Families and Survivors by Alice Adams

his brother. She is not sufficiently sensitive (or kindly) to sense the panic behind Michael’s laboriousness, his doomed eagerness to please. (And neither is Louisa.)
    Barbara gets up. “I have to go.”
    “I hope I didn’t shock you,” says Michael, convincing Barbara that he hoped the contrary.
    “I just remembered an appointment,” Barbara says, seizing on the most transparent in her repertoire of social untruths.
    Louisa grimaces and hurries toward the bathroom.
    Partly because she regards it as a gentile holiday, Mrs. Wasserman does not dress for Sunday dinner. She wears a housedress, one of her collection of drab shapeless cotton shifts from what she calls The Basement—Filene’s. Sighing, she serves the dry roast chicken.
    Louisa cannot eat. Her illness has made her despise all food; she would have chosen to get rid of, rather than to nourish, her body.
    “Louisa, you’re not eating,” says Mrs. Wasserman.
    “I’m sorry, I’m not very hungry.”
    “I suppose you’re used to a different kind of food,” insinuates her hostess, who correctly regards rejection of her food as a rejection of herself, but who has further (incorrectly) concluded that Louisa is pregnant.
    Louisa blushes and excuses herself to go to the bathroom.By this time there is no ambivalence; she is disgusting, she loathes herself.
    On Louisa’s return, Mrs. Wasserman remarks, in her “earthy” manner, “I should have known there was only one reason for hasty weddings.”
    Puzzled, almost stupefied, Louisa stares at her, then says, “I think I have colitis.”
    That changes everything. Mrs. Wasserman is consumingly fond of diseases. Enthusiastically she cries out, “But you poor thing, why didn’t you tell me? You must be miserable. You know,” she goes on, addressing her whole family, in which Louisa is now for the first time included, “that’s interesting. I was just reading about some experiments on colitis patients with ACTH. Cortizone.” She turns to Louisa. “How many times a day do you have to go?”
    The following spring, after having served in the occupation army, Eliot Spaulding comes home to Boston. To Barbara. And eventually to his father’s law firm. Barbara and Eliot are very happy together. For the next few years or so there are a lot of parties, reunions, and weddings all over Boston and up on the North Shore, down in New Haven and New York. They are not as splendid as the parties that now are referred to as “prewar,” but they are fun. Barbara and Eliot are very much caught up in all that postwar fun. Busy and quite content, Barbara has no further need or even time for Martin, who would not have fitted in. Although almost.
    But she is, or has been, very fond of Martin, and one day on a nostalgic impulse she calls and asks him over for lunch. He accepts eagerly, and arrives with a small bunch of spring flowers. But he looks so badly that Barbara is almost sorry she called him. His face is terribly dark and sallow and drawn, and there are what look like bruises on his neck.Uneasily they settle with sherry in Barbara’s pretty living room, simultaneously aware that neither of them has personal news that can be presented to the other as conversation.
    As always, Martin tries very hard. He compliments her on the room, in the new Chestnut Street apartment, skillfully selecting touches which are surely hers: the small Victorian chair in toile, the good framed Klee that he remembers from her old apartment. “It’s wonderful to be in a place where there are
no
Lautrec posters,” he tells her, laughing as though they were still close friends.
    “There do seem to be a lot around,” she agrees.
    “Droves. As bad as last year’s ‘Sunflowers’ or that Picasso mother.”
    Finding no other response, or available topic, Barbara asks, “How is your mother?”
    “Oh, fine. She’s eternal,” Martin has forgotten for the moment that Barbara has met his mother, as well as Michael and Louisa. “A rather