Families and Survivors

by Alice Adams

  Whether by agreement or not (there was no way for me to find this out), my mother stopped going out to dinner with other men. Perhaps he insisted; perhaps she was afraid of missing one of his visits. Either (or both) is possible. But she had thrown out any pretense of equal rights. She was fully engaged in acting out her love affair.

  What opposite directions my parents took! It became hard to believe that they had ever lived together. While my mother became paler and thinner in the intensity of her dedication to love, my father married fat rich Persephone, and, like her, became fat and rich. Having been frustrated in his desire to be Louisa, he turned to Persephone. His speech took on her turns of phrase. He constantly quoted her, as he had Louisa—in both cases he was unaware that he was doing so. He began to remember the tastes of extraordinary soups that his mother had made for him when he was a child, and Persephone researched the flavors. “Basically it was a borscht,” he said, “but it had some special taste she added.” Anxiously, “Do you think it could have been dill?” Persephone asked. (“Your grandmother Mrs. Wasserman, was the worst cook who ever lived,” my mother has said to me. “That overdone meat, and watery canned vegetables. Canned!”) They moved from Lombard Street to a massive house on Pacific Street, which a decorator made all white-on-white for them, and my father joined (“got into” is the phrase my mother used) the Concordia Club.

  Why had Louisa ever married Michael, my father? That was the puzzle I had to consider, and all that any reach of my imagination could come up with was that after a lively and perhaps tiring adolescence (how unlike my own!) she wanted a rest.

  …

  My mother grew thinner over Bayard. Of course the affair did not go well: how could it, with Bayard controlling all the ammunition? Louisa had entirely changed over into a new role: she had gone from being the woman who is pursued to being the woman who waits. She stared often at the telephone, as though by magic she could evoke the clamorous ring that might announce his voice. With darkened eyes she stared at the door, which might open at his turn of the lock. Of course she had given him a key.

  Bayard also shifted roles; he changed from being the pursuer to being the elusive one, who often did not phone, who was always late.

  Louisa never rebuked him, or complained. Would he have liked it better if she had? Did he actually want a scold? Who knows—perhaps his wife would know. I am sure she has scolded for years, and there he is, still married to her.

  Then one afternoon I came home and my mother was there in her pink robe, having cried a lot and saying that she had a cold, and after that there was no more Bayard, and I had missed the final scene.

  She suffered terribly. Her pain was almost visible, so intensely was it present. It was nearly impossible for her to eat. She forced down a few boiled eggs, and sipped at milk and apologized (and apologized and apologized) for so frequently giving me TV dinners, and I could not convince her that I didn’t mind.

  Then my mother got really sick; her old colitis came back and she had to go to the hospital, for a month.

  And so I went to stay with my father and Persephone, in the frilly white bedroom with its fourposter bed, “my” room. It was interesting there, and not quite what I had expected.

  For one thing, I saw for the first time that Michael had not become Persephone; he was not just fat. He seemed lost in his fat, lost and a little wistful, sad. Not that he would have liked to have Louisa back; he was too sensible for that—but he struck me as a man who felt that he was missing out, or had missed out. “I really wonder if psychology was the field for me,” he said. “Actually philosophy interests me considerably more. And, let’s face it, a lot of my patients are basically shits. That’s their basic problem.”

  (Loyal laughter from Persephone. Louisa would not have laughed.)

  I also saw many qualities of my own in Michael, my non-Louisa qualities: his calm, his ambivalence, his fair complexion and long nose.

  On most afternoons after school I stopped by the hospital to see my mother, who seemed slowly to be recovering both from Bayard and from her illness. As usual she was terribly worried about me, and as usual I tried to reassure her. I was fine. “Well, at least I don’t have to worry about your being well fed,” she remarked.

  Louisa is not always charitable about Michael.

  After my mother came home—and I, of course, with her—whenever the telephone rang she jumped violently, and she looked at me as though for protection from whatever it was going to say. But it was only Kate or one of her other friends, and she would tell them how she felt. I stayed in the living room while she was on the phone, until she forgot I was there, as she sat or paced and talked, and the long cord twisted and twitched out in the hall.

