Superior Women

by Alice Adams

  “You’re the only person I’ve ever seen just back from Hawaii without any tan at all,” is the dead-pan comment of Leslie DuVal.

  “Well, I had a lot to do there.”

  “Oh. Business?” Poor Leslie, chatty by nature, is frustrated, always, by Megan.

  “Well yes, sort of. Private business.”

  “Oh.” Leslie sniffs. Desperately concerned with style, Leslie invents her own fashions; it is her form of fiction, Megan understands. That day she is wearing black net stockings, a tight black skirt and very high heels. “Well,” she now says to Megan, “you won’t mind if I’m a little late back from lunch? I’m doing it with Benny.”

  • • •

  She goes home early.

  Tired and aimless, disoriented in her own apartment, Megan’s attention is suddenly caught by the preening voice of a news announcer; coming in, out of habit she must have flicked on the radio. He is talking about Christopher Street, and a slight breathiness in his delivery indicates that he has something big on his mind. “Christopher Street, where there have been several ugly incidents of what is known as ‘fag-baiting’ or ‘queer-bashing’ tonight added a new horror to its list. The famous playwright Adam Marr, out walking with a young actor, Donald Stark, neither of them, uh, known homosexuals—were assaulted by three men. There was an exchange of insults, and shots were fired by the men in the car, who escaped. They were not identified by passersby.… Not expected to live … Survived by … Shock … very successful playwright … wives … children … successful …”

  Megan manages to turn off the radio, that horrible self-approving voice. She manages to sit down. She finds that she is trembling, and not weeping but covering her face with her hands as though she were.

  She does not, of course, for an instant believe that Adam is dead. Nor Cathy.

  After a while, when she can, Megan dials Janet’s number, and is informed by an answering service that Dr. Marr is unavailable at this time. Is this an emergency? Well, is it? Dr. Marr will call.

  Megan considers making herself a drink, and decides on tea instead, partly because boiling the water, heating the pot—all that tea ceremony will take up a certain amount of time.

  Fortified, but hardly comforted, by her cup of tea, Megan telephones Biff.

  Biff’s voice is so tight that at first Megan thinks he must have guests, except that in that case he would explain, “Darling Megan, I couldn’t be busier. Could we just possibly talk tomorrow?” Tonight he says nothing of the sort; in a dull-sounding way he asks about her trip and then, in answer to her question (“You’ve heard the news?”) suddenly and entirely unexpectedly, entirely out of character (as Megan has known his character), Biff begins to shriek: “Of course I’ve heard the news. Lord God, don’t you know anything? It could have been me! Megan, can’t you tell I don’t want to talk to you? I don’t want to see you!”

  Shocked, wounded, and most of all terrified, Megan hangs up. She believes that in some way she can understand Biff’s outburst, his panic and rage, and she can tell herself that it really has nothing to do with her.

  She goes to bed, and lies awake. She is wholly terrified of the world, all its lurking evils. Cancer. Crazy cretins bearing guns.

  At some point her phone rings. She does not answer.

  That night, and for days, for weeks to come, Megan finds it impossible to think of Adam—dead. Instead she continuously sees him, with the most incredible vividness, as first she did see him, on the steps of Barnard Hall, the soldier who for one instant she thought might be George Wharton. Adam, the skinny too-curly-haired boy with the violent hot blue eyes, Adam saying to her, “You know, if you’d lose some weight you’d be one terrific tomato.”

  And of Cathy too Megan thinks in earlier, middle-forties scenes. Cathy alive, in all her distinctiveness, her private quirks—her odd voice and odder wit. Cathy herself.

  Of all the various known and available therapies, Megan chooses work, at that time of her life. Instead of getting out of the agency and doing something else, as she has from time to time considered, if vaguely, she throws herself back into it. She works ten and twelve hours a day, and also she walks back and forth to work every day.

  And she almost succeeds, sometimes, in numbing the pain of Cathy’s loss, and the shock of Adam’s.

  She does not call her mother.

