by Alice Adams
Having expected no answer—she was actually speaking to herself—Peg is surprised to hear Cameron saying, “Oh, great. You haven’t made that for—for years.” Not since you were sick, he means, and just does not say. And then he says, “But really, Pegs, if you’re going to go to all that trouble, could we ring in at least another couple? I’d like to ask Barbara and Harold.”
“Oh. Well, okay. You don’t think they’d be bored? College reunion, birthdays, all that?” Peg tries to laugh in her jolly old way, but it does not sound quite right.
“Of course not. And you girls can take care of all that stuff ahead of dinner. You and Lavinia. Didn’t you say they were getting here before lunch?”
“Mummy, what’s beef Wellington?” Carol asks, from the foot of the table. “Will we like it?”
“No, you wouldn’t like it at all. And Cornelia will feed you kids before we eat,” says her father decisively.
Harold and Barbara accept—Harold is someone important, in another oil company. And Peg and Cornelia decide that yes, beef Wellington would be best. (“We’ll show them folks we knows how to do,” Cornelia giggles, in what Peg thinks of as her stage Southern Negro voice. She thinks a lot, still, about Cornelia going to college.) They will start with Cornelia’s crayfish bisque. Cornelia’s sponge cake for dessert.
Why, then, does Peg experience such leaden dread, whenever she thinks of Lavinia, the dinner, as though a thick black cloud had settled around her? Is she going to be sick again?
No, she will not be. (Remembering shock, she will not be.)
• • •
But:
On the very day of the dinner, the day that Lavinia and Potter are to arrive, the phone rings early in the morning, and it is Cornelia, who says to Peg, “I bleeding. Bleeding too bad to move.”
“But Cornelia, Jesus. Every month. I mean, you’ve come here before, when you were—”
“Not like now. I bleeding too bad.”
“Cornelia, what’ll I do for the dinner?”
“You manage. You cook good.”
“But, your crayfish bisque. Sponge cake.”
“You make some other kinds. You ain’t bought the crayfish yet, is you?”
“Oh, God. Cornelia.”
“Well, if that isn’t typical,” says Cameron, informed of this emergency. “Peg, I don’t like to say this, but I really think you’ve asked for it. You’ve practically made a friend of that woman, and so of course she takes advantage of you. She probably just decided that a dinner party would be too much work. Miss Scarface is just plain lazy. I know it’s a cliché, but really, they all are.”
“Oh, I’m sure it’s not like that. She really sounded terrible. Sick.” Saying this, Peg experiences a strong surge of guilt toward Cornelia, who did sound terrible, and sick; but she, Peg, was almost too caught up in her own panic to notice. Miserably she thinks, I cannot get through this day.
In an automatic way she begins, though, to do the chores that she had planned for that morning, once the kids are off to school, the dusting and silver polishing, rechecking the guest room for Lavinia and Potter, going out to the flower market, arranging flowers, putting bowls of flowers everywhere. She is aware of moving in a dull-witted, leaden way; it is hard to think of what comes next.
And then, about midmorning, there is a taxi pulling up. Lavinia Potter. Lavinia getting out. Long thin legs, a red suit. Potter in a dark business suit, carrying bags.
“Well, old Peglet, happy birthday! I can’t tell you how glad we are to be here! If New Orleans isn’t the tackiest—now, Potter, you know we hated it. Oh, Peglet, what an adorable room! and the flowers!”
In Lavinia’s perfumed, blond, effusive presence, Peg feels heavier, duller. And much closer to panic. She is barely in control, she thinks.
But once Potter has gone off to the business that Peg suspects was the real reason for their visit, Lavinia takes charge. “Darling Peglet, just tell me the menu. In my way I’m madly efficient.”
Which she is. This comes as no surprise to Peg, who has always known that Lavinia could do anything she wanted to. But she had forgotten.
“Oh, Peg,” Lavinia scolds. “I just know you were too nice to that black girl, and so when you really needed her she let you down. Honestly, you just don’t understand colored help. You’re not used to them, growing up in New Jersey.”
Too tired to argue, too confused, Peg is also thinking that Lavinia at thirty is even more beautiful than she was at eighteen, but she can think of no way to say this, and perhaps it is something that she is not supposed to say? But heavily, clumsily, she simply says, “Lavy, you look great, really great.”
