Alice Adams

by Carol Sklenicka

  Despite its density of message, Caroline’s Daughters is a page-turner. With apparent glee, Adams drops cameos of friends and enemies into her story: her former New Yorker editor’s husband, Dr. Kiernan, “the best orthopedist at New York Presbyterian,” takes care of Sage’s broken arm; a barely disguised Herb Gold, a “so-called writer” named David Argent, “never misses a chance to appear in print.” With two exceptions—Caroline’s third husband, Ralph Carter, a retired labor leader on the model of San Francisco’s longshoreman-writer Eric Hoffer, and Stevie, the manager of Fiona’s restaurant who keeps things running and eventually marries Sage—the men in this novel are an unworthy crew. There’s Noel, a carpenter who’s uneducated, untrustworthy, unwise, and selfish but beautiful to look at (shades of Bob McNie or his son Robbie), and Roland Gallo, a Latin seducer and lawyer whose plans to run for mayor collapse when he’s connected to a prostitution ring. Adams took Gallo’s last name from Bob McNie’s winemaking clients, his seductive personality from Vasco Pereira, and his political ambition and downfall from reports about San Francisco city administrator Roger Boas, who stood trial in 1988 for his involvement in a prostitution ring involving underage Asian girls and police corruption.36

  Through these stories, Adams attacks the materialism and corruption of values in American life during the presidency of Ronald Reagan, whom she’d disliked since he’d been governor of California from 1967 to 1975. In Adams’s eighties morality play, the kind, honest people end up better off than the envious and greedy ones. She targets power imbalances between men and women in a money-driven culture dominated by traditional male values. The most ambitious, least likable daughters, Fiona and Jill, fight by men’s rules—earning money and using the power and prestige they’ve acquired to do, well, almost anything they want to do. The more vulnerable, less ambitious daughters, Sage and Portia, resist macho values and are (after some floundering) rewarded with artistic success, kind lovers, good friends, and beauty in their lives. Throughout, Caroline’s Daughters is salted with comments that indicate Adams now sees through feminist eyes: after Sage’s husband, Noel, takes over a dinner planned by Portia to celebrate Sage’s representation by a New York gallery, Portia thinks, “If two men were scheduled to have dinner together, a woman married to one of those men would not automatically assume that both men were really dying to spend the evening with her.”

  Adams’s richest insights into the silent compromises that even powerful women make involve sex. When Roland forces his way into Fiona’s apartment and pushes her onto her bed, Fiona understands, “This is what rape is… Someone you know, even someone who knows you want him. But not so quickly, so easily.” Fiona tells Gallo no and twists her face away from his, but he does not stop. When he has Fiona pinned by his weight, Gallo switches to a “slow, curiously respectful motion” to complete the act. That’s where, melodramatically, Adams closes her chapter.

  The next morning Fiona asks her sister Jill a question that continues to plague discussions of sexual assault: “Does it count as rape if you come?” Because (like most of Adams’s strong female characters) Fiona is both romantic and highly sexed. These women fall in love easily—and are slow to see that the men they are with treat them badly. They want to please men; trying to tell her husband he needs a haircut, Liza asks herself, “Why must I always be so flattering—to Saul and to all men, really? No wonder I used to be such a popular girl. Why can’t I just say, Go get a haircut, you asshole? You really need one.”

  Like Adams, Caroline’s eldest daughter, Liza, is “given to gossip” and has literary aspirations: Liza “gathers material.” Liza will succeed as a writer in part because being curious gives her access to people’s lives. By the end of Caroline’s Daughters, Liza is engaged in a debate with an editor at a commercial magazine who wants to buy her work if she will radically change her story to suit their requirements; Liza hears an “other inner voice is saying they could be right, you know, they’re not all dummies. They could be really improving the story. And then it all gets more confused because of the money.”

  Not coincidentally, having this debate with herself and challenging the magazine editor about her story gives Liza the nerve to challenge her husband about his sexual infidelity.

  * * *

  During those months she was writing Caroline’s Daughters, Alice vented some of the anger about Bob that she’d long kept to herself. The writing became cathartic for her. No mention of fatigue in writing or anxiety about editing occurs in her notes for this book. It was already under contract to Knopf. She sent her typescript, then titled “The Last Lovely City,” to Amanda Urban, whom she chose as her literary agent at ICM after Lynn Nesbit left to found her own agency in 1989.

