Alice Adams - To See You Again - Stories

She seemed not to age. Vaguely middle-aged when she first came to their town, Lucienne remained ageless, perhaps in part because she so seldom spoke of herself and thus seemed to have no history. She spoke with the slightest accent, with an odd attractive huskiness in her voice. Only much later, when Walker felt that he had known her all his life, would she occasionally allow him some glimpse of her past, dealt out like some small present, and he would learn that her husband had been a painter, which had been her own girlhood ambition. Which had somehow not worked out.

She had been right, though, about a climate for roses: her rose garden flourished extravagantly, an incredible profusion and variety of color, of scent.

Walker, as an adolescent, during the strictured Fifties, had no idea what to do with himself, with his unruly, brilliant mind nor his ungainly body. It was not a time for eccentrics. His grades were terrible, despite those big I.Q. scores. He was secretly in love with James Dean, but afraid of motorcycles. What he liked to do best, he early discovered (perhaps at Posey’s), was to get drunk, and by the time he was fifteen he had worked out a technique for staying drunk all day, an undetectable buzz from a dose of wine here, a shot of brandy there, at carefully timed intervals. Usually he drank alone, but occasionally he would have a friend, sometimes a girl, who also liked to drink, and that was always the crucial thing between them, drinking. He was a lonely mess, and he knew he was.

But somehow he got into a small New England college (actually pull from Althea; it was in her hometown) and for a while his life considerably improved. For one thing there was an extraordinary teacher, a young man just out of the Harvard program in American Civilization. Timothy Stern: his black eyes were wild and his mouth had a slightly delinquent twist; he spoke passionately of Hawthorne, Melville, Emerson and Henry James—and what had been greedy but desultory reading on Walker’s part came into focus. He drank considerably less, and he too became a passionate student of the American Renaissance.

During the fall of his junior year at college, Althea wrote to her son that Jamie McElroy had died—“quite suddenly”—and that Posey would spend part of her Christmas vacation with them. Not having been especially fond of Jamie, and still, to some degree, well disposed toward Posey, Walker’s general reaction to both those pieces of news was neutral. But any guest in that chilling house raised its temperature a little, and protected that family from each other. Mainly, as on all vacations, he looked forward to conversations with Lucienne, and to drinking by himself at the local inn.

“But what did Jamie McElroy die of?” Walker, for no clear reason, asked Lucienne, on one of their first afternoons together. “No one’s said.”

A small pause, and then Lucienne’s almost harsh, quiet voice: “I believe that he committed suicide.”

“Oh, really?” Somehow that seemed surprising, an act so extreme from passive Jamie. “Does anyone know why?”

“Well, certainly I do not. Some anger, some despair. But middle age can be cruel to people who have not had much satisfaction in their lives,” she told him. Walker wondered if, possibly, she could refer to her own life, and concluded that she did not; she was not given to even such veiled references to herself, nor to self-pity, and besides, she had always such a look of contentment, of calm.

And then, on the last night of his vacation, which was, coincidentally, the first of Posey’s visit, Althea went to bed early (“I’ve got to get some sleep; these new pills had better work”) and Walker went to the inn, alone, for brandy. He came back less drunk than he sometimes was, and fairly early. In that creaking, moaning house it was quite possible to enter and leave without being heard, and thus, from the corridor outside the living room, Walker caught the following brief but illuminating conversation:

Posey: “But, darlin’, if you told her I’ll bet she could just move back to New England and be near that boy of hers. They have so much in common, really. Honestly, it’s always been hard for me to believe he’s really your son—”

And John: “Look, I’ll tell her when I’m ready. Don’t push me, baby doll. And don’t think she’s just going to move out for our convenience, even if the house is actually mine.”

“Oh, darlin’, please don’t sound so cross. I don’t care about Althea or Walker, or even the house, just you—”

Walker continued on to the kitchen, where he found a bottle of brandy. He finished that off in his room, the old ship’s galley, before going to sleep. Fortunately, perhaps, on the trip back to school, the next day, his state of shock was somewhat mitigated by a severe hangover. Later he thought of that vacation as the last time he ever saw his mother, with whom, despite Posey’s stated view, he had not had much in common.

It was Lucienne who telephoned, several months later, in the spring, to say that his mother had died: like Jamie McElroy, a suicide, an overdose of pills. Walker had never asked how Jamie killed himself; curiously, he did so now, just after hearing the news of Althea.

Lucienne seemed not to think it an odd question, under the circumstances, and only said, “He shot himself.”

“Oh. Well, that makes it really neat for them, doesn’t it. Jamie and my mother just clearing out, conveniently. They must be in absolute heaven.” Knowing himself to be hysterical, Walker knew too that as long as he went on ranting he could not break down, although, with Lucienne, even that would have been all right. He said, “They’re murderers. I will never speak to either of them again.”

Lucienne, as she always had, chose to take him seriously. “Perhaps you are right; almost certainly you are right not to see them for a while, and I have never believed in the foolishness of funerals. I will tell John. But you know, she has succeeded in punishing them quite a lot. They will feel it.”

Walker thought she was probably right—they would feel Althea’s punishment, but at that time, and for years to come, he was absorbed in his own violent hatred for those two people. He hated them with the intensity reserved for former loves—for surely in some dim unremembered time he had loved his father, and he could remember the moment of falling in love with Posey, with humiliation, rage.

Obsessively, he thought of killing them. Easy enough: in some disguise or other he could travel to his town, that now-burgeoning suburb on the lake, and, as he often had, he could sneak into that house, unheard. Confront them, with a gun. Talk for as long as possible and terrify them, absolutely, before shooting them both. This was not, however, a very satisfying fantasy—remaining, as it did, implausible.

His only real comfort and source of support in what were truly months of agony, so powerful and pervasive was his anger, aside from letters to and from Lucienne, was Timothy Stern, his former instructor who had now become a friend, a drinking buddy. Timothy’s mother too had died relatively young, although not a suicide, and his father had remarried with indecent haste, as Timothy saw it. Someone awful. Timothy’s father had died soon after that, leaving everything to the stepmother—“of course!” And so Timothy, brilliant and somewhat older, could easily understand.

From drinking and talking companions Timothy and Walker became, not too surprisingly, lovers. Walker, who had had no previous experience of that nature, although very little experience with girlfriends either, at first was deeply shocked, but quite soon it all seemed perfectly right, seemed logical, even. He felt at home with Timothy in a sense that he had never felt at home with any person, nor in any place. Except possibly with Lucienne, in her small cluttered house, or walking in her garden—and something about Timothy even reminded him of Lucienne. If only he and Lucienne had been the same age, he thought; she was the only woman he could have loved.