Alice Adams - To See You Again - Stories

Why then, having tipped the grinning bellboy and begun to unpack, silk shirts on hangers, silk tissue-papered nightgowns and underthings in drawers, does she feel such a dizzying lurch of apprehension? It is too intense in its impact to be just a traveler’s nerves, jet lag. Felicia is suddenly quite weak; she sits down in an easy chair next to a window to absorb the view, to think sensibly about her situation, or try to. She sees a crazy variety of rooftops: mansard, Victorian curls, old weathered shingles and bright new slate. Blue water, paler sky, green hills. No help.

It is being in love with Martin, she thinks, being “in love,” and the newness of Martin Voort. I’ve never known a farming sailor before, and she smiles, because the words don’t describe Martin, really, although he owns some cranberry bogs, near Cape Cod, and he builds boats. Charles was a painter, but he was rich (Martin is not rich) and most of his friends were business people. Martin is entirely new to her.

And at my age, thinks Felicia, and she smiles again, a smile which feels tremulous on her mouth.

“Wonderful” is the word that people generally have used about Felicia. She was wonderful with Charles, whose painting never came to much, although he owned a couple of galleries, who drank a lot. Wonderful with all those kids, who were a little wild, always breaking arms or heads.

Her lover—a Mexican Communist, and like Charles a painter, but a much better painter than Charles—Felipe thought she looked wonderful, with her high-boned face, strong hands and her long, strong voluptuous body. She was wonderful about the abortion, and wonderful too when he went back to his wife.

Felicia was wonderful when Charles died, perfectly controlled and kind to everyone.

Wonderful is not how Felicia sees herself at all; she feels that she has always acted out of simple—or sometimes less simple—necessity.

Once married to Charles, and having seen the lonely, hollow space behind his thin but brilliant surface of good looks, graceful manners, skill at games—it was then impossible to leave him; and he couldn’t have stood it. And when the children had terrible coughs, or possible concussions, she took good care of them, sometimes staying up all night, simply because she wanted them well, and soon.

During the unanesthetized abortion, she figured out that you don’t scream, because that would surely make the pain much worse, when it is already so bad that it must be happening to someone else, and also because the doctor, a Brazilian chiropractor in the Mission District, is hissing, “Don’t make noise.” And when your lover defects, saying that he is going back, after all, to his wife in Guadalajara, you don’t scream about that either; what good would it do? You go back to your husband, and to the clay pots that you truly love, round and fat or delicately slender.

When your husband dies, as gracefully as he lived, after a too strenuous game of tennis, you take care of everything and everyone, and you behave well, for your own sake as well as for everyone else’s.

Then you go to visit an old friend, in Duxbury, and you meet a large wild red-haired, blue-eyed man, a “sailor-farmer,” and you fall madly in love, and you agree to meet him for a holiday, in May, in San Francisco, because he has some boats to see there.

She is scared. Sitting there, in the wide sunny window, Felicia trembles, thinking of Martin, the lovely city, themselves, for a long first time. But supposing she isn’t “wonderful” anymore? Suppose it all fails, flesh fails, hearts fail, and everything comes crashing down upon their heads, like an avalanche, or an earthquake?

She thinks, I will have to go out for a walk.

Returned from a short tour of the neighborhood, which affords quick beautiful views of the shining bay, and an amazing variety of architecture, Felicia feels herself restored; she is almost her own person again, except for a curious weakness in her legs, and the faintest throb of blood behind one temple, both of which she ascribes to fatigue. She stands there for a moment on the sidewalk, in the sunlight, and then she re-enters the hotel. She is about to walk past the desk when the bellboy, still stationed there, waves something in her direction. A yellow envelope—a telegram.

She thanks him and takes it with her into the elevator, waiting to open it until she is back in her room. It will be from Martin, to welcome her there. Already she knows the character of his gestures: he hates the phone; in fact, so far they have never talked on the telephone, but she has received at least a dozen telegrams from Martin, whose instructions must always include: “Deliver, do not phone.” After the party at which they met he wired, from Boston to Duxbury: HAVE DINNER WITH ME WILL PICK YOU UP AT SEVEN MARTIN VOORT. Later ones were either jokes or messages of love—or both: from the start they had laughed a lot.

This telegram says: DARLING CRAZY DELAY FEW DAYS LATE ALL LOVE.

The weakness that earlier Felicia had felt in her legs makes them now suddenly buckle; she falls across the bed, and all the blood in both temples pounds as she thinks: I can’t stand it, I really can’t. This is the one thing that is too much for me.

But what do you do if you can’t stand something, and you don’t scream, after all?

Maybe you just go to bed, as though you were sick?

She undresses, puts on a pretty nightgown and gets into bed, where, like a person with a dangerously high fever, she begins to shake. Her arms crossed over her breast, she clutches both elbows; she presses her ankles together. The tremors gradually subside, and finally, mercifully, she falls asleep, and into dreams. But her sleep is fitful, thin, and from time to time she half wakes from it, never at first sure where she is, nor what year of her life this is.

A long time ago, in the early Forties, during Lieutenant (USN) Charles Lord’s first leave, he and Felicia Thacher, whom he had invited out to see him, literally danced all night, at all the best hotels in town—as Felicia wondered: Why me? How come Charles picked me for this leave? She had known him since childhood; he was one of her brother’s best friends. Had someone else turned him down? She had somewhat the same reactions when he asked her to marry him, over a breakfast glass of champagne, in the Garden Court of the Palace Hotel. Why me? she wondered, and she wondered too at why she was saying yes. She said yes, dreamily, to his urgent eyes, his debonair smile, light voice, in that room full of wartime glamor, uniforms and flowers, partings and poignant brief reunions. Yes, Charles, yes, let’s do get married, all right, soon.

A dream of a courtship, and then a dream groom, handsome Charles. And tall, strong-boned, strong-willed Felicia Thacher Lord.

Ironically, since she had so many, Felicia was not especially fond of babies; a highly verbal person, she was nervous with human creatures who couldn’t talk, who screamed out their ambiguous demands, who seemed to have no sense and who often smelled terrible. She did not see herself as at all a good mother, knowing how cross and frightened she felt with little children. Good luck (Charles’s money) had provided her with helpful nurses all along to relieve her of the children, and the children of her, as she saw it. Further luck made them all turn out all right, on the whole. But thank God she was done with all that. Now she liked all the children very much; she regarded them with great fondness, and some distance.

Her husband, Charles, loved Felicia’s pregnancies (well, obviously he did), and all those births, his progeny. He spoke admiringly of how Felicia accomplished all that, her quick deliveries, perfect babies. She began to suspect that Charles had known, in the way that one’s unconscious mind knows everything, that this would be the case; he had married her to be the mother of his children.