The Stories of Alice Adams

by Alice Adams

  “I’m sure you’ll know some of her friends,” adds Carla.

  Posey Pendergast is a skinny old wreck of a woman, in a tattered straw sun hat and a red, Persian-looking outfit. She breathes heavily. Emphysema and some problems with her heart, the doctor thinks, automatically noting the pink-white skin, faintly bluish mouth, and arthritic hands—hugely blue-veined, rings buried in finger flesh. “I’ve been hearing of you for years,” she tells Benito in her raspy, classy voice. Is she English? No, more like Boston, or somewhere back there, the doctor decides. She goes on. “I can’t believe we’ve never met. I’m so glad Carla brought you,”

  “This is some house,” he says solemnly (using what Elizabeth called his innocent-Indian pose, which is one of his tricks).

  It is some house, and the doctor now remembers walking past it, with Elizabeth, marveling at its size and opulence. It was right out there on the beach, not farther along in Seadrift, with the other big, expensive houses, but out in public—a huge house built up on pilings, all enormous beams, and steel and glass, and diagonal boards.

  “My son designed it for me,” Posey Pendergast is saying. “Carla’s friend,” she adds, just as some remote flash is going off in the doctor’s mind: he used to hear a lot about this Posey, he recalls, something odd and somewhat scandalous, but from whom? Not Elizabeth, he is sure of that, although she was fond of gossip and used to lament his refusal to talk about patients. Did he hear of Posey from some patient? Some old friend?

  This large room facing the sea is now fairly full of people. Women in short, silk, flowered dresses or pastel pants, men in linen or cashmere coats. Rich old gringos is Benito’s instant assessment. He notes what seems an unusual number of hearing aids.

  He and Carla are introduced around by Posey, although Carla seems already to know a number of the guests. People extend their hands; they all say how nice it is to meet the doctor; several people say that they have heard so much about him. And then, from that roster of Anglo-Saxon names, all sounding somewhat alike, from those voices, nasal Eastern to neutral Californian, Benito hears a familiar sound: “Oh.” (It is the drawn-out “Oh” that he recognizes.) “Oh, but I’ve known Dr. Zamora very well, for a very long time.”

  He is confronted by an immense (she must weigh two hundred pounds) short woman, with a huge puff of orange hair, green eyeshadow, and the pinkish spots that skin cancer leaves marking her pale, lined forehead. It is Dolores. Originally Dolores Gutierrez—then Osborne, then Graham, and then he lost track. But here she is before him, her doughy face tightened into a mask, behind which he can indistinctly see the beauty that she was.

  “Benito Zamora. Benny Zamora. What an absolutely awful name, my darling. So spic,” said Dolores, almost fifty years ago.

  “How about Dolores Gutierrez?”

  “I can marry out of it, and I certainly plan to. Why else would I even think of Boy Osborne, or for that matter Whitney Satterfield? But you, you simply have to change yours. How about Benjamin Orland? That keeps some of the sound, you see? I really don’t like names to begin with ‘Z.’ ”

  “This is an extremely ugly room,” he told her.

  She laughed. “I know, but poor dear Norman thinks it’s the cat’s pajamas, and it’s costing him a fortune.”

  “When you laugh I feel ice on my back.” He shivered.

  “Pull the sheet up. There. My, you are a gorgeous young man. You really are. Too bad about your name. You don’t look so terribly spic.”

  They were in the pink-and-gold suite of a lesser Nob Hill hotel, definitely not the Mark or the Fairmont, but still no doubt costing poor Norman a lot. Heavy, gold-threaded, rose-colored draperies, barely parted, yielded a narrow blue view of the San Francisco Bay, the Bay Bridge, a white slice of Oakland. The bedspread, a darker rose, also gold-threaded, lay in a heavy, crumpled mass on the floor. The sheets were pink, and the shallow buttocks of Dolores Gutierrez were ivory—cool and smooth. Her hair, even then, was false gold.

  “You know what I’d really like you to do? Do you want to know?” Her voice was like scented oil, the young doctor thought, light and insidious and finally dirty, making stains.

  “I do want to know,” he told her.

