Alice Adams

by Carol Sklenicka

  Undissuaded by his mother’s predictions about the future of publishing, Peter went on to New York City to meet with editors. He had taken a year off from teaching and was working full-time on illustrations for children’s books. As for herself, after weeks of standing up to read “mean and funny” passages from Medicine Men on a book tour and trying to forecast the twenty-first century at Radcliffe, Alice concluded, “I’m not a performer or a sales person. I can’t wait to get home to write.”20

  * * *

  Over the past decade Alice had come to regard Philip Anasovich as her son’s permanent partner and her own close friend. She was deeply worried in the summer of 1998 when alarming symptoms suggested that Phil might have a brain tumor. Happily the neurology team at UCSF was able to determine that he actually suffered from an arteriovenous malformation that was successfully treated with gamma knife radiosurgery early in 1999.21

  When Phil became ill, Alice was already reeling from the loss of seventy-nine-year-old William Abrahams, who died of congestive heart failure on June 2, 1998. “Billy Abrahams seems suddenly very old, but still quite great, happy with Peter Stansky,” Alice had written a mutual friend a year earlier.22 Her life had been entwined with Billy’s for fifty years. When he lived in California they talked on the phone several times a week. Though never her book editor, Billy was often her first reader, both “brilliantly intelligent” and “exceptionally tactful.” He and Stansky had often visited with Alice and Bob McNie in Truckee, and Bob decorated two residences for them. Alice was recovering from a long, severe bout of pneumonia when Billy died. Feeling too ill to attend the private memorial service that Stansky held at their hillside home in Hillsborough, Alice asked Millicent Dillon to read a section about Billy from an essay she’d just finished about him and Judith and Max—friends she’d loved at first sight.23 Afterward, when Dillon described the day to Alice and said she was sorry she couldn’t have been there, Alice responded fiercely, “Oh, no, I didn’t want to be there. I want to think of him as still being alive and that’s what I’m going to do.”

  Billy Abrahams

  * * *

  Nineteen ninety-eight was arduous for Alice Adams in other ways. As she wore herself out with professional travel, she also packed in emotional visits with old friends. Lavishly accommodated at the Houstonian Hotel in “a pretty room, pink sunset like Venice,” in February, Alice saw her former lover Jack Boynton and his wife, Sharon; her financial advisor, Glenn Lowry; and Mary Ross Taylor, the art critic who’d been her confidante during some of the rough weeks after her breakup with Bob. In April, upon arriving in Chapel Hill for a literary festival, Alice discovered that a mix-up in the reservation dates made it necessary for her to stay at Max Steele’s condo for two nights before she could move to the Carolina Inn. She loved seeing Max but slept poorly in his spare bedroom: “Birds woke me early, and something about the house itself made me restless. Max collects things, every space is crowded with objects, so that I longed for the anonymous peace of a bare hotel room.” The poor sleep was also due to “boozy dinner parties” with Max’s friend from his Paris Review days, George Plimpton, also in town for the festival.

  During a week already packed with nostalgic visits, Alice dined with the “always marvelous” Alison Lurie and met Lurie’s younger husband, writer Edward Hower, whom she called “such an attractive smart kind funny man, what one would wish for a friend.”24 Introduced to novelist Elizabeth Spencer at Diana Steele’s house, which had tiny chairs because it was also her nursery school classroom, Alice picked up a couple of big cushions and plopped them in the corner. The two of them, who’d both published in the New Yorker extensively, “just chatted like Southern women do,” Spencer recalled.

  At the literary festival Alice also relished the discovery that the writer Daphne Athas, an acquaintance from Chapel Hill High School who’d then been “the most out of the out crowd,” was now “infinitely better than those God-awful ins, who were now Republicans with paunches.” Oddly enough, some of those “God-awful ins” from Alice’s school days turned up for the literary festival, prompted by her correspondence with Robert Macmillan (the one she’d knocked over as a toddler who later showed her his penis, and, later still, dated her friend Judith). Despite Macmillan’s “huge paunch and weighty, somewhat cross expression” and self-confessed “politics to the right of Jesse Helms,” and the presence of Macmillan’s long-suffering wife, Alice felt “a sort of warm current” between herself and him. “Sex, I guess, and we all know how mysterious and intellectually unreliable that can be.”25

