Families and Survivors by Alice Adams Page A

upsetting thing has happened with my brother, though,” he says. “His wife has some awful disease and they tried to treat it with cortisone and the drug made her go crazy. They called it a toxic psychosis. We all think Michael should do something about a divorce.”
    Actually only Martin thinks Michael should do something about a divorce. Mr. Wasserman is against all divorce; he finds the idea terrifying. What would he do if
he
were free? And Mrs. Wasserman argues that it would be unfair to poor sick Louisa, thus insuring herself against more daughters-in-law.
    Barbara notices now that she is feeling worse and worse—both more impatient and more paralyzed, and she has no idea why. The truth is that Martin’s depression and his anxiety—he is at the far limits of both—are affecting her, as cold germs or even a bout of yawning might have done.
    Sensitive Martin understands what he is doing to her. He is sorry he has come, and he thinks of leaving suddenly, on any pretext at all. He doesn’t know what to do, and so he does the worst thing he could have done. He says, “Dear old Barbara, I’m sorry to have come to you in such bad shape. The truth is that I’m in the middle of an absolutely disastrous love affair. Last night he tried to strangle me.” Martin smiles and fingers his neck as his large dark eyes fill with tears.
    Barbara is horrified. She has of course known that Martin is “queer,” but she has not extended this knowledge to include his having love affairs with men, and certainly not men who would try to strangle him. Rather stiffly she says, “I’m terribly sorry, Martin.” And then, “Excuse me, I have to see about lunch.”
    By the time she comes back to say that lunch is ready, Martin has pulled himself together, and though it takes all of his exhausted strength, he talks with most of his old animation, his desperate charm, all during lunch. He has read or somehow heard about various phases of Barbara’s new life, a life that is fully as attractive to him as his is repellent to her. He amuses her with gossip, managing to make it “Jamesian” in its subtlety and its discretion, and managing at the same time to suggest that they both know that she is superior to the apparent frivolity of her life. Thus he quiets various doubts that sometimes, if weakly, nag at Barbara’s generally cheerful mind. He almost succeeds in making her forget what he earlier said.
    But that unfortunate day is, for the moment, the end of their friendship, Barbara’s and Martin’s. He wisely does not call her to thank her for lunch. And soon afterward he reads that Mr. and Mrs. Eliot Spaulding have moved to San Francisco. (Like many Navy men, Eliot fell in love with that city, and had dreamed of living there.)
    And soon after that Martin recovers from his love affair.
    Barbara and her husband flourish in San Francisco. In common with most of their class, they survive and pass as very nice people, partly by blocking out or not seeing what is unpleasant: burned Asians, the American poor. Even the mildly “intellectual” phase of Barbara’s life has come to an end; she finds that she has less and less time to read. Besides, no one is reading Henry James any more.
    And occasionally, when Barbara grows older and makes her remark to the effect that the first Jews she ever met were horrible (“unfortunately”), it is pointed out to her by more thoughtful friends that the awfulness of the Wassermans has little if anything to do with their being Jewish. She will, of course, agree. She is even heard to remark of recently met “quite attractive” Jews that they do not seem Jewish—meaning that they do not remind her of the Wassermans. For there in Barbara’s mind is always the image of Mrs. Wasserman at the head of her table, her eyes wild and unfocused in that dreadful face, as she absorbs all the combined energies of her husband and her sons.
    By the time Barbara and Martin see each other again, much has changed: