little literal.”

  “I’m literal! You’re the literal one! You’ve got to put the same label on everything.”

  Louisa has risen and is clearing the table. She looks very uncomfortable. Kate makes a gesture to help, but she is refused, and she is then spurred on by the sight of her pregnant friend bearing piles of dirty dishes.

  “And why does Louisa have to work in a purchasing department? Why aren’t you working and letting her get a degree in something? I’m sure she’d rather.”

  “You don’t see a difference in roles?” Michael asks, again warming to the discussion. “I prefer the tension between opposites. Louisa’s femaleness makes me feel more male. You don’t believe in sexual polarity?”

  “No, I don’t think so,” says Kate, and for the first time she begins to be aware of what she does think, and in her enthusiasm about a new idea her anger at Michael somewhat diminishes. “I believe in a man and a woman living together, being friends. I don’t think it matters who does what. David is a better cook than I am. While he was interning and I was working, we sort of cooked together—it was fun. I don’t think it matters who does dishes or stays at home with kids.”

  “Well, you would have made an awfully pretty suffragette,” says Andrew, laughing. And he has succeeded in lightening the moment (not only because he is a nice man; he is also strongly attracted to Kate).

  Kate blushes, both for the compliment and for what she has said. “But I mean it,” she says, purposely exaggerating her forthrightness—this is a way she has.

  Sally Chapin looks incredulously at Kate; she can hardly believe that such a pretty and well-dressed girl could have such—such ideas. And her vocabulary comes up with no word to describe Kate’s point of view. “Masculine” is the word most generally used (at that time) to describe unfortunate behavior in women, but that does not seem quite appropriate.

  “Kate, I really don’t think you’ve given this much thought,” Louisa says.

  “No, I haven’t,” says honest Kate, “but you know how I am. Instinctual.”

  “Well, Michael thinks all the time. He’s extremely intellectual.” Louisa feels the old thrill of defending Michael: there was a triumphant moment, some years ago at Michael’s parents’ house, when Louisa told his mother please to stop interrupting what Michael was saying.

  Kate then says, “Oh, God, my train! I have to go!”

  Andrew, who has just become conscious of how attracted he is, and who for the first time is a little irritated by Michael, asks, “Can’t we take you to your train? We have to go, too. Louisa, Michael—okay?”

  Louisa agrees, and so, because of the rush, the farewells are minimized, and what might have been somewhat awkward is capsuled.

  “Goodbye—great to see you—thanks!”

  Everyone says these things, and then Louisa and Michael are left alone.

  This is often a bad moment for them, but the evening has produced a mood of affectionate rapport. They have, at times, almost the quality of a conspiracy, an alliance against all other people, which other people sometimes sense (Sally Chapin does) and find unpleasant.

  “God, she’s really got much worse,” Louisa says. “She used to be sort of marvelous.”

  “Really? She did? I got a strong sense that there’s something terribly wrong with her marriage, didn’t you?” poor Michael says eagerly. “She seemed so defensive, as though she were projecting.”

  “I’m sure you’re right. He’s probably some real jerk, and she’s sorry she married him.”

  “Do you ever get the feeling that Andrew Chapin is essentially boring?”

  “Well, yes, and God knows Sally is.”

  “Yes. Well, time for bed?” he says, smiling.

  “I think I’m frustrated, that’s what’s wrong with me,” laughs Kate, somewhat embarrassed, as she settles into the Chapins’ car. “I really didn’t mean to be so disagreeable.”

  “You really weren’t,” says gentlemanly Andrew, who is kind.

  “Michael can be awfully—psychological,” Sally says softly. She has just realized with a start that she doesn’t like Michael at all. (In fact—it is years before she knows this—Sally likes very few people.) And she thinks this violent “different” girl is interesting.

  “Well, it is his field,” Andrew reminds her, out of a feeling that someone should stand up for Michael.

  At the station, where they are just in time—the train is coming up from the South (southern California)—Kate thanks them in her enthusiastic way. She says, “Please call me when you come up to the city. David Harrington.” She says this proudly; she likes David’s name, likes wearing it. “I’d love to see you.”
/>   But by the time they do call her, or, rather, Andrew does, she is not at first quite sure who he is.

  Five / 1955

  From birth, Maude Wasserman, the daughter of Louisa and Michael, has been a startling child. She refused to be breast-fed (which did not help Louisa’s own feelings about her breasts); she would not go to sleep without music playing in her room. By the time she was one, she had begun to talk, and she wanted to be read to all the time; she demanded new Little Golden Books on every trip to the market. She memorized her favorites, Crispin’s Crispian (“Crispin was a dog who belonged to himself …”) and The Sailor Dog (“Born in the teeth of a gale, Scupper was a sailor …”). But at two she still did not walk. Michael, who had great faith in tests, had her tested with every available battery of psychological-neurological-muscular tests, all of which revealed nothing, except that she was unusually bright. She was a remarkably fast crawler. She had a great many inexplicable and alarming chest infections. She was very blond. (Louisa’s hair by now had darkened to a blacky brown.)

  On the Easter Sunday in April which is a month before Maude is to be three, she is as tall as a five-year-old, and she almost knows how to read.

  “I don’t want to wear the blue,” she screams at Louisa, reddening dangerously. “I won’t go!”

  They are invited to an Easter-egg hunt at the Chapins’ house, which is next door. After Maude was born, and despite a lot of discussion about the inadvisability of living next door to close friends, Louisa and Michael moved next to Andrew and Sally; it was as though they could not bear to be alone, once isolated with a baby (or so Louisa later thinks of that move).

  “I want to wear the pink!” Maude screams.

  The pink dress is almost outgrown; it makes Maude look too tall. Weedish, neglected.

  Nearly sick with indecision (these small crises are more than she can stand), Louisa yields, but she says, “Are you sure you don’t want to wear the blue? It’s new.”