Alice Adams

by Carol Sklenicka

  Alice saw Bob McNie as her Diego Rivera.II18 For most of the twenty years they’d lived together he had been busy with his own work—and so not interfering with hers; he’d paid his share and more of their household expenses, and he’d been a handsome, usually charming companion. Also from the beginning, Alice had recognized and accepted the element of addiction in her love for Bob. “Alice loved to have a flurry in her life. It wasn’t the men, it was the flurry that was addictive to her,” Frances Gendlin thought. Bob provided flurry. In the words spoken by Celeste in Second Chances: “I think that all my life I’ve been falling in love with men as a kind of substitute for something else.” The something else: her father’s love, withdrawn from her at age six when Nic Adams was hospitalized for severe depression after the death of her baby brother.

  With Bob’s alcoholism cresting and his ability to make her feel loved diminished, Alice understood that her devotion—her addiction—was a danger to herself. Alice confided these things only to friends who were not part of their San Francisco social circle. “She told me Bob threatened her,” Judith Adams said. “He had a breakdown, from the alcoholism probably, and he told Alice he was going to bring her down with him. And she told me, ‘I have to break the relationship.’ This is verbatim.

  “She probably told me on the phone, or maybe when she came east that year. I think she interpreted it as a threat almost on her life, that she was frightened and she had to be rid of him. He had to be out of her life,” Judith continued. “Her livelihood depended on her ability to write and she could not write with this kind of distraction and threat. I was very sympathetic to that. She was saying I come first. Her sanity and her health came before trying to mend him. I think she felt that he was broken. I also felt that—this is my own feeling now—that she was not capable of taking care of him.”

  * * *

  Near the end of August Bob came to lunch with Alice a couple of times. “Your mother doesn’t want me back,” he afterward told Peter, who was still friendly with the man who had become a stepfather to him.19

  Dr. Shore saw a “twenty percent improvement” in Bob’s depression on desipramine and released him from Mount Zion in September. Records are unclear about where he then lived and Alice’s personal notebooks are also silent on the subject. He probably spent some time with Alice and some at his house in Truckee. His and Alice’s attorney, Charles Breyer, began to manage his financial affairs. His medical record says he did poorly as an outpatient, refusing food and drink.

  Trying to decide what to do about Bob, Alice considered the love she felt for him and others. On October 6, she made notes and a list toward a future novel:

  Title MUCH LOVE (?)

  love—okay to love R.—does not mean wanting to live with, or sex—means wishing well, actually—Christian?

  Love—

  RKM [McNie]

  Peter [Linenthal]

  Dick [Poirier]

  Billy [William Abrahams]

  Vic [Victoria Wilson]

  Frannie [Kiernan]

  Allen [Wheelis]

  Judith [Clark Adams]

  Max [Steele]

  Like—

  Din [Diane Johnson]

  Syd [Goldstein]

  Til [Stewart]

  Gigi [Geraldine Green]

  Bill B. [Theophilus Brown]

  The next day, Alice had made a decision. She and Bob would not go on together. She wrote to Bob’s daughter, Morissa, now forty, who lived and worked at Camphill Village, a school for mentally disabled people in Pennsylvania. Neither Bob nor Alice had replied when Morissa sent them news of her recent marriage and new baby daughter. Then Morissa received this letter from Alice:

  I’m very sorry to break such a very long silence with not good, not at all good news, which is that Bob is very, very severely depressed, has been really since his surgery. Needless to say this is why you haven’t heard from him which I’m sure has been upsetting. Physically he’s okay, except for extreme weight loss, and at the moment a prostate problem. But, totally depressed. Negative. Hopeless. He’s been seeing a psychiatrist, in whom I do not have great faith but he won’t go to another, although he hates this one. You see?

  What caused this—God knows. Literally. My feeling, or one of them is that it’s undoubtedly been coming on for years, all that drinking was a way of staving it off. Bob hadn’t been drinking at all since the surgery, so one of his current problems is that of being what AA calls a dry drunk.III Also, as you know, he’s never really faced or talked about inner turmoil.

