Alice Adams

by Carol Sklenicka

  * * *

  Alice had not been to Chapel Hill since 1958 but she relished the hometown gossip she received in letters from Max, Lucie Jessner, and Dollie Summerlin (who had once been Judith Adams’s mother’s best friend and was now a friend of Max’s). Thus she learned about Dotsie Adams’s beau named Herbert Cannon who sent oranges from Florida and had good handwriting. Dotsie took Herbert to Maine, which Alice found ironic: “probably because I still regard it as my mother’s property, which of course it was,” she said. The irony, apparently, was that Nic was being posthumously cuckolded by Dotsie in the same house—Agatha’s house—where he’d broken Agatha’s heart by falling inappropriately in love with Dotsie.I

  Herbert and Dotsie wanted to live together, but the old Adams house was too large to manage. His plan to buy a one-story house in Chapel Hill lapsed when he suffered a stroke. Dotsie exhausted herself caring for Herbert until his sons insisted on moving him to a care facility in Florida. Jessner worried that “money play[ed] a decisive role in their caretaking” and Dotsie was “very unhappy.”

  In the spring of 1979 Dotsie sent Alice a cryptic postcard about moving to a smaller house without mentioning her plans for the Adams house. Thus she revived Alice’s “old trauma of Nic’s will” and “root-like attachment to the house itself.” Jessner, trying to mediate between her two friends even as she struggled with severe emphysema, understood: “I promised myself, on leaving Germany, never to hang my heart on possessions; with houses I do feel different, they are almost people.”11

  The house saga lasted months. Almost everything Dotsie said about the house contradicted what Alice’s father had promised her: “Nic told me always that eventually I was to have the house, and that if Dotsie had to sell it she would share whatever with me ‘of course.’ ” Now Dotsie claimed in a late-night, possibly drunken phone call that Nic had wanted her son, Tom Wilson Jr., to have the house and that she had no legal obligation to give Alice anything. Alice viewed that as an “obvious, absolute arrant lie… in the first place Nic didn’t like Tommy, often said how boring and stingy he is; in the second, Nic was not duplicitous; he would not have told Dotise [sic] that and me such an entirely other version.” Alice was so upset by the call that she put Bob on the phone to end it: “She seems to want to go to any lengths to convince me that Nic cared nothing about me at all, which of course is not difficult.”12

  Alice remembered a letter (apparently not preserved) that her mother had written her during the last winter of her life: “A terrible letter from Agatha, not long before she died, that awful winter when Dotsie was happily off with second young husband, David, Nic in a depression at Malcolm Kemp’s—anyway, Agatha wrote me that the two most ‘piercing’ events of her life had been the death of her baby son and her husband’s ‘continuing attraction’ to Dotsie. So for Dotsie now to claim it—Jesus—”13

  Dotsie also claimed that she was spending “night and day” trying to separate out things Alice might want from other possessions. “I would be locked up having shock treatment by now if not for you and Lucie,” Alice told Max as the saga wound down.

  At that point Peter volunteered to go to Chapel Hill and help Dotsie with the sorting. He thought he’d get a free vacation, and Alice thought he was doing her a favor. Peter stayed with Max (they got along terrifically) and helped Dotsie pack a cardboard drum for his mother. The items in it, Alice said when they arrived, “looked like they came from a garage sale in a not-good neighborhood.” A nice Victorian sofa Alice liked was promised to Nic’s sister, and a valuable Gustave Doré–illustrated edition of The Divine Comedy that Alice loved was sold to a book dealer. “That woman [Dotsie] is as shrewd as she is stupid,” Max told Alice on the phone. “She knows the value of everything in that house and she is not about to let you get anything good.” Max reported that Dotsie had given Peter a broken chair, all the while saying she was generous to give him and Alice anything at all. “I’m trying to think it’s funny,” Alice wrote Lucie.14

  * * *

  Before she sent Rich Rewards to New York in August, Alice asked Diane Johnson to read it and found that “the most terrific help. Really another writer is so much better than an arrogant editor. She thinks it’s going to be wonderful—very Colette, she says. I thought it was political—oh well.”15 That “very Colette” comment recalls Max Steele’s earlier comparison of Adams to the French writer.16

