Odd Jobs (64 page)

“It occurred to [Macon] that the world was divided sharply down the middle: Some lived careful lives and some lived careless lives, and everything that happened could be explained by the difference between them.
But he could not have said, not in a million years, why he was so moved by the sight of Muriel’s thin quilt trailing across the floor where she must have dragged it when she rose in the morning.” He cannot say, but the book itself slyly spells it out: Macon’s mother, Alicia, glimpsed but rarely in the novel, is herself of the party of the careless. A woman of tempestuous and fleeting enthusiasms, she had been widowed in World War II and in 1950 remarried, to “an engineer who travelled around the world building bridges,” and settled her four children with their grandparents in Baltimore. “They were met by their grandparents, two thin, severe, distinguished people in dark clothes. The children approved of them at once.” Henceforth, “like some naughty, gleeful fairy,” their mother “darted in and out of their lives leaving a trail of irresponsible remarks.” When Rose marries, Alicia, now on her fourth husband, startles Macon by being at the wedding, displeases him with her gaudy outfit (“a long white caftan trimmed with vibrant bands of satin, and when she reached up to hug him a whole culvert of metal bangles clattered and slid down her left arm”), and links arms with Muriel. “Macon had a sudden appalling thought: Maybe in his middle age he was starting to choose his mother’s style of person, as if concluding that Alicia—silly, vain, annoying woman—might have the right answers after all. But no. He put the thought away from him.” But the thought is a good one. We are all, however careful, the children of chaos. Leaving home can be going home.

S
UPERIOR
W
OMEN
, by Alice Adams. 368 pp. Knopf, 1984.

Take a group of female college friends. Simmer them in the post-graduate decades, tossing in timely headlines and fashions to taste. Add lovers, husbands, fathers, deaths, and at least one lesbian relationship. Bring to a boil close to the present time, and serve. This recipe, or something like it, seems to be a popular one; Rona Jaffe can’t stay away from reunions, and Mary McCarthy’s
The Group
put Candice Bergen in the
movies. Now Alice Adams has come up with
Superior Women
, which takes five Radcliffe students—Megan Greene, Lavinia Harcourt, Peg Harding, Cathy Barnes, and Janet Cohen—from their first meeting in June of 1943, in Cambridge, to a June exactly forty years later, in northern Georgia. Readers of Ms. Adams’s short story “Roses, Rhododendron” will be reminded of it—it, too, tells of female friendship dating from the Forties and sustained by letters, though the girls are ten instead of seventeen. As in the pairing of Lavinia and Megan, the one girl is cool and Southern and the other is needy and “hot,” with an eccentric mother and the antique business in her background; superficially antithetical, both girls are intelligent and bookish and become, somehow, one. Such female alliances repeat throughout
Superior Women
, in a number of forms, across an American landscape of great breadth and sharp detail. Cambridge and Boston, New York and White Plains, Fredericksburg and Chapel Hill, Palo Alto and San Francisco, West Texas and northern Georgia are some of the locales knowingly evoked; as the characters become ever more mobile, erotic trysts take them to momentarily vivid hotel rooms in Alaska and Hawaii, so that a survey of our American vastness, not omitting the newer states, appears to be in progress. As happened in
The Group
twenty years ago, a natural short-story writer’s avidity for the telling detail becomes, extended over a wide-ranging plurality of characters and events, rather actuarial; a certain bleakly notational texture overtakes the survey, and the reader feels that he is not so much enjoying vicarious experience as sampling data.

