Families and Survivors by Alice Adams Page B

terrible Mrs. Wasserman is dead, and Martin (as Martin Walters) has moved to San Francisco, and with his inheritance has bought a small and very smart antique store, and (what no one could conceivably have predicted) he is on the verge of a happy (if somewhat eccentric) marriage.
    And so, at that time, once more he and Barbara fill spaces in each other’s lives.

Four / 1951
    A cold red February dusk, in the early fifties. On a suburban railway platform, south of San Francisco, two young women hurry toward each other. They are so unlike that their rush together seems improbable; one, Louisa, is very pregnant, stoop-shouldered, and rather shabby; the other girl, Kate, with dark red hair, is erect and stylish. But it is true; they are old friends who have not seen each other for five years, and not been truly in touch for longer than that.
    “Oh, Louisa, you’re beautiful pregnant!” Kate cries out.
    Unused to kissing, and not quite used to shaking hands, they stand there grasping each other’s arms.
    “ ‘Built-for-birth’—remember?” Ironically Louisa quotes the epithet from her early adolescence, “B.B.,” which the standardized “popular” kids had repeated, tittering not quite out of her hearing, before she was discovered by Kate and became herself a popular Sub-Deb.
    Even now Kate flushes. She was always popular (very), but she loved (and loves) her friend.
    “And you’re so chic!” Louisa says. (Is that a compliment?)
    “Oh, well, I have to, with my silly job,” says Kate, who works in the advertising department of a fashionable store. She is wearing a trim gray flannel coat, neat white gloves, high black patent shoes. She wears her hair long; she has long exotic dark eyes and an eager vulnerable mouth. A strong voluptuous body and an impetuous mind. She has been married for less than a year and her husband, a doctor, has been in Korea for the past five months. David: she often tries not to think of him at all, but this does not work.
    The area around the small station has been fanatically landscaped: oleander bushes forced into smooth rounded shapes beside gently rising paths, and the parking lot is surrounded with smooth round stones that are gray in the dying light. The girls walk toward a large and muddy car, an old Hudson, with swollen sides—conspicuous among the bright new (postwar) station wagons and sparkling convertibles. “This is ours,” says Louisa, and then, mysteriously, “Michael doesn’t really
believe
in cars.”
    Kate has been told that Michael Wasserman is a graduate student, in psychology. She is a little afraid of this meeting; some of the intellectual awe in which she has always held Louisa has carried over to Michael—and it is worse since he is a man. (She really believes this.) Men usually like Kate, she bolsteringly reminds herself, but at the same time, she wishes that she had worn something else; she will feel overdressed in the pink silk that her coat now hides. (She is right—she will.) “Louisa,” she says, “it’s so marvelous to see you. I can’t quite believe it. When does the baby come?”
    “April. That’s what I can’t believe.” Louisa laughs jerkily as, finally, the car starts up and they back vigorously out of the parking lot.
    “I hope you’ll have an absolutely beautiful girl who looks just like you.”
    This remark, although she knows it to be sincere (she knows Kate) makes Louisa stiffen; for one thing, she has never believed herself to be beautiful (though many people in her life have told and will tell her so); for another, she is passionately anxious that her child be a boy, so anxious that she has admitted this wish to no one. She mutters, “Christ, I’d drown her at birth,” and she hunches down over the clutch, shifting violently.
    “Oh, Louisa,” chides Kate as she often did in the forties, ten years back, when Louisa’s classically lovely face went unnoticed because her body was the wrong size: she was very tall,