  Gaining confidence from Johnson’s approval, Alice told her agent, Lynn Nesbit, “I really want a lot of money for this one.” Nesbit thought she could get a higher offer on the book from another publisher, and Alice wondered how much the prestige of being published by Knopf was worth to her. She’d become good friends with Victoria Wilson but was sometimes frightened of her in her editorial role. It was all complicated by their age difference. Alice wondered if an impersonal editorial relationship would be better. For instance, she didn’t “in a personal way” like Nesbit, but knew she was terrific at her job. Likewise, she then had “a totally uninteresting cleaning person, as a result of which the house is extremely clean. With old black cleaning ladies I always confused them with Verlie, and wanted to hear about their lives and make coffee for them.”17

  Victoria Wilson

  Negotiations dragged on with Alice—in her own words—“rather unnecessarily insisting in advance that [she wouldn’t] make changes.” She began to wonder “if [she] really want[ed] the experience of being edited by Vicky again,” saying, “She is just so difficult, and our neuroses do not work out well—my dependencies, her overbearing arrogance, tightness—plus being 20 years younger.” The unsettledness of the situation was “beginning to get [her] down,” she confided to a friend. In the end she accepted a “small” advance ($17,000) for Rich Rewards from Knopf.II18 That resolved, Wilson read the manuscript for the second time and wrote: “I am really amazed by the difference in the voice; there is an assurance here, and an ease which I don’t think came through in the early books, but which struck me instantly when I read ‘Lost Luggage’…”19 With this fourth book in seven years, Alice learned to fully trust her editor.

  In mid-September 1979 Alice and Bob flew to New York City for a whirl of lunches and dinners to celebrate her signing of the contract for Rich Rewards before they continued to Italy. As it happened, Pope John Paul II was making the reverse journey, speaking to enormous crowds and disrupting traffic in New York. Alice got a glimpse of the popular pope in his limousine but was disturbed by his message. He urged the poor not to despair and to shun violence but refused to address the problem of overpopulation. “I am obsessed, who is not? with millions of starving children,” she wrote editor Alice Quinn, whom she’d met through Wilson, “so to hear someone talking about birth control and moral laxity is—difficult. The most wonderful teacher I ever had, F. O. Matthiessen at Harvard, used to explain his positions by saying, ‘I am a Christian and a Socialist,’ which I sometimes feel like saying—who’d care though.” To Diane Johnson, who was spending a sabbatical year in Paris, she fulminated about friends who admired the pope: “Did he do something wonderful that I missed? Just caused traffic jams, I thought.”20

  New York exhausted Alice and Bob before they arrived in Milan to begin a three-week drive through Northern Italy with stops at Lake Como, Verona, Bergamo, and Florence. No doubt they looked at statues and paintings and cathedrals but the moments Alice preserved in writing were personal and often funny. When a pink silk nightgown in a shop window in Florence caught her eye, Bob looked at the price tag and calculated forty dollars. It was a “perfectly okay gown but more the thought of souvenir” that led her to pull out her credit card as Bob admired a “sensational slipper satin grey robe, lined in brown silk,” priced at 249,000 lire. Over lunch she studied the Mastercard receipt. It showed too many zeros, and besides, $40 seemed too cheap for pure silk: “Bob said obviously a mistake, we’ll go back. At last shop reopened, and person said no mistake, $400. pink silk gown… MC slip already taken to bank but happy to exchange. And that is why I h
ave a really gorgeous heavy grey silk robe—and a blue linen gown that takes half an hour to iron. I plan to wear the robe Christmas morning, in fact every Christmas morning—all my life.”21

  Alice carried Bruno Trentin’s Rome office address with her but didn’t contact him while she was in Italy.22 Nonetheless, she was inspired to write a story about a sexually aggressive woman that combines details from her trip with episodes she had discussed with the writer Frances Gendlin, a close friend of Saul Bellow’s who then lived in San Francisco. With unusual candor, Alice asked Gendlin if she’d mind if she borrowed some of the things they’d discussed about women who “liked the chase of men.” In “The Chase,” which appeared in Cosmopolitan in August 1981, a mathematician named Pamela (a near-beauty with a “bold, strong-boned, handsome face”) attends a conference at Villa d’Este on Lake Como with her fiancé, a physicist. (A conference sponsored by Scientific American had taken place at that luxurious hotel while Alice and Bob were there.) Pamela has been a “sort of sexual forager, a pirate, choosing and inviting whomever she felt she would enjoy.” Nonetheless, Pamela has trouble rejecting men who want to marry her. “The Chase” ends in a museum in the Villa Giulia in Rome, where Pamela has gone alone because her fiancé is ill. An attractive man makes a pass at her as they both stare at the famous Etruscan Sarcophagus of the Spouses. The symbolism of the terra-cotta couple that has survived more than two millennia is not lost on Pamela, who feels “a certain alarm at this juxtaposition, or opposition: marriage versus an attractive, chancily come-upon man.” The man asks her to call him in New York. Back at her hotel, she tells the physicist she cannot marry him. “How odd, she thinks, women are supposed to be the ones who always want to marry.”

