Alice Adams - To See You Again - Stories

On another evening of that summer Ran told me that he was going to sell his house. “It’s too big,” he said. “Taxes. So many rooms. Maids. The windows.” He had a new and alarming habit of quick breaths between almost each word, and deep difficult breaths between sentences. Now, after such a labored pause, he added, “I’m tired of it.”

“You lying bastard.” Fear made me rough; it was at about this time that I began to adopt my stance of gruffness, to perfect my just-not-rude snort. “You wouldn’t know what to do without this house,” I told him, and then I laughed. “But if you really want to sell it, I’ll buy it from you.”

That night was as close as we had come to quarreling for some time, but in the course of those hours we worked out a highly original real-estate deal, whereby I would buy Ran’s house, but I would not take possession of it until I had paid for over half of it, by which time we both knew that Ran would be dead.

And that, Ms. Heffelfinger, in brief, is how it went. I bought Ran’s house, and soon afterward, early that fall, he died, and I moved in. I sorted and labeled and stored away all his papers, his manuscripts, his library, as though it had all been infinitely valuable, which, to me, it was. (He had kept no letters from Gloria, which was both gratifying and frustrating.)

After so much heavy thought, and so much to drink, I should have awakened the next day in a state of hung-over exhaustion—a state that my poor guilty Presbyterian Ran used to describe as being “richly deserved.” But I did not feel terrible, not at all. I got up and made myself a healthy breakfast, and then I telephoned the inn, for Candida Heffelfinger.

She came over promptly, in answer to my invitation (a summons, it must have sounded like), and she looked as I had imagined that she would: contrite and tired, and rumpled. Unlike me, she could not have slept well.

She told me that she had been walking around the town, and how much she liked it, and I agreed. Then we both admired, again, the bright fall view from my windows.

And then she said, “I’ve been thinking—and I hope this won’t sound presumptuous, but would you mind if I shifted the focus of our talk a little? I mean, so many people have written about the legendary love affair.”

This was irritating: she was saying to me exactly what I had meant to say to her.

I snorted. “I suppose you mean to take another tack, and zero in on our fights?”

“Oh no, of course not. I wouldn’t—”

“In point of fact,” I told her, “the written accounts are remarkably close to the truth. I was in Italy, and Gloria Bingham visited here for a while, and then she left. Ran and I both had our flings, but no one else mattered much to either of us.”

Candida seemed to find that statement both moving and final, as I did myself. She was silent for a while, and then she said, “I really meant about your work. It’s interesting, your beginning with those small figures. The gain in scope.”

“It undoubtedly had something to do with my physical size,” I told her, very dry.

“I can understand that,” she said. Well, I believed that she could, indeed; we are about the same height. Big ladies.

“What really happened,” I then told her, “was in Italy, for the first time, I saw real Michelangelos. In the Bargello, and in the Vatican, St. Peter’s—”

We talked for several hours, and I saw that I had been right all along about Candida; my instincts still were fine. She was very nice indeed, and smart. I liked her. Our talk went on all morning, and into the afternoon.

I had a marvelous time.

In the late Forties, just after the Second World War, a large party—in fact, a dance—took place in a small castle in Central Europe. It was late August, a very black, hot still night. In the castle’s million-windowed central hall, American music, on records, issued from a Victrola. Glasses and pitchers of pale watery wine were set out on a long table. An elderly man in a shabby white coat poured out the wine and changed or turned over the records—indifferently, since he did not speak English and disliked the music.

Couples, some in costume, most in some variety of festive or at least dressed-up attire, danced out on the floor; other people stood about in clusters, in animated or sometimes serious conversation. The next day, everyone there would be leaving the castle, the American professors, instructors, American wives and all the European students, for this had been an experiment in international education, and the six weeks were just over.

One person, the very distinguished Professor Howard Stein, an elegant Bostonian, brilliant, of a high, exacerbated consciousness, was neither dancing nor talking to anyone. He was listening to the saccharine, meretricious music—longing for Mozart, for a soaring of Bach—and thinking that the experiment, the seminar, had been a failure. With deep embarrassment, and perfect clarity—his fate—he recalled the speech that he himself gave on the first afternoon of the conference, in a small clearing, among romantic statuary, beside the castle’s lake. They had all come to this place, he had said and now could hear himself saying, from widely divergent histories, geographies, in some cases opposing ideologies, but they were all now united in staunch and sober anti-Fascism, were all opposed to the forces of darkness recently defeated.

Wild applause and cries of approval, in various languages, greeted those remarks, and later, fervent handshakes from moist-eyed colleagues, fellow teachers at the eminent Midwestern university that had sent them all there.

And what he had said turned out to be, quite simply and horribly, not true . Many of the German and Austrian students, and one of the Italians, a skinny young woman, had gradually and sometimes inadvertently revealed themselves as Nazi-Fascists still. During the second week of the seminar, the Danish students, a splendidly blond and handsome group, had left in a body, having recognized one of the Germans as a former professor who had been forced to leave Denmark because of Nazi sympathies. (The German left too, a day later, with a face-saving story of illness.) At a poetry reading a German student loudly remarked that Heine was not a German, he was Jewish. And a supposedly “reconstructed” Austrian, who had spent time in a POW camp in Texas and had been horrified at the Southern treatment of Negroes, announced, when asked, that he saw no relationship between that treatment of a “race” and what had gone on in Germany. That same Austrian and the Italian woman were later overheard (by Howard Stein) in a shared reference to “our Navy.”

The question about the treatment of races had been put to the Austrian by Howard’s least favorite wife of an instructor, one of his own former students; an unbearably serious young woman, too thin, with hyperintense brown eyes, who was just then dancing past with an authentic anti-Fascist, a young Italian who was known to have fought with the partisans.

Diana McBride, the young American wife not liked by Howard Stein, would surely have agreed with him, however, about the seminar. In fact, earlier in the evening she had said to the university dean who organized the whole thing, in her half-tentative, half-bold way, “Wouldn’t it have been better to have it in a more friendly country, like France?”

“You should not make that suggestion unless you are prepared to act on it, to perform the work of removal,” she was told, with considerable force, by the dean. Of necessity, he believed that the seminar had been a great success.

Silenced by power, although uncomfortably aware of the illogic of what he had said, Diana felt that everything she had done, all summer, had been wrong. To begin with, their very presence at the seminar, hers and her husband’s, was suspect. The other instructors were chosen for academic distinction, whereas Braxton McBride was asked in the hope that his father, rich old William McBride, would contribute substantially to the project. Instead, Mr. McBride’s contribution was as penurious as were most of his gestures, and there Braxton was, already announced as an instructor. Hideously embarrassing: Diana felt it much more than Braxton did. He behaved as he always had, like a plump rich spoiled only child, taking interest in and appreciation of himself for granted. Not bothering to please anyone.