Alice Adams

by Carol Sklenicka

  Late in 1985, Alice had plastic surgery on her eyelids. “Already I look much younger (I think),” she told Lurie a few days afterward. “Healing seems to be something I do well—compensation for deplorable skin, I guess.”24 When she’d fully recovered, Bob gave a little party, as if unveiling Alice’s new face. “She was the first person I knew who had any form of cosmetic surgery, so I was surprised and curious,” Mother Jones editor Deirdre English said. “I thought, good for you for having it done. And for being really open about it.”

  Also that fall Bob and Alice’s landlady at 3904 Clay had her property reappraised and learned that the rent was severely under market. (Had she read about Alice’s new fortune in Herb Caen’s column?) She raised the rent to $725 a month—and warned that she would keep increasing it until it caught up to the market rate. After a tax advisor showed them the deductions they were missing out on, they began looking for a house in bad shape that Bob could fix up. Nothing suited until Alice’s friend Sydney Goldstein, founder of the City Arts & Lectures series, and her husband, attorney Charles Breyer, mentioned that they needed more space for their growing family. Even though the Goldstein-Breyers’s house was already in good shape, Alice and Bob bought the moderate (thirteen-hundred-square-foot) brown-shingled Italianate Victorian on the south edge of Alta Plaza. Alice provided most of the cash for a down payment, and Bob planned to make it a showplace for his work. Ownership would be in both their names, and thus their “long-term illicit” and recently troubled affair moved toward commitment.

  They celebrated with their annual respite at the Catalina Beach Resort in Zihuatanejo. From the balcony of the small, jerry-built, and familiar hotel Alice watched “slow, laced circular surges of foam in the black satin sea. Above, like thrown diamonds, [were] stars, a brilliant cascade—.”25

  Ripe with hopes that this new house would soothe and center their lives, Alice looked toward a future as bright and unknowable as that cascade of stars.

  I. Never discarding good material, Adams turned her leftover notes into “Crossing Madeira: Enchanting Vistas of the Wild North Coast: Notes on a Drive from Funchal to Porto Moniz.” (San Francisco Examiner, December 17, 1989, T8–T9.)

  II. Arlene Young told Giddins a story from her father’s days with Louis Armstrong and His All-Stars: “Trummy had taken her on the road when she was a little girl, and Lucille Armstrong made an unexpected visit to a city where they were working. Arlene was playing in the hotel corridor when Lucille arrived. Arlene told Mrs. Armstrong that Pops was with one of his secretaries: ‘Pops sure has a lot of secretaries,’ Arlene added. Well, Pops had a fit and told Trummy no more kids on the road.”

  III. The conversation quoted above from Superior Women so matches Norman Mailer’s attitude about his first wife and Alice’s friend, Beatrice Silverman, that one suspects Alice heard the line from him. Mailer’s letters to Silverman, recently placed at the Harry Ransom Center, have a similar tone.

  IV. Updike’s calling Superior Women a romantic novel sounds patronizing, but, as his biographer Adam Begley asserts, Updike “needed to dress up garden-variety infidelity as the inescapable consequence of some grand passion… he was in love with love.” Perhaps Updike disliked Adams’s jaundiced take on romance in her novel. (Adam Begley, Updike [New York: Harper, 2014], 258.)

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Fame and Fortune

  — 1986–1987 —

  What does it mean to love an animal, a pet, in my case a cat, in the fierce, entire, and unambivalent way that some of us do?… Does the cat (did the cat) represent some person, a parent, or a child? some part of one’s self? I don’t think so—”

  —Alice Adams, “The Islands,” After You’ve Gone

  Alice and Bob accomplished the twelve-block move early in February 1986. Moving was traumatic. Unlike many people, Alice felt that disruption pushed her to write: “Writing so many stories to regain balance, really,” she noted, feeling the loss of the apartment “containing so much (esp. V.),” where she’d lived longest, twenty-six years.1 She mourned the years of Peter’s boyhood and her young womanhood, and her love affair with Vasco Pereira conducted in secrecy there.2 Later, though, she told an interviewer that the new house instantly felt right: “I like it so much I can hardly believe it. I never want to move from this house.” Her three cats, Ferg, Black, and Brown, also liked the new house: “They have stairs. They’re like elderly people who’ve been advised to get more exercise,” Alice said. “They have a more interesting life here. There are more birds to watch, more patches of sunshine.”3

  The house at 2661 Clay Street faced north toward the terraced slope of Alta Plaza—a sight reminiscent of a Mayan temple. From the back of the house French doors opened to a deck that Bob and Alice filled with potted plants; below that was a lovely, small formal garden designed by Thomas Church with boxwood hedges and a large mirror inset in the foliage against the back fence. They planted a magnolia tree in one corner: it flowered profusely and reminded Alice of the South.

