Alice Adams
Page 4
Agatha in particular spent much of the season in bed with “vicious” colds. Alice later remembered a fantasy she’d had when she was “extremely young”: “My mother being sick and my taking care of her, I think I even talked her into acting it out with me—I brought her pretend-tea in bed. I think that must have been a way to make her less terrifying—and of course to put myself in charge.”10 In the spring, Agatha seemed “a little better” and everyone understood that her indispositions during the previous winter had been complicated by pregnancy. Her baby was due in August.
Meanwhile, Agatha and Nic coped with their rambunctious four-year-old by considering Alice difficult. The little girl who looked adorable in little white smocks and slippers became known as a “fabulous crawler” who happily knocked over a neighbor boy who was just learning to walk. Her parents let her know that as a baby she “had been hyper-aggressive in a very unfeminine (un-Southern) way.”11 Adams’s story “The Visit”—written many decades later with Hortense, Buck, and Grace standing in for Agatha, Nic, and Alice—proposes that the child’s difficultness is a projection by uneasy parents:
Her father, a classic beau of his time, was handsome, and drank too much, and chased girls. Her mother… was smart and snobbish… tended to say exactly what she thought, and she wasn’t one bit pretty. Neither of them seemed like ordinary parents, a fact they made a point of—of being above and beyond most normal parental concerns, of not acting like “parents.” “We appreciate Grace as a person, and not just because she’s our daughter,” Hortense, the mother, was fairly often heard to say, which may have accounted for the fact that Grace was a rather unchildlike child: precocious, impertinent, too smart for her own good. Rebellious, always.
* * *
As her parents adjusted to an expanding family and a constricting economy, Alice began kindergarten early and opened the imaginary world she shared with her dolls to encompass other people. In a letter she dictated to her mother for her grandmother Boyd, she said, “I love you so well. You come to help me take care of dolls. We will both be happy if you do come. Verlie cooks beautifully.”12
Another kindergartner, Josephine MacMillan, became Alice’s best friend, as she remembered in her story “Child’s Play,” wherein she becomes Prudence, opposite to Josephine’s Laura Lee: “A long time ago, in the thirties, two little girls found almost perfect complements in each other. Theirs was a balanced, exceptionally happy friendship: skinny, scared, precocious Prudence Jamieson and pretty, placid, trustful Laura Lee Matthews.” Though the friendship had been arranged by the girls’ parents for their own convenience, “Prudence and Laura Lee really took to each other, as their grateful hard-drinking parents remarked.” During long summer twilights,
the small girls used to play in the sprawling, bountiful Matthews garden, and one of their favorite pastimes involved making a series of precariously fragile, momentarily lovely dolls out of flower petals. Pansy faces with hollyhock skirts, like dancers’ tutus, for example, or petunia skirts and tiny rosebud faces… This occupation entirely absorbed both children, and it formed an idyllic part of their childhood, something they lightly, laughingly mentioned to each other as they became more complex but still firm adult friends.13
There were other kinds of play, too. Neighborhood twins Robert Macmillan and Dougald Macmillan IV (unrelated to Josephine) were the first boys to hold Alice’s attention, and she remembered one scene all her life. As she and Robert walked through the woods by their houses, he asked her if it was okay if he peed. “I had never seen a penis before, and I truly thought it was marvelous, so pink and pretty. Emitting an arc of pee off into the leaves,” Adams wrote, he “went on to explain that his thing was indeed marvelous. He could make it stand up just by thinking about it, he said to me. And he showed me.”14
The Adams house was filled with books. Agatha read poems to Alice from The Sugar-Plum Tree and Other Verses or from the tissue-thin pages of The Home Book of Verse, where they preferred “long, sad Scottish ballads.” Young Alice made elaborate, expressive crayon illustrations of smiling cats or groups of children that her parents preserved, and she read Victorian books about dolls that Agatha had saved from her own childhood. After those came “trash novels” (as she later called them, probably echoing her mother’s opinion) about large, happy families, like Margaret Sidney’s Five Little Peppers, and a series of novels about the exemplary Grace Harlowe (generous, kind, and always ladylike, but also smart and independent) and her friends at school and college by Josephine Chase (pseudonym Jessie Graham Flower). She received books in the mail from a children’s book club and eventually chose whatever she wanted from her parents’ shelves; the Bull’s Head Bookshop, which her mother helped found in the basement of the new University Library; and that library’s three hundred thousand books, one of the largest collections in the South. Other entertainment came from movies at two picture houses downtown and plays at the Playmakers Theatre.