  Alice enclosed a gift check for Morissa’s six-month-old, Serena. “I love the name, lately I’ve spent a lot of time with the Serenity Prayer in Al-Anon, which may be saving my remaining sanity.” Alice was preparing to hand Bob over to his daughter.20

  * * *

  Bob was readmitted to Mount Zion, where he had minor surgery to remove a benign tumor in his prostate on October 12. After five days he came home for one night but was too ill to stay. Alice returned him to Mount Zion, agreeing to pay the $600-a-day cost. Robert Jr. (Robbie), then living with his wife and two small sons in Portland, used frequent-flyer points gifted him by a friend to visit his father. He found Bob “in very bad shape—physically suffering from medical problems unaddressed, a dreadful prison-ward set up, and the WRONG anti-depressant which had him climbing the walls.”21

  Alice bought Morissa a ticket to San Francisco. With Serena, she arrived in late October, spoke briefly with Alice when she picked up the keys to Bob’s cars, and took charge. She and her brother moved Bob to the Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute at UC San Francisco on Parnassus Street on November 3.

  His admissions interview there reports that Bob said “his girlfriend has left him and says she desires no further contact with him. He is not welcome at her house.” His new doctors diagnosed “Bipolar Affective Disorder Mixed with Mention of Psychotic Features.” His ability to function was assessed at 38 out of 100. In the past year Morissa had recognized an “archetypically alcoholic pattern” in her father’s attitudes toward her. She thought “his fear of his weakness” led him to be dishonest with people who cared about him. She was angry and spoke forthrightly to him.22 She told Peter Linenthal, “I’m just surprised that it happened so soon; that entertaining facade eventually had to crack with all the pain he’s had.”23

  Over the next five weeks, Bob improved significantly. Another course of Flagyl cleared up his bowel complaints and he was treated for a urinary tract infection due to his prostate surgery. Taking lithium and clonazepam, he gained fourteen pounds, his depression “greatly improved,” and he became “bright, jovial, and joking.” He told Morissa that his relationship with Alice was “worn out” because they were “leading different lives, and [he was] such a clam-up.” Morissa accused her father of “systematically casting out his children” and said she thought it was curious that Bob and Alice had never married. He replied that Alice had been frightened by Robbie McNie. He also said that he could no longer do his work because “it’s for the young—it’s competitive” and because he’d “ruined his credit.” He told her he’d “wanted out for some time but [couldn’t] do anything else.”24

  As Bob got better, he called Alice to tell her he wished he could move back into their house. She felt some sympathy but answered that this was impossible. He was now well enough to “be irritating—all surface.” He asked her to take some of his clothes to the dry cleaner. As she went through them, she lost patience again: “So many, unused, all wadded up.” She was further disturbed when Bob called her friend Nell Sinton and asked her to urge Alice to see him: “His successful manipulation of her, doing what he wanted.”25 Alone at midnight on Christmas Eve, she had another insight: “A shaft into my chest—R is the beautiful object of love, who will always turn me down, find me deficient—”

  Bob declined to discuss plans for his release from UCSF. He refused to go to Pennsylvania with Morissa and insisted that he would live independently. Charles Breyer served as a mediator. Alice agre
ed to provide Bob with $2,000–$2,500 monthly against his share of the house as part of their separation agreement. Breyer found an apartment Bob could afford at 2714 Webster Street in San Francisco and put his house near Truckee (of which Alice was not a co-owner) on the market, priced at $400,000 for sale “as is.” It needed maintenance. Bob’s house was “falling apart, looking terrific—like him,” Alice noted sarcastically.26

  Bob was discharged from UCSF on December 10 with prescriptions to continue his medications (lithium, phenelzine, and clonazepam) and referrals for outpatient care. “However,” the final report by Dr. Victor Reus and Dr. Kavitha Rao read, “the patient appeared to be ambivalent about outpatient psychotherapy as well as the need for continued medication.” They considered Bob’s prognosis “guarded.” Within days of moving into his apartment a few blocks downhill from what had now become Alice’s house on Alta Plaza, Bob stopped taking his meds. According to Morissa McNie and others, his severe depression continued for another five years.

