Families and Survivors

by Alice Adams

  But slowly over the summer, Michael’s anxiety diminishes. The cold San Francisco summer seems to last, and nothing changes. Perhaps nothing is going to change. Louisa goes to work; she cheerfully complains that she is tired. She goes to bed early. They all go to bed early. Separately.

  Then, early in September, Louisa tells Michael excitedly that on a sudden impulse she has called her old friend Kate. (“You remember Kate? She came down to see us for dinner, when I was pregnant.” He does, but not quite: someone sexy, something unpleasant.) Kate now lives in Berkeley; her husband is a surgeon—hearts. They have a house near Tahoe, and have invited Louisa for a week. Louisa and Maude. “I told them you couldn’t get away.” And so they go. (The agency is nice about letting Louisa take time off, with no pay.)

  Michael does not like being alone; he finds it frightening, a silence full of echoes. He eats a lot—snacks, several meals a day. But he decides that he is really all right; it is temporary. His wife and daughter are away on a visit.

  He thinks that the thing to do is to make a celebration of their return. Louisa has sometimes remarked that he is “joyless”—his is not a festive sensibility. He is not Southern, with all their ceremonies and effusions.

  He goes out to buy champagne, although at the last minute he cannot remember which one Louisa has said is best, Korbel or Almadén. (French champagne would be going too far, really; it would show desperation.) He decides on Almadén, but is sure that he has made the wrong decision. He remembers to put glasses in the refrigerator. He considers calling a baby-sitter, so that he can take Louisa out to dinner, but then is struck with a better idea; he will take them both out. Safer that way. A reunited family.

  And they go to a family-style restaurant, brown Louisa and Maude and pale Michael, who feels fat; can he have gained weight in a week? (he has.) A French-Italian restaurant, where you get a lot to eat. On the walls are amateurish reproductions of famous paintings, but the effect is warm.

  At first Maude and Louisa talk a lot. How cold the lake was. Water skiing—Louisa surprised herself by being good at it. “Sort of. But I must be feeling really confident these days.” She smiles. Sailing. Kate’s children. Busy David, the successful doctor. “Really repairing hearts.” Kate’s intense domesticity. “But she seems really happy doing all that, and the kids are nice. The youngest is named for me—I was touched.”

  Then it all seems to fizzle down, their talk, and they might not have been away, Louisa and Maude. The three of them could be any tired family, out hopefully for dinner.

  They go home.

  Maude goes to bed.

  With a sort of bravado Michael brings in the champagne. Chilled glasses on a tray. “I thought we ought to celebrate your coming home,” he says. “But I can’t remember if it was Korbel or Almadén we liked.”

  “Korbel.”

  “Oh.” His weak smile. “Oh, well.”

  She clears her throat. “Michael, we have to see about getting a divorce.”

  “But—” But there is nothing for him to say. He looks at her stupidly, quite aware that that is what he is doing. Then he says what is at least half true. “I thought you’d changed your mind.”

  “Michael! How could we go on living together? How could we? There isn’t anything—nothing—.”

  Almost unconsciously, because he has opened it and it is there, they are sipping their wine.

  He says, “Couldn’t we just—go on?”

  “Go on where? With no sex? I’ve been—unfaithful to you. Often. And I hate being like that.”

  His face has become very hot. “I don’t believe you.” (But, like most pieces of sexual information, this one has always been somewhere within him, a submerged knowledge.) “What do you mean, unfaithful?”

  “Just that. Screwing other people. All kinds.” Her voice runs out of power, trails off. She has made a great effort to say what she is saying. Or perhaps she is lying?

  “I don’t believe you,” Michael says again.

  With her hands she makes a small despairing gesture. “Okay, don’t. But what’s terrible is how little you notice. Anything.”

  He hesitates, knowing that whatever he says will somehow be used against him. He says, “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Exactly.” She sighs, with an infinite and terrible weariness. It is clear that she is most of all tired of Michael.

  And clear from her eyes that she pities him. But in his pain he will accept even pity. Very simply he says, “I don’t know what to do.”

  “Michael, if you could only see how much better off you’ll be without me. I’m terrible for you, and I can’t stop. You could marry someone who loves you.” For an instant she brightens. “You could marry Persephone Taylor. I think she has a sort of crush on you. And she’s so rich.”

  “I could never marry anyone who looks like that.” (He does.) But for the moment he is barely thinking about Persephone. He is thinking: I could never be married to anyone but you.

  Miserably (for the moment) he believes this to be true.

  Eight / 1961

  (Maude’s later memory of herself and her parents at that time.)

  When she first came home in the afternoon, just after she got a part-time job in an advertising agency and she and my father were divorced, she would make herself a long drink of bourbon with a lot of ice. Louisa, my mother. She would put the drink on the coffee table and then bring in the phone, with its long coiled and twisted cord, and put the box on the floor beside her and pick up the receiver, and dial and listen and talk. Or sometimes she would pick up the phone and walk around with it; she did that most often when she was talking to someone whom she didn’t like, or who bored her (my father, Michael; or, later, my father and Persephone, his wife). Then she would make terrible private faces that only I could see, and she would gesture with the phone, raising and lowering it like a barbell.