In the last year of her life, Adams thought about her tendency to relocate the literature she read to her own “known, familiar sites,” so that her favorite fairy tales took place in the woods near Chapel Hill or a boathouse in Maine. She also mentally rewrote the endings of stories she read, turning them into wishful enactments like the stories she’d invented for her dolls. On the ending of “Goldilocks and the Three Bears,” for instance, she wrote, “The intruding little girl, Goldilocks, is somehow ejected from the home of the bears, sometimes thrown from an upstairs window… [or] peaceably leaving through the front door… But I seem to have found or invented still a third version of my own, in which having at last come upon such a warm and congenial family, Goldilocks is adopted by that family, with the Littlest Bear for her brother (something I very much wished I had).”15
* * *
As the end of her pregnancy approached, thirty-eight-year-old Agatha was scheduled for surgery at Duke University Hospital.II Alice was sent to spend a month with her grandmother and other relatives in White Plains, New York.16 Contemporary practice dictated that a woman who’d once had a cesarean section could not afterward have a vaginal delivery. At five, perceptive Alice certainly knew her mother was pregnant and probably sensed the apprehensions and expectations that were circulating within the family while she was away. Alice made herself “difficult” and, probably, “fell in love” with her aunt Virginia’s husband, Edgar Dare.17 Those circumstances appeared in her novel Rich Rewards, where she portrayed a five-year-old girl who clamored for attention from an uncle, “a perfectly nice, rather ordinary young man in his middle twenties,” who never suspected that the child “who behaved with such consistent brattiness” was filled with “wild emotion” about him. Adams attributed her character’s “nutty obsessiveness with love and men” to being in love with an uncle when she was five. That hilarious account masks a different loss that Adams rarely spoke of and never wrote about.
Midmorning on August 30, 1931, Agatha gave birth to a son by C-section. While she was under anesthetic, her surgeon repaired a hernia and performed a tubal ligation to sterilize her. Before Agatha can have been much recovered from these procedures, the baby died. He had lived just six and a half hours. According to his death certificate, signed by G. E. Harrison at Duke hospital, the cause of death was status thymo-lymphaticus. Autopsy notes in the obstetrical logbook translate the condition as “hypertrophy of thymus gland.” The baby weighed five and a half pounds.
Joel Willard Adams was small, but the condition to which his death was attributed by the staff at Duke was by that time no longer regarded as unusual, diseased, or dangerous by medical researchers.
The history of the diagnosis status thymo-lymphaticus provides a sad footnote to the death of the Adams baby. As a favored explanation for the sudden death of an infant, the term entered medical literature in the 1880s. Many doctors and much of the public came to believe that an enlarged thymus gland, because of its location near the heart, aorta, and lungs, could cause internal suffocation. The condition was often diagnosed in
babies who died under or immediately after anesthesia with chloroform, and yet the anesthesia was seldom considered the primary culprit.