  * * *

  At first Alice felt relieved to put the great “accident” of Bob and his problems behind her. She began a new notebook to mark the change. It had been “a good ‘Colette’ day,” she wrote after a long walk and dinner with artist friends Bill Brown and Paul Wohner on November 15, perhaps wishing to emulate the freewheeling life of the French writer to whom her work had been compared.27

  In early March Alice hopped a plane to Southern California for a weekend at the Santa Anita racetrack with Mary Ross Taylor and the Lowrys, who owned a racehorse at the time—“Fun—though I don’t see the tracks as a permanent part of my life,” Alice said—and found there the setting for her Lila Lewisohn story called “At the Races.”28 By the summer of 1988, Alice realized, “What I mourn is actually dead. His craziness—concealed in a curious way in booze, drunk he [was] most himself—angry, promiscuous, entirely irrational.”

  Entries about Bob punctuate Alice’s notebook for months. As she grieved, she analyzed the roots of her need for him and admitted to herself that she’d stayed with Bob much longer than she should have and that she’d known he had affairs while they were together: “Years of total dedication, riveted attention to Bob… even when he had affairs, deeply painful. You could say I was addicted to him, and I was—”IV

  Alice’s anomalous situation—“a non-husband gone mad, and gone”29—was socially awkward. Not everyone was sympathetic. Pride had prevented her from complaining about Bob to friends in San Francisco, so few knew about his dark side. “In a way,” Diane Johnson recalled, “it was wonderful for a writer to have this caretaker person, but there was a price. It was slightly infantilizing.” To these friends, Alice’s decision to break with Bob appeared sudden and cruel. “We thought Alice sort of turned on Bob in a rather baffling way. She couldn’t handle his illness—so maybe it was a time for resentments that had been building up to come out? It was a strange thing that a lot of people were not quite in agreement with,” Johnson said. “Even if they ended up being friends with Alice, there was this tiny reservation.”

  * * *

  Trying to resume her social life, Alice went to a dinner party with a cardiologist named Ray Rosenman who did research on type A personalities. Seated on the other side of her was Robert Flynn Johnson, a curator at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. “At a certain point,” Johnson recalled, “Rosenman was pontificating about something and Alice leaned toward me conspiratorially, ‘Can you get me out of here?’ ” They made excuses and Johnson drove Alice home. “She opened an extremely cold bottle of chardonnay and we drank the whole bottle and talked.” Johnson, who was some twenty years younger than Alice, became a close platonic friend. “We entered into each other’s social circles,” he said. “She was highly opinionated, wonderful sense of humor, a self-deprecating but highly original individual. I did worry that I might end up in one of her short stories.”

  When a mutual friend suggested to Alice that her recently divorced doctor, David Rabin, was interested in her, she invited him to dinner. After one evening, she knew they had no chemistry together. Yet, she romanticized Rabin for a few weeks, wanting of him “fun, talk, and kissing” but finding the idea of sex too scary. He was just her “current name for loneliness,” she soon realized. When they spoke again, she had the flu, so their next meeting was a professional “house call” rather than a date. Within days, Adams began “Your Doctor Loves You,” a story in which she braids the pain of separating from a man while still living in a house he’d furnished with the awkwardness of beginning to date again. The story ends when the protagonist’s doctor and love interest sends her a bill for his house call. That really happened. Unlike Holly in the story, Alice objected, and she saved Rabin’s handwritten apology.30

  It would take Alice much longer to work her way toward a fictional treatment of the life she’d shared with Robert Kendall McNie. Her notebooks are rich in feelings but often cryptic. She was plagued by “ancient longings” and “nameless yearning” for men.31 She dreamed about Malcolm Kemp, her father’s psychiatrist who had seduced her when she was still a teenager. Her attachment to her current psychiatrist, Dr. Wheelis, she realized, was “a bought relationship, like that with a masseur, that would end when she stopped writing him checks.” She mourned lovers who’d died recently—Trummy Young and Vasco Pereira. She looked up “sentimental” in the dictionary and copied out: “addicted to indulgence in sentiments of a superficial nature” and “nostalgia for what never existed, or—was false (Fitzgerald).” Had the loves that had so much shaped her life been sentimental indulgences? As she learned to think of Bob “without tears” she wondered if she still had “too much anger” toward him.