  The reunion was a flop. One woman brought a photo album with pictures of their parents “plastered and smoking their heads off” at a costume party in the 1940s. Alice failed to recognize “a tall dark woman with an exceptionally mean, disapproving face.” But someone else identified her as Agatha Adams in a black wig, shot from an angle that made her look tall. Seventy-two-year-old Alice was startled: “I had not recognized my own mother? But of course in a sense I had; I recognized a mean spirit, and passed by it as quickly as I could—just as, years back, I had left home as soon as possible, for good.”

  Alice’s correspondence with Robert Macmillan ended with the festival. Perhaps, she realized later, the rapport she’d felt with him had been based on the fear of Agatha that both of them felt as children. With all the Southern subtlety that she claimed to despise, Alice “took a slap at Robert” by writing his twin brother to say “how great [it was] to see him so thin and elegant… No mention of R. at all.”26 She also wrote an essay called “Why I Left Home: Partial Truths” about the whole incident (with some fictional enhancements that further insulted Robert) and sent a copy to Judith Adams.

  Already feeling wiped out by Chapel Hill, Alice flew to Oaxaca to spend Easter week with Peter and Phil. She complained about ninety-eight-degree days, the bathroom in their $20-a-night hotel, and the men’s tireless shopping, but she told Alison Lurie, “I think I got a good-sport award from Peter,” The zocalo was beautiful, jacaranda trees were in purple profusion, the coffee was fantastic—but it would be her last trip to Mexico, which to her seemed “too hot, poor, dusty—slightly unreal—Indians, the unknown, possibly dangerous.”27

  Again Alice found San Francisco wonderful to come home to, despite the usual summer fog, and she stayed put for the next few months. Frances Kiernan flew in for her seventy-second birthday weekend. They celebrated with a small dinner party at Peter and Phil’s kitchen table on Potrero Hill. Alice wore a stylish close-fitting sweater with her signature chunky jewelry. Derek Parmenter, in a checked sport coat, attended, and Carolyn See sent a “tower of flowers.” Alice declared it “all very nice, especially for an old birthday phobe.”28 But Kiernan noticed that Alice was napping often and wasn’t able to walk in the city as they’d done in the past.

  Alice came to New York City in late September 1998. She’d hired someone to word-process a typescript of After the War and looked forward to discussing the book with Wilson. She directed the driver of her taxi from the airport toward her usual hotel, the Wyndham, but found Fifty-Eighth Street cordoned off because Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in town for negotiations with Madeleine Albright and Yasser Arafat, was staying at the Plaza. As Amanda Urban recalled, Alice got out at the blockade and dragged her suitcase the rest of the way, injuring her knee and exhausting herself. “Alice could be so stubborn and independent,” Urban said. “People lost patience with her because she wasn’t taking care of herself on occasions like that. She could be ornery.” But Urban had good news for Alice. Wilson was reading the manuscript of After the War. Though she thought there were too many characters in the opening scene, she had agreed to purchase it.

  Before year’s end Alice had patched up her mostly epistolary friendship with Donald Hall, which had suffered a break when Hall told Alice about his “twenty-hour date” with a gorgeous young woman who was “fantastic in bed.” In a first reply, Alice teased Hall that his happy confession had “a very Herb Gold sound” and
said, “I hope your prose is not affected.” A week later, she explained that it was hard “to make the leap from sympathizing with a man in total mourning to cheering on a boyish sexual reincarnation. Also, I don’t have any other friends who speak in that way of their intimate lives (Herb Gold and I don’t speak).”29 Given that she published stories far more explicit than his letter, Hall may have been surprised to hear that he’d offended Alice. She discussed the matter with Alison Lurie, who replied, “We have to remember that the genes of most men, even at a relatively advanced age, are always urging them to seek out stupid young females and knock them up.… We are lucky because our genes only suggest that we cultivate our houses and gardens and be kind to whatever helpless creatures such as cats, students, and grandchildren.” Eventually Alice understood that Hall had had a manic episode, part of his “total derangement at Jane’s death,” and felt “rather insensitive and stupid: I certainly should know about manic-depression, both my father and Bob… Also over and over again I’ve seen people in mourning go into ‘inappropriate’ love affairs as part of the process; I did the same thing myself.”30

