Thus holding hands and kissing in honeysuckle caves in the Southern pine woods was replaced by necking in a car “in the marvelous privacy of deep snowbanks,” with “curious pink light on all the surrounding miles of white, reflected in all the lakes.” Again, for Adams, the landscape is eroticized by her strong emotions. While naïve characters in the stories notice clichéd romantic symbols like the full moon, the authentic, intelligent characters notice wind, clouds, water, trees, or patterns of light.
Adams toggles often between these two kinds of imagery, just as she alternates between simple romantic fantasies and more detached analysis. Amid the excitement and the kissing, the girl (in the story) wonders what her steady boyfriend is really like: “They still don’t talk much, and so his existence is largely in her imagination—and her senses. They are absorbed in kissing, gentle and prolonged.” After a formal Christmas dance the girl is in love with her boyfriend and “also in love with the dance, that scene, chiffon and silk and black ties… the fragrance of pine and perfume.” That night in their parking spot, with the branches around the car laden with fresh snow, “not quite aware that their mouths have opened,” the boy “reaches inside her coat, he touches her smooth bare shoulder, but then pulls his hand back. (He ‘respects’ her.) He says, ‘God, some times I wish—’ And then he says, ‘Are you hungry? Want to go out to O’Connell’s?’ ” The carnal possession promised in “their” song having been postponed, the couple continue to spend most of their time kissing—French kissing, in the black coupe.
The words her boyfriend has spoken about a friend (Steve) who is “just out for what he can get” with his girl echo in Shelley’s mind. She decides something must change. On New Year’s Eve, under a slender moon, she determinedly tells her boyfriend, “I don’t think we should do that any more.” Respecting her, he agrees. She playfully asks, “You’ll love me anyway?” The boy agrees that he loves her anyway. Stating the lesson Alice would learn—and unlearn—in Madison, Adams explains: “For he believes in her premise, believes he should love her anyway, kissing or not. Love is more important than sex: love is not the same thing.”
Despite this belief, the Shelley and Frank in “The Nice Girl” soon break up. They are “wretched and inarticulate” and the girl wishes she could say, “I’ve changed my mind—let’s go off in your car. I love you.” She doesn’t say that. Instead she spends most of January 1941 “suffering in a classic way.” To Judith, Alice explained, “I didn’t know what was expected of one when going steady. When Bobby and I broke up I thought life was over.”
Alice’s letters to Judith tend to confirm that she, like her heroine Shelley in “The Nice Girl,” dated several boys from West Madison High School who drank too much and took her to ballrooms with names like the Top Hat and the Hollywood. Shelley “worries a little that she is becoming fast, but there are so many girls who are a lot faster than she is.” Thus Alice’s adventures in the backseats of Madison brought her full circle from a doomed attempt at love without sex to seemingly easier and ultimately far more confusing versions of sex without love. One wonders how far Alice went that spring of her debut as a popular and sought-after girl. The evidence of Adams’s letters, fiction, and later notebooks suggests that Alice probably did not go “all the way” with any of those Madison boys. Some things could not go in letters: “I’d give anything to talk to you for about five hours,” Alice complained to Judith. “I’ve got so awfully much to tell you about. You have no idea.”
As Alice’s school year closed in June, Jim McMullan from North Carolina came to visit her in Madison, staying two days and writing in her yearbook that he intended to win her back from “Mac” when she returned to Chapel Hill. Mac, whose last name Alice didn’t record, may have been the fast, older boy “just out for what he can get” in “The Nice Girl.” Whoever he was, Alice didn’t tell him about Jim McMullan’s visit—“Tricky, aren’t I?” After McMullan’s visit, Alice confided to Judith that her “love life [was] still so damn muddled,” and said, “I think I’d like to start going steady again. That would certainly simplify matters but there’s no one on the horizon whom I’d want to go with. Mac asked me to, but that would not be at all a good idea.”
Oddly enough, just days before her final departure from Madison, Alice accepted Mac’s offer to go steady. She explained to Judith, “I think it’s a poor idea in general but I thought under the circumstances, it’s best,” and said that Mac was “not too handsome but very smart. Perfect personality… has much higher ideals than most guys. He never drinks.”