  * * *

  For twenty years, Lucie Jessner had been the mother figure who faithfully encouraged Alice in both love and work. She’d consoled Alice as Dotsie sold the Adams family house. By early December Lucie’s emphysema had worsened. Alice and Bob went to visit her at home in Washington, DC, for a last time: “Lucie is in very bad shape,” Alice wrote Diane Johnson, “but in the three days we were there she seemed to pick up, and talking to her was wonderful… so incredibly graceful and generous, so interested in everyone but herself. She is being taken care of by an adorable handsome grandson and a marvelous black lady, Thomasina—an ideal combination, when you think of it.”23

  Alice and Bob stayed with Judith and Tim Adams in Washington, giving Alice and Judith a chance to renew the mutual admiration and friendship that had survived on letters for many years. En route to DC, they’d visited Charleston, South Carolina—“so fucking pretty [she] could hardly stand it.” Nor could she stand the people. Their Southernness brought back “all that childhood panic and rage.” When their flight between Washington and Atlanta unexpectedly made an unscheduled landing at Raleigh-Durham, Alice burst into tears over the irretrievableness of the past. That event became the germ of her story “An Unscheduled Stop.”III24 A stopover in New Orleans was not much better. Alice thought the vaunted food seemed like it all came smothered with the same béchamel sauce from a giant vat beneath the city. Her favorite thing on her first return to the South in more than twenty years was a traditional New Orleans jazz concert at Preservation Hall. Otherwise, she couldn’t wait to leave: “I used to think that everyone I knew there was stupid and a racial bigot and I found out I was at least half right.”25

  * * *

  Lucie Johanna Ney Jessner died December 18, 1979. “How perfectly in character, how exquisitely polite of her to wait for death (for which she must have longed, she was so miserably uncomfortable) until after I had come and gone,” Alice wrote of her later in a story she called “Elizabeth.” In a eulogy she sent to be read at a memorial service held at Georgetown University, she said she often reread letters from Lucie as she did “certain favorite books, certain poetry. For, as in all writing of the highest order, Lucie’s letters have the unique and beautiful sound of her own voice.” Lucie’s letters, Alice said, had additional magic because “on days when a letter arrived from Lucie, there would always be, along with that considerable pleasure, some piece of remarkably good news.”26

  Though eulogies can be an occasion for exaggeration, Alice Adams believed in the magic of Lucie Jessner’s influence. Through this friend she’d met Max Steele and found the courage to divorce. She’d learned of the sale of her first short story after spending a day with Lucie later the same summer. Over the years, she insisted, her best news—winning a Guggenheim fellowship in 1978, for instance—arrived in tandem with a letter from Lucie Jessner. In “Elizabeth,” Adams wrote: “With her I was less trivial and mean, and much more intelligent, more finely observant than usual, and if not elegant at least restrained.” That Max Steele felt the same way about Lucie made him something like a brother; Adams included a stand-in for Max named Judson in “Elizabeth”—even as she transformed the setting from Washington, DC, to a small coastal village in Mexico.

  The losses of the past year, reminders of mortality, prompted Alice to criticize herself. As a new decade approached, she wrote in her notebook, “Twenty years ago I was broke & underweight, often lonely & often suffering from some anguished love. Now I am 5 pounds overweight & have plenty of money. I worry about what to buy, worry that I could be missing some available treat in clothes, or trips, or food, something to buy. I worry about investments, I give more thought to my digestion than to love…”

  She caught herself “looking at poor people, people not making it, like the person I used to be, with a sort of contempt.”27

  Alice didn’t like the successful, self-involved woman she felt herself becoming. She sensed that shaping her personality to complement Bob and his alcoholism (the proverbial elephant in the room) had corrupted her. Once she’d made a choice to be a serious writer rather than a woman whose life is love affairs.” Was she now living for “lifestyle” (the kind of trendy nonword she hated) in a city devoted to conspicuous consumption, in a state and country that had just elected Ronald Reagan, a Republican movie actor, to be president?

