Families and Survivors (21 page)

“Okay,” says Allison.

They go inside and sit down.

“You have to get up and get a tray and walk around with it,” Allison tells them.

“Oh?” They are very interested. “You were here before?”

Dishonestly she points to a sign. “Over there. It says.”

“Oh.” Disappointed.

They do what the sign says. (What Grace said—Grace and Martin?) They put indistinguishable things onto their plates.

Father asks, “How’s the food at the—uh—hospital?”

“It’s really lousy.”

“Darling, for a minute she sounded exactly like you!” Mrs. Chapin sounds like herself, soft and very surprised.

But what is remarkable about that? They are all the same person: how should they sound?

Today, even more than usual, Douglas keeps flashing into Allison’s mind. Douglas everywhere, all ages and sizes of Douglas. Small Douglas, on top of a fence.

“No drinks, I guess,” says Alex, her father. His red-tan face darkens.

“Darling, it’s possibly just as well?” Sweet Sally.

“Did Douglas jump off the fence that time, or fall?” asks Allison.

“He jumped,” says Alex, his face suddenly full of some terrible pain.

“Not now,” Sally murmurs, and she touches his hand.

At the other tables are other people whom Allison has
seen before. Perhaps some of them are also patients who are out for lunch with their visitors? Alex and Sally wonder this, too, but they are too polite to ask.

Since they have one definite thing to say to her, but have decided to postpone its saying, it is hard for Alex and Sally Chapin-Magowan to talk to Allison. She would like to help them out but she is not sure how.

“I have a friend named Mary,” she tells them.

“Oh, really. Isn’t that nice.”

But there again they are stopped. They can’t think of a further thing to ask about Mary, because what they really would like to know about Mary is what’s wrong with her; why is she here?

Allison tries to tell them. “I guess we both sort of fit into the landscape there,” she says. They don’t know what she means, but they are afraid to say so. “Mary is extremely fat,” she explains. Then she thinks of “full of Grace,” and she begins to laugh.

They smile sadly at her, thinking, She is not getting any better.

In fact, the time that Douglas jumped, they were all there: Sally and Andrew Chapin and their three boys; and Alex Magowan and Grace, his wife, and their three children, Douglas and Allison and Jennifer. Jennifer?

“Jennifer?” Allison asks.

“Oh, Jennifer’s just fine. She’s finishing up at Miss Hamlin’s and then she’s thinking about Stanford.”

“I don’t remember her terribly well,” says Allison, wanting to be honest.

“Your sister?” They try to believe what she has said.

“I remember Douglas all the time.”

Her father pours milk into his coffee. “Douglas—had an accident,” he says.

What they are going to tell her will not necessarily be true.

“He was skiing,” says Alex slowly.

“What is ‘skiing’?” Allison asks politely.

“What is
skiing?
Allison, Squaw
Valley
—we went there every year.” He turns to Sally, to his wife. “I know it’s beside the point, but do you have any idea what it costs these days to take three kids skiing for a week?” Back to Allison, he wildly continues. “Skiing—snow, going down mountains. You do remember?”

She remembers something: cold, being afraid. But she has to resist. “Not really,” she says, very softly. (Is she turning into Sally, Mrs. Chapin; into her father’s wife?)

Her father and Sally Chapin look at each other. “Maybe not now,” says Mrs. Chapin. “After all, we’ve waited this long—”

Relief rises in Allison’s throat, but it has the taste of bile.

And there is still the problem of conversation. “I have a friend named Mary,” Allison says before she remembers having already said that. “She’s been there much longer than I have.” She did not tell them that before; she is sure of it.

They try to look interested. “Much longer?”

“Three months longer.” This could quite possibly be true, but it was the wrong thing to say: how can she be sure of a number when she doesn’t know what skiing is? “Of course I could be wrong,” she adds, and then this strikes her as very funny, and she laughs “inappropriately.”

“Well, shall we go? Everyone had enough?”

Their pushed chairs make a very loud noise on the restaurant floor. Three chairs.

“Is this a new car?” asks Allison, but this time they are not pleased at her question—of course not.

“Yes.” Her father frowns, with no mention of beating Germans.

They all get into the car. They take off.