Very pleased, Lavinia frowns, in her special way. “Oh come on, I’m a thirty-year-old mother. Can you believe it? But you have to see Amy. She’s very beautiful, no picture can give you any idea.”
“I’d love to see her,” Peg mumbles. She is thinking that a miniature Lavinia would truly be more than she could stand.
“Well now, let’s see about your dinner,” Lavinia bustles. “Peglet, no one does beef Wellington themselves, at home. It’s a caterer thing. We’ll just broil the steak. Just a lovely big plain steak. Very easy. And since your girl’s not around to make her famous bisque, well, I know a really great trick with canned beef bouillon and tomato juice. Everyone loves it. Great short cuts, that’s my specialty,” and Lavinia laughs, her old charming complicitous laugh.
By midafternoon the dinner has been taken as far as it can go, for the moment, and so Lavinia and Peg settle in the living room with cups of tea. Finally, to talk. (Although, really, Peg does not want talk. With Lavinia there, the living room suddenly looks so shabby, everything so old and battered, as she herself feels old and battered, as heavy as her furniture. She would rather lie down, with the door closed. She would rather get in the car and drive out to see Cornelia; with Lavinia so close by, so disapproving, she has not even dared telephone Cornelia.)
“Well, do you ever see old Megan?” Making a huge effort, Peg has asked this question heartily (but perhaps too heartily? She has a sense of having said something wrong).
Lavinia frowns, in her old way. “Not much, really. Sometimes we talk on the phone. But you know, our lives are simply too different. They just don’t overlap. And with Megan there’s always been something a little, well, odd.”
“I guess there is.” Peg is finding it hard to pay attention. She is not thinking of Megan, really.
“Oh, Peglet, you know she’s pretty difficult. It may have something to do with coming from California. Isn’t her mother a carhop, or something like that? But all those Jews she used to go out with, and recently she told me that she actually knows this Negro trombone player. Jackson something. She has actually gone out with him. And you know Megan, heaven knows what else.”
“Megan has a Negro friend?”
“Yes, silly Peglet, what do you think I’ve been saying. A friend, and maybe something more.”
“I think Rosa Parks is wonderful,” is the next thing that Peg says.
“Who? Do I know her? Was she in our class?” Lavinia is genuinely puzzled, and she had wanted to go on talking about Megan, having quite a bit more to say. But, Rosa Parks?
“You know, Rosa Parks,” insists Peg. “The woman on the bus in Montgomery.”
“Oh. Oh well, really, Peg, I didn’t know you’d got so political.”
“I’m not. It’s not that. I just think she was really—brave.” At this Peg’s weak blue eyes fill with tears. She is losing her nerve, all the nerve that it now takes to talk to Lavinia, that she will need for tonight. She is thinking of Cornelia, bleeding.
“In a way, I suppose she was very brave.” Lavinia speaks slowly, judiciously; she is trying to be fair. But then, with more authority (and much more feeling), she adds, “She really started a lot of trouble, though. A lot of people are going to get hurt. And for what? Just so Negroes can sit on the front seat in buses?”
Peg reflects on this, and concludes that it is tru
e: a lot of people will get hurt, and will it really do any good, finally? Lavinia is always right, she leaves no room for argument (even when she is not right, is wrong). Peg finds her spirits lowered, almost flattened out, as though Lavinia had forceably pushed them down. Almost with relief she suddenly remembers, and cries out, “Oh, God, I forgot all about our cake!”
Relieved to have the subject changed, Lavinia giggles; she felt that it had been getting out of hand, their talk. What is the point in even discussing such things? “Peglet, you just forget about doing any baking,” she tells her friend. “Just give me your car keys and tell me where there’s a good bakery.”
“Oh no, I’ll go too. But you’re right, we have to buy one.” The dinner has changed hands, Peg is thinking; it is now Lavinia’s dinner, her project. But was it once Cornelia’s dinner?
“Speaking of Negroes, as we sort of were,” Lavinia continues, “do you all down here read much about Adam Marr? You know, the playwright that Janet Cohen married?”
“Uh, I can’t remember.”
