Alice Adams - To See You Again - Stories

Diana, in many ways her husband’s opposite, took very little for granted, and sometimes she tried too hard to please; it was this latter quality which had gone so wrong with Howard Stein on one of the first days of the seminar. They were coming home from a group excursion to a neighboring, larger and grander castle, and by accident, surely, Diana and Howard sat down next to each other in the long open truck, the transportation for that day’s excursion. Wildly casting about for something to say to the distinguished critic, her former professor, Diana seized upon the passing scenery: a gentle landscape of woods and meadows. “It looks rather like New England, don’t you think?” she observed (unavoidably tight-voiced, and stilted). Dr. Stein turned fully on her; he glared as what she took to be tears of rage filled his eyes. “Most emphatically not,” he said, and he turned around to begin a conversation with a knot of Spanish students (Loyalists) on his other side. Confronted with his narrow back and the black, patrician shape of his skull, Diana felt tears sting her own eyes.

Howard Stein had a reputation for not liking wives, even for being rude to them; still, Diana was sorely aware of it.

However, the afternoon before the dance, a good thing happened to Diana: in the neighboring town, in a small shop, she found a pretty dress which fit her perfectly, a dark silk, embroidered with small flowers. It was a little peasanty, a costume, but perfect for the farewell dance. And since for six weeks there had been nothing to spend money on but ice cream at the local PX, she had plenty of traveler’s checks.

Generally, Diana did not like the way she looked, but that night, in that dress, she felt transformed. It fit her so smoothly, seeming to shape her thin body; its sheen added color to her face and eyes.

And then that nice boy, Vittorio, asked her to dance.

Out on the porch, Stanley Morris, from Brooklyn, a young, enthusiastic and most promising instructor, was vigorously embracing a young Estonian girl, and at the same time deciding that he would, after all, marry the dark, graceful, intelligent and clearly rich girl whom he had met on the boat coming over.

With her natural elegance, Vassar, Phi Beta, she would be a terrific asset wherever Stanley went; even at Harvard, his wild and not unfounded hope, she would fit right in. And she was sexy, too; those nights on the boat were wonderful.

The Estonian girl, a small round blonde, was terribly attracted to that handsome American; she couldn’t help squirming against his hands. But some still cool part of her mind was thinking that she didn’t trust him, quite. He had told her that he had no girlfriend, and that after the seminar he would come up to visit her, in the small town in Brittany where her family now lived, but somehow she didn’t believe him, and she managed to push his hand away.

It was an extremely hot night, still; an almost full pale moon, earlier a slight illumination, now had set. The lake was flat, unmoving, and no breeze stirred in the surrounding shrubbery, the concealing pines.

Tired of watching the dancers, and there was no one around he wanted to talk to—he was tired of everyone there—Howard Stein decided to go out for a breath of air. He opened the wide door to the porch, and as he passed them, he dimly recognized Stanley Morris amorously engaged with the slutty-looking Estonian girl. Howard gave a slight twitch of disgust; he felt infinitely alone.

And with the most terrible sadness, as he walked out toward the lake, he remembered another, much happier summer of his life, twenty years back, when as a young man he had taken a hiking tour through some of the Loire Valley, the Dordogne, with Kenneth Carlisle, his great friend, now dead for several years. It was quite possible, tortured Howard had forced himself to admit, that he had been in love with Kenneth; certainly those were his strongest feelings, ever, about another human being. However, Kenneth, who later married, could never have suspected anything of the sort; they were, quite simply, perfect friends, perfectly happy together. And there had been nothing of that nature in Howard’s later life, nothing at all.

Passing the grove, with its silly statuary, where he made that awful sentimental speech, Howard realized that he was close to tears.

He would have to do something, get a grip on himself, somehow. This fall he would start a new book; maybe at last the one on Melville.

And tomorrow he would force himself to make a final visit to the Jewish DP camp just down the road from the castle. This hastily and poorly thrown together camp, housing some four hundred displaced Jews who were waiting to go to Israel, had been, for Howard, an aching problem. First, Stanley Morris, good-looking, warm and ebulliently sympathetic to those people, went over there to pay a sort of investigatory call. He returned to the castle with wrenching stories of how he had been received: with such dignity and grace, such appreciation. He was served tea; those people were overjoyed to find a cultivated American who spoke Yiddish—they were terrific people, Stanley said. Compassionate and concerned, and feeling strong kinship with those displaced Jews, Howard overcame his own shy reluctance to go anywhere; the next time Stanley visited the camp, Howard went along. (Howard did not speak Yiddish; for generations no one in his family had.) And Howard too was deeply moved by just what Stanley had described: the dignity, the courage, the gratitude for distinguished visits. One of the men had been a classics professor in Munich; another, a Polish physicist.

However, after that Stanley announced that he had been too disturbed ever to return; it tore him apart, he said, alluding to relatives lost in the Holocaust. Believing that in all conscience he must respect Stanley’s feelings, Howard returned to the camp for several visits alone. In his academic German he had to explain Stanley’s absence: extreme busyness, he said. He felt apologetic about not knowing Yiddish; in fact, he felt himself to be a poor substitute for Stanley.

But tomorrow he would visit them once more, to say goodbye.

One reason that Diana McBride felt badly about Howard Stein’s evident distaste for her was that he was the greatest teacher in her experience. She had taken two courses from him as an undergraduate, one on Donne and the Metaphysical poets, another an American literature survey. She had not read Donne before, nor any of those poets, and she was powerfully affected both by the marvelous poetry and by Howard Stein’s concise and brilliant lectures. She would leave the lecture hall in a sort of daze, illuminated, stirred, still in her mind hearing that crisp and elegant voice, those sharp Bostonian vowels.

And his lectures at the seminar had been wonderful; he spoke on Melville, Whitman, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams.

To the Italian boy, as they slowly danced, she said, “Dr. Stein’s lectures were terrific, weren’t they?”

“I think that he is a great man,” said Vittorio Garibaldi.

Vittorio was a slender, fair-complected northern Italian from Padua. There was the faintest physical resemblance between him and Diana; both were light, slight people—a kinship of which they themselves were unaware, being so entirely unfamiliar to each other, but which they may have sensed as a sort of affinity.

Diana was aware of feeling less shy with Vittorio than she usually was, even dancing better. She felt light on her feet as they whirled to “Tuxedo Junction,” and a little lightheaded, almost silly; possibly from the wine? But she hadn’t had that much.

The record stopped and she and Vittorio looked at each other, and for no reason at all they laughed.

“Is that young girl, young McBride’s wife, partly Italian?” an eminent historian asked an eminent economist; both were American professors.