Read Online Families and Survivors by Alice Adams - Free Book Online Page A

like—actualized.”
    “Of course we almost never hear from my parents,” Louisa, who must have been thinking about this in the kitchen, comes in with glasses and ice and water.
    Knowing Jack Calloway, Kate can well imagine: a handsome, charming, ultra-Southern man (though not froma very “good” family), who daily rides one of his mares, who talks well, telling stories with a flourish, and who loves parties and pretty ladies and strong drink. He is occasionally hospitalized for what are called nervous breakdowns, and is given electric shock, which calms him down. It has never been clear how he feels about his daughter, but Kate can too easily imagine how he would feel about Louisa’s marriage. (Can that be partly why—Kate represses this half-formed question.)
    “Even when I was so sick in Boston—I had colitis,” Louisa says.
    “They gave her cortisone, which precipitated a psychotic break. It happens fairly often,” Michael gently explains.
    “Jack never wrote. Caroline did, but such cold guilty letters—rather literary letters, actually. But at least I got the money for an analysis out of them. Not that it’s doing any good.”
    “Now, honey—”
    “And I hate those drives to the city.”
    Wholly confused, Kate merely notes that Louisa has taken to referring to her parents by their first names—to remove herself from them?
    Michael laughs, but without much mirth. “It’s hard to tell what’s worse, the smothering attentions of my parents or the coldness of Louisa’s. But of course smothering is exactly what they would like to do to Louisa. I think they had a great deal to do with her breakdown.”
    “Well, what are David’s parents like?” Louisa asks, smiling but rather challenging.
    “Uh, actually they’re quite nice. They’re divorced, but they’ve both remarried and the new marriages seem to be working out.”
    “Maybe that’s the answer.” Michael laughs again.
    Louisa looks at him, stricken, so that he says, “Honey, of course I didn’t mean us,” and coming to stand behind her, pulling her back he kisses her.
    Louisa’s stomach is enormous. Kate tries (and fails) to imagine how that would be. A living child inside one? Instead she is struck with a pang of missing David, a pang that is vivid and sexual. “Louisa,” she says quickly, “what about your work—do you still write poems and draw? Louisa is the most talented person I’ve ever known,” Kate says, smiling to Michael.
    “It’s called ‘too many minor talents.’ ” Louisa laughs, wry and self-deprecating. “No, I got tired of all that. Besides, I have so little time.”
    “But that’s terrible—you did marvelous things.”
    “Marvelous for a thirteen-year-old, maybe. I’m afraid ‘precocious’ is the word.” She frowns. “When I was crazy, I wrote a lot of poems. Poetry is Caroline, Caroline crying. I won’t do that again.”
    Confused Kate tells her, “I still have the drawing you did of John.”
    “Really, you do?”
    “Of course; it’s a treasure. Every time I move, I’m careful to take it with me.”
    “I’ll make more drinks,” says Michael, and he does.
    “I wonder where John is,” Louisa says. “I think Caroline wrote that he married some fabulous New York beauty, an heiress or a model or something. John would marry someone mythic.”
    The two girls laugh, almost easily.
    “The boy who broke my heart,” Kate says. “God, how serious I was. But you know, that was a very bad thing for me. I did suffer.”
    “Really?” Louisa looks at her curiously. It is hard for her to believe that her attractive friend has been scarred—orperhaps she is too concentrated on her own scarring. Looking at Michael, she says that she had better see about dinner.
    The quality of their connection, Michael’s with Louisa, is still quite obscure to Kate. She sees only that it is very unlike hers with David, and she thinks: David and I are noisier and more open, but then Louisa has always been more