Alice Adams

by Carol Sklenicka

  When Robert McNie died of cardiovascular problems in 2005, he was living with Linda Hogan, a woman he’d already been involved with during his last decade with Alice. Among Bob’s things in her basement, his son and daughter found boxes of gay pornography and books by psychiatrists about homosexuality. “It was sad because they were not books that gave a healthy picture at all,” Morissa McNie said. “These books emphasized deviance. It just infuriated me so much to know that my father never revealed his orientation, never let homosexuality be an open aspect of his life.” At that time, Morissa called Deborah Sparks, and through their conversation they “both saw that that was the missing piece about Bob, which helped Morissa understand him better, at last.”27 But that understanding came too late for the several women—Deen, Alice, Elaine—and children whose lives had been damaged by Bob’s lack of self-knowledge, deceptions, and alcohol abuse.

  When Morissa and Robbie found Bob’s gay pornography, Peter Linenthal felt shocked again. “We talked about it,” his friend Stephen Brown recalled, “and I said to him, ‘Remember ALMOST PERFECT??!! And you wonder if she knew what was going on? Wake up!’ ”

  Whatever part Alice played in suppressing knowledge of Bob’s bisexuality, because of pride, distaste, kindness, passivity, or embarrassment, she probably found it cathartic to take on the subject in her structurally “almost perfect” novel. Those inclined to wonder what “really happened” must live with some ambiguity.

  * * *

  To the extent that Almost Perfect was cathartic for Alice, it also exhausted her. The summer she sent the manuscript to Wilson, while she was trying to bring herself to break up with Dan Simon and start a new novel that would be about Chapel Hill, Alice was troubled by headaches, general malaise, and redness on her face that she attributed to a respiratory infection or allergies. Despite giving up swimming for exercise, she lost weight. An MRI of her head showed that her sinuses were full of fluid, which neither antibiotics nor steroids relieved. On a visit to writer Mary Gaitskill in Marin County, she became “unexpectedly exhausted” after a short walk. She blamed allergies. In July, she visited the Kiernans in Sag Harbor, New York, where she luxuriated in the comfort and pleasantness of the house and told Trent Duffy that the fresh pesto sauce he made was the best she’d ever had. She spent her days floating in the pool and taking naps, explaining that she’d been troubled by migraines.

  Just before her sixty-sixth birthday in 1992 Alice visited with Carolyn See in Santa Monica. They had dinner with Beverly Lowry, Mary Ross Taylor, and a newer friend, screenwriter Judith Rascoe, at a Mexican restaurant called La Serenata. “I was so enthralled,” See recalled. “I thought, this is it, this is the literary life!” This group of talented, successful women was celebrating Lowry’s book Crossed Over, just that morning on the cover of the Los Angeles Times Book Review, drinking and telling outrageous stories. One of Lowry’s stories, See said, “was about taking the kids to nursery school and seeing the housewives dropping off their kids all perfectly dressed and made-up—because they weren’t going home but out to a tryst. And Alice told about the doctor she was dating who was so protective of her that she found it irritating.”

  All through that evening of crazy stories and laughing and eating and drinking, Alice was pinching the bridge of her nose and saying, “I’m sorry, I have such a terrible headache.”

  During these late-summer weeks, Alice often called Judith Adams and her husband, who was dying of esophageal cancer. On Labor Day, the day after Tim died, Judith called to thank Alice for being a true friend. “I can’t begin to tell you how much Tim loved your phone calls… your courtesy and manners are astounding and unusual; they make a difference in our crazy, chaotic world,” she added in a following letter. “I’m strong,” Judith told Alice on the phone. “I took care of him.” For their generation, which had lived through a deep depression and a world war, physical and emotional strength were great virtues.