  37

  In Georgia, after the deaths of the Sawyers (mercifully occurring within a single year), their house was bought by a sporting type from Texas, in the probate sale. He soon became disappointed with the local game, the scrawny rabbits and tough old squirrels not being just what he had in mind, and he took out his chagrin on the house, in the form of total neglect. The Sawyers’ lawyer, a family friend, wrote to Peg, who had kept up with the Sawyers. Would she possibly be interested? Would she not! And so, when Peg arrived, she found too a great deal of work to be done; rescue work, so gratifying! She has probably never been so happy in her life, as she sees to propping up the sagging porch, arranges for the sanding of floors, discusses drains.

  She loves everything about the house: its history, beginning with the Sawyers, just down from Black Mountain with their dream of a house, and its later service as a shelter for civil rights workers; and its situation, the broad view of hills and meadow, everywhere green. She is crazy about the heavy gray wisteria vines that frame the porch—her porch.

  Apart from the rudimentary, necessary repairs, Peg is remodeling the top floor, and the attic; what was once a long gallery of bedrooms, ideal for the days when she and the other rights workers were there (including Henry Stuyvesant), she now wants as a long, large, and very private, very beautiful room, with a lovely view, for her own very private life, with Vera, whom she loves beyond words. (A love that includes the most passionate gratitude. “You gave me to myself,” she has said, to Vera.)

  The fact that Vera is often sick makes her an even more romantic figure, in Peg’s view. And Vera never has ugly, minor ailments, as Peg herself sometimes does. During the first winter they were together Vera had pneumonia, and then an allergic reaction to antibiotics that almost killed her. How rare and valuable she is, to Peg—how beautiful, how loved. How unlike Peg.

  Vera is considerably more realistic, more down-to-earth than Peg is, both because she has been in social work and because she has had quite a few more love affairs than Peg has, with women, sometimes men—“You would have found someone, sometime, if you hadn’t met me,” she tells Peg. And then, very affectionately, since she is truly fond of Peg (if not “in love”), “But I don’t have to tell you, I’m sure glad it was me.”

  “Yes, you do have to tell me. Tell me that often, please.”

  In that first spring of beginning work on the house, Peg’s house, the air inside is full of sawdust and fresh smells of new-sawn pine, sounds of hammering, sawing, the occasional protesting screech of a nail pulled out; and the voices of the young men who are doing the work, kids, actually. (And Peg is in trouble, fighting hard with the local union, because some of them are black.)

  Surrounding the house, outside, the woods are full of spring. Sudden sprays of dogwood, white against the pines, like fountains. Budding maples, poplars, crepe myrtle. Peg walks everywhere, smiling to herself; she pushes aside the damp strong green boughs, brushes at cobwebs, and looks down at the thick carpeting of wet dead winter leaves, and brown needles—to see, with a rush of delight, a small patch of yellow dogtooth violets, or yellow or purple or white wild iris.

  Sometimes alone, sometimes walking there with Vera. “Vera, look! Anemones, there by the waterfall!”

  “Peg, you’re too much. A person would think you never saw spring before.” Vera touches her arm, and laughs, in her gentle way.

  “Well, actually I might as well not. This is different.”

  The tobacco barn still stands, more crumbled now, with big holes in the plaster chinks, but still imposing. In fact Peg does not quite know what to do with it, if anything. The best plan seems to be to let it alon
e, let it fall down in its own dignified way.

  At the moment Candy is sleeping out there—Candy, a twenty-eight-year-old disaster of the sixties, of drugs and God knows what else (Peg does not want to know any more than she does). Candy sleeps out there in her ancient filthy sleeping bag, which is like a baby’s totem blanket, Peg has thought. But Peg thinks too that personal dirt and too-cold fresh spring air are less damaging to Candy than whatever her sleeping arrangements used to be, in her pads in San Francisco and Seattle, Vancouver, Anchorage, and back to San Francisco, where Peg finally found her.

  Sometimes, sometimes for days, Candy is perfectly fine. She washes her hair and smiles, and sweeps up sawdust and eats at mealtimes, with Peg and Vera and the kids who are working there. She never talks when anyone is around, but that is all right at those meals; she is just a pale thin young girl, with short clean blond hair. Candy Sinclair.

