The Stories of Alice Adams

by Alice Adams

  It was at Lyman’s that Margery reached her—not wanting to wait to call Charlotte in the morning. She had to tell her the news.

  “I can’t believe this,” said Margery over the phone. “The place is going for a hundred thousand. Honestly, Char, it must be a wreck.”

  Not grasping the sum of money, her mind instead wandering back to the actual house (a wreck?), Charlotte only said, “Well, it didn’t use to be.”

  “Who ever would have thought that a hundred thousand could come to look like a bargain?” said Margery.

  Vaguely offended at the word “bargain” being attached to her house, Charlotte murmured, “Not I.”

  An odd lapse, or confusion, of memory had been disturbing Charlotte, along with her other troubles, ever since first hearing from Blanche about the house: simply, she could not remember whether a giant pine that had been near the side porch had been cut down or not. In her earliest memories it was there; as a small child she had played with dolls and Dinky toys among its roots. And she could remember it when, as an older girl, she had sat there on the porch, making out with some boy. But then: had there been talk about cutting it down? Had Ian said it had to go, that it menaced the roof, or the porch? Possessed of an unusually active visual imagination, Charlotte could see the waving heavy-boughed pine, and she could also see its stump, raw and flat and new—or was she seeing the stump from another tree, somewhere else?

  • • •

  Without waiting to show it to Lyman or to Margery—to anyone—Charlotte took the yellow landscape to her gallery, a new one, in Embarcadero Center, and it was sold the next day, for more money than Charlotte could believe: enough to live on for five or six months, she thought.

  To celebrate, and because, marriage or not, he was an extremely nice man, Charlotte took Lyman out to dinner, inviting him to a new French place, all polished brass and big mirrors and white linen, which they had sometimes walked past.

  Exactly the kind of occasion that should be fun and won’t be, Charlotte thought as she dressed, putting on an unaccustomed skirt and silk shirt and high sandals. Lyman will make some dumb scene about not letting me pay, and we won’t have anything to talk about except the food, which will not be good.

  The restaurant was attractive. And as they sat down, Lyman in a coat and tie, straw hair under control, Charlotte thought, Well, we do make a fairly handsome couple.

  Easily, Lyman told the waiter to put the wine on a separate check, he would take care of that.

  “Mais bien sûr, Monsieur.”

  As Charlotte thought, Well, so far so good.

  The food, too, was good, but then after a while something in the tone of the restaurant, maybe, began to make them unfamiliar to themselves. Charlotte heard Lyman talking in a new and stilted way—indeed, discussing the food—and she began to think, I was right.

  Mainly for something new to say, she asked, “How come you never talk about Portland?” more complainingly than she had meant to. “Did you like it, growing up there?”

  He grinned, showing white, white teeth. “Well, I really did,” he said. “It’s still small enough to be comprehensible, sort of. There are even some cobbled streets left. And we lived out on Cape Elizabeth, right on the Atlantic.”

  He went on and on about Portland—the coast, the beaches, the rocks—and Charlotte could see it all vividly as he spoke.

  But why was this conversation making her so sad? And then she knew: she was hearing the nostalgia in Lyman’s voice; his missing the place he came from was making her miss her own place, her house.

  • • •

  She also took Margery out, for lunch, for further celebration.

  “I honestly think I must be going crazy,” Charlotte said. “Lyman could not be a nicer person; he’s kind and smart, and being five years younger than I am is not important, really. But I keep making trouble. If I had better sense I could be perfectly happy with Lyman. I sometimes am.”

  Margery laughed. “If you had better sense you might not be a painter.”

  “Well, I guess.”

  Margery raised her wineglass in a toast, and then she asked, “What ever will you do with all that money?”

  Charlotte frowned, her hands gestured helplessness. “I don’t know, it’s been worrying me. I should do something—sensible.”

  “What about our buying the Berkeley house?”

  “What?”

  “Your house in Berkeley. I have some money saved up … and I could … and you could … we could … rent … invest … property values.”