Alex and Sally. Grace and Martin. Musingly Allison says these name combinations over to herself. Allison and Douglas. Who?

They again pass the river, the messy eucalyptus trees. The boys fishing there.

Her father, who has given up telling Allison anything, now would like to ask her something. He clears his throat. “Do they say anything to you about—uh—getting out?”

His question for an instant terrifies Allison. Out? In her new soft voice, she asks him, “Where is out?”

They give up.

They begin to talk between themselves, as though Allison were not there, or as they might have done if she only spoke and understood some foreign language. Korean. Vietnamese.

“There seemed no point—”

“No, why add—”

“I suppose I should talk—”

“I suppose.”

They return to the beginning of the beautifully kept grounds.

Feeling better and wanting to help them—her helpless visitors stranded there in the front seat—Allison with an effort presents a memory, a gift. “Once at Squaw Valley Douglas told me that if you skied out over the headwall, at Siberia, you would fly, fly for the rest of your life. I thought he was kidding but he wasn’t, and he was angry that I wouldn’t try it. But Douglas is very handsome, isn’t he? The best-looking one of us.”

She has not helped at all. Parting from her, their faces are anguished, so that Allison is seized with a wrenching, helpless pity for them both—for them all, whoever they are.

…

They go away and Allison finds Mary. “It was okay,” she says, “but where we went for lunch was really lousy, although everyone seems to go there.”

“Yes,” says her friend.

“I think they wanted to tell me something about Douglas, but I saw absolutely no point in letting them do that. Why add?”

“Yes.”

In an enormous raftered house on outer Broadway in San Francisco, Louisa and John Jeffreys are celebrating the early hours of New Year’s Eve with the people who live in that house, with Maude and some of her friends.

The house, a Victorian mansion, has been scheduled for destruction. It was bought by an extremely successful Italian builder, who is a distant cousin of the mayor’s. Here, in an elegant neighborhood, on a block with a stupendous view of the Bay and Marin County, the builder will put yet another high-rise, apartments for which he can charge exalted rents. The kids are allowed to rent the house from month to month, for what comes to around fifty dollars a month apiece; there are quite a few of them. (It is not, strictly speaking, a commune—just friends living in the same house.) This arrangement came about because one of the kids is the son of a lawyer who is close to the mayor, and who is also a friend of the builder’s. It makes everyone, including the mayor, feel pleasantly tolerant; they are being nice to hippies.

The young people do not seem to be made nervous by the imminent destruction of their house. They feel that by then they may want to move on, anyway. Also they do not think in terms of a distant future (reasonably enough, for their generation).

The great rooms with distant dusky ceilings and narrow mullioned windows are somewhat overwhelming, resistant to change. But the kids have done their best. A shawl draped here, another there—posters, driftwood sculpture. And for their party they have made a great effort at tidying up.

So many young people. Thirty or so. It is not at all clear to Louisa and John which of them live there, which ones are guests for the evening. It is even less clear what the relationships within the group might be.

A few of them are recognized as old friends. Jennifer Magowan is there, and Allison—skinny frightened Allison, out from Napa on a pass; she sits in a corner drinking wine, pouring wine down her throat—she can’t last long. Jennifer is with Stephen Harrington, the son of Kate, Louisa’s friend. Stephen has Kate’s dark red hair, which he wears very long, and her long sexy eyes. And a full beard.

And others, unknown—some introduced, some not:

A small blond girl in a long dress that must be her idea of a forties costume: calf-length, sequined. Thirties? It is not really a look that Louisa or John can remember. But the girl reminds Louisa dimly of someone from a long time ago; she seems vaguely Southern, and finally it comes to her. She nudges John. “Do you remember Snubby MacDonald?” “No—” “John, you were in love with her, before Kate!” “Well, sort of. Blond?” “You don’t even remember! I remember everything that ever happened.” (She does.)

Two girls in bright red loosely crocheted dresses,
clearly made by one of them; they both have black curly hair and big noses. Sisters.

A tall somewhat frail-looking boy named Jonathan. (Louisa stares at him, not knowing why, and then she understands that he looks a little like Maude—a boy Maude.)

A dark sturdy bearded boy.