  But then, it is as if overnight her hair can go dirty and drab, and her eyes shift to a look of such anxiety as Peg has never seen, on anyone. Panic, terror, and a horrible wild nervous impatience. At those times she will follow Peg around all day, talking in an incessant and almost senseless mutter: “Do you think it could rain? I think it looks perfectly clear but who can tell? About anything? People come and go when you weren’t expecting them to do anything at all. My periods make me feel terrible. I hate blood. Once I missed for four months in Anchorage. Just the cold, I guess, and I wasn’t eating much. I hadn’t been fucking, I don’t think. Do you think it will snow down here this winter? Are we still going to be here next winter, do you think?”

  Having listened to this, with variations, for several months now, Peg is almost able to turn it off, simply to keep on with whatever she is doing. At intervals she smiles at Candy, in a way that she hopes is reassuring.

  At other times the content of Candy’s rambling is genuinely alarming: barely whispering, Candy confides, “Along with the Thorazine they implanted this radio set in my head. It’s tiny, that’s why the scar is so small you can’t even see it. But I can’t turn it off, and people are telling me these terrible things. Like, I’m scheduled to go to Washington and be a call girl for the government, it’s part of the Watergate deal. I’m supposed to, uh, go down on all those guys, and let them, uh, do it to me, anally. It’ll hurt! They talk about this stuff all the time, but I don’t think they know where I am. They don’t know you’ve got this Georgia hideout for us.”

  Helpless Peg can only stroke Candy’s hair, and say, “Darling Candy, that’s terrible, that’s horrible for you. But maybe they’ll stop.”

  And this gentle reassurance seems to work a little, sometimes.

  Vera is a considerable, kind help. “You’re doing exactly right,” she tells Peg. “Most people, including doctors, try to tell kids like Candy that what they feel isn’t true, they don’t have radios in their heads. But for them it is true, they do have radios, and they do hear those voices. I think you’re wonderful with her.”

  What Cameron has said to Candy, Peg gathers, is: You are crazy, no daughter of mine can be crazy, you have got to stop saying those things. “Did he mean I’m not really his daughter?” Candy has asked.

  “Darling, no, he just meant he was upset. Of course you’re his daughter.” And you are the result of that ghastly drunken coupling, Peg thinks, and of course does not say.

  At other times Candy is saner than anyone. When Megan calls to tell Peg that Cathy has died, it is Candy who comforts her mother, pointing out, “In an odd way it all seems to have worked out right. Cathy’s child, and her mother, and her mother’s new husband. Was Cathy married to the father of her child?”

  “I don’t know. At first Megan said she was, and he died, but Lavinia always said there was something funny going on. ‘Funny’ seems an odd word for it all, somehow.”

  “Well, Cathy must have felt sort of good about the way it worked out. Her mother getting married and taking care of the child.”

  “I don’t know if she felt good about anything.” Peg sighs.

  • • •

  Lavinia also calls about Cathy’s death; she and Peg have a brief, awkward conversation about that (Peg has already heard how “rude” Cathy was, on Lavinia’s visit) and then Lavinia goes on to scold Peg about her new living arrangements (about which she knows very little).

  “I’m sure you know what you’re doing, dearest Peglet,” says Lavinia, clearly not sure at all, “but I can’t believe you did right in leaving that nice old Cameron.”

  “Well, I hope I did.”

  “He did say you’d taken your maid along.”

  “My maid? What on earth is he talking about?”

  It is true that Cornelia has said she will come to visit, but surely that is not what Cameron meant? “I’m living here with Candy and a friend I met here before, that summer I spent working here,” Peg halfway explains. And then, with more courage than she would have known she had, she adds, “Possibly because my friend is a Mexican-American Cameron chose to refer to her as my maid.”

  “Oh, well, yes, I guess.” Lavinia trails off, and they both get off the phone as soon as possible.

  And then, on one of her “good” days Candy announces that she is tired of the tobacco barn; she wants to move into the house.

