The Stories of Alice Adams

by Alice Adams

  They had too an enormous retreat from the world: that huge house full of books everywhere. And the aging pale parents, Josiah and Sophie Washington, who had been and continued to be surprised at finding themselves parents, who retreated from parenthood to long conversations about the histories of other Southern families. “It was a perfect background for eccentrics of the future,” Richard later told Ellen.

  Both Roger and Richard had chosen history as their field of concentration at Harvard. During those summer afternoons, and into the gaudy fall, while R.O.T.C. units drilled in the Yard and pretty Radcliffe girls—in sloppy sweaters and skirts, white athletic socks and loafers—lounged on the steps of Widener Library, Richard and Roger studied furiously in their ground-floor rooms in Adams House, and at night they went to movies. Every night a movie, in suburbs as far-lying as the subway system would carry them, until one night when the only movie they had not seen twice was I Wanted Wings, in Arlington. So they stayed home and for a joke read chapters of Lee’s Lieutenants aloud to each other, which was not one of the texts for History I but which was the only book in the room they had not already read. It had been an off-to-college present from their not very imaginative mother. In stage Southern accents they read to each other about Fredericksburg and Chickamauga, Appomattox and Antietam.

  Roger had a photographic memory, of which Richard was wildly proud. His own memory was erratic; he easily memorized poetry but he had a lot of trouble with names and dates, with facts. As they walked across the Yard in the brilliant September air, Roger recited several pages from that book, still in that wildly exaggerated accent: “… and before the Northern armies could marshal their forces …” while Richard gamboled beside him, laughing like a monkey.

  They were taking a course called Philosophic Problems of the Postwar World. With everyone else they stood around outside Emerson Hall, waiting for the hour to sound. Richard was overheard to say to Roger, in that crazy Southern voice, “As I see it, the chief postwar problem is what to do with the black people.”

  At the end of the summer Roger had four A’s and Richard had two A’s, a C and a D, the D being in Biology. They had no friends. Richard regarded their friendlessness as a sign of their superiority; no one else was as brilliant, as amusing, as his brother, and thus they were unappreciated. Roger didn’t think much about that sort of thing then. He was solely concentrated on getting top grades.

  Those Harvard years were, or perhaps became in memory, the happiest of Richard’s life. Completely isolated from their classmates and from the war that for most people dominated the scene, he and Roger went about their scholarly pursuits; he had Roger’s almost undivided attention, and it was a time when Roger laughed at all his jokes.

  Aside from the Southern joke, which was their mainstay, they developed a kind of wild irony of their own, an irony that later would have been called sick, or black. Roger’s obesity came into this. “You must have another hot dog, you won’t last the afternoon,” Richard would say as Roger wolfed down his seventh hot dog at lunch at the corner stand. And when Roger did order and eat another hot dog they both thought that wildly funny. Richard’s heart was funny too. At the foot of the steps of Widener Roger would say, “Come on, I’ll race you up to the top,” and they would stand there, helplessly laughing.

  That was how Richard remembered those years: big fat Roger, tilted to one side chuckling hugely, and himself, dark and wiry and bent double laughing, in the Cambridge sun. And he remembered that he could even be careless about his health in those years; he almost never hurt. They went for long walks in all the variously beautiful weathers of Cambridge. Years later, in seasonless California, Richard would sigh for some past Cambridge spring, or summer or fall. Roger remembered much less: for one thing he was in later life so extremely busy.

  They were reacted to at Harvard for the most part with indifference; other people were also preoccupied, and also that is how, in general, Harvard is—it lets you alone. However, they did manage to be irritating: to the then current remark, “Don’t you know there’s a war on?” both Roger and Richard Washington had been heard to respond, “Sir, the War has been over for almost a hundred years.” Also, those were very “liberal” years; racism, or what sounded like it, was very unpopular. No one made jokes about black people, no one but Roger and Richard.