“Well, naturally Megan used to be their practically best friend. I heard she was living with them in Paris. Although I don’t think she sees them much anymore. But you didn’t read that Adam Marr married that colored girl?”
“Oh. I think so. Something.”
“Well, he did. Although I hear she’s gorgeous. You know how some of them are. But he left Janet in some big old barn of a house in White Plains, of all places. I guess Megan goes up to see her sometimes.”
“What does his wife do? The Negro that Adam Marr married.”
“Oh, I don’t think she does anything much. From what I hear being married to him’s a full-time job, and then some. I think she used to be a model, you know a lot of magazines are using them now. Even Vogue.”
After a pause, in a troubled way Peg muses, “I wonder how Cathy is.”
“It’s strange, I have this strong feeling that something really peculiar is going on with our little Cathy,” Lavinia tells her. “I don’t think she even writes to Megan anymore.”
In its way, the birthday dinner is a great success.
As usual Lavinia was right: the soup is highly praised, and she laughingly (charmingly) refuses to tell anyone what it consists of. “That’s a secret, just between Peglet and me,” she says, with a small wink in Peg’s direction.
And Potter and Lavinia get along with Harold and Barbara as though (literally, actually) they had always known each other. And indeed it turns out that they had known each other’s cousins, gone to school with each other’s best friends, had spent summer vacations at the very same places, and winter vacations too. Everything they say is familiar also to Peg, and those same names, same schools and summer beaches, winter suns—but it is as though she had never heard of them; she might be some accidental stranger in these people’s midst, so acute is her sense of isolation.
Now they are talking about Senator McCarthy, whom one of them very much dislikes, “… although, you’ve got to admit, he got a job done that someone had to do,” says Harold, looking piously boyish.
Potter Cobb frowns at his steak. “He was instrumental, at least, in doing a lot of damage to a friend of ours. Man named Henry Stuyvesant, just about to get started in state politics, a few years back in New York, with every kind of backing, and that name—” Potter grins sheepishly, embarrassed at even mentioning the possible distinction of a name. “Anyway, Henry had all this going for him, and some Broadway, Hollywood connections too. Darling, who’s that fellow that married the Negro girl?”
“Adam Marr,” Lavinia supplies, through tightened lips that only Peg observes, and wonders at.
“Well, Henry is a perfect prince of a guy, even if he does have some pretty funny friends. He hasn’t always had the greatest judgment in the world. Would you agree to that, darling?”
Lavinia stares at her husband. Is it possible that she has flushed, just slightly?
Potter continues. “It seems that old Henry went through a fairly pinko phase as an undergraduate, the war in Spain, all that business. Well, some fellows from the senator’s office got in touch with him, and they just said he’d better forget about public office. He wanted to fight them, but of course he’d have really ruined himself, that way. But the poor fellow really took it hard.”
Lavinia is up on her feet, but smiling. “Darling Peglet, we’re the maid, remember? Come on, let’s clear this stuff off, or we might get fired.” She achieves a laugh.
In the kitchen, standing at the sink, efficient Lavinia unaccountably breaks a wine glass, as Peg is bringing in the dinner plates. Lavinia holds up a furiously bleeding index finger. Her eyes are full of tears as she exclaims, “Oh, shit, shit! Why does Potter have to be so stupid? Who wants to hear about that ass of a senator? I hate politics.”
Peg holds the finger under cold water, and then produces a Band-Aid. For the first time that day she feels that she knows what she is doing.
And almost instantly Lavinia recovers. She smiles. “Oh, Peglet, you’re so good to me!”
Together, Lavinia and Peg bring in the birthday cake, with their thirty candles, and everyone claps and sings Happy Birthday to “the girls.”
The next day, Peg cannot get Cornelia on the phone. No answer, even. But that is impossible: even if Cornelia isn’t there, where are all the children? You can’t just vanish if you have four children, as Peg would be the first to know. Someone has to be taking care of them, always.
She thinks of driving out to Cornelia’s house, but then she reasons that if no one is answering the phone, there can’t be anyone at the house.
In an idle way, she stares at the phone book, then notices that a couple of numbers are scribbled there, in Cornelia’s schoolgirl writing.