  Margery made the appointment and got the key from the real-estate agent—all the negotiations would have to be in her name, obviously—and on a bright October afternoon she and Charlotte drove over to Berkeley: two prospective buyers of an empty house.

  They drove up Marin, and up and up, and then turned right on Grizzly Peak, at which point the sheer familiarity of everything she saw accelerated and heated the flow of Charlotte’s blood: how she knew all those particular turns of the road, those steep sudden views of the bay. And then there it was, in a clump of tall waving eucalyptus: her house. Sand-colored adobe bricks and a red tiled roof, a narrow wooden porch stuck out to one side like an ill-advised whim, long one-storied wings seeming to wander off behind. Perhaps because of the five years’ lapse since she had been there, or maybe because she was seeing it with Margery, Charlotte thought, What a nutty-looking house, it’s crazy. But that was an affectionate thought; the house could have been an eccentric relative. In fact, it reminded her considerably of Ian: uncontrolled, given over to impulse. (An adobe house in the Berkeley hills had been itself an eccentric impulse, or a sentimental one: Ian and her mother had spent their honeymoon in Mexico.)

  When Margery had parked the car, they got out and walked toward it, toward Charlotte’s house. All the vines and shrubbery had increased considerably in the five years since her last visit; a green growth of wisteria almost covered the porch.

  Like a thief, an accomplice in crime, Charlotte followed Margery up to the front door, which, with the real-estate agent’s key, Margery opened, and they walked into an absolutely empty, echoing house.

  But why was Charlotte so frightened? She could have been an actual intruder, even a thief, so violent was her apprehension as they walked from room to room, both of them on tiptoe. And along with this fear came a total disorientation: was this small stained room the one that had always been called the guest room but where Ian slept from one wife to another? And was this smaller room her own, in which she had lain and listened to Eugenia’s weeping? Shivering, to Margery she whispered, “It all looks so small.”

  “Rooms do, without any furniture. Honestly, they weren’t kidding about its being in bad shape.”

  “I’m going back outside,” whispered Charlotte.

  Outside was more familiar: the sweeping view of the bay—the water and sky, the darker skyline. The shrubs and trees and vines were all in their proper place, except for the big pine, which indeed was missing. Nor was there any stump where Charlotte thought the tree had been. Instead, in that spot Blanche (it must have been Blanche) had put in a bed of geraniums, her favorites; in the intense October sunlight they gave off a dusty, slightly rancid smell.

  Margery came out at last, and together she and Charlotte walked around the house, Margery stopping to peer down at foundations, to mutter about dry rot.

  Once back in the car, seemingly having put dry rot out of her mind, Margery began to talk animatedly about possible reconstruction of the house: “It really has marvelous potential; it needs a lot of work, but I could knock out walls … open up … a deck.”

  By this time they were on the bridge, crossing the shining water far below—that day an interesting slate blue, a color that wet stones sometimes are.

  “Well, so what do you think?” asked Margery.

  “I don’t know. I guess it really doesn’t seem my kind of thing,” Charlotte said, with a certain effort.

  “But I thought you wanted—I tho
ught it would help.” Although clearly intending kindness, sympathy, Margery sounded very slightly huffy: her professional imagination was being rebuffed.

  Margery would get over her huffiness in time, Charlotte thought. And while Charlotte could not entirely “get over” her pain at the loss of what she continued to think of as her house, it would perhaps become bearable, little more than an occasional sharp twinge.

  She began a new painting, this time all shades of blue, from slate to brightest azure.

  When, a few weeks later, a postcard came from Blanche, in Santa Barbara, showing lots of palms and flowers, and announcing that she was going to marry the most wonderful (underlined) man with a lovely house on the ocean, near the Biltmore Hotel, Charlotte stuck the card in a box with letters that she meant to answer soon.

  It was a few months after that, near Christmastime, that, waking with Lyman in his wide, eccentrically carved oak bed—their most recent decision had been to make no decision, no firm plans about legalities or moving in—in a wondering voice Charlotte said, “You know, it’s curious, I don’t dream that I live in Berkeley anymore. My dreams don’t take place in that house.”

