Alice Adams - To See You Again - Stories

But there right in the middle of the kitchen, of all places for her to be, was Claire’s mother, with her head of wild red hair that everyone talked about (saying, “Too bad Claire didn’t get your hair, Isabel honey”). She was laughing and telling Lobelia something that some new guests had said about her beaten biscuits, so that Lobelia was smiling, very happy. And Isabel had never looked so beautiful, blue eyes and white teeth flashing, wearing a yellow dress, something floating.

Claire’s father, Bayard, must have thought she was beautiful, too; coming into the kitchen at just that moment, he stared at Isabel, and then a great smile broke across his red, usually melancholy face, and he went over and kissed her on the neck—a thing that Claire had never seen him do before.

Isabel must also have been surprised. “Well really, Bayard,” she said, in her irrevocably Bostonian voice, frowning a little but very pleased.

And no one scolded Claire for her dirty dress, making it a most unusual evening for all of them. Claire took some chicken and biscuits up to her room, with the vague thought that maybe from now on her whole life would be patterned after this extraordinary day: happy hours of attention from the older kids, and smiles and kisses and happy getting-along-well parents at home.

Naturally enough, things did not continue in quite that way. Sometimes the older kids were nice to Claire and sometimes not, and most of the time Isabel and Bayard got along as badly as ever, and they drank, and drank.

And, like many couples whose mainstay is sheer rage, they kept on being married. Flamboyant Isabel had a couple of flagrant affairs (Claire gathered this from local gossip, later); they separated, reconciled; they both threatened suicide and got drunk together, instead.

Later, Claire escaped to a college in New England, where she was for the most part extremely happy: new friends, a turbulent emotional life, with boys—and no parents. She kept vacations at home to a minimum, often visiting New York or New England friends, instead.

And then, having graduated, she further escaped, to San Francisco, to the first of a series of impressive jobs (impressive to her friends; Isabel and Bayard always seemed a little vague as to what it was, exactly, that she did). But, writing letters back and forth, they got along quite well, Claire and her parents. Better than ever.

Which led to one of her more conspicuous errors in judgment: one June, having been told that her parents were going to Greece for a month, on an impulse Claire wrote and asked if (maybe, possibly) she could have—even rent—the house for that period; she was between jobs and had four weeks’ vacation coming. She hadn’t been home for so long, and she would really like to see them. Getting no answer at all to her letter, she was—well, hurt. And, characteristically, she castigated herself for that silly pain. How could she possibly, after a lifetime of evidence to the contrary, believe that her parents would behave in an ordinary “parental” way, would want to see her and maybe lend her a house?

However, at the very last minute—the week before they were to leave for Greece—Isabel wrote and said of course she could stay in the house; in fact, it would be quite helpful, since the latest maid had just quit; she was only sorry that their timing now worked out so that she and Bayard could not be there when Claire was, not even for a couple of days.

And so Claire rushed about getting tickets, packing—rushed back to Hilton and into love with Spencer Goddard, an impossible man, a local doctor, an allergist, whose wife and children were spending the summer in Vermont. And she fell in love despite several of Claire’s private rules: against affairs with men who were married, with doctors and especially with Southern men, to whom she was not usually drawn (an unreliable lot, in regard to women, as she perfectly well knew). She later excused this lapse by concluding that it was not so much Spencer she had fallen in love with as it was the countryside, the land around Hilton. And that was very likely true.

The house itself was a little depressing that summer: floors long unpolished, certain necessary repairs not made to the tiles on the bathroom floors, the pantry shelves. There was even a smashed pane of glass in the sideboard, where the china and glassware were kept. The absence of a maid could explain some of this, or maybe Bayard and Isabel were drinking even more than usual? Claire was not much bothered by the state of the house, however; once she had fallen in love with Spencer Goddard she paid little attention to anything else.

They met at a party that someone gave for Claire the first week she was back in Hilton (gave out of sheer curiosity, she believed). Spencer was tall and lean, his blond hair almost gray, maybe twenty years older than Claire. Within ten minutes of their meeting he told her that he couldn’t keep his eyes off her, that something about her face was haunting—if he never saw her again he would never forget her face. (Claire to Susan, later: “Only a submoron would fall for a man who came on like that.”) And the next morning he was at her door with roses, saying that this was the most beautiful day, so far, that summer; wouldn’t she come for a walk?

They walked down the white dirt road that led from her house to the woods, and turned off on the path that led to the waterfall and the small meadow of broomstraw, where the children used to build Indian huts.

The waterfall tumbled, still, from a flat ledge of slick black rock, between two densely rooted giant pines, down to an almost perfectly circular pool, dark and deep and always cold. Sometimes there were wild anemones in the crevices between the surrounding rocks, and below the pool the brook ran on through wild tangles of flowering honeysuckle vines—where, naturally enough, Spencer and Claire exchanged their first kiss.

After that day, and that night, Spencer came to her house, the big stone house, for the moment entirely hers, at all hours, several times a day and every night. He couldn’t get enough of her, he said. And under such a barrage of apparent adoration, in the familiar June smells of roses and flowering privet and rich earth, the high singing of summer breezes in the pines, Claire began to think that she had, indeed, fallen in love; she had come home in order to find Spencer Goddard.

Actually, San Francisco was his favorite city, Spencer told her; he had often thought he would give anything to live there, and now that he had found her, lovely Claire, whom he could not live without—well, he would have to see. And Claire thought, Well, why not? Men do divorce their wives for younger women, sometimes; it can’t be much of a marriage; maybe he will.

She said very little to Spencer along those lines. She said nothing at all until the day he took her to the airport (the airport in which she now sits, in an almost empty plane); on that last morning, sad and sleepless and slightly hung over, she said everything that she had not intended to say; she said that she did not see how she could get through the next few months without him, that if he came to Reno for a divorce she could join him there. And she cried, and for once Spencer said almost nothing at all.

He did not follow her to San Francisco, did not write or call. Once, having come in late from a party at which she had drunk too much wine, Claire called him—to hear him say, in a cold, very wide-awake voice, that she must have the wrong number.

She did hear quite a bit, however, from both Bayard and Isabel. In their version of her summer at home, she had wrecked their house and disgraced them both with her flagrant carryings-on, about which everyone was talking.

Almost as angry as she was wounded, Claire wrote back that they seemed to have forgotten that the house was in awful shape when she got there. Was she supposed to have waxed the floors and repaired the tiles and replaced the broken glass in the cabinet? And as for flagrant carryings-on, what about theirs?