  Bob’s studio on Bluxome was “cold enough to hang meat with no spoilage” that winter, so Bob spent most days at home altering the house, which needed few improvements. The narrow Victorian, one of a row of six in a development by the Real Estate Associates in the 1870s, had the false front and small connected rooms with high ceilings typical of that style.4 Bob glued large mirrors to the parlor walls above couches that faced each other. “You saw yourself in the mirrors behind the couch,” Judith Rascoe remembered, “but you learned to avert your eyes and ignore them and it did produce that infinite mirror thing.”

  When Bob finished his transformation, the downstairs rooms had dark hardwood floors. The foyer was painted chocolate brown and featured one English riding boot gleaming with oxblood polish by the marble hearth; a brass chandelier adorned with rams’ horns didn’t throw much light on the scene, but it added to a faux–Wuthering Heights aura. He painted the dining room walls a glossy mahogany red and filled every available space with lovely wood furniture and art, including large paintings by Theophilus Brown and Peter Linenthal. The overall effect, Sydney Goldstein thought, resembled a “dark, glossy opera set.”

  The pièce de résistance of Bob’s redecoration of the house was a mostly black downstairs powder room: black lacquered walls, black tile, black toilet, black curtains. Aluminum buckets converted to light fixtures and a shiny stainless-steel sink bowl finished the look. Some called the effect astonishing and elegant; others sensed something odd and frightening about it.

  The second floor was a realm of light compared to the downstairs. In the master bedroom pale walls and a white tile floor, quilts from Alice’s family, and a bed facing a bay window overlooking the garden and city created “a marvelous place to sleep,” recalled Trent Duffy, who once cat-sat for Alice. Bob added two revolving storage units for his own large wardrobe. Overnight guests were accommodated in a smaller bedroom or a lower-level garden suite.

  Alice’s study stretched across the front of the house on the second floor. From here, “far too often,” Alice watched the walkers and runners and dogs in Alta Plaza. On her long, wide desk—a door on two filing cabinets—she kept a beautiful hand-colored picture of Agatha as a girl, photographs of friends, and a row of her own books to remind her, she said, “when faith fails, that this is indeed what I do, have done, will presumably do again.” She wrote on a “big, fancy typewriter” next to the desk. A framed quilt made by her grandmother Boyd that had lain across Alice’s bed when she was a child, a small carved desk inherited from Lavina Calvin “still crammed with mementoes from her life,” and a wall of bookshelves completed the room. “There is remarkable harmony between the patterns of book jackets and spines, and the pattern of the quilt,” Alice noticed.5

  In this study—she called it “America’s Room, and Mine” in honor of the Guatemalan nanny who’d lived there with the Goldstein-Breyers—Adams would work through her most prolific writing years, producing six novels, two story collections, and a travel memoir about M
exico.

  These triumphant years were not without difficulty and sorrow. As Alice’s renown and income were rising, Bob McNie struggled to maintain his mental and financial equilibrium. For years Alice had known that Bob drank too much. She also understood that her success might disturb him—that, after all, is a theme that preoccupies Megan in Superior Women. Alice probably hoped that buying a house with Bob (providing much of the money for the house in exchange for his physical management of it) would satisfy his ego and balance the scales.

  * * *

  Bob touted Alice’s success in public, but privately his discontent simmered and sometimes erupted. On February 18, 1986, among pages of notes about dreams and outlines for stories, she wrote: “The worst fight: violent threats—scared but planning: Chuck, AW—move to condo.”