  * * *

  When recommendations for the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction were due, Adams convinced at least one fellow juror, Julian Moynahan, to support Beloved by Toni Morrison. “I take it all back about Toni M.,” he wrote Adams. “I just finished Beloved and it’s high up there—with Faulkner, Hawthorne—a masterpiece—four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie (all the way through).” The panel’s decision came on the heels of the controversial awarding of the National Book Award to Larry Heinemann’s first novel, Paco’s Story, a choice that had disappointed both supporters of Beloved and those of Philip Roth’s The Counterlife.32 The jurors’ committee of Adams, Moynahan, and Richard Eder submitted their list of finalists and statements to the Pulitzer Prize Board on December 26, 1987. Their finalists were Persian Nights by Diane Johnson, for which Adams wrote the statement;V That Night by Alice McDermott, for which Eder wrote; and Beloved, for which Moynahan wrote. Adams had loyally supported her friend Johnson’s novel but also played a decisive role in securing the prize for Morrison.

  Before the Pulitzer board announced the winner in April, forty-eight black writers signed a letter published in the New York Times Book Review in January deploring the fact that neither James Baldwin (who died in 1987) nor Morrison had won a National Book Award or Pulitzer Prize. John Edgar Wideman, one of the letter’s signers, told reporters that his group did not intend to influence the Pulitzer committee, which didn’t prevent many people from assuming that was exactly their intention. In that context, it’s important to know that Adams and Moynahan and Eder had turned in their selections, including Moynahan’s strong argument for Beloved, well ahead of the published letter.33

  During 1988 Wilson helped Adams prepare After You’ve Gone, her fourth collection of short stories. The title story takes the form of a letter from a lawyer to her former lover, a poet. He’s gone, but the younger woman he left with, Sally Ann, sends the narrator letters of complaint about how he treats her. The witty ironies of “After You’ve Gone” suggest that Alice had reached a similar point of bemusement in her recovery from Bob. The story explains the ownership of 2661 Clay: “The house. I know that it was and is not yours, despite that reckless moment at the Trident (too many margaritas, too palely glimmering a view of our city, San Francisco) when I offered to put it in both our names, as joint tenants
, which I literally saw us as, even though it was I who made payments. However, your two-year occupancy and your incredibly skillful house-husbanding made it seem quite truly yours.” Released in September 1989, with a jewel-toned dust jacket—Diebenkorn’s Seated Woman (1967) on the front and a delectable author photo by Thomas Victor of Adams with a longer, more feminine haircut—After You’ve Gone was ignored by the New York Times but got good reviews elsewhere. These stories, playwright and social historian Elaine Kendall noticed, have a “feminist undertow” because their admirable women are “hopelessly involved with unworthy men.”34

  Composing her seventh novel, Caroline’s Daughters, occupied Alice during the tortuous months following her breakup with Bob McNie. She escaped the turmoil of her own feelings by cramming this novel with news and scraps of gossip and pithy observations like “Men are not really mad for complexity in women, or big intensity.” Of all her novels, this one has the most extravagant plot—and for all its fun and energy, Caroline’s Daughters picks up the apocalyptic mood that Alice felt. Maybe it was in self-defense that Adams told Penelope Rowlands that Caroline’s Daughters was her “most fictional book ever.”35 Caroline Carter, the novel’s matriarch, who is part Alice Adams and part Judith Clark Adams, returns to San Francisco after five years in Lisbon to her house on Alta Plaza (it’s Alice’s house exactly) with fresh eyes for a changing city and the lives of her five daughters. The novel is a six-ring circus organized around Caroline and her daughters, each of whom takes the lead in six chapters—hence a total of thirty-six chapters. Readers witness a semi-incestuous attraction, high-end prostitution, and a political lawyer who sleeps with two half sisters and pursues their mother; there’s also a mafioso-style murder, domestic abuse and rape, a homeless former doctor’s wife, a stock-market crash, and a restaurant teetering toward bankruptcy. Caroline and her daughters display increasing comprehension of what it means to compete as a woman in the eighties: “Now women are supposed to have a great husband and children and run several corporations; be good at Leveraged Buy-Outs or design marvelous post-modern houses. Or run for public office. Or maybe all of those somehow at once. Not to mention being very thin and aerobically fit, a memorable cook-hostess-decorator. And fabulous in bed, multi-orgasmic and tender and demanding, all at once.”