Families and Survivors Read Online Free PDF Page A

see other people—sometimes?
    “God,” Kate says to Louisa. “I couldn’t believe it was
John
, saying all that dumb stuff. John is so in
tell
igent. He sounded like something out of some dumb advice column. Like a Sub-Deb column.” She laughs harshly.
    Kate’s anger makes it harder for Louisa to respond; in her own heightened emotional state she could more readily answer sorrow—she was prepared to weep with Kate. Weakly she says, “That’s too bad.”
    Of course it doesn’t really matter what Louisa says or does not say.
    Kate goes on. “I had this terrible feeling that I was too much for him, you know? And now he’s made me feel all heavy and serious, when we had so much
fun.
”
    “God, I’m really sorry.”
    “Obviously what he means is that he wants to see that drippy little Mary Beth. You were so right about her.”
    “I guess.” But Louisa is becoming impatient; she wants to be alone, and tosavor her own love affair.
    “I really feel lousy,” Kate says. “Honestly, maybe you’d better go. My cold must be coming back or something.”
    By Friday, even more snow has fallen on the town (miraculously, for so early in November)—on the golf course, everywhere. And Louisa is well embarked on what is to be a lifetime occupation, or preoccupation: the enshrouding of any man at all in veils and layers of her own complexity, so that the love object himself is nearly lost. Who is Richard? By the time he comes to her door, blond and smiling and happy to see her, he is also innumerable otherpeople, with whom she has imaginatively acted out a hundred passionate episodes.
    (It is the following spring, and a new girl has come to school, a more voluptuous Mary Beth, and Richard suddenly abandons Louisa, just as John has left Kate. It is five years later and she and Richard get married. This country gets into the war and Richard is killed. It is many years later, at a party in New York: Louisa is a famous poet-painter-actress and Richard comes up to her at a party and asks if she remembers him. It is any time at all and she and Richard make love in some warm and dark and very private place.)
    Since the country club and golf course border Jack Calloway’s land, Louisa and Richard walk along the narrow shoveled path, between high banks of snow, in the starry crystal dark. As soon as they are out of sight of her parents’ house, he takes her hand and they walk silently, until Richard says, “You know, something funny came up. John told me he’s bringing along that Mary Beth tonight.”
    Louisa’s heart sickens and shrinks, but loyalty prompts her to make as little of this as possible. “Well, Kate’s still home with her cold,” she tells him.
    “She is? Well, that’s different. I guess.”
    Thus, from the beginning, her knowledge of Kate’s pain adds a melancholy depth to Louisa’s love affair, or perhaps Kate’s suffering touches an important chord already present in Louisa. A few minutes later, when Richard stops at a bend in the path and they kiss, some part of Louisa feels a thrill of pain, and she thinks of Kate and John, who also kissed, perhaps at that very bend, before the snow.
    “God,” Richard says. “You’re fun to kiss.”
    She dimly feels that this is not quite what he should have said, but at that moment his presence is stronger, more powerful, than the dark workings of her own mind.
    In the distance, then, they see the pillared, well-litcountry club, and the white smooth undulations of the golf course, the bluish snow. Their friends are there with sleds, all gathered near the club’s front steps. Mary Beth with John, Snubby with someone tall but indistinguishable. Other couples.
    Tightening his grip on her hand, Richard says, “God, this should really be fun.”
    “Oh, yes!” Louisa says.

Two / 1945
    Now Louisa’s father is in Virginia; he is in a sanatorium, being treated with electric shock for a depression. She is not; she is in Cambridge with Norm Goldman, on a corduroy sofa.