The first hundred pages of
Superior Women
move slowest and least skimmingly; they take place at Radcliffe between 1943 and 1946. Megan, back home in Palo Alto, has been smitten by “a post–prep school boy from New England,” George Wharton, whose “compellingly exotic” looks, clothes, and accent excite her to a lifelong romance with things Eastern. She comes to Radcliffe—a bold, continent-spanning move—and meets the four other superior women of the title, all bright, we are somewhat insistently assured, and all resident in Barnard Hall; Janet Cohen, because she is Jewish, stands apart from her three housemates, of whom Lavinia is outspokenly anti-Semitic. The intricacies of remaining “technical virgins,” the degradations of dating drunken and inept college boys, the rise and fall of romantic passions, the subtle but intensely felt shifts of closeness among the young women are lovingly and expertly laid bare. Megan, the most full-bodied and
ardent of them, surrenders her virginity to a Jewish section man, Simon Jacoby, while her original heartthrob, George Wharton, defects to a girl of his social class; Lavinia crosses her own class lines to love the Irish Gordon Shaughnessey, who inconsiderately dies of a burst appendix; Peg unexpectedly collapses into pregnancy and marriage; Cathy is whirlwind-courted by her fellow Catholic “Phil-Flash” Flannigan; and Janet remains the patient admirer of the exuberant, foulmouthed, gifted, and Marxist Adam Marr. Graduation Day arrives and they go their separate ways, if they haven’t already gone. Janet marries Adam, and Lavinia, done mourning Gordon Shaughnessey, marries the uninspiring but presentable Potter Cobb. Megan, after a year in Paris with the Marrs and others, travels to New York, carries on with a gorgeous black trombonist called Jackson Clay, works in publishing, and becomes a prosperous literary agent. She lives on West Twelfth Street; uptown, Lavinia settles into an East Sixties life of parties, interior decoration, and creeping discontent. Peg endures four children and the Texas climate until fondness for her Negro cook, Cornelia, leads her into social consciousness and rebellion. Cathy attends graduate school at Stanford and sees a fatherly priest a few times too often. As to the Marrs, Adam makes a great splash as a playwright and goes from being obnoxious to atrocious, while the divorced Janet heads for the haven of a medical degree. And that’s not the half of it; the book in its latter stretches has so much plot, so summarily relayed, that it reads like the class notes crowded at the back of an alumnae magazine. Children and traumas and political movements are reduced to rumors that pop up in letters or conversations among the rapidly aging old friends; it all bounces along so briskly that the author seems to assign no importance to these events save a demographic one: this is what tends to happen to you if you graduated from Radcliffe in 1946. Typically, you marry, are miserable, have some miserable children, and take comfort in pills and affairs (Lavinia) or communal living and liberal activism (Peg).

Though there is a good deal of ethnic cross-reference in the text of
Superior Women
, its many characters fall almost entirely into four groups: blacks, Jews, Irish Americans, and upper-class Wasps. The Wasps are the heavies, with their ghastly clubbiness and haughty prejudices; just their melodious names—Lavinia Harcourt, George Wharton, Potter Cobb, Connie Winsor, Cameron Sinclair, Price Christopher—would make even a middle-of-the-road reader see red, and when the toniest
name of them all, Henry Stuyvesant, turns out to have no money and to have once joined the Communist party, we still find it hard to love him. Whereas the blacks are beautiful people: Jackson Clay a great musician, if a little stoned in his later, Hawaiian phase, and Cornelia loyal and gentle and so intelligent that just a perfunctory sprinkling of money turns her from a cook into a schoolteacher, and Vera, who is Mexican and only
looks
black, the perfect match at last for dear, big, good-hearted Peg. The Jews, too, are beyond reproach. Whatever the job set before them, they do it: Janet Cohen Marr becomes a good intern (“Considered very able, I believe,” Dr. George Wharton grudgingly admits), and her son Aron has written “a very good novel,” about a gay relationship; Barbara Blumenthal, the literary agent who hires Megan, “is a very successful woman, who manages at the same [time] to be quite simply nice”; and Simon Jacoby, to whom Megan entrusts her defloration, does it ably and nicely. Blacks and Jews, in this book, are invariably figures of comfort. Wasps represent privilege and power; their hegemony, covertly asserted in a conspiracy of correct schools and addresses, of intertwining acquaintanceships and similar family antiques, becomes overt in the sinister figure of Harvey Rodman, a crippled and fantastically rich insider in the administration of Richard Nixon. He boasts to Lavinia, “It’s exciting how few people we’ve managed to get it down to, just a very few, in total control. There’s not much spreading around these days, baby doll, in terms of real power.” And, somewhat like Fu Manchu in bygone days, “he laughs, excitingly.” Only the Irish have in them the potential to be good or bad—to be human, in short. Adam Marr, though he doesn’t seem—“light brown curly hair, a big nose, thin face, and large, intense blue eyes”—very Irish, is labelled as such and clearly designed, with his sensitivity and outrageousness, to arouse ambivalent feelings in the reader; Cathy Barnes, too, remains mysterious, as her wit turns to bitterness, and her austerity to martyrdom. Megan Greene, the heart and heroine of the novel, oscillates between her “strong, eager needs” and her habit of getting top marks, between her sexual and her intellectual prowess, between her passion for the circumspect Henry James and her headlong falls into love.