  Urban read it fast, over New Year’s weekend, and called Alice on January 2, 1990, to say she loved it. This novel is vivid with a quality that Urban appreciated in Alice: “Of all the people I knew,” Urban recalled, “Alice and Clay Felker [legendary magazine editor, founder of New York magazine] were the most fun to talk about other people with. They both had a lot of smart insights and observations about people.”

  Generosity to friends became a hallmark of Alice’s single life. When she read in the paper that San Francisco Examiner columnist Stephanie Salter, a woman she’d met just once, had been mugged and slashed with a knife in front of her house, Alice mailed Salter an invitation. “She could only imagine that I must be very afraid now to come home and be alone, she said. If I wanted I could come live with her until my physical wounds healed and I got back my confidence.”37 Alice also stepped in to help Anne Lamott when she gave birth to her son, Samuel, by paying her rent for several months and going in with others “on a washing machine that hooked up to the kitchen faucets—it was a thing of beauty.” When Sam moved from a crib to his big-boy bed Alice gave him a set of Power Ranger sheets that “filled him with courage,” Lamott said.

  Alice continued to give parties when she lived alone. Sandra Russell, an aspiring painter who supported herself by catering, loved working for Alice: “She kept chicken stock she’d made in the freezer; she owned good old Sabatier knives and some beautiful silver from her mother, beautiful glasses from Mexico.” Russell’s multicourse menus featured risottos, paellas, or seafood stews. Film critic David Thomson and photographer-writer Lucy Gray, who moved to San Francisco from Dartmouth College in 1983 and met Alice through Diane Johnson, recalled, “She gave big dinner parties, catered, for twenty people or more. Formal. Drinks first, passed by someone hired. These were serious occasions, anybody who was invited had credentials. Talent.” People like the biographer Diane Middlebrook, chemist Carl Djerassi (developer of oral contraceptives), painters Bill Brown and Bob Bechtle, art historian Whitney Chadwick, and literary agent Fred Hill might be there, along with writers Caroline Drewes, Diane Johnson, Leonard Michaels, Anne Lamott, Mary Gaitskill, and guests from out of town—novelist Carolyn See, agent Amanda Urban and her husband, New Yorker writer Ken Auletta. “The conversation was serious and competitive, people throwing their hat in the ring.”

  * * *

  In New York City and Sag Harbor in September 1988, Alice enjoyed seeing Victoria Wilson and other friends, but something was lacking. Previously such trips had been “an escape from R, no expectation but that.” She now missed that frisson of freedom—even as she also knew she would not want him back.

  Alice had a “marvelous” trip to Baton Rouge in November.38 Soon after she wrote a story set in a diner there. “Breakfast at Louie’s Café” is about an aging gay man from San Francisco who resembles Bob McNie in appearance and manner:

  Once very handsome, too handsome, almost, with his wavy hair, high fine brow and strong nose—he was frequently, often violently loved. But now most of the thick black hair is either gray or gone … Scotty these days lives very much alone… he puts a good face on things, his friends like to say… He is fun, or usually he is fun … the “face” and the fun require a certain effort: they cause a strain that at times he fears might even be vi
sible.

  On the way back to the New Orleans airport, Alice insisted on stopping for oysters. “She was extremely nervous about getting to the airport on time, but didn’t want to miss out on oysters,” Betsy Wing, her driver that day, recalled.

  A year after the breakup, Alice’s notebook tells us, she felt “washes of pain.” But she faulted Bob for telling Sydney Goldstein that he couldn’t come to her Thanksgiving dinner because the contrast with the bleakness of his life would be too painful. In that reasoning Alice saw Bob’s “terrific self-pity—He could live less bleakly—He could call me—knows I’m sympathetic, available—” Maybe that was a turning point.