She tries the first number. A man answers, a Negro man. “I never heard of no Cornelia Smith,” he says, too loud, and he hangs up.
The second number produces a shrill woman, also a Negro, who says, “She owe you money, it your tough luck, white lady.”
“She doesn’t owe me anything, I just wanted—” But that person has also hung up.
At last, trying Cornelia’s house once more, Peg gets the small faint voice of a child, who says, “She gone to the hospital.”
Once at the Negro hospital, that afternoon, it still takes Peg more than an hour to find Cornelia, an hour of surly and/or stupid bureaucrats, of corridors crowded with gurneys, wheelchairs, ambulatory patients, in their shabby hospital robes. Large wards of beds, full of men and women who are not Cornelia.
Peg has left her own house in a hurry, having errands to do on her way to see Cornelia: she stopped by Cornelia’s house with some hastily bought presents for the children, and she has with her a present for Cornelia. (She did not even stop to call Lavinia, to say goodbye, she now guiltily thinks.) Nor did she get dressed up; she is wearing the old college Levi’s that she had put on at breakfast. And now, confronting one hospital official after another, including a succession of hostile nurses, she wishes that she had got dressed. No one cares in the slightest whether or not she finds Cornelia Smith, who is there for an unknown and probably suspicious ailment.
The smells of disinfectant and of medicine have begun to give Peg a headache. As she hurries through those corridors and wards she gets glimpses of bloody bandages, of faces drawn in pain, and of tearful visitors, sitting miserably on the hard waiting room benches. She sees tiny fearful (Negro) children in oversized wheelchairs, or on crutches.
But finally, in a narrow white bed, in a roomful of beds, she comes to Cornelia: Cornelia, ashen-faced, dopey, weakly crying. She barely smiles as Peg comes up to her, she only murmurs, “Miz Sinclair.”
Peg takes her hand; she is thinking how beautiful Cornelia is, more beautiful than Lavinia ever was, even.
“Miz Sinclair, they done took it out. They done took everything out of me,” Cornelia cries.
“Oh, Cornelia, how do you mean? What was wrong?”
“I ain’t no more woman, they done took
it out.”
“A hysterectomy? Is that what they said—did you hear that word?”
“Yes’m, they say that.” And Cornelia cries harder, sniffling, holding her fist to her nose and wiping at tears.
Wishing she had a handkerchief or even some Kleenex to offer, Peg feebly says, “Oh, Cornelia, oh, that’s too bad.”
“They just took it all out!” Cornelia begins to cry harder, her words making what she feels worse.
Peg wonders if her visit is doing any good; she does not feel helpful, or cheering.
“Cornelia,” she tries to ask, “is there anything I could bring you, anything you need? I took some things over to your house for the children, just some food and a few clothes, some toys, so don’t worry. They all looked fine—”
“I just need to be back where I was before,” Cornelia moans.
“But Cornelia, now you won’t have all that trouble every month. And you really didn’t want any more children, did you?”
“No’m, I didn’t, but I might, some year. Somethin’ could happen to these ones that I have.” And she cries and cries.
Peg has brought Cornelia a pink silk nightgown; having had no idea what to bring, she was caught by a display of gowns, in the department store where she went to look for children’s toys. Deciding that it might at least be a diversion, she holds out the box, as she says, “Here, I thought you might like this.”
Quieted, for the moment, Cornelia takes and begins to unwrap the present; she even smiles. But then as she parts the tissue and comes to the actual gown, her tears begin again, coming harder and faster than before. “But I got no more use—,” she gets out, with the most terrible plaintiveness.
After a dull, uncomprehending moment, Peg suddenly understands that Cornelia believes her sexual life to be over: the nightgown will not do her any good, with men. And of course she, Peg, must tell her that this is not true. Which seems impossible. They don’t talk about sex, they have no words for it.
“Cornelia, what you think isn’t really true,” she clumsily attempts. “I mean, you can still find some nice man, who loves you.” For a minute she is too embarrassed by the transparent silliness of what she is saying to continue: Cornelia has never yet and most likely never will find a nice man to love her. Peg forces herself to say what is more nearly true. “Cornelia, you can still have intercourse. Have sex, if you want to.”