In the early twentieth century, pathologists began to question the diagnosis while “a growing number of anesthetists took the existence of status lymphaticus for granted and stressed diagnosing the condition in advance of surgeries” on young patients. In 1926, though, the Medical Research Council and the Pathological Society of Great Britain and Ireland organized an investigative committee that found the diagnosis has “no more value than affirmative evidence in cases of witchcraft” and “ought to be abandoned.” In 1931 the Lancet declared the end of the diagnosis in an article titled “The End of Status Lymphaticus.” The British Medical Research Council committee excused the long mistake with the following observation: “It is simple humanity to search for some explanation which will satisfy the modern mind where ‘the visitation of God’ would once have been enough. Hence the doctrine of ‘status lymphaticus’ which, owing to our ignorance of the anatomy of the normal healthy human body, has survived longer than it should.” American medical texts still included status lymphaticus in the 1940s, and American doctors were using radiation to shrink infants’ thymuses until in the 1950s they realized that the radiation was causing cancer. Historian of medicine Ann Dally’s fascinating chronicle of the diagnosis argues that doctors had unintentionally created a mythology of disease because there was a “need” for it: status lymphaticus offered a desperately wanted explanation for deaths that could not otherwise be explained, especially in light of a desire not to blame anesthesia for deaths in surgery.18
In fact, Duke University Hospital used a complicated anesthesia protocol for cesarean sections in the 1930s. Operating under the belief that narcotics did not cross the placenta (disproved by Dr. Virginia Apgar in 1952), Duke anesthesiologists sedated obstetric patients using a dangerous method that administered ether as needed without accurate measurement of the amount inhaled. Next they often used “layered” anesthesia, a protocol that did not become common elsewhere until the 1940s. In addition to ether they “administered a spinal or caudal, local procaine, and nitrous oxide plus halothane and/or cyclopropane,” reports historian of medicine Jacqueline Wolf, who has studied obstetric records from that era at Duke and other hospitals. “It’s not hard to imagine killing an infant with all those drugs,” Wolf commented. “It’s harder to imagine so many surviving such a birth.”19
Yet many did survive. There is no clear reason why Alice’s baby brother did not. Perhaps the “simple humanity” of the diagnosis spared Nic and Agatha the trauma of asking how much Agatha’s age and need for a cesarean-section birth and anesthesia contributed to their loss. Joel Willard Adams, named for Nic’s father and grandfather, was buried in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery at the edge of the University of North Carolina campus. The grave marker, if there ever was one, has not survived.20
At the end of October, two months after Joel’s death and Agatha’s surgery, Nic wrote Tom Wilson: “It will certainly be fine to see you Thanksgiving. Don’t fail to come. We miss you badly. Agatha is still improving, though not so very strong yet. She had a rough time of it.” Before the end of the year, Agatha wrote a poem she titled “To a Caller”:
My eyes you say are very calm and quiet
You praise my strange tranquility of mien;
You do not know that far behind this stillness
There dwells a woman you have never seen,
Who screams and runs forever through the mazes
The dark and secret alleys of my brain;
A woman weeping for her only son,
Rebellious to inexorable pain.
The effects of Joel’s death on Agatha’s health and sexuality, on her and Nic’s marriage, and on little Alice were incalculable and incontrovertible.21 When Alice’s grandmother brought her back to Chapel Hill to enter first grade, the family universe was entirely changed, full of sadness and repressed anger. “Alice took this all upon herself as her fault,” her friend Judith Clark Adams believed. “And I think that was her first broken heart. The first broken love affair. Alice never talked about it.”
Nic Adams continued to expand the house, but it seems that no one slept in the new master bedroom. Agatha slept in the guest room and Nic slept on the sleeping porch, while Alice remained upstairs with her own bathroom in the old section of the house above rooms that were rented to a bachelor professor named Bill. Alice remembered “a not-quite conscious feeling that my parents were too far away from where I slept; that they were also far from each other did not strike me as strange until some time later.”22
By the time Alice was old enough to realize such things, a severe, unspoken emotional distance separated her mother and father. The contrast that attracted them to each other—Agatha’s seriousness and maturity, Nic’s extroversion, high spirits, and flirtatiousness—was exacerbated by Nic’s heavy drinking. The usual constraints of marriage, motherhood, and a lack of her own intellectual work became a stranglehold for Agatha. “They were at odds temperamentally,” Alice’s friend Judith Clark Adams thought. “Their Southern manners did not allow for overt conflict. I cannot imagine Agatha and Nic screaming at each other. I cannot imagine Agatha ever raising her voice. She had a beautiful, modulated Southern accent. But what took place was actually more vicious than that because of the ironic, sarcastic distancing of Nic. And Agatha was just too inhibited and too rigidly polite. Certainly there was tremendous unhappiness there. And I think losing the baby had a really profound effect.”