  “Well, this is really perverse. Really. It may be a little too much for you.” She was suddenly almost breathless with wanting to tell him what she really wanted, what was so terrifically exciting.

  “Tell me.” His breath caught, too, although in a rational way he believed that they had surely done everything. He stroked her smooth, cool bottom.

  “I want you to pay me,” she said. “I know you don’t have much money, so that will make it all the more exciting. I want you to pay me a lot. And I might give it back to you, but then again I might not.”

  After several minutes, during which he took back his hand, Benito told her, “I don’t want to do that. I don’t think it would be fun.”

  And now this new Dolores, whose laugh is deeper, tells him, “This is a classic situation, isn’t it, my angel? Famous man runs into an old lady friend, who’s run to fat?” She laughs, and, as before, Benito shivers. “But wherever did you meet my darling old Posey?”

  “Just now, actually. I never saw her before.”

  “The love of my life,” Dolores declaims, as the doctor reflects that this could well be true, for he has just remembered a few more lines from their past. “I really don’t like men at all,” Dolores confided back then. “I only need them, although I’m terrified of them. And now I’ve fallen in love with this beautiful girl, who is very rich, of course. Even thinner than I am. With the most delicious name. Posey Pendergast. You must meet her one day. She would like you, too.”

  Wishing no more of this, and wishing no more of Dolores, ever, Benito turns in search of Carla, who seems to have vanished or hidden herself in the crowd that now populates this oversized room, milling around the long bar table and spilling out onto the broad deck that faces the sea. As he catches sight of the deck, the doctor instinctively moves toward it, even as Dolores is saying, “You must come back and tell me how you made all that money, Dr. Do-Good.”

  “Excuse me,” he mutters stiffly, making for the door. He is not at all graceful in the usual way of Latins; Elizabeth said that from time to time.

  From the deck San Francisco is still invisible; it lurks there behind the great cliffs of land, across the surging, dark-streaked sea. The tall, pale city, lovely and unreal. Benito thinks of his amazement at that city, years back, when he roamed its streets as an almost indigent medical student—at Stanford, in those days a city medical school, at Clay and Webster Streets, in Pacific Heights. How lonely he used to feel as he walked across those hills and stared at massive apartment houses, at enormous family houses—how isolated and full of greed. He wanted the city, both to possess and to immerse himself in it. It is hardly surprising, he now thinks—with a small, wry, private smile—that he ended up in bed with Dolores Gutierrez, and that a few years later he found himself the owner of many sleazy blocks of hotels in the Tenderloin.

  But that is not how he ended up, the doctor tells himself, in a fierce interior whisper. He ended up with Elizabeth, who was both beautiful and good, a serious woman, with whom he lived harmoniously, if sometimes sadly (they had no children, and Elizabeth was given to depression), near St. Francis Wood, in a house with a view of everything—the city and the sea, the Farallon Islands.

  Nor is that life with Elizabeth how he ended up, actually. The actual is now, of course, and he has ended up alone. Childless and without Elizabeth.

  The doctor takes deep breaths, inhaling the cool, fresh wind, and exhaling, he hopes and believes, the germs of self-pity that sometimes enter and threaten to invade his system. He looks back to the great Marin headlands, those steep, sweeping hills of green. Far out at sea he sees two small, hopeful white boats, sails bobbing against the dark horizon.

  Looking back inside the house, he sees Carla in intimate-seeming conversation with withered old Posey. Fresh from the intim
ations of Dolores, he shudders: Posey must be even older than he is, and quite unwell. But before he has time for speculation along those lines, he is jolted by a face, suddenly glimpsed behind the glass doors: bright-eyed and buck-toothed, thinner and grayer but otherwise not much aged, in a starched white embroidered shirt (Why on earth? Does he want to look Mexican?), that lawyer, Herman Tolliver.

  “Well, of course they should be condemned; half this town should be condemned, are you crazy?” Tolliver grinned sideways, hiding his teeth. “The point is, they’re not going to be condemned. Somebody’s going to make a bundle off them. And from where I’m sitting it looks like you could be the guy. Along with me.” Another grin, which was then extinguished as Tolliver tended to the lighting of a new cigar.

