Read Online A Southern Exposure by Alice Adams - Free Book Online

California, to her aunt, and have the baby there. It never occurred to either of them to somehow “get rid of it.” Of course there were abortions then (Brett could have told them that), but usually not for white middle-class people like them. Their pregnancies were concealed in marriages,or in some complicated fictions—like the one that Russ and Deirdre eventually devised. More importantly, Deirdre really wanted this child, this child of Russ—and he did too, once he appreciated her great calm, her absolute lack of demands.
    Deirdre told Russ none of the family hysteria, the threats and the weeping.
    The whole Yates family drove to California; they were moving out there, it was said, and nothing was heard of them for many months. And then the news was indeed dramatic: Emily Yates had been pregnant, it seemed, and had given birth to a little boy, named Graham, in whose birth she had died (such a risk, trying to bear another child at her age, so selfish of Clarence). Clarence Yates had bought a new filling station in the San Fernando Valley, and was staying put. But Deirdre was coming back in a couple of years to live in Pinehill, the rumor went. To bring up her little brother there. Little Graham.
    Having been passionately anxious to get Deirdre into the beautiful old brick house, having worked strenuously and paid a lot of money to that end, Russell gradually comes to realize something quite terrible and amazing. Which is simply that, once Deirdre is back here in town, he does not want, passionately, to see her. He does not long for her constantly, as in the old (five years ago) days. It is enough for him that she is here. And the boy.
    He comes to see her at night, in the old, excited, frantic way—but even at their extreme moments he has a sense of staginess, of acting. And in Deirdre too he senses an unreality, as though part of her mind were always on her son,her “brother,” rather than on Russ, her poet-lover. Pale and still, unsmiling, she lies beneath him, until at last she stirs, and she says, “It’s a beautiful house, I really like it here.”
    “If you ever need anything, you’ll tell me—you promise?” He bends down to kiss her eyelids, as he always does. “Or for the boy.”
    She says, “I don’t reckon—” But the sentence is broken by a small cry from Graham’s room. Getting up, she says to him, “I’ll be right back.”
    Lying there alone in the dark, in the house that he bought for her, and for her son, their son, Russ experiences a sadness, a sorrow so profound that it comes close to madness.
    He thinks, So it all comes to this. A very beautiful and intelligent (but so uneducated) young woman, in a pretty, secret house, with her little son. It is like a story already written, finished. Russ wants no further role in this play, which he knows, in his heart, that Deirdre would make extremely easy for him. His exit.
    And he wonders, Was this all she ever wanted of him, after all? A house, and a son? And in that case, why him? Almost any man could have given her those things. Why the added presence of his fame, and poetry?
    Perhaps, Russ is forced to conclude, that part of it was simply accidental. He was simply the man her eyes fell on at her own ripest moment for love.
    He will never write again, Russ thinks, at that black moment, still waiting for Deirdre. His poems are fully as trashy as his life is. Of course they are.
    He will go back to Hollywood. He will write bits of scripts about pigs.
    He stays at home, and won’t see anyone. Especially no local parties, or “gatherings,” as they are called. Once, at thepost office, he runs into that little fool from Oklahoma, that Jimmy Hightower, whatever he calls himself. Who tells Russ (as though he cared) that some new people have moved to town whom he, Russ, would probably like. In fact, the lady, Mrs. Baird, knows considerable of his poetry by heart. She is in fact an unusual lady, this Cynthia Baird is (Russ detects a just-controlled