  Therefore, it is not too surprising that one night Roger and Richard came back from the movies (a revival of a Broadway Melody in Dorchester: Roger loved musicals) to find that someone had put a swastika in black chalk on the door to their room. Richard was absolutely enchanted; in a way it was the highest moment of his life. All his sense of the monstrosity of the outside world was justified, as well as his fondness for drama; he was persecuted and isolated with his brother. “Roger,” he said very loudly and very Southernly, “do you reckon that’s some kind of Indian sign they’ve gone and put on our door?”

  Roger laughed too, or later Richard remembered Roger as laughing, but he recalled mainly his own delight in that climactic illuminated moment. They went into their room and shut the door, and after them someone yelled from down the stairwell, “Southern Fascists!” Richard went on chortling with pleasure, lying across the studio couch, while Roger walked thoughtfully about the room, that big bare room made personal only by their books and some dark curtains now drawn against the heady Cambridge spring night. Then Roger put a Lotte Lenya record on the player.

  That was more or less that. The next day the janitor washed the chalk off, and Roger and Richard did not speculate as to who had put it there. Anyone could have.

  But a week or so later Roger told Richard that he was tired of history; he was switching his field of concentration to economics. And then he would go to law school. “Fat makes you already eccentric,” he said. “And eccentrics have to be rich.”

  “In that case I’ll switch to Greek,” Richard countered furiously, “and remain land poor.”

  And that shorthand conversation made perfect sense to both of them.

  They both did what they said they would, except that soon after their graduation (Roger summa cum laude and Phi Bete) Richard had a heart attack that kept him in the hospital at home in Virginia, off and on for a couple of years, fending off his anxious mother and writing long funny letters to Roger, who seemed to be enjoying law school.

  So it worked out that by the time Richard went back to Harvard for his master’s in Greek literature, Roger had got out of law school and gone out to San Francisco, where he began to succeed as a management consultant to increasingly important firms. He was too busy even to come home for the funerals of his parents, who died within a month of each other during his first winter in San Francisco—Josiah and Sophie Washington, who had, they thought, divided their land equally between their two sons. Roger sold his immediately for thirty thousand, and thought he had done very well. He urged Richard to do the same, but Richard lazily or perversely held on to his, until the advent of a freeway forced him to sell, for a hundred thousand.

  Richard did not enjoy his second time at Harvard, except in the sense that one does enjoy a season of mourning. He was terribly lonely, he missed Roger vividly, everywhere in Cambridge, and his heart hurt most of the time.

  Thus it was not until the early fifties that Richard got his teaching job in the boys’ school in San Francisco, and came out to see his brother again. And then came into his money, and met Ellen.

  In those days, even after getting his money, Richard lived in a downtown hotel—his eccentricity. He had a large room that the maid was not allowed to enter. (“In that case why live in a hotel?” practical Roger had asked.) The room was stacked everywhere with books, with records and papers. Richard took most of his meals in the hotel dining room; after he came home from a day of teaching he rarely went out. He was not well; much of the time he felt dizzy, and he ached, but again it was hard to gauge the degree to which his loneliness was chosen. If Roger, for example, had had a bad heart he would undoubtedly have had it continually in the midst
of a crowd.

  Indeed, in the years since his Harvard isolation Roger had become extremely gregarious. Professionally he was hyperactive; his entire intelligence and energy were occupied. And a vivid social life grew out of professional contacts. People whose adviser he was in a legal economic sense also asked him to dinner, and he became known as a very courtly, if somewhat ponderous bachelor, as well as an astute businessman. Roger was greedy for company; he reveled in all his invitations, his cocktails and dinners and his girls.

  Girls who fell in love with Richard were always girls with whom Roger had not been successful; that was how Richard met girls. In one of their rare conversations about relationships with women, Roger remarked on Richard’s perfect score with women; Richard had never been turned down.

  “But with how many ladies have I—uh—attempted to prove my valor?” Richard asked, in the parody Southern manner that he sometimes tried to continue with Roger. “Four, or is it three? I sometimes lose track of these—uh—astronomicals.”

