About Alice Read Online Free PDF Page A

didn’t delude herself about the chances of the Alice Tax being passed, but she did believe that it would have been a good idea. She thought that, in a country where millions of children didn’t have adequate food or access to a doctor, there should be a limit to how much people could keep for themselves—a generous limit, maybe, but still a limit. She believed in the principle of enoughness. The Alice Tax seemed to come up in conversation most often when we were with people whose incomes would probably have made them subject to its provisions. This did not surprise me. Alice had what I once described as an “instinctual attraction for avoided subjects”—a description I used in the context of a dinner we once had with a man described by the friends who brought him along as a “sugar baron.” Somehow, by the end of that meal, the connection between sugar and rotten teeth had come up in conversation three times. If we’d had the misfortune to live in a milieu that called on me to work my way up in a corporation and on Alice to be the supportive and diplomatic and perfectly behaved corporate wife, I sometimes told her, I would never have emerged from middle management.
    Once, I gave a speech at the annual dinner the Yale Westchester Alumni Association puts on to raise money for the scholarships it provides for students from West-chester. The other speaker was the governor of New York, George Pataki, who had grown up, in modest circumstances, in Peekskill, on the northwestern edge of the county. Although Pataki doesn’t have a reputation for eloquence, he gave an elegant and moving speech about his older brother being admitted to Yale and his father, who worked in the post office, driving after work to New Haven to confront the director of admissions on how a postal worker’s son was expected to go to Yale without a scholarship. (The director of admissions picked up the phone and called someone in the Yale Westchester Alumni Association.) “That was one of the best speeches I’ve ever heard,” Alice told the governor, when he returned to our table and sat down. “Why in the world are you a Republican?”
    She was direct. There were things she didn’t like, and she was never shy about saying so. She didn’t like clubs, or just about any institution that excluded anybody. She couldn’t understand why anyone would accept an invitation to join a club, and the fact that there were people in New York who would actually go out of their way to get into a club just made her shake her head. Her attitude toward religion was somewhere between uninterested and hostile, except that she claimed to believe that you could hear what your children said about you at your funeral. She didn’t like games—athletic games, board games, any games. In the spring of 2001, she had a bypass operation—the massive radiation she’d had twenty-five years before had eventually damaged her arteries and her heart—and afterward the surgeon asked me if she was someone for whom, say, tennis was important. When I mentioned that to Sarah—this was before I looked back and realized that this question was among the things he said that had begun to scare me—Sarah said, “I think you could honestly say that she’s never played a game.”
    That was almost true. A friend she was fond of sometimes ordered guests to divide into teams for charades, and Alice didn’t refuse to play even if she did grumble a bit. All of Alice’s rules were subject to occasional exceptions, usually dependent on how she felt about the person in question. Despite her normal antipathy to clubs, for instance, she always spoke highly (sometimes almost covetously) of Tiro e Segno, an Italian-American social club on MacDougal Street; we sometimes had lunch there with one of her favorites, Wally Popolizio, a lawyer who had become, in effect, our surrogate uncle while we were looking