  In that long-ago time (about forty years back) the doctor had just opened his own office and begun his cardiology practice. And had just met a young woman, with straw-blond hair, clear, dark-blue eyes, and a sexy overbite—Carole Lombard with a Gene Tierney mouth. A young woman of class and style, none of which he could ever afford. Elizabeth Montague: her very name was defeating. Whoever would exchange Montague for Zamora?

  None of which excused Benito’s acquiescence in Tolliver’s scheme. (Certain details as to the precise use of Tolliver’s “hotels” Benito arranged not quite to know, but he had, of course, his suspicions.) It ended in making the doctor and his wife, Elizabeth Montague Zamora, very rich. And in funding the clinics for the indigent of Chiapas.

  • • •

  After that first encounter with Herman Tolliver, the doctor almost managed never to see him again. They talked on the phone, or, in the later days of success and busyness, through secretaries. Benito was aware of Tolliver, aware that they were both making a great deal of money, but otherwise he was fairly successful in dismissing the man from his mind.

  One morning, not long before Elizabeth died, she looked up from the paper at breakfast (Benito only scanned the New York Times, did not read local news at all) and said, “Didn’t you used to know this scandalous lawyer, this Tolliver?”

  “We’ve met.” But how did Elizabeth know that? Benito, shaken, wondered, and then remembered: some time back there had been phone calls, a secretary saying that Mr. Tolliver wanted to get in touch (fortunately, nothing urgent). Just enough to fix the name in Elizabeth’s mind. “Is he scandalous?” Benito then asked his wife, very lightly.

  “Well, some business with tax evasion. Goodness, do all lawyers do things like that these days?”

  Aware of his own relief (he certainly did not want public scandals connected with Tolliver), Benito told her, “I very much doubt it, my darling.”

  And that was the end of that, it seemed.

  Carla is now talking to both old Posey and Herman Tolliver, but the doctor can see from her posture that she doesn’t really like Tolliver, does not really want to talk to him. She is barely giving him the time of day, holding her glass out in front of her like a shield, or a weapon. She keeps glancing about, not smiling, as Tolliver goes on talking.

  Is she looking for him? the doctor wonders. Does she ask herself what has happened to old Benito? He smiles to himself at this notion—and then, almost at the same moment, is chilled with longing for Elizabeth.

  A problem with death, the doctor has more than once thought, is its removal of all the merciful dross of memory: he no longer remembers any petty annoyances, ever, or even moments of boredom, irritation, or sad, faded acts of love. All that is erased, and he only recalls, with the most cruel, searing accuracy, the golden peaks of their time together. Beautiful days, long nights of love. He sees Elizabeth at their dining table, on a rare warm summer night. Her shoulders bare and white; a thin gold necklace that he has brought her from Oaxaca shines in the candlelight; she is bending toward their guest, old Dr. McPherson, from med-school days. Benito sees, too, McPherson’s wife, and other colleague guests with their wives—all attractive, pale, and well dressed. But none so attractive as his own wife, his pale Elizabeth.

  “Oh, there you are,” Carla says, coming up to him suddenly.

  “You couldn’t see me out here? I could see you quite clearly,” he tells her, in his sober, mechanical voice.

  “I was busy fending off that creep, Tolliver. Mr. Slime.” She tosses her hair, now gleaming in the sunlight. “I can’t imagine what Posey sees in him. Do you know him?”

  “We’ve met,” the doctor admits. “But how do you know him?”

  “I’m a reporter, remember? I meet everyone.”

  “And Posey Pendergast? You know her because—”

  But that question and its possible answer are interrupted, cut off by the enormous, puffing arrival of Dolores. “Oh, here’s where you’ve got to,” she tells Benito and Carla, as though she had not seen them from afar and headed directly to where they stand, leaning together against the balcony’s railing. “Carla, I’m absolutely in love with your hair,” says Dolores.

  Carla giggles—out of character for her, the doctor thinks—and then, another surprise, she takes his arm for a moment and laughs as she asks him, “Why don’t you ever say such flattering things to me?”