  Ellen made five.

  One March afternoon, a few months after they had met, Richard lay across some tufts of new grass on the bank of a duck pond in Golden Gate Park, watching Ellen, who was out wading among the ducks. Like a child, she held her skirt bunched up in front of her, at the top of her long thin childish legs. Water still had spattered the shabby gray flannel; Ellen visibly didn’t care. She splashed out toward some brown ducks who were peacefully squatted on the surface of the pond. They fled, scuttering across the water, submarining under, as Ellen screamed out, “See! They know I’m here!”

  Her long fish eyes that day were almost blue with excitement. When she was unhappy or simply remote they were gray. After she finally went mad they were gray all the time.

  At the farther edge of the pond were willows, now thickly green with spring; they grew out into the water in heavy clusters. And all about the pond were tall eucalyptus, scenting the air with lemon, shedding their bark in long strips, as the breeze fluttered their sad green scimitar leaves above Richard’s heavy head.

  Out of the water, out of her element, Ellen became a detached and languorous girl who sat on the grass not far from Richard, clutching her arms about her knees and watching him curiously, listening to that tormented and violent Southern talk.

  “Interest! Interest!” was what Richard was saying. “My own brother, my heir, and he offers me interest on a loan. My God, I told him, ‘You’re my brother, take all the money, but for God’s sake don’t offer me interest.’ ”

  Above the trees pale-gray clouds drifted ceremoniously across the sky. Half closing her eyes, Ellen turned them into doves, flocks and flocks of pale soft gray doves.

  “God, if I’d only sold the bloody land when Roger sold his,” said Richard for the tenth or perhaps the hundredth time that day. “And got only thirty thousand like him instead of this bloody hundred.”

  Richard’s wildness and the intensity of his pain had oddly a calming effect on Ellen. Unlike most people, who were frightened or impatient or even—like Roger—bored, Ellen experienced with Richard a reduction of the panic in which she normally lived. Rather reasonably she asked him what she had often been told but had forgotten: “Why didn’t you sell it then?”

  “I preferred to be land poor.” This was in the old stage Southern voice. “Ah pruhfuhd.” Then, “Christ, I didn’t want the money. I still don’t. If I could only just give it to him. Without dying, that is.” And he laughed wildly.

  By this time pain had deeply lined Richard’s face. There were heavy lines across his forehead, lines down the sides of his nose and beside his wide, intensely compressed mouth. Many people, especially recent friends of Roger’s, considered Richard to be crazy, but even they were aware that what sounded like madness could have been an outcry against sheer physical suffering.

  “I may not even go to New York,” Ellen said. “It takes so much nerve.”

  Ellen was a mathematician—“of all things,” as most people said. Especially her Oakland-Baptist-John Birch Society mother said that, and often. Ellen was talented and had been offered a fellowship at Columbia.

  “Stay here,” Richard said. “Let me keep you. God, won’t anybody take my money?”

  The melodramatic note in that last told Ellen that Richard was going to talk about Roger again, and she sighed. She liked it better when he was reading poetry to her, or when he didn’t talk at all and played records, Telemann and Boccherini, Haydn and Schubert, in his cluttered and most personal room.

  But Richard said, “Roger wants to invest in some resort land at Squaw Valley, with some of his rich new German friends. Do you know the altitude at Squaw Valley? Six thousand feet. I wouldn’t last a minute there. How to explain why his brother is never invited for weekends or summer vacations. I am socially unacceptable to my brother—isn’t that marvelous?”

  Richard’s eyes were beautiful; they were large and clear and gray, in that agonized face. Those eyes exposed all his pain and anger and despair, his eyes and his passionate deep Southern voice. He was really too much for anyone, and certainly for himself. And there were times, especially when he ranted endlessly and obsessively about Roger, when even Ellen wanted to be away from him, to be with some dull and ordinary person.