  From so much moving, the long cord became impossibly twisted. Just lying on the floor it would twitch—a snake. I sometimes thought that if I had been a boy and very angry at my mother I would have cut that cord with some heavy clippers, and she would say, “What a little devil he is!”—although that does not sound like Louisa. It was not that I especially wanted to be a boy, but I imagined that boys and their mothers got along in a simpler way than Louisa and I did.

  When my program was over, or a few minutes after, I would go into the living room and stand there, and when she saw me she would smile in a wide bright way and say into the phone, “Excuse me—here’s Maude,” and then, to me, “Darling, how are you? What kind of a day did you have?”

  I would tell her a few things, really wanting her to go on talking to her friend. As she did, too, but neither of us could do what we wanted to. That was how we were with each other, at that time.

  This was when I was nine or so and my mother was in her early thirties. On TV I watched teen-age dance times in the afternoons: very wholesome kids rocking gently, far apart from each other, pausing to refresh themselves with soft drinks. They were only a few years older than me, but I couldn’t believe that I would soon be like them, the way (I then thought) I was supposed to. It was frightening: how else would I be?

  Sometimes in the mornings I would play sick or cut school to watch daytime serials with names like “Brighter Day” or “Shining Hour” or “Storm Clouds.” I knew that I never would be like those people, either, but that was less frightening; I somehow also knew I wasn’t supposed to. I could lose myself in almost any world—except, of course, my own and my mother’s.

  My mother, Louisa, was (still is) tall and thin, and in her own way beautiful, with dark hair and nice skin, and large eyes. Green-shadowed eyes. In those days she was excited about being “free” (free except for me). She suddenly knew a lot of men who took her out to dinner, and it would all have been fine except that she worried so much: about money (my father had got the better deal out of the divorce, and Persephone was rich); about me (she needn’t have—I was really okay); about getting baby-si
tters when she went out; and about the fact that she didn’t really care much about any of the men she knew. My mother is always worried about something.

  “Well, he’s nice enough,” she would say into the phone. “We have a good time but I come home and think, So what? Why bother? I could just as easily stay home with Maude. I can’t believe that I left Michael for this ‘dating’ scene. I do wonder what I want.”

  I knew what she wanted, and maybe she did, too: she wanted a full-scale melodrama, like the ones that I watched on the twelve-inch screen.

  My father, who didn’t want the divorce, was almost immediately taken up by rich fat Persephone. He moved to a flat on Lombard Street, where it curls down Russian Hill, and Persephone lived near there. She kept inviting him in for expensive food; she seemed to spend most of her time doing a sort of food research, and then buying and cooking it all, and she loved to talk about food. “There was a special small cake we used to have at home, in Madison,” she would say, “but I can’t quite remember the seasoning. It could have been coriander.”

  I was a disappointment, a discouragement to Persephone, because in those days I did not like to eat very much. I was bored with all food, even the special little cakes with which she tried to woo me, along with my father. It was terribly important to Persephone that I like her, which was dumb: although he loves me overwhelmingly, my father isn’t interested in my opinions; my mother’s were more than he could cope with. He is not a good listener.

  As though to atone for my not eating, he ate enough for both of us. I also had an impression that he was trying to be as fat as Persephone was, and finally, by the time they were married, that is more or less what happened: he was enormous, from croissants, brioche, caviar, and Béarnaise and heavy wine. In fact they came to sort of look alike.

  While my parents were still married, I had an idea that Michael, my father, would have liked to be Louisa, my mother. At parties at our house when she told stories, laughing and gesturing a lot, I would watch his face, and he seemed to be wishing that he were like her. And once—this was really peculiar—a man from a newspaper who was writing an article on “young suburban mothers” (we were then living on the Peninsula) came to interview my mother, and my father answered all the questions: “Well, Louisa usually shops around mid-afternoon. She draws. Her drawings are mostly of people.” My mother did not interrupt (being polite is important to Louisa), but she looked at him as though she did not want to believe what he was doing.

  They didn’t fight, but the air between them was heavy and gray-dead. My mother came to life when there were other people around; then she joked and talked a lot, frantically gay. But she had a lot of trouble sleeping (a long time ago she had been really sick), and most mornings she couldn’t get up for a while (which perhaps is one reason that Persephone always made a point of inviting my father for breakfast: lox and bagels, potato pancakes, German crêpes).

  I didn’t mind living in the suburbs as much as my mother did. I had some friends, and in the summer we squirted each other with hoses in the back yards, and our mothers took us to playgrounds, and for walks across the golf course. We went for picnics in the state parks or to the beach, where usually it was too cold. I preferred the park picnics, at long tables in huge dark groves of redwoods, near a stream with ferny banks.

  We did not have TV then, and since I was too young to have seen many other people I did not recognize my parents’ marriage as being “bad.” It is only later when I remember their faces, how they looked at each other, that I see her unhappiness and his passive but total confusion.

  And so they were divorced and they moved to different parts of San Francisco: my rich father to curly Lombard Street, my mother to our fringe Pacific Heights flat. Her courage only went so far.