  “I didn’t know they ever did,” Lyman said.

  Legends

  Partly because she was so very plain, large and cumbersome, like her name, at first I liked Candida Heffelfinger better than any interviewer who had come around for years. Tall, almost gaunt, she had a big white pockmarked face, lank brown hair and beautiful dark eyes—have you ever noticed how many otherwise ugly women have lovely eyes? Also, she had that special, unassuming niceness that plain women often have; I should know, it was years before I dared to be as mean and recalcitrant, as harsh-mannered as I had always wanted to be.

  I liked her as soon as I saw her awkwardly getting out of the red Toyota that she must have rented at the Raleigh-Durham Airport, and start up the pine-strewn path to my (Ran’s) house. And I liked her although I knew that she would want to talk about my legendary love affair, about Ran, rather than about my work, the sculpture. I was used to that; it interested everyone, our “love,” and besides, what can you say about structures almost twenty feet high, some weighing thousands of pounds?

  In a welcoming way, and also as a surprise—I would not be the ogress that almost anyone in New York would have warned her about—I went to the door to greet her.

  “Miss Phelps?” she puffed out. “Jane Phelps?”

  Well, who in hell else would I be? But I said yes, and asked her to come in, and what would she like to drink?

  In her dowdy-expensive gray flannel suit she followed me into the living room, and said that she drank bourbon-and-water.

  I made the drinks, and we both settled down in that high-ceilinged, glassed-in living room; we stared out at the fading November sunset, against the black lace network of trees. We smoked our cigarettes, and drank, and we made friendly small talk about her flight, the drive from the airport to Hilton. This house, its view.

  I not only liked Ms. Heffelfinger; I felt that I knew a lot about her. With that name, and that flat, unaccented voice, she would be Midwestern, as I am, from somewhere in Minnesota, or Wisconsin. I imagined a rural childhood for her, and I saw her as the eldest in a family of brothers, whose care would often fall to her. Then adolescence—well, we all know about the adolescent years of ugly girls: the furtive sexual encounters with boys who later don’t speak to you in the halls at school, who invite small fluffy blondes to their parties. Then college, at a state university, where the social failure would be somewhat balanced by academic triumph, and maybe even a passingly satisfactory affair with a young instructor, although more likely an aging professor, paunchy and grimly married. Next the New York experience, the good job and the lonely love affairs: married men or alcoholics, or both, or worse.

  You might ask why such an unattractive girl would be chosen in that way at all, but only if you had never heard the old saying that ugly women as lovers are fantastic. I remember the first time I heard that voiced, by a short, very truculent and quite untalented painter. I was entirely outraged, as though one of my most intimate secrets had been spoken aloud, for of course it is often true: a beautiful woman would expect to be made love to, we expect to make love.

  Ms. Heffelfinger and I said what we could about the town—very old pre-Civil War—and the house, Ran’s house, which was built in the twenties—and then considered very innovative, all that glass—with prize money from his first symphony. (Ran was once a famous composer.)

  Perhaps by way of changing our direction, I asked her if she minded living alone in New York—and I was totally unprepared for her answer.

  “Well, actually we don’t live in the city,” she said. “We live in a small town in northern New Jersey. It’s very unchic, but it’s great for the kids, they love it.”

  We? Kids? Perhaps unfairly I felt that I had been deceived, or at least misled. I tried to keep surprise and suspicion from my face but they must have shown (everything does), for she laughed and said, “I know, I don’t look married, or much like a mother, but maybe that’s just as well?” And then she said, “Well, we might as well start? It’s okay to turn on the tape?”

  I said yes as I noted what nice teeth she had, just then exhibited in her first smile. I thought too that I had better be on my guard, more than usually so.

  Now the sky beyond all that naked glass was entirely black, and you would have thought that everything outside was stilled, unless you knew—as I, a night walker, knew—that in those depths of woods small leaves yet stirred, and tiny birds were settling for the night. Ms. Heffelfinger turned on her recorder, and she began to say what I had known that she would say: a small speech to the effect that she knew very little in a general way about sculpture, “although I am really moved by it, more so than any other visual form.” (Was that true?)