Lavinia and Megan are, like the two little girls of “Roses, Rhododendron,” matched opposites: “tall thin blond, impeccably expensively dressed Lavinia—and plump dark Megan, in her slightly wrong California clothes.” The compounded attraction and repulsion between them should be the axis of the novel, around which its many lesser
worlds turn. If this doesn’t quite work, it is not for any failing of vitality and believability on Megan’s part but because Lavinia doesn’t get, as a character, a fair shake. Her purported intelligence (“Actually, perhaps surprisingly, Lavinia herself has a remarkably high IQ; in those numerical terms the two girls are identical”) is buried under the reflexive snobbery, the feral schemingness, the ossified narcissism that the author loads upon her, for political reasons: she symbolizes the sterility of the haves. Too rarely is Lavinia allowed to shed the accoutrements of her class. Toward the end, she and Megan have parallel breakdowns, and for a moment, dreadfully feeling her fifty years of self-indulgent, wasted life, she stands naked and confused: “But then she begins to cry again—crying, shivering, everything out of control, nothing as intended, as meant. She is an ugly white old woman, all gooseflesh, crying, crying, and every single minute getting older, uglier.” Momentarily rescued, by Megan’s lover, from this ugliness, she uses the rescue to perpetrate ugliness of her own design; the author restores her to her formal status as “rich and beautiful and rich and wicked” and drops her from the novel like a used-up poppet. She has amounted to less than we might have hoped from the Radcliffe pages. Megan, self-described as “poor and innocent and slightly simple,” is intended to command our sympathy, and does; but are we supposed to feel something lamely collegiate about her life’s culmination, in 1983, at a feminine dormitory in the Georgia hills, meddling in good works among the Atlanta underclass and snuggling into her weekend visitations from a Chapel Hill professor? Are we supposed to suspect that her tried-and-true beau, his physical charms detailed down to (or up to) his giraffelike eyelashes, is just a senior wimp? They once intended to marry, but put it off for one of the strangest reasons in romantic fiction: they were depressed by the election of Richard Nixon as President. “Both Megan and Henry find it surprising that this event should be a factor in their personal lives, but the truth is that they are both so depressed by Nixon that they are stunned into a sort of immobility.”
Superior Women
, indeed, makes much of Nixon, who may end by finding his way into more works of the literary imagination than any executive since King Arthur. World War II whisks by in a hazy flecking of uniforms, and of Korea and Kennedy’s assassination there is not a mention, but Nixon and Watergate get right into bed with Ms. Adams’s characters, causing impotence in one instance and celibacy in another.

Internal references indicate that the author had in mind, as models
for this narrative, the schoolgirl novels of Jessie Graham Flower and Jane Austen’s novels of female education and (as a graduation prize) marriage. The superior women, at college, entertain no expectation higher than the materialization of “the knight (ah! Mr. Knightley!), the perfect figure of romance.” As Nina Auerbach, in her fine
Communities of Women: An Idea in Fiction
, has pointed out, the women in Austen are waiting for the door to open, and the gentlemen to enter. Elizabeth Bennet of
Pride and Prejudice
can scarcely stand the suspense: “Anxious and uneasy, the period which passed in the drawing-room, before the gentlemen came, was wearisome and dull to a degree, that almost made her uncivil. She looked forward to their entrance, as the point on which all her chance of pleasure for the evening must depend.” Over a century later, the girls of Barnard and Bertram Halls are still pinning their chance of pleasure on the male visitors, though the dates as described are horror shows of compulsory drunkenness and frantic fumbling. The girls stagger back to the dorm like shell-shocked soldiers from the front, and even good-natured Megan is hard-pressed to find the bright side of being pawed on the cold dirt underneath a Charles River bridge. And yet, though four of the five become career women of a sort, their lives are chronicled in terms of amorous discovery and conquest, of multiple orgasms and helpless heartbreak. Looking back on the college years, Megan reflects, “The fact that Phil-Flash was on the whole a jerk now seems less important than that with him Cathy was confident, and happy. As she so visibly now is not.”
^a
As the novel progresses, the reader’s heart learns to sink whenever a white heterosexual male enters the scene, for to a man they are crude, exploitive, and ultimately feckless. The black Jackson Clay doesn’t disappoint, of course, nor do Megan’s Paris pal Danny and her New York pal Biff; both are homosexuals. Naturally Megan asks herself, “Are gay men really nicer than so-called straight men?” Adam Marr, for whom she has always felt an unaccountable sneaking fondness, turns out to have been a closet homosexual, which explains the fondness. The plight of the superior woman, as he once explained it to Megan, is that “Just any old guy won’t do. You wouldn’t like him, and even if you did your strength would scare him.… Inferior men are afraid of you.” Since, on the evidence marshaled
here, all men are inferior, the plight is universal. Stop watching the door, ladies, and ask yourselves to dance.