(Few of them have names; none have last names.)

Louisa and John have spent Christmas in Mexico—Oaxaca—they are both splendidly tanned: John with his very white hair, Louisa with her dark hair fashionably streaked blond. They have not seen Maude for a month or so. And they see that something extraordinary has happened in that month: Maude has turned beautiful. From being a pale, somewhat sickly, too tall and too thin girl, she has become a beautiful young woman. Still tall and thin, still delicate, her frailness now is controlled—is lovely. Her skin shines. Her long face is witty and intelligent—is happy. Even (incongruous on her thin body) her full loose breasts look proud. Feeling that the unattractive old phrase “flatchested” was made especially for herself, Louisa sees an irony in this; and then it comes to her that, of course, Maude’s breasts are a gift from her grandmother, horrible fat Mrs. Wasserman.

Looking at her lovely daughter, Louisa is amazed; she would not dare to take credit for Maude. And she wonders: Is Maude now beautiful for good, or is this simply a moment in her life?

Although of course they were invited, Louisa and John are actually spectators at the party. They stand together, apart from the rest, in a tentative position near the door. They talk to each other. They are glad to be there, they
smile in an appreciative way, but they do not have a lot to say to most of “the children.”

The connection between Jennifer and Kate’s boy Stephen is at least superficially clear: they are lovers, they live together. Jennifer looks at him in an amused, protective way; his look at her is mildly irritated and very sexual. His sexy look reminds Louisa strongly of his mother—of sexy young Kate, years back, on the dance floor of the decorated high school gymnasium (the Tin Can). Louisa remembers how John looked at Kate, back then, and now she looks jealously at him, as though all that had just happened. She is still powerfully attracted to John, and she thinks that later—in fact soon—they will go home and smoke grass, and make love.

So far, this evening, there are no drugs in evidence in the room. For various reasons this particular group of kids uses very little drugs.

Maude has come over to where Louisa and John are standing. Close up she is even prettier. She is wearing a long gauzy flowered dress, all shades of pink, that is very becoming to her own delicacy. And that is what her mother chooses to say. “What a pretty dress. It’s really perfect for you.”

“Thanks. I like it a lot. Jennifer made it for me, for Christmas.”

“Really? She made it? But that’s terrific.”

But then, as often with Maude or with others of her age, Louisa has begun to feel that she overdoes what she is saying, that her style is over emphatic. They say so little, these children. They so steadfastly refuse effusion.

And Maude’s voice is so soft and delicate, so gentle. She visibly and audibly tries to be nice to her mother. “You look great, too,” she says. “Are you going on to another party?”

Does this mean are you leaving soon? Louisa imagines
this (of course) and then reminds herself that Maude is never so crude.

Soon afterward John and Louisa do leave, and they begin the long drive toward the hills of Berkeley, where they have recently bought a house.

At times (as even “happily married” women will) Louisa has a lonely sense that she and John don’t
talk.
How she yearns for more conversation, for in fact the sort of conversation that she often has with Kate. Can one have personal conversations only with women? And she thinks then of a succession of men who wouldn’t talk with her (Michael talked
at
). Instead of talking (perhaps) she works, alone, and she and John make love.

In other moods she romanticizes their relationship, and she tells herself that their lengthy frame of reference makes talk unnecessary—simply to be together is to communicate.

(Perhaps both are true?)

However, tonight they are talking—a lot.

“You know one thing that’s marvelous?” Louisa now says. “Those fat girls in the awful crocheted dresses. In our day they’d have been hiding in corners. ‘Wallflowers.’ But they looked perfectly pleased with themselves.”

“Did they? I didn’t notice.”

“Darling, they were right there.” She laughs. “They’d never have made it into the Sub-Deb Club.”

“That blonde was sort of dreadful.”

“I thought she was real cute.”

“You’re teasing.”

“Yes, I am.”

“Odd that she was with such a faggy boy.”

“Which boy?”

“Poor Allison doesn’t look much better. God, she’s so thin.”

“I never saw her before, did I?”

“No, but she doesn’t. When I remember her parents, Grace and Alex, all those years ago—of all people to have a crazy child. And there was something about her brother going over a headwall on purpose.”