  Alice resisted admitting that she was sick. Her doctor blamed allergies. She had already told Dan Simon that she wanted to break up with him, but she said okay when he called one morning offering to bring soup. “It would take more character than I have [to say no],” she wrote in her notebook.28 She thought Dan Simon was the cause of her malaise and continued to plan trips without him. In Austin, Texas, she stayed in “the B and B from hell—terminal English-inn cute” (it became the setting for her story “A Shadow on the Brain”) and dined with Tom Staley, the director of the Harry Ransom Center, who offered to acquire her papers for the center’s collections. While there she had several nosebleeds. Then she went to the Grand Tetons in Wyoming with her artist friends Theophilus (Bill) Brown and Paul Wohner.

  “We’d be at her house or out to dinner and a little bit of blood would start coming out of her nose,” Peter remembered. “She’d notice or I’d mention it, and she’d take a hankie and start dabbing, and she’d say, ‘What a drag’ or ‘What a pain in the ass.’ It seemed like it was scaring me more than her.”

  By then her internist, Dr. Jerome Botkin, had referred her to an ear, nose, and throat specialist, Dr. Mark Singer. He scheduled her for an endoscopic surgery to remove polyps in her sinuses. As Alice awoke from anesthesia on the afternoon of September 22, 1992, she asked her doctors what they had found.

  Dr. Botkin said, “We didn’t like what we found up there.” He explained that there was a tumor in her sinus. It was probably malignant.29

  “What are my chances?” she asked.

  “About 25%,” Dr. Singer answered.

  “You mean 75% die?” Alice asked.

  “You could put it like that.”

  Recording that conversation in her notebook, Alice wrote that she felt “a curious calm.” She remembered thinking she had “about three years to live, plenty of money for that. Sell my house, sell everything—all vague—”30

  Peter brought his mother home from the hospital.

  When Dan Simon came to visit, she said, “Well, now you have another Alice with cancer.” And so, Simon reentered her life, ready to use his medical experience to save this Alice Adams from the fate that had snatched Alice Simon away from him.

  I. The short-lived series focused on off-the-beaten-path destinations: Mary Lee Settle on Turkey, Herbert Gold on Haiti, M. F. K. Fisher on Dijon, France. Each volume was introduced by Jan Morris, who called Adams’s entry “a kind of retrospective journal” that reminds her of the diaries of Virginia Woolf because “the whole adds up to so much more than the sum of the parts.”

  II. Speaking of coincidences, the original beauty for Adams’s story “Beautiful Girl,” who gave her the Manx cat but no longer spoke to Alice, died of alcohol-related disease in 1991 as Adams was completing “Islands.”

  III. The sea crater resembles Minn’s Cauldron on the coast of England in The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch, one of Alice Adams’s favorite novelists. A similar cave, the Little River Blowhole, exists in Mendocino County, where Bob McNie and Alice often went for a spring weekend.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Sick

  — 1992–1995 —

  “But I still don’t see why everyone has to wait so long. Everywhere.”

  “Everyone is busy.”

  “Yes, but the patients are sick.”

  “Oh, sick,” he muttered, as though “sick” were nothing to “busy.”

  —Alice Adams, Medicine Men

  Alice had tried to break up with Dan Simon before she heard her cancer diagnosis. When she told him about it, he stepped up as the medical advisor she needed to guide her through the delicate process of determining the best treatment. Simon believed that Alice’s internist had mishandled her case by treating her for sinusitis while the tumor in her nasal cavity and sinuses was threatening her optic nerve and the base of her brain.1 Dr. Mark Singer, who discovered the tumor, has pointed out that its location and rapidly growing type made it extremely difficult to diagnose.2

  In any event Simon just took over and brought Alice to Stanford Medical
Center, where he had good connections because his wife had been treated there for four years with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. “Alice may not return to the care of her internist, Dr. Botkin, so why don’t you make me the referring doctor, so all letters and reports come to me,” he wrote to one of his Stanford contacts. Simon had not been practicing medicine for several years, so his letterhead carried his home address.

  Alice underwent surgery at Stanford University Hospital on October 19, 1992. To accomplish the removal of the large squamous-cell carcinoma that involved her entire nasal cavity as well as her maxillary and sphenoid sinuses, her ethmoid cavity, nasopharynx, her posterior septum, and the nasal surface of the soft palate, otolaryngologist Willard Fee Jr. and neurosurgeon Lawrence Shuer and their colleagues performed a “degloving” of her face. They used multiple incisions to move her face aside and remove the extensive tumor. An incision was also made from inside her palate.