  Ellen had met Roger, who always retained a few intellectual friends, at a Berkeley cocktail party, and she had had dinner with him a couple of times before the night they celebrated Richard’s money at the silly expensive restaurant, where the picture was taken. Ellen had not liked Roger very much. He was exceptionally bright; she recognized and responded to that, but she was used to very bright people, and all the money-power-society talk that Roger tried to impress her with alarmed her. “You could marry extremely well if you wanted to,” Roger told her. “With your skin and those eyes and those long legs. And no one should marry on less than thirty thousand a year. It can’t be done.” Then he had laughed. “But you’d probably rather marry a starving poet, wouldn’t you? Come and meet my crazy brother, though, even if he has just come into money.”

  And so Richard and Ellen met, and in their fashions fell in love.

  Now, feeling dizzy, Richard lay back on the bright-green grass and stared up through the lowering maze of silvered leaves to the gray procession of clouds. Sickness sometimes made him maudlin; now he closed his eyes and imagined that instead of the pond there was a river near his feet, the Virginia James of his childhood, or the Charles at Harvard, with Roger.

  Not opening his eyes but grinning wildly to himself, he asked Ellen, “Did I ever tell you about the night they put the swastika on our door?”

  Of course Richard lent Roger the money, with no interest, and their dwindling relationship continued.

  Sometimes even in the midst of his burgeoning social life Roger was lonely; he hated to be alone. Sometimes late at night he would telephone to Richard, who always stayed up late reading and playing records. These conversations, though never long, were how they kept in touch.

  At some point, a couple of years after Richard had met Ellen, Roger began to talk about a girl named Karen Erdman, and Richard knew that she was the one he would marry. But Roger took a long time deciding—Karen was a patient girl. Richard did not meet Karen until the engagement party, but he was so intuitively attuned to his brother that he could see her and feel the quality of her presence: that big generous and intelligent girl who adored his brother. After all, Richard also loved Roger.

  “The question seems to me,” advised Richard, “as to whether you want to marry at all. If you do, obviously Karen is the girl you should marry.”

  “I have a very good time as a bachelor,” Roger mused. “But it takes too much of my time. You break off with one girl and then you have to go looking for another, and at first you have to spend all that time talking to them.”

  “God, what a romantic view. In that case perhaps you should marry.”

  “But she wants children. I find it almost impossible to imagine children.”

  “Sir, wha
t kind of a man would deplore the possibility of progeny?” Richard asked, in their old voice.

  “I can’t decide what to do,” said Roger. Then, as an afterthought: “How is Ellen?”

  “Marvelous. She has managed to turn down four fellowships in one year.”

  “She’s crazy.”

  “You’re quite right there.”

  “Well. Good night.”

  “Good night.”

  A heavy engraved invitation invited Richard to the Erdmans’ engagement party for their daughter. “Oddly enough,” Richard said to Ellen. “Since they’re being married at Tahoe I’m surprised they didn’t do the whole thing up there. Or simply not mention it until later. God knows I don’t read the society pages.”

  Richard was not asked to bring Ellen.

  The Erdman house, in Seacliff, was manorial. Broad halls led into broader, longer rooms; immense windows showed an enormous view of the Bay. And the décor was appropriately sumptuous: satins and velvets and silks, walnut and mahogany and gilt. Aubusson and Louis XV. For that family those were the proper surroundings. They were big dark rich people who dressed and ate and entertained extremely well.

  In those crowded, scented, overheated rooms Richard’s pale lined face was wet. He went out so infrequently; the profusion and brilliance of expensive clothes, in all possible fabrics, of jewels—all made him dizzily stare. The acres of tables of incredibly elaborate food made him further perspire. He stood about in corners, trying to cope with his dizziness and wildly wondering what he could find to say to anyone there. Lunatic phrases of gallantry came to him. Could he say to the beautiful blonde across the room, “I just love the way you do your hair, it goes so well with your shoes”? Or, to the tall distinguished European, who was actually wearing his decorations, “I understand you’re in money, sir. I’m in Greek, myself. Up to my ass in Greek.” No, he could not say anything. He had nothing to say.