The boys of Madison so affected fourteen-year-old Alice that she had no qualms about giving advice to Judith when she was severely hurt by a breakup with Robert Macmillan in Chapel Hill: “My advice is to get as many other men as you can and in doing that you’ll either forget Rob, get interested in some one else, or get him back, and any one of those things would be ideal from your view point.” Has the romantic Alice been subsumed in a worldly femme fatale? Has she ceased to believe in true love? Not quite. The advice to Judith continues: “Don’t say you can’t get anyone else, because I know damn well you can. As long as I’ve been in Madison, I have only met about four girls who have as much on the ball as you… I’m trying to say something that will help you but even then it’s hard for you. I finally got over Bobby but even now there’s a funny feeling when I see him.”3
Adams’s year in Madison became the basis for a revision of her thinking about the problematic relation of love and sex. Shelley of her uncollected story “The Nice Girl” reflects on the problem twenty years later. Her current husband tells her that she was taken in by “the whole myth… the sex-love thing. The division. In a way you were acting like a boy.” This interpretation offered from a man’s point of view stirs resentment in the woman. She doesn’t want to admit that she separated sex from love and prefers “her own version, which is vague as to outline, but vivid as to details: the pink mist above the city, the snow, Frank’s sharp shoulder blades.”
Sensual details are Adams’s answer to the conventional rules that hemmed and twisted her youthful sexual curiosity. Despite its appearance in mainstream McCall’s, “The Nice Girl” complicates its “love story” genre. Shelley’s persistent longing for the boy who “respected” her but also broke her teenage heart because he too wanted sex leads her to ask herself, “But why couldn’t I have gone on with Frank, and done all those things with him that spring? I really cared about Frank.” She has turned the love-sex equation on its head: “by some curious (unconscious) contemporary logic, because she is not ‘in love,’ these sexy explorations do not count.”
“The Nice Girl” takes self-awareness one step further by questioning the premise of the “heartbreak story” in which the man does wrong to the woman. In telling the story long after its main events take place, Adams asks, did Shelley actually want “the pain of breaking up? Practicing heartbreak?” She gives her story two codas. First, a meeting with Jean five years later reveals that Frank married one of the popular girls who was both beautiful and fast. Second, twenty years later, there’s the conversation with her husband about the sex-love divide. And then there’s one more layer to this Russian doll of a story: Adams’s remembering of the episode and transformation of it to fiction thirty-some years after it occurred.I
* * *
While it might seem that Alice cared about nothing except kissing and going steady during her pivotal year in Madison, some of the vividness the year held in her memory was due to the national political debate and the disturbing news from Europe.
Since 1938, the US had been building up armaments in what President Roosevelt called “measures short of war, but stronger and more effective than mere words.” But events continued to outflank American hopes of avoiding war. In September Japan officially allied with Germany and Italy and continued attacking China and other Asian countries. FDR maneuvered to aid Britain without inflaming isolationists, who now called themselves the Committee to Defend America First and drew sup
port from such influential figures as Henry Ford, Joseph P. Kennedy, and Charles Lindbergh. Nonetheless, Congress enacted universal conscription. In October more than sixteen million men aged twenty-one to thirty-five registered, though many also married in hopes of winning deferments. Photographs of London in flames under an onslaught of Nazi bombers made the case for war more strongly than the president could. Roosevelt, with Henry Wallace as his vice president, defeated Republican Wendell Willkie in a campaign season dominated by debate between isolationists and interventionists. In November Americans were divided 50-50 about helping England. By December, the balance had shifted: 60 percent of Americans polled by Gallup favored assisting England. With Willkie’s endorsement, FDR expanded military contracts.
Isolationists remained vocal among Wisconsin’s fundamentalist Lutheran and German-American populations, and Alice’s friendship with Jean Salter brought her close to the debate. Confined to bed with a pregnancy in her forties, Jean’s mother had become obsessed with the war news. “She went off the charts in a way,” her daughter recalled. She wrote pro-war letters to the Capital Times in Madison and other papers, and promoted the settlement of displaced European families in cities across the United States. Her idea was that every sizable town could sponsor a refugee family. A German family resettled in Madison lived across the street from the Salters. Friedrich Roetter, a lawyer, left Germany for England after unsuccessfully defending German Communist Party leader Ernst Thälmann, who was arrested by the Gestapo in 1933 and killed at Buchenwald in 1944. In Wisconsin, Roetter earned a PhD in political science and became a teacher while his wife, Ada, gave lectures across the Midwest about conditions in Germany. Their son, Jurgen Roetter, attended Wisconsin High School.