  Happily for Alice, she could not see all the work that had taken place in the interior spaces of her head and she probably never read the operation report. On the first night she had double vision and thought there were two clocks on the wall and two other patients in the room with her, one old, one young, both speaking Spanish. Hoping to sleep, she used sign language to get someone to turn off a loud TV, but soon it went on again.3

  The removed specimens analyzed at the Stanford pathology lab were eight fragmented parts measuring as large as seven centimeters. Dr. Fee estimated that the tumor had been “two golf-ball sized.” The medical team saw that the tumor had not invaded the dura mater covering the brain and found no evidence of metastasis to lymph nodes or other sites; nonetheless, they planned to recommend further treatment for microscopic disease that might have spread to Alice’s neck.

  Swollen and bandaged, Alice’s face looked “very different, Asian in a way,” to Peter when he saw her after the surgery. She was unable to speak because of tubes in her throat and her nose, and the front part of her hair was shaved. Beneath the bandages her face was covered with stapled incisions, but Peter “could see her in her eyes.” He brought a big red cardboard heart he’d painted and told his mother how relieved he was that she was okay, and she replied that she never expected to die from this surgery. She saved the heart for the rest of her life.

  Alice asked Sandra Russell, the painter from England who had catered parties for her, to visit her in the hospital: “We had become friends—she used to tell me I should charge more and be more serious about painting,” Russell recalled. “She thought I would tell the truth about how she looked. And the truth was, she looked awful, all bruised. It wasn’t like her. She was such a strong woman. She was scared to look in the mirror and scared that people would be shocked when they visited her. I did tell her that she just looked a little bruised and puffy—but that she looked better than some people I’d seen after a face lift! I know that I felt that she could never look ugly—she was a beautiful person inside and out.”

  Dan Simon became more obsessively involved in Alice’s life than ever. He discussed her case with the other doctors and the nurses as they made rounds and took pride in her recovery. Adams reports one of these conversations in her novel Medicine Men, published in 1997. Her main character, Molly Bonner, feels dehumanized as a female patient with an all-male medical team. Her surgeon and his acolytes on their rounds “always seemed extremely happy to see her… because she was regarded as a triumph, living proof of their consummate skill. In a self-congratulatory way they spoke among themselves: ‘Beautiful nose, no scars. You can barely see that line across her forehead. Her hair growing back already. Great job!’ ”

  Alice came home to “a houseful of flowers and presents—and confusion.” Peter visited. Dan was there almost all the time. Bob called or visited. A week later, back at Stanford, Alice was fitted with a face mask to protect her eyes and mouth while her nasal area and neck were irradiated. More than ever, she hated the indignity and reduction of being a patient. Why, she asked Dan Simon, did the patients have to spend so much time in waiting rooms? An exchange between Molly and Dr. Dave Jacobs in Medicine Men catches Alice’s frustration:

  “But I still don’t see why everyone has to wait so long. Everywhere.”

  “Everyone is busy.”

  “Yes, but the patients are sick.”

  “Oh, sick,” he muttered, as though “sick” were nothing to “busy.”

  Along with six weeks of radiation therapy at Stanford, Alice’s oncologist started her on test doses of chemotherapy. She developed severe mouth ulcerations as a side effect of bleomycin chemotherapy, so that was discontinued and another adjuvant treatment was proposed. Dan Simon accompanied Alice to Loma Linda University Medical Center in Southern California, where she received proton-beam radiation. While there she “developed severe mucositis (inflammation of the digestive tract) which necessitated insertion of a feeding tube,” followed by severe nausea that was alleviated by a prescription.4

  As treatments continued Alice’s misery and irritability increased to the point that she noticed herself thinking about people in the medical profession by categories—all of which seemed negative to her. She listed them in her notebook as “ex-football, Chinks, Irish, Black Israeli”; a woman who was slow to bring her pain medication was “a slow Mexican nurse who asks if she can watch TV here, at midnight.” But her other persona, the writer, asked herself on the same page: “Why do I make so much of her being Mexican?—what is this new racism?”5