  Nor was Alice content, as Lurie had posited, with domestic pursuits. Late in 1998, as the House of Representatives moved toward impeachment of President Clinton, Alice’s friend Susan Sward introduced her to Agar Jaicks, a recent widower and Democratic Party leader. Alice thought Jaicks was both nice and sexy—an expert flirt—and thus he held her attention for several weeks. That ended after it turned out that he was highly allergic to cats; they wished each other well and agreed that neither of them, in his words, “felt whole in the relationship.”31 In her notebook she wrote, “Men our age are scared of us—it’s not (just) that we look old & ugly—they think we have something on them—and we do.” She called her dates with Jaicks her “latest romantic disaster,” but a few months later when she saw him ceremoniously embracing Nancy Pelosi on television, “spruce and dapper—oozing sincerity—warmth”—she felt “reactivated fantasies—I did like his voice.”32

  Alice reminded herself: “So much complicated attention to single broken inferior men—write their stories.” In no time, she was at work on two new ones about widowers, “First Date” and “Her Unmentionables.”33

  * * *

  Adams’s fifth collection of short stories, The Last Lovely City, came out in January, about the time the Senate voted to acquit Clinton. A review in the Sunday Book Review section of the New York Times on February 14 was no Valentine. Susan Bolotin disliked the characters of Adams’s “densely populated and lonely” world because they “let life lead them by the hand. Things happen to people. The people, too tired or too drunk to fight back, go along for the ride. Chance is destiny.” Their main flaw, as Adams understood the review, was age.

  What Bolotin saw as passivity seemed like artful realism to seasoned readers who realized their smallness in the face of human frailties, including the emotional force of one’s own history. “These people may be high achievers in the socioeconomic realm, but when it comes to love they’re no more in control than teen-agers,” Alison Baker wrote in the Oregonian. Indeed, there’s ironic self-awareness in characters like the lovers Lila and Julian in the Lila Lewisohn stories, who watch their lives from the sidelines in the four final stories of the book. For them, finding a way to be together after years when other obligations made that difficult is a minor triumph.

  Sallie Bingham reminded readers of the Santa Fe New Mexican that getting old is not a passive activity: “In a world with no tomorrow, a magnificently accoutered world that is, in the end, a hall of mirrors, surviving is an act of courage.” In the Southern Review Randall Curb noticed that “like Colette, Adams tends to focus on women beyond the first bloom of youth… yet despite heartbreak and disaffection, they never get enough of love.” Other reviewers thought Adams’s stories continued to “exemplify the kind of perfection that theorists and critics extol… the deftly limned but fully realized character, the complication quickly described, and the denouement which offers insight or a catch in the throat.” And such artfulness was enough to offset any malaise that readers might absorb from Adams’s characters, Carol Lake argued in the Austin American-Statesman: “You laugh and in laughing you feel rescued from a similar malaise. You can feel Adams’ strong voice as she sorts out incidents to create a structure, to give form and meaning.”34

  Despite the many good reviews, Alice complained to friends that she’d been attacked for writing about old people. Mary Gordon responded with an ad hominem attack on Bolotin. From Paris, Mavis Gallant reminded Alice: “Shakespeare played the age card with ‘King Lear.’ Verdi and Shakespeare did it with ‘Falstaff.’ Balzac played it with ‘Pere Goriot,’ Hemingway with ‘The Old Man and the Sea,’ Brecht with ‘Mother Courage.’ Nothing stings so much as the dumb remark, particularly when it is anonymous or made by someone one has no use for. Every work of art has a card to play. The real difficulty is when one is up against people who have no idea how fiction is written.”35

  * * *

  “I thought I gave a rather attractive view of old age,” Alice wrote to Diane Johnson. She was looking forward to arthroscopic surgery on her left knee, hoping to regain her mobility after several months of hobbling about on a cane. She felt “ready for the ice floe” after a recent accident at home had left her with a cracked rib too. Of course, checking herself into a hospital again was troubling. “Are you certain your doctors have not read Medicine Men?” Donald Hall asked her.36