  I said I understood, and I gave the snort that over the years I had perfected. “Actually no one knows a damn thing about my work but me, and sometimes I’m not at all sure that I do,” I told her.

  She smiled, again those nice teeth, our smoke circled up to the arched, beamed ceiling, and then she made her second predictable speech; everyone said it, in one form or another. “Of course you realize that the main interest, prurient though it may be, is in your relationship with Randolph Caldwell.”

  I smiled, showing my tolerant indifference to prurience, to vulgar curiosity. “Of course, the legendary love affair,” I said.

  “By now I’m quite an expert on the legend,” Ms. Heffelfinger assured me, looking off into a distance that might have contained her notes. “You came to Hilton not long after Lucinda Caldwell died, is that right? Mr. Caldwell at that time was still in mourning for his wife?”

  “In his way. Yes. Mourning.” I had never met Lucinda, of course, but I too, in my way, had sometimes mourned for her.

  And while I had strayed off in that direction, poor Lucinda’s, Ms. Heffelfinger slowly inserted her knife into my heart.

  “One thing I don’t quite understand,” she said, beginning gently, so that I hardly felt it. Then, “About Gloria Bingham.” In. “Just when was it that she first came here, and met Randolph Caldwell?”

  All the books and articles, if they mention her at all, other than as a footnote, make it perfectly clear that Gloria Bingham was a totally unimportant figure in Ran’s life, a girl who came after Lucinda, and before me, his major love. But I was unable just then to parrot the legend to Ms. Heffelfinger—or even, had I wanted to, to tell her that it was a bloody lie. I began to cough, passionately, as though I were trying to cough up my heart, that sudden cold stone in my chest.

  Candida Heffelfinger looked alarmed, of course. She got up—for a moment I thought she meant to hit me on the back; fortunately she decided not to. She looked wildly about, and at last discovered the bar. She went over and brought me a glass of water, so helpful.

  By then I could thank her, weakly. “But I really don’t think I can talk anymore just now. I’ll call you tom
orrow,” I told her. “You’re staying at the inn?” In fact, I was not at all sure that I would call her—why?

  She said yes, fine, and got up to go. I did not rise, I barely could have. I gave her a limp old lady’s hand to shake, and I watched as she walked down the hall to the door, then turned to wave. Her suit was now rumpled, as though that brief encounter with me had messed up her clothes, as well as her good intentions.

  It was the maid’s night off, and so I decided not to bother with dinner. I made myself another drink, and then another, and later I had some cheese for nourishment. I watched the stars come out among the blackened pine and oak boughs, and then a waning moon come up, and I thought about life, and truth, and lies, as an old drunk person is very apt to do.

  The true story, my—“our”—story, began a long time ago, in the thirties, my own late twenties, when I came to Hilton to begin an instructorship in the art department. I rented a tiny house, a cabin, on the road leading up to the Caldwell house, in the deepest, leafiest, most romantic Southern woods. And on that white road I first saw, driving fast in a snappy open car, a handsome man in early middle age, with thick gray hair, dark eyes and a bright red plaid wool shirt. Randolph Caldwell, the composer, I was told when I asked Dr. James, the head of the art department, about my conspicuous neighbor. (This was just after Lucinda Caldwell had died, and no one then had ever heard of Gloria Bingham. So you may conclude, Ms. Heffelfinger, that it was I, not Gloria, who formed the unimportant link, who came between Lucinda and Gloria.)

  And later it was Dr. James who introduced me to Ran, in the A. & P., at the vegetable counter.

  “I’m delighted to meet a near neighbor,” he said as he took my hand, but his eyes glazed over in the automatic way of a man meeting a not pretty woman, a look I knew.

  “I’ve admired your car,” I told him, half-lying, and hoping that he would not imagine I knew anything whatsoever about cars.