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

complicated than I am. She has a dim sense that Michael is controlling Louisa in some subtle way, although on the surface he is agreeable, somewhat passive.
    They have dinner on the square maple table. Michael eats ravenously, breaking and buttering his bread while Louisa serves the coq au vin, and rice.
    “Louisa, how marvelous this is,” Kate says. “And the rice!”
    “I have some sort of atavistic thing with rice,” Louisa says.
    “My mother is an appalling cook,” says Michael, “but she’s somehow perpetrated a myth that she’s terrific. God, the years of dry roast chicken and overdone beef, and everyone sitting around saying how great it is.”
    This speech makes Kate uncomfortable; she is not sure why. She says, “I like to cook,” hoping for a change of subject. And she adds, “I’m not terribly good—yet.”
    But Michael goes on. “And she sends me clothes, embarrassing big packages from Brooks. God! My brother still lives at home—of course he’s gay.”
    This is an unfamiliar word to Kate, but she senses what he must mean, and does not want to hear about it. She turns to Louisa, and speaks in her old forthright way. “But I think you should go on doing those things you used to do. You were good—everyone thought so, and I know you were.”
    “Louisa is very ambivalent about what might be intellectual competition.” Michael explains. “She’s afraid I mightslap her down, the way her father always did. Isn’t that true, honey?”
    Louisa sounds tired. “I suppose so,” she says. “Or afraid I wouldn’t do anything really good. I think it’s more that.”
    A terrible sense of strangeness suddenly overwhelms Kate; what is she doing there with those two people? She feels lonely, lost, with her old friend who has become a mumbling stranger. (Louisa is still in some way very sick. Miserable. Her eyes are desperate.) Why are she and Louisa here at all, thousands of miles from home? Why this husband, this Michael, whose heavy presence dominates the room?
    But then the doorbell rings, and Michael gets up to let other people in.
    A couple, young and good-looking, obviously “Eastern” in their style. Kate is at least momentarily reassured; she sees these people as landmarks. Sally and Andrew Chapin. Sally is hugely pregnant with their third child. Andrew is a graduate student in English; he has just got a new book by Lionel Trilling, which has several essays on Freud, on psychoanalysis, and he wonders what Michael thinks about it.
    Michael hasn’t seen the Trilling book, but he says what he imagines it will be like; he uses words like “eclectic” and “neo-”(attached to a variety of names). Andrew and Louisa both listen to this as though it were extraordinary stuff, and for all Kate knows it is.
    But then, as she listens (or half listens) to the two men, a sort of bell sounds in Kate’s mind, and she repeats the name: “Andrew Chapin?”
    Interrupted, they both turn to her—both with (dissimilar) slight frowns.
    Andrew says, “You’re thinking of my father. A writer.He was very popular for a while. A brief career, poor guy,” he adds.
    “Oh, of course. My mother was mad for him.”
    “He was an unusual talent,” Michael announces, frowning more intensely and giving Kate the impression that he would prefer not to share the talents of “Andrew Chapin” with Kate’s mother. (Poor Jane Flickinger: Kate smiles involuntarily at this summoning of her mother, for whom she feels a kind of tolerant affection.)
    Michael is, in fact, fascinated by the elder Andrew Chapin (who wrote delicately of exacerbated New England consciences, who hinted at wild sexual distortions; it was Martin who first gave Michael those books). And Michael is impressed with knowing the writer’s son—as Andrew is fascinated by Michael. And given the perversity of human attractions it is perhaps not odd that they are drawn to qualities in the other that each man himself could have done without: a famous father,