  “But darling, where?” Peg would also like to know for how long, but she cannot ask that, not of her daughter. Nor could she expect Candy to know.

  But Candy’s modest request has the (perhaps intended) effect of making Peg feel guilty for the very large amount of space that she, Peg, has had in mind for herself and Vera, that whole long room. Of course they do not need all that.

  She also wonders what, at close range, as it were, Candy will make of her own connection with Vera, but decides rather easily not to worry; she somehow concludes that whatever Candy thinks could in no way be harmful to herself, to Candy.

  • • •

  In a gradual way, Peg begins to notice that on those good days, Candy seems to have a particular friend among the kids who are working on the house: a small, very thin, very black young man, the probable youngest of the group—he looks about sixteen.

  Peg sees Candy and Russell, who is smaller than Candy is, engaged in serious, rather hurried private conversations, here and there, during Russell’s coffee breaks, or at lunch.

  With Peg, Candy does not mention Russell at all, and so Peg sees fit not to ask, but she wonders about their connection, and she worries, a little. Although they never seem to smile at each other, Peg of course considers the possibility that they are lovers, and then chastises herself for doing so. She knows nothing at all about Candy’s sexual life, she does not want to know. But she has to admit that she finds that possibility disturbing. Mainly because she does not think that Candy is well enough, really, to handle anything as serious as sex. Peg has never believed that the young are as light-hearted about sexual matters as they say they are; if they were they would all be much happier, wouldn’t they?

  “Russell is really upset,” Candy tells Peg, one day (one good day). Candy’s tone, though, is so tense, so enforcedly calm, or so it seems to Peg, that Peg is frightened, for Candy. She cannot quite focus on Russell’s upset.

  Candy continues: “His sister gets out of jail next week, he says she got into a fight with her husband, and she cut him so he wouldn’t kill her. But they locked her up, not him. And now she’s getting out, with no place to go, and her husband’s going to be looking for her. And Mom, do you think she could stay here with us for a while?”

  Even as Peg is saying, Yes, of course, her mind is running ahead, to her own long dream of a bedroom, which she now begins to see that she was not supposed to have. It will be diminished by one, by two, and who knows who will come next? She sees that she should perhaps have left the house as it was. She and Vera could have the attic (or half the attic).

  The next day, a Saturday, about midafternoon, from nowhere strange yellowish heavy clouds appear, all around the green horizon, and distant rumblings of th
under sound. Peg summons Vera to come and sit out on the porch, to watch.

  Vera laughs at her. “It’s just a thunderstorm. You’re so funny, you think everything that happens down here is strange and wonderful. Like Oz.”

  Peg cheerfully agrees. “I guess I do. It is Oz, for me.”

  They sit in adjacent rockers, on the long wide-open porch—like an old couple, people who have been together forever (like the Sawyers), Peg thinks, and she next thinks: dear God, please let us be that, an endless couple.

  The sky darkens, and is split by a single crack of lightning, and then, in the weird sulfurous half-light, the threatened rain pours down.

  “You’re not cold?” Peg asks Vera.

  “No, it’s so warm out. And you’re right, it’s wonderful to watch.”

  Peg tells herself to stop worrying over Vera’s health—and in fact Vera has never looked better. Her delicate dusky skin is lightly flushed, her dark eyes clear. She is not only pretty, she is a healthy young woman, Peg firmly tells herself. To Vera she says, “It’s a little worrying, all these people suddenly moving in. And this summer Cornelia wants to come to visit. And Megan.”

  Surprisingly, Vera takes this up very seriously. “I think we have to talk about where we’re going,” she says.

  Peg’s heart clenches: does she mean, she’ll move out if all those people come? She’ll find someone else, some new woman, or a man? Too quickly she says, “Well, they don’t have to come, I mean we don’t have to have Russell’s sister, or anyone, if you don’t want—”

  “But we do have to, and I do want. And I want to stay with you, silly Peg.” Vera reaches out to Peg, her long cool fingers close around Peg’s wrist.

  Peg’s skin burns, at that touch. She says, “Well, all right.”

  “We just have to talk about what we’re going to do with the house,” says Vera.

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