Caroline's Daughters (42 page)

Almost, though not quite content with that resolution, Caroline tries to put it from her mind, and to concentrate, metaphorically as well as actually, on tending her own garden. The girls, as she sometimes thinks of them, seem more or less “in place” (Ralph's old phrase for the rare times of peace among the daughters); she sees all of them somewhat less than usual. Instead she spends time with some long-neglected friends.

When she does think of Mary Higgins Lord, in either or both incarnations, the black-and-pearls doctor's wife, and the wild chanting street woman (“Three hundred sixty-five days a week, fire from dung”—Caroline will never forget her song), when she thinks of Mary Lord, Caroline almost rebukes herself for so much attention paid to a single woman. With the world so visibly coming apart, with every day more homeless, more AIDS, more pollution, more carcinogenic everything—how could she have worried in that obsessive
way about one single damaged, maddened woman, terrible and deeply pitiable though her story was?

However.

However, one morning Sage calls to say that she is not feeling well. Nothing serious, nothing to do with her pregnancy, just a silly summer cold. But she does not feel like going up to Seattle with Stevie, as they were going to do, to see his parents. Would Caroline—possibly? Stevie knows a nice inn up there, right next to the Pike Place Market, which at least used to be wonderful.

And so Caroline took the plane to Seattle with Stevie. Well, why not? She has never been there, had always vaguely wanted to see the great Northwest. She checked into a small and pretty hotel, near the market. Into a room with a large view of water and islands.

The phone book yielded up no Mary Higgins Lord, in any form. There was, however, an M. Higgins, at a number which, after some hesitation, Caroline called; she got what seemed to be a hotel switchboard, operated by an Oriental-sounding elderly woman who seemed to understand very little, to grasp none of the names that Caroline mentioned until she said the magic: “Higgsie?” and then was volubly told, “Oh yes, our friend Higgsie. In Room 804. I think she sick today, not come down, maybe you come see her? Oh yes, all our guests like visitors, very much! More merrier!”

The hotel turned out to be only a couple of blocks from Caroline's hotel, but those blocks brought Caroline into a very different, menacing neighborhood. She walked down a wide, dirty street on which winos, druggy-looking people lounged about, or whispered on corners to each other. Some of them looked to be Indians, she thought; all looked desperately poor. She gave what change she had and a bill to a heavy dark woman on a blanket, with a very small cat—and she entered the hotel, a black massive structure, very dingy and old.

The lobby was bleak and bare: a few upright chairs, a decrepit, off-green sofa. Several very old, rather shabby people sitting there, all staring as she passed. Finding her way to what looked to be a reception desk, Caroline saw, indeed, an extremely wizened Chinese woman, with incongruously beautiful long gray hair, who grinned happily, and called up to “Higgsie” to announce a visitor. Who said again, “More merrier!”

The elevator was very large, all dingy brass, and it mounted with an incredible slowness. To the eighth floor, the top.

Caroline walked down a broad and barely illuminated hall, peering at numbers until she came to it. 804. She knocked, and a soft old voice told her to come right in.

And there, propped up among fancy pastel satin pillows, among boxes of Kleenex, cookie cartons, a few slick magazines—there lay a woman, huge and soft and fat, with long white hair, a woman who never in a million years could have been Higgsie the street woman, the woman who chanted so desperately about dung, and fire, and days. (Who never, probably, appeared at expensive parties in black and pearls, intimidatingly.) Despite her light-yellow eyes.

Caroline's heart irrationally plunged, and she understood then how much she had looked forward to seeing Higgsie
well
: that would have meant that everything was all right, after all, or would get better, somehow.

Much afraid that her disappointment and confusion would show, Caroline began to chatter: “I'm terribly sorry—I'm from San Francisco. And someone told me—another woman named Higgsie. I'm so sorry—”

The woman turned. Her whole massive body moved as those eyes came to rest on Caroline. Turning, she looked somehow powerful, very strong. But the voice that emerged was creaky as she said, “I guess you expected my sister, Mrs. Lord.”

“Oh! Well yes, I did. Mary Higgins Lord. We used to call her Higgsie too.” A pause. “Is she here in Seattle? I heard that her former husband, Bayard—”

“Yes indeed. He found her and threw her up here. Got her off the streets, all right.”

“But what happened?”

“She died, of course. My name's Mavis, but you can call me Higgsie too, if you want to.”

“Died?”

“Day she got here. Her heart gave out. Her and her ‘escort' got off the plane and he brought her here, room next to mine here all ready for Mary. But I took one look and I knew it would be no go. Too far gone, she was, for retrieving.”

All this information, this infinitely sad story lies there between
them. Caroline would like to ask more, much more about Mary Higgins Lord, she would like the whole story of her life from this odd unlikely older sister, but at least for the moment she does not.

“Well, it's nice that you came to see me, dear,” says this Higgsie. “Would you like a cookie? As they say downstairs, more merrier.”

“Yes. Thanks.” She might as well visit her every day while she's here, Caroline decides, this amiable, lonely and slightly loony woman with whom she has so accidentally become connected, and in a gradual way they can start to talk.

Between these visits, which are brief—Mavis's attention falters, she falls into light naps after half an hour or so—Caroline walks about the city, very much liking it. And comparing it, inevitably, with San Francisco.

The air is cleaner here, she thinks, and the architecture more straightforward, less pretentious. The people plainer, and also more straightforward. She finds, off Pioneer Square, a wonderful bookstore, one that has, apparently, everything, including a nice bricked-in downstairs café.

But it is mostly the air that she likes, its freshness, its cool. It seems new air, unused. And she loves the views of the dark smooth water, and islands.

She thinks, I could easily sell my house. I could buy a house up here for less than half the proceeds, and live on the rest. I might even be able to find some sort of job.

It is on her third visit to Mavis Higgins that the two women discuss Caroline's daughters.

“They all seem embarked on some definite course at the moment,” is how Caroline sums it up. “But I seem to have said that before about them, and was wrong. In fact, I'm often wrong about my daughters.”

“We'll all be better once the awful Eighties are over,” Mavis tells her. “I'm just eighty-one myself. Friend of mine said the Nineties are going to be lots better.”

Hearing this somewhat confusing sentence, Caroline wonders, Is
Mavis referring to the age of the century—the coming decade—or to her own great age? Either supposition could turn out to be true, she thinks. Caroline hopes that the Nineties of Mavis Higgins and those of the century will be a vast improvement, but she is not at all sure they will be.

But Caroline herself has suddenly been struck with a new concern, having to do with the beautiful clay birdbath that Sage made for her, which now ornaments her deck in San Francisco. However could she pack it, Caroline wonders, to keep it safe?

Books by Alice Adams

Careless Love

Families and Survivors

Listening to Billie

Beautiful Girl
(stories)

Rich Rewards

To See You Again
(stories)

Superior Women

Return Trips
(stories)

After You've Gone
(stories)

Caroline's Daughters

Mexico: Some Travels and Travelers There

Almost Perfect

A Southern Exposure

Medicine Men

The Last Lovely City
(stories)

After the War

The Stories of Alice Adams

A Note About the Author

Alice Adams was born in Virginia and graduated from Radcliffe College. She was the recipient of an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. She lived in San Francisco until her death in 1999.