  As Alice moved into the latter part of her century, the 1980s, she mourned the passing of Lucie Jessner—“that impossibility, a perfect person.” Lucie had been an unselfish defender of her work, a conscientious soul who influenced and inspired Alice without trying to alter her. How, she now asked herself, could she pursue financial and personal independence while at the same time maintaining the purity and playfulness of her artistic vocation?

  I. Five years earlier, Alice had consoled Dotsie because “Mr. Canon” [sic] had returned to his wife: “I certainly can’t imagine living with a man who wanted to be somewhere else… I’m certainly lucky that Vasco’s wife won out (I’m sure he would have found several dozen young girls by now).” (AA to DSA, August 13, 1974.)

  II. A note in the Knopf files at the Harry Ransom Center suggests that Robert Gottlieb, who called the novel “extended romantic wetdreaming,” resisted a higher advance for Rich Rewards. (HRC, Knopf Addition.)

  III. The story’s protagonist, Claire, returns home to Hilton and has a summer affair with a doctor, which makes it somewhat of a sequel to “Home Is Where.” Claire is dispossessed of the house where she grew up because her mother wills it to a religious order.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Rewards

  — 1980–1982 —

  Missing one bus accident is no sure sign that a person’s life will always come up rosy, because nobody’s does, not for long.

  —Alice Adams, “Alaska,” To See You Again

  During her meditation upon the loss of the house in Chapel Hill, Alice reached a “valuable insight”: “My anguish, tortured labyrinth of pain [is] actually worth more than any house, or furniture; that is my capital.”1 After Dotsie sold the house for $84,000 in January 1980, Alice saw the episode as a traumatic confrontation with her father that left her feeling that neither she nor her mother had ever owned the house. The working title of one story she wrote about the sale was “Disinheri
tance.” She began it after Margery Finn Brown told her that she’d also been upset about losing a family house, but then realized she’d been really miserable in that house. “That would certainly apply in my case too,” Alice said. “Those years with Agatha and Nic were awful. In any case since she said that I feel more detached from the house.” In the story a young woman “has not one but three mean, avaricious and stupid stepmothers, three in succession, I mean.” Alice read the story to Bob before she sent it out; he assured her that “it certainly did not sound at all like [her] situation with Dotsie.” It appeared in the New Yorker with the title “Berkeley House” in the spring of 1980.2

  In “My First and Only House,” an essay published in Geo magazine in 1984, Adams described how she had been “imprinted” by that house beside Pittsboro Road and wondered why, living as she did in “real-estate-crazed California,” she had never been the owner of a house. “Circumstances aside,” she speculated, “is it possible that I have never bought or seriously thought of buying another house because of the strength of that imprinting…” The circumstances that caused Alice to live in houses owned by others were clear enough. When Bob McNie divorced, he kept his showcase vacation home in Truckee and moved into Alice’s large flat at 3904 Clay Street, where the rent remained affordable at $400 a month in 1979. After smoke and water damage from a fire in the apartment upstairs, Bob updated their flat with refinished floors, cushions for the circular window seat and a teal-blue linen velvet couch for the living room, butcher-block counters and tomato-red walls in the kitchen. They felt no motivation to purchase a house in San Francisco.

  And yet, Adams frequently considered how a woman makes a mental home for herself in the material world. She characterizes Northern Californians by their particular houses and communities. They live in Victorian or redwood-beamed or sea-sprayed houses or apartments with views of the bay or the hills; they travel along the Pacific coast from Carmel to Stinson to Mendocino, from the Marin County enclaves of Ross and Belvedere down the Peninsula to Stanford and east into the Berkeley Hills, Sacramento, and Lake Tahoe. While readers who don’t know Northern California may need a map to follow her, they can sense how Adams makes distinctions among cities and towns, hillsides, mountains, and beaches to delineate her characters, viewing houses and towns, as Max Steele wrote of her, “with the eye of an artist, never that of an auctioneer.”3 Nowhere are these domestic and geographic details sharper than in Rich Rewards, the novel she completed in 1979 and saw published in 1980.