Alice Adams - To See You Again - Stories

She was aware, though, in a distant way, that Blanche, a fading tall blond Southern belle from Savannah, had not found much security in Berkeley, with those threatening academic people, or with Ian, who was inveterately mean to women: mean to Charlotte’s mother, who had died young, and miserable; mean to his next, long-wooed wife, Pinky; and mean to Avis, the third. Mean to Blanche, often not speaking to her for days. In a way, leaving the house to Blanche was one of Ian’s kinder gestures, although not exactly kind in regard to Charlotte.

Later, back from Paris and living in New York, very broke, nowhere near making it, Charlotte had remembered Ian’s letter, and with uncharacteristic bravado—she was generally, and with good reason, quite frightened of her father—she wrote to him and said, “What exactly did you mean about leaving Blanche the house? Don’t I get any of it?” And Ian, a smooth talker, wrote back reassuringly, “Of course Blanche will leave it to you. You’ll get it all, eventually.” But he did not say that in his will, and, what with taxes and repairs, the place probably was too much for Blanche, who was getting on. No surprise that she would have to sell the place, except that Charlotte was surprised; she was horrified.

A week or so after the postcard came, after Charlotte had begun to lie awake thinking always of the house, she had lunch with her friend Margery, an architect. Charlotte had formed the habit of telling Margery much, although never all, of what was on her mind. That day she talked for a while to Margery about Lyman, saying that it bothered her that he was five years younger, although why should that be a problem? She did not say that she really liked him enough to scare her, a little.

And then she tried to say what she felt about the house. She spoke, however, without much hope of comfort or understanding; she believed that because of her profession Margery would have a rather anatomical view of houses. To Margery, a house would be a shell for living in, designed and built in a certain way, in a certain state of repair.

Charlotte said, and she felt her breath tighten as she spoke, “It’s crazy, the very idea of that house’s being sold makes me feel dislodged. Deracinated.” She tried to laugh, and coughed.

Margery laughed, too, and then she said, “Well, once I felt pretty much that way, when the house in Illinois that I grew up in was being sold. And then I thought, What’s wrong with me? I spent the worst years of my life in that house, I was miserable there.”

“Oh, Margery,” Charlotte cried out. “It was horrible. My mother dying, and then Ian fighting with Pinky, and then Avis. Not speaking to Blanche.”

Home from lunch, in her studio, from which on clear days she could see the Berkeley hills, Charlotte thought back to all the misery and unhappiness of the Grizzly Peak house. And maybe now, remembering, she would be all right?

But she was not all right. Lyman had gone to a convention of booksellers in Los Angeles, and that night, instead of sleeping, Charlotte argued ragingly with Ian, who had been dead for five years: “Why didn’t you say in your will that I was supposed to have the house? What made you trust Blanche? You know she doesn’t like me, none of them have. Why didn’t you think of me when you made your will?”

And to Blanche: “If you’re so broke why don’t you go to work, for a change? You could try interior decoration, or real estate. I’ve always supported myself, one way or another, and if you think I liked being a waitress at Zim’s …”

She got up in the morning scratchy-eyed, heavy in the head and heart, with no mind for work. She did work,though, on a stylized landscape, its tidiness possibly being a counter to the confusion in her mind: a great flat yellow stretch of fields, hills nearly the same color and a paler-yellow sky.

One of the things that Charlotte did not tell Margery—and she hated to think what a shrink would make of this—was about her dreams: almost always, all her life, they had taken place in that pale adobe hilltop house, with its sprawling wings, in its high grove of redwood and eucalyptus trees. Even in Paris, or New York, in her dream life, there she would be. This struck her as unbearably sentimental, not to mention infantile. Nevertheless, it was true.

For a time, then, Charlotte managed to get her worrying about the house down to ten or fifteen minutes a day; during those minutes she would still rave and rage, first at Ian, then at Blanche, but afterward she would get to work. She was working well, on that yellow landscape.

Also, she was getting along happily with Lyman Clay—surprisingly, since most of her love affairs had been marked by turbulence. Lyman was in fact such a gentle man, sensitive and keenly appreciative of her painting, and of her, that at times Charlotte wondered if he could be gay; no evidence pointed in that direction, it was just a way that living in San Francisco in those end-of-the-Seventies years could make you think. She very much liked his unmanageable white-blond hair, his flat Maine voice and his Yankee wit.

A couple of weeks after getting the first postcard, in a mood of relative peace Charlotte decided that, in a simple and honest way, she would tell Blanche that she was indeed upset about her selling the house but that she now almost understood. She could almost stand it. After all, Blanche had been nicer than her two other stepmothers; once she had taken the trouble to polish and pack and deliver some old wineglasses of Charlotte’s mother’s (just in time, Charlotte was sure, to keep Ian from breaking them). But Charlotte forgot, as she thought of writing to Blanche, Blanche’s deep suspicion of anything Charlotte did or said. Suspicion, Charlotte had to admit, not entirely unfounded. “I’ve tried to love Charlotte,” Blanche had remarked one time to Ian, who reported this to Charlotte, in a concurring way—the effort of loving her being too much for anyone, it would seem.

And so, in answer to her postcard, Charlotte got back a long typed letter from Blanche, mainly to the effect that Charlotte had no legal right to the house. As if Charlotte didn’t know her father’s will by heart.

Even in her postcards, Blanche spoke what Charlotte thought of as “Southern,” by which she meant the content as well as the accent. It was always necessary for Charlotte to shove aside a lot of words to get at what Blanche meant. That letter, translated, meant: Your father didn’t care about you at all, he only cared for me. Which Charlotte had heard and even concluded on her own. Still, it hurt to have it pointed out.

In other, lighter moods, Charlotte could almost think of Blanche as funny; she was much a master, or mistress, of the velvet barb—as when she once remarked to Charlotte, “And I’ve always thought you were so pretty, even if no one else ever did.” Well, Charlotte had never thought of herself as especially pretty—except maybe for a few minutes, sometimes. She no more needed to have that pointed out than she needed to be reminded of her father’s non-caring. Still, the way Blanche got it across was fairly funny, Charlotte guessed.

Because Charlotte had been only six when her mother died, her memories of Eugenia, though clear, were brief, truncated. Eugenia had played the recorder, and she had gone to all the chamber-music concerts that came to Berkeley—a lot of concerts. Her erudition in both musical and literary areas was legendary. To this day she was talked about. She had had many friends in the academic community —professors, musicians, literary types, who no doubt disliked noisy, self-made Ian, as he probably disliked them back, and disliked Eugenia’s friendships with them, and finally disliked Eugenia. And turned to beautiful, rich Pinky.

What Charlotte remembered best was lying in bed, her wing of the house juxtaposed to her mother’s solitary wing, and hearing Eugenia weeping, weeping—hours of tears. Those terrible sounds were what Charlotte instantly, audibly remembered when her friend Margery said how miserable she had been in her parents’ house. Eugenia’s tears, her thick and heavy unhappiness had made the child Charlotte sick and heavy with unhappiness as Eugenia lay there crying over Ian—Ian the handsome, the unkind, the menace to women.