In her story “Fall: 1940,” Adams invokes the Salter and Roetter family connection and revisits Alice’s tender feelings about her days in Madison, and how she absorbed the political context of that year. For Caroline Coffin Gerhardt, who is based on Jean Salter’s mother, the coming war is a worry that prevents her from thinking about anything else beyond routine care of her children: “Hitler must be stopped. The urgency of it possessed her, what Hitler was doing to the Jews, the horror of it always in her mind.… There in the isolationist Midwest she was excoriated as a warmonger.” Because of their work with the resettlement committee and friendship with refugees, the Salters were apprised of persecutions, medical experiments, and killings at concentration camps (Adams names Dachau and Buchenwald in her story) before news of the camps and proof of extermination programs appeared in mainstream media.II
In June 1941, as the Adams family was packing to leave Madison, Hitler’s troops attacked the Soviet Union, ending the Nazi-Soviet pact, forcing the Russians to join the Allies, and at least postponing a Nazi invasion of England. To some the Nazi turnabout seemed like a reprieve that would allow the United States to stay out of the war. For Nic and Agatha Adams, leaving Madison also came as a reprieve. In February, Agatha published a poem in the Chapel Hill newspaper complaining that she was tired of reading in that paper about daffodils and roses while she faced three more months of winter in the frigid north: “Consider us in exile and in gloom, / And spare us these long columns filled with bloom.”
* * *
Alice and her steady, Mac, said goodbye at the end of June. Because Alice declined to spend a fifth summer at camp even though Judith Clark was returning for another session, the Adamses invited Jean Salter to spend the summer with them at Lake Sebago. As usual, they broke up the long drive with a stay at the home of relatives in White Plains. In Manhattan they saw two plays, Emlyn Williams’s The Corn Is Green with Ethel Barrymore in the lead, and Lillian Hellman’s Watch on the Rhine, about the struggle against Nazism in the United States. Once Jean and Alice were allowed to take the train into the city alone for what Alice described to Judith as “one of the best days of my life.”
Mac wrote Alice every other day as promised but said he couldn’t visit her in Maine because he’d taken a job at “a big national defense factory… Damn Hitler anyway!!!” Thinking over her love life, Alice realized—as she also wrote Judith—“It’s funny—every year [starting at age eleven!] I say goodbye to someone and then wait for their letters in White Plains; Robert, Sammy, Jim & now Mac.” Curiosity about her feelings matches her desire for romance: “I don’t think I miss Mac as much as I did his three preceders [sic], though he’s by far the most wonderful & sweet & smooth…”4
At Lake Sebago Alice and Jean slept in a screened cabin away from the main house. “We would get into our cabin at night and just crack jokes and make comments that struck us as being brilliant,” Jean remembered. “There was no other kid out there to say we were not. It was a lovely friendship.” Jean and Alice canoed, walked into the nearest town for the mail, and tried to meet boys from Camp Pokomoke. They succeeded. Alice became “awfully crazy about” two of them, Tom with an “adorable smile” and a portable record player and Eddy, winner of a national Gene Krupa drumming contest. She’d returned Mac’s pin to him by then, having decided that she “really didn’t like him and had no desire to string him along.” Jim McMullan, whom she’d see again in Chapel Hill, had fallen from favor too: “I’m so afraid of going home to all those kids. They’ll all hate me. Especially I don’t want to see Jim and I know I don’t like him and kissing him would make me violently sick.”5
For a girl just turned fifteen, for a girl who saw herself—and was seen by others—as bright but reserved in school and nervous around boys, Alice had racked up a long list of discarded boyfriends. Remembering that Alice’s chest was well developed, Jean Salter laughed, “Alice was more savvy than I, and she knew what to do with breasts.” Nonetheless, Alice’s knowing talk and frequent falls for “perfect” boys who turned out to be only human and horny suggest she was navigating rough interior territory as she tried to prove herself different from Agatha or sought the affection that she didn’t feel from Nic.
