Families and Survivors

by Alice Adams

  Louisa goes on in this vein, saying things that Kate half knows. Kate listens loyally, but her mind is not there. She is thinking about her husband, David, the great heart surgeon. Thinking: Is David fucking that nurse, that blond Miss Murray? Angrily, painfully, she thinks: Stupid prick, how trite of him. David at forty-five. The male menopause. Can I help being fat? Well, yes, I could help it, but screw him, why should I?

  “I am literally stricken with her loss,” Louisa says, still speaking of her mother. “And then John,” she says, now unstricken, and she smiles deeply, an inward, pervasive smile.

  John has just moved back to Virginia, after an unfortunate life in New York: a dead wife, a patchy career. (This reinforces the local view that it is dangerous to marry Yankees, and to try to work up there. Just look at that Calloway girl, that poor Louisa.) Aware of this view, John and Louisa think, and they say to each other: “They don’t know the half of it.”

  To Kate, John is still a vivid memory of early pain, turning her down. (“Shall we take our clothes off, John—and do everything?” “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”) And then dumping her for that girl, that dumb little bitch, that—? (No, not Miss Murray.) She asks Louisa, “What was that girl’s name, do you remember? The one John liked for a while, after me?” She gives that last phrase a wry twist.

  “Mary Beth Williamson.” Louisa has an odd memory. She laughs. “John couldn’t remember her name, either. God, what a dumb little bitch she was.”

  “He doesn’t?” Then maybe in twenty years David won’t remember the nurse’s name, but by then it will be too late. Or—maybe he isn’t screwing her after all. “It’s so hot,” Kate says, and she flops flatly into the pool, a large lazy splash.

  Feeling her friend’s unhappiness (What is wrong with Kate? She doesn’t say), Louisa is dimly reminded of another time, of herself excited and “in love,” at a time of sadness for Kate. And she remembers that she was in love with Richard Trowbridge (Richard Trowbridge?) and Kate was mourning over John. Snow, and sledding on the golf course. She remembers everything.

  And now she loves John, and she is also mourning. In her strange, exaggerated state of mind, she could easily cry or laugh. In fact she does a lot of both. Now she slips into the pool after Kate. In tandem, more or less, they swim around its out-of-style kidney shape. They get out together.

  A new thought bursts from Louisa, this time a funny one. “Kate, did I tell you what happened to Richard Trowbridge? John just told me last night.” (She loves to say John’s name.)

  “Richard—?”

  “You remember Richard. He was mad about you, and then me.” Louisa begins to laugh.

  Kate has remembered. “Oh, Richard.”

  “Well, he’s living in Washington, and he’s in the C.I.A.! He’s important there!” Louisa chokes on this.

  “The C.I.A.—that’s marvelous.” Kate laughs, too; for various (and divergent) reasons they are both almost hysterical.

  “The C.I.A.—”

  “Richard—”

  “How perfect—”

  “Our country really needs—”

  But (and again for separate reasons) neither of them can laugh long, and they sober up together. Kate says, “I don’t know, I really wonder about marriage.”

  “Oh?”

  Kate gestures, unspecifically. “Fifteen years—it’s so long. It’s so easy to get out of touch.”

  “Touch” makes Louisa think of John. His touch. But she tries to listen. “Out of touch?”

  “You sort of stop talking. I mean, of course we still talk, but a lot of it is about the kids. Lists for a Christmas party. Income tax. You know.”

  “I can’t imagine fifteen years,” Louisa says, not very helpfully. But the very idea has made her vulnerable spirits sink. Where will they be, she and John, in fifteen years? Should they marry?

  And you almost stop screwing. Kate goes on to herself, except for an occasional quick morning bout. David waking up with a hard-on, happening to be next to me. Not like years past, when we waited for the kids to go to sleep so we could do it on the sofa, listening to Ella, or Frank—hoping the music drowned us out.