  Is she flirting with him, seriously flirting? Well, she could be. Such things do happen, the doctor reminds himself. And she seems a very honest young woman, and kind. She could brighten my life, he thinks, and lighten my home, all those rooms with their splendid views that seem to have darkened.

  “Don’t you want some lunch?” she is asking. “Can I get you something?”

  Before he can answer (and he had very much liked the idea of her bringing him food), Dolores, again interrupting, has stated, “He never eats. Can’t you tell? Dr. Abstemious, I used to call him.”

  “Well, I’m really hungry, I’ll see you two later.” And with an uncertain smile (from shyness? annoyance? and if annoyance, at which of them?), Carla has left. She is pushing back into the room, through the crowds; she has vanished behind the glass.

  Looking at Dolores then, the old doctor is seized with rage; he stares at that puffy, self-adoring face, those dark and infinitely self-pitying eyes. How he longs to push her against the railing, down into the sand! How he despises her!

  “My darling, I believe you’re really hungry after all,” is what Dolores says, but she may have felt some of his anger, for she deftly steps sideways, on her high, thin, dangerous heels, just out of his reach.

  “Not in the least,” says Benito rigidly. “In fact, I think I’ll go for a walk on the beach.”

  Down on the sand, though, as he walks along the dark, packed strip that is nearest to the sea, Benito’s confusion increases. He feels the presence of those people in that rather vulgar, glassed-in house behind him—of Dolores Gutierrez and Herman Tolliver, and God knows who else, what other ghosts from his past whom he simply failed to see. As though they were giants, he feels their looming presences, and feels their connection to some past year or years of his own life. He no longer knows where he is. What place is this, what country? What rolling gray-green ocean does he walk beside? What year it this, and what is his own true age?

  Clearly, some derangement has taken hold of him, or nearly, and Benito is forced to fight back with certain heavy and irrefutable facts: this is September, 1990, the last year of a decade, and the year in which Elizabeth died. He is in Stinson Beach, and if he continues walking far enough along the coast—he is heading south, toward the Golden Gate—he will be in sight of beautiful, mystical San Francisco, the city and the center of all his early dreams, the city where everything, finally, happened: Dolores Gutierrez and his medical degree; Herman Tolliver and those hotels. His (at last) successful medical practice. Elizabeth, and all that money, and his house with its fabulous views. His fame as Dr. Do-Good.

  His whole San Francisco history seems to rise up then and to break his heart. The city itself is still pale and distant and invisible, and he stands absolutely still, a tall figure on the sand, next to an intricate, crumbling sand castle that some children have recently abando
ned.

  Hearing running feet behind him, at that moment the doctor turns in fright—expecting what? some dangerous stranger?—but it is Carla, out of breath, her hair streaming backward in the wind. His savior. “Ah, you,” he says to her. “You ran.”

  “And these are not the greatest running shoes.” She laughs, pointing down to her sandals, now sand-streaked and damp.

  “You came after me—”

  She looks down, and away. “Well. It was partly an excuse to get out of there. It was getting a little claustrophobic, and almost everyone I talked to was hard-of-hearing.”

  “Oh, right.”

  “Well, shall we walk for a while?”

  “Yes.”

  Walking along with Carla, the doctor finds that those giants from his dark and tangled past have quite suddenly receded: Dolores and Tolliver have shrunk down to human size, the size of people accidentally encountered at a party. Such meetings can happen to anyone, easily, especially at a certain age.

  Benito even finds that he can talk about them. “To tell you the truth”—an ominous beginning, he knows, but it is what he intends to do—“I did some business with Herman Tolliver a long time ago, maybe forty years. It came out very well, financially, but I’m still a little ashamed of it. It seems to me now that I was pretending to myself not to know certain things that I really did know.”

  “You mean about his hotels?”

  “Well, yes. Hotels. But how do you—does everyone know all that?”

  “I’m a reporter, remember? Investigative.” She laughs, then sniffles a little in the hard, cold ocean wind. “He had an idea a few years back about running for supervisor, but I’m sure he was really thinking mayor, ultimately. But we dug up some stuff.”

  “Here, take my handkerchief—”