Caroline's Daughters

C
aroline Carter and her husband, Ralph, as a couple are impressive, even imposing: perched at the top of a broad concrete flight of stairs, in one of San Francisco's prettiest, greenest and most elevated parks (the view is marvellous, hills and tall buildings, church spires and further high green parks), they draw a lot of attention from the stray passers-by, the dog walkers and strollers, on this bright April Sunday. For one thing they both look foreign, Caroline and Ralph, although Caroline has lived in this city for many years and Ralph is a native son. But now, out of the country for over five years, they wear mildly eccentric clothes. Caroline's heavy gray sweater (she expected fog) is un-American in design, as is the cut of Ralph's tweed jacket. Also, they are very large people, Caroline a tall fair woman, broad-faced, serene, with wide-set green-blue eyes and heavy gray-blonde hair—and Ralph a towering, massive man, once called “hulking” by a hostile press. Ralph is Caroline's third husband, and she his fourth wife—an unpropitious history, perhaps, but after twenty-five years this marriage seems to have taken: they look quite permanently married.

And, almost rich and almost old, Caroline is back in a city where for many years she was young and almost broke, where four of her five daughters were born, and where she enjoyed a number of lovers. A lively life, then, and in its way romantic, although Caroline is eminently a realist, a practical, sensible woman. Or so she sees herself, generally.

At the moment they are sitting there like tourists in the early
sunlight, looking down the terraced hill and across the street to their own house—from which they have been temporarily expelled by those five daughters, who are giving a welcome-home party for Ralph and Caroline. A somewhat delayed welcome back: their actual return from Portugal, where they spent most of those five years, took place in January. In any case the daughters, Sage, Liza, Fiona, Jill and Portia, are “doing it all,” bringing food and drink and even flowers—quite foolishly, Caroline thinks, her garden is full of flowers. It is the sort of party that has been discussed and discussed, and that Caroline has all along tried somehow to prevent, but has not. And now it is almost upon her. Upon them all.

The food will be almost entirely done by Fiona, the middle, highly successful food-person daughter: “Fiona's” is an extremely trendy, very popular (this year) California-cuisine restaurant, on Potrero Hill.

Everything about this project has contributed to Caroline's unease, now expressed in her restless posture, and her large strong hands that gesture helplessness from her lap. “I'd like it so much better if they were all doing it, and not just Fiona,” she says, with a small worried frown. “Or if I were doing it all myself.”

“If you were doing it all.” Ralph laughs at her, gently. “Come on, Caro.”

But Caroline insists. “Well, it is our house. Even if food is what Fiona does. Ostensibly. So funny, she really can't cook. I don't know, it just all seems wrong. Everything,” she vaguely finishes.

“Our rich kids,” Ralph supplies.

“I suppose that's part of it. To have two such extremely successful ones, in ways I never knew about or even imagined.”

Ralph makes an ambiguous sound, expressing to Caroline the fact that she has said all this before, more or less. But she does not mind this comment from Ralph, whom she loves (usually); she has needed, repeatedly, to say how she feels about these particular daughters, the very rich ones: Fiona, at thirty-three the well-known restaurateur (does anyone say “restaurateuse,” Caroline wonders?), and Jill, at thirty-one a very rich young lawyer-stockbroker.

“Well, there's always Portia,” Ralph put in, now in his turn repeating himself. “We can count on her not to get ahead, I think.”
Portia, twenty-five, is the one and only daughter from the marriage of Caroline and Ralph.

“Well, you're right about Portia,” says Caroline, about this youngest, most problematic child. “And then there's Sage,” she adds, with a sigh for her eldest daughter, a bravely unsuccessful, highly talented (in her mother's view) ceramicist, whose strange, small, intensely expressive figures sell rarely or not at all, in their occasional viewings, in local galleries. Sage, now forty-one, is the product of Caroline's very early (at nineteen) marriage to Aaron Levine, who died in that war, in 1943, before Sage was born. Subtle, dark Sage is the image of her father. She seems given to trouble: fairly soon after the demise of a spectacularly unfortunate love affair with a local lawyer-politico, she married a man named Noel Finn, who is overly handsome (again, in Caroline's view), a carpenter, some seven years younger than Sage.