  Not only the contents of her mind but the impossibility of speaking them is oppressive to Kate; she feels lonely, and isolated from Louisa, who seemingly is saying everything in her mind. And Kate wonders: Do I not tell Louisa about what is nearly ruining me with worry out of pride, what is called false pride? Or don’t I say it because saying it might make it worse, like not screaming during physical pain. (“I’m afraid David is fucking his nurse” would be a scream.) Kate doesn’t know. she never cried out during the difficult births of her children. Stephen, Jane, Louisa, and Christopher, who is only three, who was not exactly intended. (But should she have cried out?)

  “Christ,” Kate says, instead of saying anything else, “I’ve got to take off some weight.”

  “Oh, why? There’re so many skinny women around. I love the way you look,” Louisa ardently tells her.

  Kate laughs. “You’re crazy.” But of course she is pleased.

  “So—what else is new?”

  Louisa says, “I suppose you don’t remember that time you came to see me and Michael? When I was pregnant?”

  “Of course I do. You lived in a funny sort of rented house, and after dinner those other people came over. The boy who took me to lunch that time.”

  “Andrew Chapin. That’s funny—he reminds me of John. Do you think they’re a type?”

  “Perhaps.” Sighing, Kate looks down at her legs, foreshortened in the water, pale and fat-looking. But is Louisa right, or just being nice? Is it okay to be fat?

  Louisa is saying, “But you were so marvelous that time; that’s what I remember. You really lit into Michael about my having a terrible full-time job so that he could go to graduate school.”

  “Did I? What a guest!”

  “But you were right. Why should I have been the one? And what’s awful is that at the time it seemed perfectly normal. And I was so crazy that I thought Michael was normal.”

  “I don’t really remember that part of it.” (I was too absorbed in missing David, Kate remembers.)

  For many reasons Kate would like not to see John Jeffreys on this brief visit, and so far she has not. She does not want to see John himself, or John and Louisa, “in love.”

  But this is unavoidable; it is a small town still, and there they all are.

  A party is given for Louisa, a small quiet one, since there has just been a funeral, and of course it is known that Kate is visiting there, is staying at the Inn. She has persuaded Louisa that she needs some time alone, not saying just why. “At this point the utmost luxury that I can imagine is an anonymous hotel,” which the Inn is not, but she makes do there.

  And everyone remembers the girlhood of Louisa and Kate. (“That cute little red-haired Yankee girl—whatever happened to her people?”) Dashing young Kate, wearing red, who came down and broke the hearts of several Southern boys: Richard Trowbridge (but then he got to like Louisa, and she ditched him), and then John Jeffreys. So now the chivalrous story goes: Southern boys do not ditch girls.

  As all her life she has, undecorous, unrestrained Kate admires the decorum and restraint of Southerners; even Louisa has a curious tendency to behave well at times when Kate might not. These gentle old people sip tall drinks of bourbon and water. (Mint juleps are too much trouble, and are locally regarded as a little pretentious, a drink that rich Yankees might serve—that Kate’s parents often did serve, until they caught on that it was not the thing to do.) Gentle references are made to Louisa’s dead parents, and to the recent funeral. “I did think the service went well, didn’t you, Louisa, dear? And the flowers were lovely. The perfect time of year.”

  (Kate wants to say, “How very considerate of Jack to die in May.” Or a part of her wants to say that. Another part would like to be as gentle as these people are.)

  And Louisa. She is wearing such a Southern dress. Pale blue, with tiny f
lowers of a deeper blue, a tucked bodice, flowing skirt. (Miss Louisa.) Her hazel eyes are enormous, tearing readily at the names of her parents. Tearing at the sight or voice of John, whom she is for the moment passing off as a kind old friend. “John has been such a help.”

  She even says that, as Kate thinks: Christ!

  John Jeffreys. It is apparent to Kate that at first he does not know who she is (she was such a slender girl, back then) and so she is free to watch him. He is still very thin, but with startlingly white hair, so that his eyes are even larger and darker than they were. But the same eyes. Same sad witty intelligent face. Kate has, of course, been filled in on his life by Louisa. His wife’s suicide, his attempts at careers. Drinking too much. Playing the piano. In everything John is always somewhat tentative, not quite committed—Kate is suddenly aware of this, and of the fact that he hasn’t changed at all; he is as Southern, as gracefully elusive, as when he was a boy, and Kate experiences a twist of fear for Louisa. (But why? Louisa has always, somehow, managed to survive: Louisa is a born survivor.)