  Sunday, November 27, 1988, found Alice enjoying a “bright better day—work—A walk…” A week later, she spent an afternoon with her son, Peter, and Phil Anasovich in Golden Gate Park: “the bright grass & sunshine… Trees—Eucalyptus, cypress, Giant tree ferns.” They looked for the house near the park where Bob had lived with his family in the 1950s, and Alice thought, “I’ve outgrown Bob.” She was able to continue the walk toward “the beach, striped mauve sky. Tea—”

  * * *

  Alice kicked off 1989 by giving a seventieth-birthday party for Billy Abrahams at her house. Her guests included Billy’s partner Peter Stansky (in on the surprise, of course), Diane Johnson and John Murray, Millicent Dillon, Jessica Mitford, literary agent Fred Hill, Richard Poirier, and Joe Kanon. “My party for Billy was the greatest ever, he will never recover—nor I—A total surprise,” Alice told Max Steele.39

  “Is it okay to be well?” Alice asked herself in February 1989. Now she allowed herself to miss the “good Bob… wise, funny, even strong.” She missed his “dailiness, the dumb jokes. In fact all day I’ve missed his ordinary (okay) voice (the sane nice Bob) coming in [saying]—‘Anybody home?’ ”

  Alice’s essay “Frida Kahlo’s Passion” appeared, beautifully illustrated, in Art and Antiques magazine in January of 1989. For the second winter since breaking with Bob, she would not begin her new year in Zihuatanejo. “Am I ‘sick with longing’ for Mexico?” she asked herself. As a substitute she was describing the beach resort for a book of travel essays she’d contracted to write. Mexico: Some Travels and Some Travelers There would also allow her to re-embrace her love of Mexico by taking trips with various friends to sites in the country that were not Pacific coast beach resorts—not the Zihuatanejo she’d known with Bob.

  In a profile headlined “The Next Chapter: Alice Adams Embarks on New Travels, New Projects and a Life Lived Alone,” Alice’s neighbor and new friend Caroline Drewes emphasized beauty: “Her image, as she lifts her glass, is repeated in the mirrored walls of this cloistered room. Reflected there is a tall slender woman, quite wonderful looking with the gray-green eyes and that swing of shiny silver hair. She wears pale corduroy slacks and a loose crimson sweater and the sometimes heavy jewelry that becomes her. She is a woman who knows very well what becomes her. Silk and satin and velvet, among other things.” Adams told Drewes she felt ambivalent about living alone. She can “write at odd hours and not feel silly” and “eat corn flakes for supper” but feels anxious about owning a house and traveling alone. “I’ve become much more independent and competent. I’ve had to.”40

  Even when travel went wrong, Adams made use of the material. In October 1989, shortly after the opening reception of an exhibit of Peter Linenthal’s sculpture at Triangle Gallery in San Francisco, she participated for the second time in the Toronto International Festival of Authors. A reporter who interviewed her there found her “as understated as her fiction, with a kind of youthful openness and suggestion of wonderment in her unadorned features that belie her 63 years.” Both Peter’s exhibit and Alice’s return from Canada were disrupted by the Loma Prieta earthquake, which violently shut down San Francisco on October 17. Alice retrieved the day with one of her richest Lila Lewisohn stories, “Earthquake Damage,” in which Lila feels extreme anxiety about the safety of her lover, Julian, when she is stranded alone in Toronto after a major Bay Area earthquake. Lila has just attended a conference about contemporary single life that has shaken her; Julian is home in Marin County “harboring” his alcoholic ex-wife, Karen. “Earthquake Damage” is about the human need for “primal reassurance” and “creature comfort.” One last delay on the runway as Lila finally heads home leads to this metaphorical denouement: “Glancing from her [airplane] window, quite suddenly Lila sees… a large, lean, yellowish dog, whose gallop is purposeful, determined. He will get back to his place, but in the meantime he enjoys the run, his freedom of the forbidden field. His long nose swings up and down, his tail streams backward, a pennant, as Lila… begins in a quiet, controlled, and private way to laugh. ‘It was just so funny,’ she will say to Julian later. ‘The final thing, that dog. And he looked so proud! As though instead of getting in our way he had come to our rescue.’ ”

  Peter was less fortunate. In traumatized San Francisco, no one was thinking much about art that season. His brightly painted metal reliefs and mobiles—hand-cut organic forms held together by trailing twists of wire—were beloved by friends and family but drew no reviews and few sales; after the gallery show closed his sculptures lodged in the basement of Alice’s house or his stepbrother Lincoln’s yard in Berkeley.

