Alice Adams - To See You Again - Stories

To begin with the worst: Howard Stein committed suicide, an overdose of pills, in the early Fifties. In various intellectual communities, from his own Midwestern university to Harvard and Yale, there were frequent and overheated arguments as to why he did this. Political despair at the emerging climate of the Fifties was one of the most popular theories, repressed homosexuality the other. A few quieter voices (wives) mentioned loneliness, isolation, the sheer fatigue of living.

The dean who had organized the seminar, and who so believed in its success, suddenly left the academic world altogether and went into real estate, where he made a fortune in the late Fifties and early Sixties.

The eminent professors, on the whole, went on to further eminence, except for one, the historian, who, as an enthusiastic adviser to President Johnson on the Vietnam War, an eager hawk, was generally (academically) considered to have disgraced himself.

The unreconstructed Austrian boy married the Fascist Italian girl, amid great pomp, in Venice.

Another marriage: the dark Spanish boy and the pretty blond Estonian girl were married, at her parents’ home in Brittany.

Most of the people in the Jewish DP camp made it to Israel; only a few, very old and already sick, died on the way. There in Israel they were generally happy, although some of the youngest were killed in later wars. The classics professor from Munich lived on to have numerous grandchildren. The physicist, having enjoyed a distinguished career at the Hebrew University, was honored at several international conferences.

Stanley Morris did not have quite the career that anyone would have imagined for him. He married as planned, but instead of Harvard, as he had dreamed, he ended up in a large Southern university. A good school, but not Harvard. He was unfaithful to his wife with a succession of younger and younger girls, most of whom strongly resembled her; they were all dark and rich and graceful and intelligent, as she was. Stanley wrote one book—interestingly, on the theme of ambition in American literature—which did not do well. He was flabbergasted when, in early middle age, his wife left him for a much younger man.

Vittorio Garibaldi, who had taken a train to Rome, via Innsbruck, early on the morning after the dance, thus not seeing Diana again, enrolled that fall in law school in his native Padua. A few years after that he married a beautiful girl from Ferrara. He remained a Socialist, despite strong pressures from almost all other directions, and he had, increasingly, a reputation for kindness, intelligence and utter probity. He was at last appointed to a judgeship, a position in which he continued to be admired, sought after, loved. His wife and children loved him very much. He was truly a remarkable man; in his way, a hero of his times.

For a while Diana McBride did follow the wives-of-graduate-students pattern, rather than the grander plan of law school that she had announced to Vittorio, and sometimes she felt that as a broken pledge. She went to work in a law firm, thus helping to support the education of Braxton McBride; she was underpaid and condescended to, and she even had a miserable, punishing affair with one of the junior partners. But what she managed to learn of the law was extremely interesting to her, even exhilarating; she found the judicial system fascinating.

Sometimes she thought of Vittorio, and longingly she would imagine that she had run off with him and shared whatever life he made; remembering that he had not asked her to was painful. In fact, those hours with Vittorio, recalled, were bruising to her during her own worst years. What she had experienced as beautiful rebuked her; she had turned out to be unworthy after all. At other times she could barely believe that it had happened.

Braxton got his degree, and then he got a job, in another, smaller Midwestern university. At that point, to everyone’s surprise (including her own, although she was sustained in part by a sense of having fulfilled a contract), Diana said no, she did not want to move to the smaller town with Braxton. She wanted to go to law school, and she wanted, almost incidentally, a divorce.

By this time William McBride had died and Braxton was rich. Diana asked for enough money to put herself through law school. She applied to and was accepted by Yale, her undergraduate record having been exceptional—a fact that over the years she had tended to forget.

Braxton eventually became the head of his department in his very small college. But he was a very big frog, and he liked it there.

Initially terrified, Diana worked her head off at Yale, and she did extremely well. And gradually she was able to calm down and to enjoy it, this first experience of competence, of gratifying work. She learned how to keep up superior grades with a somewhat more relaxed work schedule. And she was crazy about New England, exploring the countryside. During one gaudy fall she became involved with a fellow student, another older overachiever named Jerry Stein, from Worcester, Massachusetts. Jerry was a strong, dark man, sturdily built. He was more easygoing, much more relaxed than Diana was, warm and friendly, whereas she tended to be diffident; they were good complements to each other.

“I used to know a professor named Stein. He was famous, very distinguished. Howard Stein,” Diana said one morning to Jerry—an idle remark as from his bed she watched him making breakfast; thin Diana, huddled in blankets. It was early November, after one of their first nights of staying together.

“ Well . Howard Stein was my cousin, distantly. The Boston branch.”

They smiled at each other, delighted at this new coincidence (the first had been of feeling), this new proof of the logic of their love.

Then Jerry said, “He never liked me much. He thought I was one more unnecessary little brat running around.”

“Oh, really? He didn’t like me either, not at all.” And slowly, but eagerly, over breakfast, the good coffee and warm rolls and cheese, Diana told about the seminar that summer: Howard Stein’s opening speech, in the clearing, among the statuary, and the dumb thing she said to him on the truck ride home, about the look of the countryside.

“Well, that wasn’t really so dumb. He must have heard worse.” Jerry laughed.

“I know, but he looked so mad. I felt awful. I hated that summer.” Saying this, Diana thought suddenly, sharply of Vittorio, and to herself she added: I hated everything about it but Vittorio—and even at that moment, newly in love with Jerry, she had the most vivid sense of Vittorio. She could hear his voice.

She never tried to tell Jerry about Vittorio, as much out of a sense of impossibility as from delicacy: how to describe such a collision, and its long reverberations?

The involvement with Jerry, which Diana never thought of as an affair, and certainly not as a “relationship,” continued over the winter and into an extraordinary New England spring. Diana felt herself to be another person; she hardly recognized this new, confident, loved woman—a thin woman, with gold-brown eyes. She and Jerry got married over a long weekend late in August, almost ten years after the seminar, after Vittorio and after Diana’s time with him.

Out of law school, both Diana and Jerry managed to get federal jobs in Washington, and during the Sixties they were actively involved in civil rights, and then in the peace movement.

Toward the end of the Sixties, discouraged at the political scene in Washington, they moved back up to New England, to a small town in western Massachusetts, near the Berkshires, and also not far from Worcester, where Jerry had grown up, and where he had sometimes met his distinguished cousin Howard Stein at some family gathering. Jerry and Diana were very busy, both practicing law, and they remained, for the most part, quite happy with each other.