  “Your father would have liked—”

  “Remember the time that Jack—?”

  “Caroline—”

  “A perfect time—”

  So those fading voices continue, over cool chicken salad and hot biscuits and tomatoes (from someone’s garden) and iced tea—so gentle and so false—until Kate is choking on an interior scream that threatens to climb into her throat, to explode in her mouth. Jack Calloway was a terrible person, a noisy bigot, screwing everything he could, including my mother. Do any of you remember Jane Flickinger, that chic Midwestern lady, that sucker for Southern charm? Screwed everyone and always made sure that Caroline knew. He reduced his wife to a dry shadow, and did what he could to wreck his daughter, but Louisa somehow finally evaded him. She survives.

  Of course she says nothing at all.

  John Jeffreys has recognized her; he is standing at her elbow, lightly smiling. They exchange sounds of recognition, and greetings. He says, “Such intensity in your eyes. I’m sure you won’t tell me any thoughts.”

  So Kate says, “You watch out, or I will tell you some of my thoughts.” The old Kate: challenging, emphatic.

  He smiles. “Will you if I get you a drink?”

  She smiles, too, managing an almost Southern, guarded smile, and yields her glass. As, cruelly, she thinks that he is a perfect husband for rich women. And then she hates herself for having thought that—it isn’t true.

  By now it is late, past dinner. The pale firefly dusk has been replaced by a dark blue night sky, across which there are billowing white clouds. This particular house is out in the country, in the hills beyond the town; the sky is huge.

  Kate has a sudden and strong sense of being drunk. Odd: normally she can drink quite a lot, but now she feels a slow lurch within her head as John comes up with another, stronger drink.

  She tells him, “Christ, I really feel drunk.” He used to hate her swearing, she remembers, but now his face looks only concerned, and kind.

  “Really?” he asks. “Do you want to go home?”

  “I probably should. I might start being a disgrace.”

  He smiles, and goes over to Louisa, who (for decorum) has come in her own car. In Jack’s latest (last) Mercedes. And so it is arranged. John will drive Kate back to the Inn.

  They speak farewells to their hosts, who seem to remember something, seeing Kate and John together; as though struck by some distant echo, those old faces are momentarily alight with recognition.

  During the round of farewells, Kate has finished her new drink, which has made her feel much worse.

  “I’m really sorry,” she says to John in the car, his shabby old Ford. “I’m really not in terribly good shape.”

  The billowing clouds are enormous, very white against the midnight blue. It is somehow an unreal sky. Unnatural.

  “Do you want to talk?” asks John. “We are old friends.” He says this with the gentlest irony.

  Christ! It makes her cry.

  She says, “I think my husband—David—is fucking his nurse.” She has blurted this out; she is out of control. A noisy Yankee. Drunk.

  “But is it important?” His gentle voice.

  “Of course it’s important. Christ, what do you mean?”

  “I just asked. I meant important to David. It might not be, you know.”

  He has stopped the car, off from the country road, in a grove of pines. He sighs. (He has just realized that he is trying to rescue yet another woman.)

  Kate turns to him; she is aware suddenly and vividly of the sexiness of their situation, and of the significance of what he has just said.

  She murmurs, “It might be something unimportant to David?”

  “Yes, very unimportant.” But they are no longer talking about David.

  They reach for each other; they begin to kiss, to cling together.

  But Kate is sick. Nausea rises in her throat, a quick wave, so that she swallows hard. She breaks from John; she opens the door and leans out. She vomits, convulsively.

  When she is through, drained and exhausted, she closes the door, leans back on the seat. John hands her a handkerchief.

  They are both quiet, and then Kate bursts out, “God, what were we doing?”

  “Maybe something unimportant.”

  “But Louisa—David—”

  “They aren’t here. And you’re a really attractive woman. You always have been.”

  “John, please don’t give me that Southern shit. Not just now.”