* * *
Because Alice needed another year of high school beyond what Chapel Hill offered before she could apply to colleges, her parents planned to send her to a boarding school where she’d be protected from the predations of college men and prepared for a good women’s college. By midsummer Alice was looking forward to enrolling at St. Catherine’s Episcopal school in Richmond, Virginia, and ordering uniforms and working through Latin exercises and reading lists: “We have to take notes on all the stuff we read, which is hell. They’re all swell books but I’ve read most of them before and taking notes as I go along ruins them anyway.”
As her summer in Maine ended, Alice’s cousin Mary Elizabeth Jervey was visiting. While Alice reread The Forsyte Saga (“decidedly my favorite book”), Mary Liz read “a rather spicy little one and [Alice was] continually having to explain to her about ‘adultery,’ ‘bastards,’ and ‘rape,’ ” Alice semicomplained in a long letter to Judith. Her cousin would be “lucky if [Alice didn’t] murder her brutally” for being “so infernally and eternally sweet” and “as dumb and childish as humanly possible.” Poor Mary Liz found herself in the path of Alice’s rebellion against all things Southern—in particular Southern belles.
With three years of Latin behind her, Alice was well prepared for the curriculum at her new school; in addition, two of her mother’s friends in Richmond private school circles, Miss Fanny Crenshaw and Miss Katherine Cory, had added their “social” endorsements to Alice’s application. But the excitement Alice professed during the summer quickly evaporated. “Alice had a feeling about St. Catherine’s that it wasn’t teaching us the right things,” her first roommate, Barbara Bates Guinee, remembered. “It was teaching us honesty, integrity, being a complete person, being your own self. I don’t know why she didn’t like that.”
One reason, plainly, was that St. Catherine’s was an all-girls school. Boys were nearby at St. Christopher’s School but the girls rarely saw them. To Alice, who’d always attended coed schools and lived close to a university, the chaste compound on the edge of Richmond was
a prison. She felt further restricted by the deeply Virginian qualities of St. Catherine’s, which she described in Careless Love (keeping the school’s name but moving its location to Charleston): the girls came from “good Southern families, lesser fortunes… famous antebellum names” and received a “surprisingly good education” because “what else was there to do but study?”
Founded by Miss Virginia Ellett in 1890 and operated by the Episcopal Diocese of Virginia since 1920, St. Catherine’s prepared day students and boarders for competitive national colleges on a classy Georgian campus in the West End of Richmond. Its formidable headmistress during Alice’s years was Mrs. Jeffrey Richardson Brackett (née Louisa deBernière Bacot) of Charleston, South Carolina, and Goucher College. As Miss Jefferson in Careless Love, the headmistress marries, at sixty, a Mr. Howe, who is eighty-two. “Was Mrs. Howe a virgin? This was much discussed.”
In the fall of 1941 Alice joined a junior class divided between “boarders” and “day girls” from Richmond, the latter of whom were in the majority. Boarders wore uniform dresses made by the Doncaster Collar and Shirt Co. Day girls wore “their own” clothes. Pages of rules governed boarders’ attire. One struggles, for instance, to grasp the logic of this one: “Plain brown belts, no thicker than one inch are the only belts other than regular cloth belts which may be worn with any uniform.” If that sounds manageable, consider this: “jacket sleeves never rolled or pushed up… riding jackets worn only for riding.” Round-the-clock, seven days a week, boarders lived by the school’s strict regimen. They awoke to a clanging bell at seven a.m. and were scheduled to the minute for classes, meals, and activities except for two free hours in the late afternoon before mandatory vesper services. Boarders were forbidden to wear makeup or to shampoo their hair more than once a week. Study hall began after dinner and lasted until bedtime at ten. Sundays offered moderate excitement when girls were escorted to the same church service that the St. Christopher’s boys attended. One boarder recalled, “You could not go any place except one nearby drugstore without a teacher to chaperone you. They had us on a $5 a month allowance, and you had to pay for your chaperone to go out with you if you wanted to go to a movie or a play. So $5 didn’t go very far.”
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