  Chuck refers to Chuck Breyer, the attorney from whom they had purchased their house and someone in whom Alice confided. AW is Allen Wheelis, the psychiatrist Alice had been seeing once a month in recent years. Her clinical relationship with Wheelis was complicated by the fact the doctor was also a published writer whose books reveal his personal history and predilections. Author Daphne Merkin praises him for “the seeming ease with which he divulges his own unrequited needs, implacable fears and unacceptable impulses in the name of illuminating his patients’ and readers’ neurotic quandaries.”6 Wheelis, a man raised in Texas who struggled to overcome cruel treatment by his father, was considered a maverick among analysts because of his willingness to try unorthodox methods of treatment. He “operated more in an authentic psychoanalytic spirit than did the psychoanalytic establishment; and the establishment, sadly, never realized it,” according to his friend and fellow analyst Owen Renik. Known for his existential despair, Wheelis was, nonetheless, an inspirational force who could “inspire hope in a hopeless patient or courage in a fearful one,” Renik said.I7

  Alice’s connection to Wheelis was intense, at least on her side. Her notebooks show that she consulted Wheelis for several years, kept notes on dreams to tell him about (some of which involved him), owned and read his books, and pondered his advice. She noted that she had to resist a “wish to instruct him literarily” and asked herself if that desire was generous or controlling or perhaps a “means of extending” their connection;8 later she noted, “I was very attracted to him, is the truth. I guess I wanted him for my dad—a totally unavailable person.”9 (When Til Stewart, who was also seeing Wheelis at this time, confided to Alice that she found it difficult to quit Wheelis, Alice felt jealous of Til.)10 Sessions with Wheelis and readings from the Al-Anon program for codependents gave Alice courage to change her relationship with Bob McNie. She probably also attended Al-Anon meetings, as this note from March 1986 suggests: “Panic—rage at R. But—friendly dream, helpful Bob re: Peter. Al-Anon: fear—rage—control.”11

  Alice’s reinvolvement with an analyst influenced her to produce her series of stories about two psychiatrists, Lila Lewinsohn and Julian Brownfield. These two have been lovers since medical school and through several problematic marriages but never fully available to each other. Now late middle aged, they continue to see and need each other even as they avoid further commitment. Tall, intelligent Lila is “a seriously disturbed walking wounded person who is good at her work—a depressive,” and her lover, based on Wheelis, is “courtly, graceful, depressed.”12

  * * *

  Peter Linenthal was also on the threshold of a new life. Even after Peter told his mother about his relationship with Phillip Galgiani, he brought the occasional girl to meet her. In 1974, Alice had written Lucie Jessner, “Peter has a NEW GIRLFRIEND who in an odd way reminds me of myself; some jarring combination of shy and bold.”13

  In the spring of 1979 when Adams was writing her story “Snow,” about a father’s dawning acceptance of his daughter’s lesbian orientation, Peter was involved with a man named Ethan whom he brought to meet his mother and Bob. When Alice “at last” told Peter that she and Bob thought Ethan was really nice, she reported to Diane Johnson, “P. tells me that he thinks being gay is ‘unnatural,’ he is terribly interested in a beautiful girl named Barbara, who is blonde and shy. Honestly—why do we even listen to our children when they say alarming things?”14

  By the 1980s though, during a time when gay men were coming to San Francisco’s Castro District from all over the country, Peter was certain that he would live his life as an openly gay man. The election of Harvey Milk to the board of supervisors in 1977 culminated a decade of gay rights activism and led to the passage of the nation’s first ordinance outlawing discrimination based on sexual orientation. Richard Rodriguez writes of the first Gay Freedom Day parade that he saw: “There were marching bands. There were floats… from the foot of Market Street they marched, east to west, following the mythic American path toward optimism.”15

  Peter patronized the gay bathhouses that flourished then. “Those were not just for bathing,” he explained. “They were like a health club except there were private rooms you could go into.” In the bathhouses he encountered former teachers as well as gay runaways; he met a guy named Louise “who looked like a woman, or rather like Fred Flintstone dressed like a woman.” He appreciated that he’d never had to leave his home city to express his sexuality: “My parents were part of San Francisco, they were part of this new world.” When Supervisor Milk and Mayor George Moscone were assassinated, Alice mourned the death of Milk as “the greatest loss” because he was “a true original.” She attended his public funeral and found it “most affecting.”16