  What would she have done without the telephone? I have wondered about that. I remember a terrible afternoon in the last days of Bayard (Bayard the Bad, as I came to think of him) when the phone was out of order and no one could fix it until the next day. She stared at it, physically hovering around that small black corded box, as though it were a sick person who might return to life with enough care. It would have been absolutely impossible for her to leave it alone and go for a walk, the sensible thing which even a character in “Brighter Day” would have done.

  The first I ever hear of Bayard was from my mother, speaking to her friend Kate over the phone. She said, “Really, these married men who meet you at parties and then call up. What do they think? Someone named Bayard has called me three times this week.”

  Before she met Bayard, and for the brief period after that during which she was still her own woman, my mother and I were quite successfully passing in our roles: she was the stylish divorcée who went out a lot, and I was a young girl who watched too much TV, and at school with the other girls I pretended to be afraid of boys. But I was not afraid of boys, really, and sometimes I felt a kind of separation from the other girls. I have no idea what my mother felt about herself.

  “And this is my daughter, Maude,” my mother said, clinging to me in what seemed an unnatural way. She was speaking to the largest man I had ever seen, a florid giant with thick red hair. Bayard. I disliked him on sight, which my sentimental mother attributed to some knowledge that he would hurt her. Not so: I simply don’t like arrogant, oversized people.

  He did not like me, either. “Well, how do you do, young lady,” he said, with his eyes cold and pale blue. He had pale pink freckles all over his hands. Kate and Stephen, although they have red hair, do not have freckles.

  “You can stay in the living room with us, Maude, if you like,” my mother pleaded with me.

  But I turned her down cold. “I’ve got a lot of homework to do,” I lied.

  “I’ll only stay a minute,” promised Bayard—falsely, as things turned out. She should have known, or perhaps she did.

  At dinner that night, an hour and a half later, my mother was flushed and angrily excited. Very attractive. “I simply couldn’t get rid of him!” she kept saying. “The nerve. Just because he’s used to pushing people around.”

  At that time, and for months afterward, my mother and I pretended that I did not know who Bayard was, which was fairly dumb. I read the papers, and there he always was: civic leader, opera patron, owner of, married to, seen at—all that. My poor mother had met her match.

  As though our flat were a small country containing something that he could use, Bayard invaded it, and us. There was a saturation bombardment of phone calls, telegrams, and flowers. He favored flowers with aggressive shapes: birds-of-paradise, and gladioli. These were in fact my mother’s least favorite flowers, but her enthusiasm was convincing, even to me. He often showed up at the door—a surprise attack. An incursion.

  For a while she struggled, using rather pathetic ruses such as having me answer the phone and say she was out, or inviting a friend to come for tea when he was supposed to arrive. But it was an unequal fight.

  I came home from school one afternoon, on a day that my mother had stayed in bed with a slight flu, and from the disarray in her room or some vibration that she gave off I knew that Bayard had just left, and that the scene between them had been decisive—the decision his.

  During dinner, for which she got up, she showed a funny tendency to giggle, and God knows I was not being especially funny. I was curiously watching her. The phone rang several times that evening, and each time she answered, and it was Bayard, and they had breathless brief conversations during which she said silly things: “Yes I, too. Incredible. Yes. Tomorrow. A miracle.”

  (Much later, when she was being funny again, my mother said to Kate, “I only hope that God protects me from any more miracles.”)

  After that I began to watch my mother in earnest. I even lost interest in most television programs. Her drama was far more real, and it went on all day long.

  He came at odd hours, Bayard did, and I think without calling first. Often he appeared late in the afternoon, and so my mother no longer came home from wor
k to make a drink and sit down to telephone her friends. Instead she rushed to the bathroom to wash up, and then she sat at her dressing table doing unnecessary things to her face and hoping that he would come. Needless to say, when he did I was no longer urged to stay in the living room; I was firmly reminded of homework and (contradictorily) of favorite TV programs.

  Under such treatment I “regressed,” or so my guilty mother saw it. The truth is that I was interested in what was going on. And so I would slide into the living room and whine, “When’s dinner, Mom?” and see them tear apart from their embrace.

  Poor mother, poor Louisa—certainly she still blames herself for this period of my life, and feels that it marked and marred me. And there has never been a way to tell her that she is wrong, that on the contrary she provided me with more entertainment than most children my age got, those who had to live through the fifties with only TV to watch.

  Since all his notices in the papers indicated that Bayard was extremely rich, I had fantasies of my mother in mink (which she would have thought extremely tacky—a word she liked) or at least of my mother being able to quit her advertising job—a job she didn’t like, that did not pay well, and that left no time for her own drawings, which had been important to her. But nothing of the sort ever happened. In fact the flowers stopped coming early on, and the only contribution that I noticed were occasional bottles of Scotch, which is what Bayard drank. My mother, being Southern, favored bourbon.

  Watching them, as I continuously did, I tried fervently to figure out why. Why had they chosen each other? Why my mother for Bayard, and him for her? At that time most people struck me as interchangeable.

  But there they were, ravenously upon each other on the sofa in the late afternoons, and sometimes I would wake at night to hear his steps creaking down the hall toward my mother’s room.