  * * *

  To celebrate the end of a decade of success beyond her imagining and, at the same time, painful changes in her personal life, Alice again looked to Mexico. Researching her travel book, she met Fran and Howard Kiernan in Oaxaca City for Thanksgiving in 1989 and then spent a week alone in Cuernavaca. As she planned that trip, she recorded a curious reversal in her notebook. Instead of missing Bob as a travel companion, she was missing the thought of him at home, taking care of things: “Missing Bob on trips: there’s no one home (But there is: Peter, cats).”41

  Traveling by her side or staying home, Bob had been part of Alice’s life for twenty-three years. Everything she wrote in the late 1980s, from Second Chances and Caroline’s Daughters to Mexico: Some Travels and Some Travelers There, the stories in After You’ve Gone, and other stories and essays never collected, was imbued with the spirit of Bob and her effort to reinvent herself.

  The “Book of Bob” (as she referred to it in her notebook) that would tell the story “simply, as it was,” took much longer.

  I. Writing and revising Second Chances took Adams about three years and her next novel took another four, so the large advance averaged out to an annual salary of about $150,000, less her agent’s commission. In addition Adams received some income from royalties on previous books, sales of articles and stories, and visiting-writer jobs.

  II. Or perhaps her second Diego: in another note Adams wrote: “Diego—Vasco.”

  III. Alice’s statement contradicts Judith Adams’s precise memory that Bob was drinking wine when he and Alice visited her at Bailey Island, Maine, earlier in the year.

  IV. Her reference to Bob’s affairs indicates she’d known Bob was unfaithful, but she may not have admitted it to herself or talked to anyone about it. When Bob emerged from his long depression and began a relationship with Elaine Badgley Arnoux, he confided to her that he’d had affairs with other women while he lived with Alice: “He kept a little studio down in North Beach and it had a bedroom where he brought them,” Badgley Arnoux recalled. “He was loyal to those women… the woman that he was with when he died was someone he had been seeing for years. And yet he loved Alice.”

  V. Johnson’s “consummate novelistic skill, including a genius for social comedy,” Adams wrote, “has produced a novel of extreme moral and historical complexity—the classic Americans-abroad situation with many differences, and some new and startling excellences.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Book of Bob

  — 1990–1992 —

  It was as though craziness were a heavy black rubber ball (so Stella imagined it) tossed back and forth between them; thus if one of them had it, the other did not.

  —Alice Adams, Almost Perfec
t

  Eager to recoup the large advance paid to Adams, Knopf launched Caroline’s Daughters with style in March 1991: a high-gloss black cover with striking graphics in yellow, teal, melon, and lavender; a full-page ad in the New York Times Book Review; a featured selection of the Literary Guild. The major papers gave the book rave reviews. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in the Times explains how Adams manages so many people and such melodramatic plot events without sacrificing her profound interest in women’s lives: “Adams achieves her best effects by juxtaposing the obvious with the subtle,” he writes. “As the plot roars around off stage sweeping the reader in its path, the characters go calmly about their business, dreaming their dreams, fearing their fears, reacting to one another.” Penelope Rowlands’s profile of Alice and her “sexy new book” in San Francisco Focus bore the headline “Our Own Colette.”1

  Other novelists also responded with enthusiasm. Lynne Sharon Schwartz noticed that “like a capricious fairy godmother, Alice Adams has endowed each of Caroline’s daughters with assets one or more of her sisters might covet: artistic talent, beauty, wealth, a constant husband, a pure heart” and found the novel “a roomy and tantalizing old-fashioned read. I know of no other contemporary novelist who is both so smoothly charming and so ominously intelligent. It’s like sherbet laced with absinthe.”2 Carolyn See, reviewing in the Washington Post, called the new novel “the best book Alice Adams has ever written,” praising its “history and sociology of a great American city” and tacitly reminding readers that a novel by and perhaps for women can also be a thriller: “Caroline has had her adventures the female way.” See’s closing comment seems prescient of the challenges ahead for the Bay Area: “This San Francisco they live in is still an earthly paradise. Worldly riches have nothing to do with this God-given glory… but this particular earthly Eden has been tampered with, eroded, polluted by man-made greed. And here, if I read correctly, Alice Adams gives us her version of sin. It’s not adultery… It has to do with greed…”3