  But by 1984, the AIDS epidemic had become widely evident in San Francisco. “You saw a lot of people in the Castro District walking around with big sores. It was awful,” Peter recalled. His former partner Ethan, who had married a woman and fathered a child, was diagnosed with the disease. Much of the gay community and some of the city’s straight population came together to care for those who were dying. Alice helped Project Open Hand prepare and deliver meals to homebound AIDS patients. People talked about losing two-thirds of their friends within a few years. When a Catholic church in the Castro honored members of its AIDS support group, gay, straight, male, female, young, and old people stood shyly before the congregation: “AIDS was a disease of the entire city,” Rodriguez writes. “Its victims were often black, Hispanic, straight. Neither were Charity and Mercy only white, only male, only gay.”17

  In the midst of this plague, Peter lost only a few people that he knew well. He felt “odd, lucky, and guilty.” He also knew that he wanted a more settled life. In January 1983, he placed a classified ad in the Bay Guardian:

  GM, 32, artist, teacher, liberal, tall, swimmer, intellectual. Would like to meet a man about my age also involved in work he finds rewarding, who considers monogamy a possibility, likes to have a good time, and not particularly into gay scene. Tell me about yourself.

  A “big pile” of replies arrived in his mailbox at the weekly paper. “I divided them up into ‘no way,’ ‘hard to tell,’ and ‘interesting,’ ” Peter said. He met seven or eight men for coffee or at his house but soon realized that “if they come to your house they know a whole lot more about you than you know about them. What if they are creepy or you never want to see them again?”

  One reply stood out. “I am an architect who enjoys his work… and has hopes of greater accomplishments in his field,” Philip Anasovich wrote. “I suppose the person who said ‘The art of living is to live with art’ (Andre Malraux?) expresses my feelings.” Anasovich said he enjoyed painting and photographing, singing and cooking, as well as opera, ballet, symphony, theater, cinema, reading, dining out, and travel. “If we were to meet on the street you would find a tall (6'1") and slender man of 33 years, with brown hair and beard (very small) and green/brown eyes.”

  He continued, “There is much I do not understand about gay life and about myself. I’m not into the ‘gay scene’ as you call it. I must be me.” He added that he thought Peter’s ad was brave and requested that Peter write him a letter about himself
. “You can tell so much about a person from the way they write a letter,” he said later.

  Peter and Philip exchanged several letters, using their home addresses, and Peter drove by Philip’s apartment on Bay Street. Then Peter broke his rule and invited Philip to his place on Potrero Hill. “So,” Peter remembered, “we did meet here the very first time. Phil was on his way to a voice lesson, I showed him art I was working on, I could tell he was a genuinely interested and intelligent person and I’d like to see him again.”

  The search was over.

  Philip Anasovich grew up in a small town in Connecticut. His mother, Violette Micheline Graux Mayo, born in Compiègne, France, just after the First World War, married William Anasovich, an American soldier of Russian descent, shortly after the Second World War. He was a chemist assigned to investigate chemical weapons in Germany; she, a secretary for Francolor (a Swiss dye company), served as his translator. He brought Violette home to Seymour, Connecticut, a small town where he had many cousins among the numerous other Belarusian families; she later earned a master’s degree in French literature at Wesleyan University. After Phil finished high school, he attended the University of Southern California and earned a master’s degree in architecture. He’d been living and working in San Francisco for three years when he met Peter.

  The next year Phil gave up his pleasant apartment and wonderful bay view and walkable commute to move in with Peter on Potrero Hill. Their two cats, Phil’s Cassandra and Peter’s Snapper (named for the cat’s favorite fish), got along, and Phil remodeled the kitchen and helped Peter find places for the collection of steel sculptures he’d been building in his living room. Phil’s first meeting with Alice Adams stayed in his memory: “Two shyer people meeting could hardly be imagined,” Phil said. “She was kind, beautiful, and gracious. I brought her some flowers. It seemed as though we had barely met, but things seemed hopeful.” Their friendship deepened as they discovered they shared a love of French culture and were both deeply read in French literature. “As a teenager, I read all the nineteenth-century classic novels,” Phil recalled, “to learn about life and my mother’s heritage.”