  He laughs.

  He starts the car; he drives her into town, to the Inn. And that is that, except that it is an incident to which Kate gives a lot of thought.

  She begins, of course, by supposing that they had gone on, had completed the act so impetuously begun, or perhaps the act begun twenty years ago, which could have been another thing that John meant to say. Okay: they have made love, fucked, in a parked car on a country road, in a grove of pines. Two old friends. What did it mean? That John did not really love Louisa? No, but it would mean exactly that to Louisa if John were foolish (or cruel) enough to tell her. (If John were Jack Calloway.) And she remembers what she has not thought of for years: that boy, that Andrew Chapin. Suppose they had gone on to a motel, as they both had wanted to do?

  David of course has denied screwing the nurse, screwing any nurse, and now Kate thinks of him with a sort of tired affection, bringing tears to her eyes for a moment.

  “Do you think John has changed a lot?” Louisa asks. It is her way of asking, “What do you think of John? Isn’t he marvelous?”

  Being “in love” has made Louisa younger; she laughs a lot and finds it hard to concentrate on anything but John.

  “I don’t know.” Dishearteningly, Kate realizes that whatever she says will not matter much. However, she tries. “The trouble is that it’s hard to separate John now from John then. Old images impinge,” she says.

  “Exactly!” Louisa seizes on this. “I sometimes wonder who I’m in love with. I mean, it must be at least partially the boy we knew all that time ago—”

  “He looks a lot the same. Thin. But that marvelous hair.”

  “Yes, I’d have known him anywhere,” Louisa breathes. Then, with the jumpiness that presently characterizes her conversation, “I’m so worried about Maude,” she says. “All the summer-of-love flower-child stuff that we keep reading about. She writes, but all she says is that things are ‘really beautiful.’ ”

  “Well, maybe they are?”

  Louisa frowns, then grins. “In any case she’s happier. She did used to be so lonely. Isolated. And hunched over those enormous breasts. Of course I would have a daughter with huge breasts.” She laughs.

  Kate says, remembering, “I think Stephen said he saw her somewhere. He said she looked great. Wouldn’t it be great if they were friends?”

  At her own insistence Kate goes for long walks alone, around the town and out a little way into the surrounding countryside. Purpo
sefully (sentimentally) she chooses the directions that she used to take with John, that spring. She takes roads leading out of town and into the woods, the pine-needled paths, in the sunny, piny air. But the paths have gone wrong—or something has.

  She comes to the top of a hill (a place where she and John used to stop and kiss, or so she now believes). From there you could see an ancient cornfield, overgrown in springtime with wild flowers, and after the field a thick growth of green, lining the creek. And somewhere down there was a small romantic road, a cart track, actually; two people coming down from the woods in single file could walk there together, holding hands above the wild grasses, the tiny flowers that filled the ruts.

  But now: Kate looks down a red clay bank, steeply slashed into the hillside. A highway, a superhighway. A subdivision of “Colonial” white bungalows.

  Christ, have they buried the creek?

  “Christ, did they bury the creek?” Kate asks this of Louisa, at dinner in what is now Louisa’s house. (It is curious that after contesting his wife’s will, contesting Louisa’s inheritance from her mother, Jack has still left her almost everything. Perhaps he thought that otherwise it would not look well.) Louisa and Kate and John—they are being served by a black woman whom Louisa has introduced as Mary, who looks very much like the maid the Calloways had a long time ago (twenty-five years?), when Louisa and Kate first met.

  John smiles, and Kate wonders. Could he be remembering their walks? Does he know where she went that afternoon and what was in her mind? Probably, she decides.

  He says, “The creek might as well have been buried. That subdivision.”

  The dining room is at the end of a wing, in that sprawling, oversized house. There are windows on three sides, long windows, and now light from their bright table falls outside on slick rhododendron leaves, the bushes grown enormous, bearing heavy, creamy blooms. Kate remembers how awed she was by that room, years back: the imposing windows, so much bright crystal and silver. The several maids, at times a butler. A romantic room—Kate thinks that Louisa and John should be here alone.