  Alice’s surgery went smoothly and she recovered happily, saying, “I love lying in my beautiful room with a bed full of cats and books.” Peter was “the greatest help” and stayed over several nights. She drafted a story called “Sending Love,” which she described to Dick Poirier as “a very affectionate one about Bob. High time, I think. He really was in most ways so marvelous.”37 Thirteen pages (two typed, the rest in her semicursive printing) survive among Adams’s papers. By so much condensing the long relationship, Adams emphasized how quickly she’d fallen for Bob. In the story, “Tom” brings the narrator orange juice in bed and has “an actor’s voice, all feeling so it doesn’t much matter what he says.” She’s so desperately worried when he’s hours late for their second night together—“I knew next to nothing of his life, there were no possibilities to which to anchor my fears—and so I feared everything”—and so relieved when he arrives that she whispers, “Don’t explain.” Thus her easy forgiveness sets a pattern. Their “entire connection is marked always by a lack of explicitness; we did not spell things out or make plans.” But what terrific times they had—in bed, in the kitchen, on a trip to Madeira, he was “affectionately warm, always a lot of kissing and loving touches, and cheerfully funny.” Years in, when she began to make demands—“I think you might say when you’re not coming over”—the man balks. He’s having business troubles, then falls into a deep depression, dons an old gray robe, and begins “to sit around in this robe all day, doing absolutely nothing.”

  “Sending Love” hews closer to the facts of Alice and Bob’s relationship than anything else Alice wrote. If, as she intended, it’s “very affectionate,” it is also sadly self-diagnostic. Through this story Adams recognizes that the lapses that finally made cohabitation with Bob impossible for her were there from the beginning, part of the attraction itself. Intuitively knowing she could not change this man, she writes, “she let him believe she was “much less anxiously needful than in fact [she was].”38

  * * *

  Two weeks after her surgery, Alice was getting about on a colorful cane from Mexico. She could walk, take showers, and even get on the city bus. When Jack Leggett invited her to dinner (Edwina was away) they walked to Via Veneto on Fillmore and had a lively time discussing the importance of wealth. The best story she’d ever read, she told Leggett, was “The Rich Boy” by F. Scott Fitzgerald. When he got home, Leggett read the story and called Alice to tell her he found it “formless” and didn’t understand her enthusiasm. “But, Jack,” she replied, “you k
now I don’t care for plot at all.”39

  On Thursday, May 20, 1999, while sitting at home alone, Alice felt a severe pain in her chest that radiated to her arms and jaw. Her knees buckled when she got up to call for help. Her Alabaman neighbor Colmont Hopkins immediately came to drive her to the emergency room at Mount Zion Hospital. By then the pain had subsided, but she felt weak, nauseous, and dizzy. Aspirin, nitroglycerin, and a small dose of morphine soon brought her symptoms under control, and Dr. Botkin admitted her to the hospital on the assumption that she’d had a heart attack. She canceled plans to go out for dinner with Penelope Rowlands on Saturday night. Sunday morning rapid atrial fibrillations sent her to the ICU for the weekend. On Monday morning a cardiac catheterization revealed that her arteries were healthy, though the area where her aorta joined her heart was “tortuous” (twisted) and “dilated,” probably due to high blood pressure.

  On Tuesday morning cardiologist Dr. Edward Cohen corrected Alice’s heart rhythm with a procedure called cardioversion—two electrical shocks that returned her to normal. But Dr. Botkin still had no explanation for the attack she’d had on May 20. Its etiology was, he noted, “a puzzle.” If the earlier diagnosis of non-Q-wave myocardial infarction was wrong, then perhaps Alice had a pulmonary embolism (blood clot in her lungs), perhaps because of her recent knee surgery. Botkin called in pulmonologist Thomas Addison, but his tests (ventilation and perfusion) showed only minor defects in her lungs, nothing to account for the attack. Addison’s notes describe Alice as “a somewhat chronically ill appearing lady who is in no distress” and “a delightful lady.” Speculating about the attack, he noted, “dissection also comes to mind, but the cardiac catheterization I would think essentially rules that out.”