  “It’s really interesting how one can seem to be a demanding shrew, or so I’ve been told,” she said to Kate. “I would have thought I was quite what is called permissive. You know, it would be much easier for me if he were dead.” And then she said, “And, aside from anything else, he has turned me into the most awful gloomy bore. I haven’t said anything remotely funny for months,” which was a little more like her old tone.

  Once, in the middle of the night, the phone rang, very loud, just outside my mother’s bedroom door. (She always brought it down the length of our hall when she went to bed.) Instantly awake, I knew that it was Bayard, and I was also sure that he was somewhere near, perhaps a little drunk. Wanting to come to see her. I was cold and afraid, and sure that she would let him; she would want another act to her drama.

  Her voice surprised me, so wide awake, so gay. “Oh, Bayard, how nice. No, I wasn’t asleep at all. In fact—well, no, that wouldn’t be a good idea.” She lowered her voice. “Someone’s here. A friend.” Then, louder and very cheerful, “Well, so nice to hear from you. Yes, you, too. Goodbye.”

  Amazing—talk about style!

  But then, with the soft putting down of the receiver, she broke into horrible sobs that went on and on.

  Well, at last, after many months, her pain seemed to go away, and she could even speak amusingly about that affair. “It must be a sort of initiation rite, the big affair with the married man,” she said into the phone, to Kate. “The married man chosen for being very unlike your husband, and who turns out finally to be rather like your father. God, I really envy you, being out of such an impossible circle.” She laughed, and sipped at her drink. “Well, I’ve got to go. Lewis is picking me up for dinner, and I want to feed Maude first.”

  It was much like her pre-Bayard conversations, but there were subtle changes in my mother, visible perhaps only to one watching her intensely. She was slightly less open and enthusiastic than before, or perhaps her enthusiasms were more controlled. Her wit was more ironic than before Bayard. Of course these could be changes that occur with age; I had no way of knowing. But visibly her style of dress had changed: while before she had tended to somewhat subdued classics, to gray flannel and camel’s hair, white wool and black cashmere, suddenly a lot of red entered her wardrobe: scarlet scarves and silk shirts and narrow velvet pants. She looked neat!

  And she went back to her dinners with bachelors that sometimes turned into love affairs, and I went back to watching television, the beginnings of the Kennedys and listening to Dylan.

  A year or so later, my grandmother Caroline died, and shortly after that it turned out that we were rich, or in any case much richer: Caroline had left everything to my mother. (Later it also turned out that Louisa’s father, my grandfather Jack, had tried to contest her will! For that reason, and also because of a flare-up of colitis, she did not go back to the funeral.)

  “What she did is terribly touching,” my mother said to me, her eyes and her voice full of tears. “How terrible that I can’t thank her—that we can’t talk. We never did.”

  (I wondered: Is this a reason that she talks so much to me?)

  And so my mother bought a small house for us, off Lake Street, next to the Presidio woods. She quit her job, and she fixed up the top floor of our new house (the
house where Bayard had never been) as a studio for herself. She worked hard, and she began in a small way to be a success: drawings in various galleries, a small show, a couple of short (but favorable) reviews.

  Of course the money helped a lot, but I still think she showed some courage. I give my mother points for guts.

  However, she made a couple of foolish mistakes—with me. In some excited burst, just after she got the money (“I’m adoring being nouveau riche,” she said over the phone; she said it often), she asked me if I wanted to have my nose fixed. “I mean, if you’d rather have it a little smaller,” she said.

  “No, of course not.”

  “Well, I didn’t mean—darling, of course I love the way you look.” She laughed apologetically.

  I laughed, too—forgivingly.

  That suggestion was her first mistake, and of course her apologies are the second. She would like to apologize to me for all those years, and I have never worked out a way of telling her that watching her was a welcome change from TV for me—that in spite of everything, of Bayard and all her worries, she looked freer than anyone else in sight.