Tellingly, in story after story that mirrors Alice’s girlhood in Chapel Hill, the couple who resemble Nic and Agatha—usually Tom and Jessica Todd, or sometimes Taylor—have two children: a girl named Avery and a boy named Devlin. The characters with A names are ciphers for Alice, while Devlin represents the lost baby, Joel. Such a longed-for unit of loving parents and children haunts much of the fiction Adams wrote about her growing-up years.
In a photograph of the Adams family from late 1931, Agatha, wearing a sad, private smile, stands with an older woman while little Alice, grasping a bunch of flowers and her mother’s hand, eyes the camera from under her bangs and recedes behind the fur cuff of her mother’s coat. Nic, lanky, handsome, biting his pipe stem (just as Alice often described him), occupies the left half of the picture. He seems both self-involved and distracted, focused on a wide-brimmed hat and black cat that he holds. One can’t infer too much from one photograph, but Nic’s standing apart from the three females in that picture seems to confirm Alice’s recollections of him as more a performer rather than a participant.
In a world and a family mired in depression, Alice needed new companions—books, friends, and nature—to help her grow into herself.
I. I could not identify Verlie Jones in 1930 Census records.
II. Endowed by American Tobacco Company founder James Buchanan Duke in 1930, the new hospital in Durham was deemed the best medical institution between Baltimore and New Orleans. North Carolina had long lacked adequate medical facilities.
CHAPTER FOUR
Depressions
— 1931–1937 —
And I felt the most passionate envy of that condition, that bodily family warmth. As I imagined it, they would all lie cuddled like puppies, with the mother and father on the outside edges, protectively.
—Alice Adams, “My First and Only House,” Return Trips
Nic Adams became more attractive and sociable as he aged, while Agatha lost her youthful complexion and figure. In “Roses, Rhododendron,” Adams’s iconic story of adolescent friendship and the silent undercurrent of unhappiness within her parents’ home, she describes her mother as Emily Farr: “a small plump woman, very erect,” who “sat down very stiffly” because of “some terrible, never diagnosed trouble with her back; generally she wore a brace.” Her dark brown hair had turned beautifully and uniformly white, though it was “badly cut in that butchered nineteen-thirties way.” It would be frivolous to impute Agatha’s rage to
loss of sexual appeal. Since graduating from college and meeting Nic Adams twenty years earlier, she had suffered the loss of her health, her husband’s companionship and devotion, and her intellectual vocation. She was hurt and she was angry.
If it’s true that Agatha never raised her voice, her restraint only increased the weight of her criticisms of both her husband and her daughter. Near the end of her life, Adams wrote in a notebook: “My mother was given to unkind truths which she expressed at considerable length. Complex, intelligent insights into the deficiencies of my character. I think she must at times have done the same thing to my father—but maybe not, she both loved & feared him more, in fact some of the rage I got may have been deflected.”1
Adams tried repeatedly to fathom her mother by portraying her in her fiction. As Jessica Taylor in an early unpublished story called “The Wake,” she is a Tidewater Virginian for whom “the personal was infinitely difficult.” In her first published novel, Careless Love, Daisy Duke’s mother’s suicide—prompted by her husband’s philandering—devastates ten-year-old Daisy. As Jessica Todd in stories in Beautiful Girl, she has a “mournful, exacerbated and extreme intelligence” that “is not compelling” to her husband, Tom. When a young man talks to her about poetry and recommends books to her, Jessica feels respected and desired: “A woman desired is a woman not seen as herself, is a woman re-created—she is remembering Tom’s brief blind passion for her.”