“Sage will be the first to come today,” says Caroline, who is now beginning to speak her thoughts aloud. “And she'll bring some present that I won't quite know what to do with. And there'll be some excuse about Noel.”

Caroline is right, as things turn out, but before that happens she and Ralph get up and walk about, and they talk about how much San Francisco has changed since they left it in 1980 (Reagan's year, as they think of it), and how much they like their house, despite neighborhood changes.

Behind where Caroline and Ralph were sitting is a tall grove of waving pines and redwoods, enclosing a little play area for children. Sandboxes, slides—all at the moment unoccupied, amazing in this sunshine, this early fog-free morning. The long flight of stairs is flanked by terraces of grass, marked off with hedges and narrow paths. And below is the street, on the other side of which is a row of very attractive Victorian houses, all originally (just before the turn of the century) identical. And one of these is Caroline and Ralph's.

It is really Caroline's house. She bought it when she first came to San Francisco as a young widow in the Forties, an investment for which she used the last of her husband's insurance money. The
house was in bad shape at that time, sagging and neglected; Caroline, who is skillful with houses, had it all fixed up—and in the course of that long process (she kept running out of money) she grew to love the house but could not afford to live in it. Also, her next (second) husband, Dr. James McAndrew, did not like the neighborhood, at that time considered “bad,” too close to what was then known as “the Fillmore,” an area where mostly black people lived. And so, with Jim, Caroline moved to a “better” neighborhood, and she rented out her house. (Liza, now thirty-five, and then Fiona and Jill came in an orderly succession during that marriage of Caroline's to Jim—whom she divorced in 1959 in order to marry Ralph, by whom she was then pregnant with Portia.)

As Caroline herself would have been the first to admit, she was stubborn and foolhardy about the house, rather than prescient. She did not have an instinct for real estate, she did not think in those terms. Her feelings about the house's drastic rise in value are ambivalent, to say the least (upper Fillmore Street was “gentrified,” the black people “relocated”).

She did have an instinct for houses, perhaps an atavistic inheritance from her English mother, the actress-playwright Molly Blair. She bought the house, really, because it was small and beautiful; she felt that it would suit her perfectly, and she was quite right. But Ralph, when they first married, did not want to live in the house for an opposite reason to Jim McAndrew's: for him the neighborhood was much too fancy, he felt (Ralph is a former longshoreman, later a political writer).

Then, in 1980, Molly Blair died, and a subsequent revival of interest in her work, publication of new editions of her plays, gave Caroline, her only child, a fair amount of money. And Reagan was elected. And Ralph had a mild heart attack. “Take it easy. Change your life,” he was fairly forcefully advised.

For a combination of reasons, then, after distributing much of her money among her daughters, Caroline and Ralph took off for Portugal, where they spent almost five years—during which the tenants of the house were elderly friends of Caroline's, who died within months of each other this past year, a strong reason for the return from Portugal of Caroline and Ralph. They returned to a valuable and perfectly maintained house; sheer practicality helped to persuade
Ralph to live there after all. Their south garden, a treasure, widely coveted in San Francisco, grew bountifully—just now, in April, full of roses and camellias, rhododendron, white wisteria.

“It's a perfect house for two people,” in their sunnier moments Caroline and Ralph have remarked to each other. And, at darker times, “How can the two of us possibly occupy a whole house? with all the homeless people—”

In their walk about the park, marking time until the arrival of the daughters and the pre-emption of their own roles, in their own house, Ralph and Caroline have touched lightly on all these topics, including that of the beauty of their garden.

“It must be in my genes,” Caroline has earlier remarked. “The way I respond to gardens. I absolutely fall in love.”

“Except that I really like the garden too,” Ralph tells her. “My Texas genes?” Ralph's parents, grandparents, great grandparents all were Texans, a fact often manifest in his voice. Especially as he ages, Caroline thinks, he sounds more and more Southern. Texan.

And they now return to the more pressing topic of their daughters.

So many! Whatever have I done to deserve five daughters? rueful Caroline has been heard to remark, and there does seem a certain illogic to that fate, in her particular case. (And it was in many ways the presence of all those young women in San Francisco—like many California offspring, those five cannot imagine life elsewhere, for themselves—that kept Caroline for all those years away in Portugal. “I simply don't want to be so
present
in their lives,” said Caroline.)