  Nine / 1964

  Andrew Chapin has the impression that his wife has just said something startling, but he is not sure; Sally’s voice, as always, is so soft and gentle.

  She repeats, “I think we have to get a divorce, Andrew.”

  It later occurred to Andrew that it was very like Sally to ask for a divorce at the breakfast table—not, as most wives would have done, he felt, in bed. He was not sure how he knew this about most wives. In any case, the neat breakfast table seemed the logical place for Sally’s announcement. A non-intimate scene: both of them fully dressed, pink lipstick on Sally’s delicate mouth, pale blue eye shadow on her lids: they are both outfitted for the day, for the outer world rather than for each other.

  Then Sally says another startling thing: “I’m sorry, but I want to marry Alex.”

  “Alex—?”

  She smiles a little at that; after all, they know only one Alex. Alex Magowan, who has been their close friend for years; they have just nursed him through his own divorce—or at least until now Andrew had assumed that the nursing-through was a joint project.

  “But Alex isn’t really the point,” Sally goes on, very softly, very firmly. She has decided what to say. “My falling in love with Alex was a symptom, not a cause. I mean, we would have had to split up anyway.”

  “Really? Why?” Wanting more coffee, but feeling that it would be a little tasteless to ask for it at just this moment, instead Andrew leans back and looks at his wife, as though trying to understand who she is. Her tired pale blue eyes years ago held a haunted look that was, to Andrew, terribly compelling. Her strong, rather prominent downy chin. Darkening blond hair.

  “You haven’t noticed anything wrong?” she asks softly.

  The boys are off at school, but one of them has left a transistor radio on; from somewhere blasts “I Want To Hold Your Hand.” Andrew and Sally exchange a look that expresses one small area of agreement; they both hate the Beatles.

  “When?” Andrew asks.

  “Oh, for the last few years. Or—I don’t know, maybe longer.” Sally sighs. Then she bursts out, “You’re so Eastern—I’ve never felt at home with you. And all your rich relatives, they’re so polite to me.” She begins to cry.

  Torn between a desire to comfort her and a need to satisfy intellectual curiosity, Andrew lets the latter win out. “Why didn’t you mention this fifteen years ago?”

  “Oh, then I was so impressed. I thought marrying you would make me part of all that. Part of your family.”

  “Christ, Sally, you are my family.” Andrew is quickly sorry to have said this. She cries harder, her mascara runs. She had not planned to cry.

  But just as Andrew pities her most it comes to him that Alex is from Seattle, and the corniness of this oppresses him. No one here but us real Westerners, he thinks. He says, “Alex is an excuse; he is not a symptom.”

  She stops crying, and in her reasonable voice she asks, “Well, what’s worse?”

  Looking at their familiar yellow-and-white Stranglware, a wedding present that is now only used for breakfast à deux, since most of it broke, Andrew begins to go into what is to be the first phase of his reaction to the divorce, which is disbelief. Can Sally have said what he had heard her say? Quite honestly he says to her, “I somehow don’t believe this is us.”

  She narrows her eyes accusingly. “That just shows how little you noticed.”

  He won’t let her get by with this. “I didn’t notice that you and Alex were in love with each other, if that’s what you mean. I thought we were all good friends.”

  She flushes, and pushes out that blond downed chin. “I didn’t mean that. I meant between us.” But before he can react to that she adds, in her clearest voice, “And I want you to know one thing: Alex and I haven’t done—anything wrong. We’ve just talked.”

  For some reason this strikes Andrew as extremely funny. “You mean, you’re telling me that you and Alex are madly in love and getting married without—without ever—.” (He and Sally have no word for the act of love, which later strikes Andrew as a very bad sign.)

  “What’s so funny about that?” Sally says. Adding, cruelly, “It’s what we did.”

  Half hearing her, Andrew goes on laughing, gasping, until he realizes that he is crying. Then, pretending to choke on his laughter, he rushes from the table to the downstairs bathroom, where he is sick.