  Along with her own outrage at what had happened to her, Alice had to cope with the invaluable help she was receiving from Simon. As Peter summarized, “That was the problem. Dan was a drag as a person but knew a lot about cancer.” One reason that Simon was difficult, Alice now realized, was his “rage at the world for not being Alice.”6 His grief for the wife he had been unable to save was channeled into aggressive control of Alice Adams’s medical treatment. Her feelings about her condition, the sort of anger and frustration that most cancer patients experience, infuriated him and he didn’t hesitate to tell her so. Nor did Dan hesitate to let Alice know that his late wife had been a “perfect patient-wife,” more passive and trusting than Alice Adams.7

  In late January, home from Loma Linda, Alice sat in the sunshine at her house and felt “some control.”8 She thought about how to limit her interaction with Dan and began a short story to be called “Humpty Dumpty”—about a woman whose head had been taken apart and (she hoped) put together again.9 At a follow-up visit to Stanford in mid-February, the oncologists told Alice that her treatments were finished. There would be no further chemotherapy. Immediately following that appointment, she told Dan Simon that they were finished as a couple.10 She saw him just once more in her life, when he surprised her at a reading three years later. He’d attended, apparently, not out of literary or romantic interest but rather to assess her condition. The next day he wrote to Dr. Fee at Stanford: “You did a wonderful job on her… I believe she is cured.”11

  When her scars healed, Alice’s face still looked very different. The bridge of her nose had collapsed, “so her nose looked smaller, as if she’d had a nose job and it had been overdone,” Peter said. For months after her radiation treatments ended, she struggled to eat. She’d lost her senses of taste and smell. She suffered from lack of saliva and nausea and fatigue. THC pills relieved the nausea but she weighed just 122 pounds at her five-month checkup in June.

  After a June 1993 visit to Stanford, Alice transferred back to her San Francisco internist, Dr. Jerome Botkin. When she was ready to start going out in public again, she asked a handsome man, her friend Robert Flynn Johnson, how her face looked. “If they knew you before, they’d look closely,” he answered, “but if they didn’t know you, they would just assume that’s who you are.” Johnson later said, “It wasn’t that she was vain. I think she felt that she was maimed. I had to reassure her that she was way overstating her situation.” Film critic David Thomson thought that Alice’s essential beauty—her grace—increased after the surge
ry. “She never lost that sort of glamour—it was her inner spirit.”

  Alice rarely spoke of the changes in her appearance. In part her reticence can be attributed to her Southern manners or her disinclination to hear about illnesses. Once when Frances Gendlin mentioned that she was feeling better after a bout of digestive difficulties, Alice replied, “And you’ve been so good about not talking about them.” But Millicent Dillon, the biographer of Jane and Paul Bowles who became closer to Alice after her surgery, was astonished and impressed by Alice’s acceptance of the damage to her face: “She was so beautiful and then the cancer and the surgery altered her face and marred her beauty. Yet she made no attempt to have reconstructive surgery. I don’t think she was afraid of surgery. It was something else. She had this sense of herself—this presence, this elegant demeanor—that was unbroken.” Still, Alice probably felt the insult when her longtime hairdresser on Sacramento Street suddenly became too busy to schedule her. The changes in Alice’s face disturbed her, the hairdresser confided to another client. Alice found someone new to style her bangs to cover the scar on her forehead.12

  “To say she wasn’t a complainer is to put it mildly,” Peter Linenthal said. “Imagine what it was for a person who loved flowers and perfume and food to lose the ability to taste and smell! All she would say about it was that it made the texture of food more important to her. As if that terrible loss were a gift she’d received. She especially savored oysters.” Peter wondered if somehow his mother’s fear of her own mother’s criticism had conditioned her resilience. “Somehow she spared everybody her suffering. And she said she never forgot anything that happened to her; hard for me to imagine, but it gave her a lot of material.”

  * * *