  …

  The Magowan divorce, like an earthquake, sent tremors through their shocked circle of friends. The Magowans? Alex and Grace? Although for several years, since Allison has been sick, Grace had been behaving in a way that everyone thought was odd; she took Allison on long trips instead of to doctors, she spent most of her time alone with Allison.

  Alex came over to tell Sally and Andrew about it. His normally florid face had a darker, unhealthy flush, as though his blood were infected. “I thought you people should be the first to know,” he said, with no irony—in fact with considerable dignity. “Grace and I—we’re breaking up.”

  As Alex said that, Andrew had an image of a ship, a wooden hull splitting apart in a storm, or tossed by a giant whale. And indeed the Magowans’ marriage had the stately quality of a ship. They were majestic: they never did the messy things that other people sometimes did: no public spats, no drunken passes at others’ mates. (Well, Andrew later thought, Sally and I didn’t do too many of those things, either.)

  Sally cried out, “Oh, no,” and almost immediately began to cry.

  Alex looked grimmer and darker still. One of his problems, which Andrew recognized but was helpless to alleviate, was that Alex had no vocabulary for the depth of what had happened to him. Even more than most people do, he spoke normally in clichés; things were terrific, or great, or really lousy. But how could you call a deserting wife or a mad child really lousy?

  He spoke with a tremendous effort as his large hands gripped each other. “It’s really this thing with Allison. God knows I’m no expert, but I seriously think the kid should see a psychiatrist.”

  “Of course she should,” Andrew said gently.

  Alex looked grateful. “Well, I’m afraid I said that a few too many times to Grace. God, it’s like—like I’d insulted her. Like I’d told her to go to a psychiatrist. So now she wants to move back to New Hampshire with Allison. She thinks a small town is what Allison needs. God, I can’t move to a small town in New Hampshire. I’m just getting started.”

  Allison by then was ten. She had more or less come out of an awful phase of not eating and of vomiting a lot. Now she got into fights. Seeming to have no notion of her own size, or sex, she physically attacked big boys, who sometimes hit her back. She was always in various forms of trouble at school. (A phase that preceded further withdrawal.) And Grace had never admitted any of this. “Oh, the kids are all fine,” she would say.

  Sally was speaking to Alex. “No, of course you couldn�
��t move to New Hampshire,” she said softly. And then, “Alex, would you like me to try to talk to Grace?”

  “That’s terrific of you, Sal. Really. But I just don’t think so. She’s become—unreasonable.”

  “Okay. But if there’s anything we can do …”

  And so Grace left town with Allison, leaving Alex with the two other children, Douglas and Jennifer. And the two somewhat diminished families became closer than ever. Sally made Christmas and Thanksgiving dinners for all of them. Alex, who was getting quickly rich in housing developments, sometimes took them all out lavishly, to family dinners at the Palace Hotel, or the Redwood Room at the Clift.

  Once at the St. Francis, in a bar adjoining the dining room, they saw someone they all thought they knew: Louisa Wasserman. Whoever it was, she was totally absorbed in a huge red-haired man. Impressive. And Louisa, or whoever, did not see them, or perhaps she pretended not to. (And Sally had the further—curious—impression that Andrew did not want to see Louisa.)

  “If that’s Louisa, she really looks terrific,” Sally said, looking at Andrew. “I heard she and Michael got a divorce.”

  “One more.” Alex scowled. Then he smiled at his friends. “I hope you people realize how lucky you are.”

  They thought they did.

  And so, after several more painful conversations, and more tears, Andrew moves into a bachelor pad on Telegraph Hill, with a king-sized bed and an expensive view of the city, a long way across town from the Pacific Heights where Sally and the boys remain. He has two bedrooms, one that is equipped for weekend visits with bunk beds—those ex-family rituals that by the sixties are such a commonplace. Andrew sees his life as moving into realms of situation comedy. It makes him cringe, the banality of it all. For Andrew has always had an almost artistic double vision of himself—the “almost” keeps him a professor rather than an artist.