About Alice Read online

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  CHAPTER I

  CHAPTER II

  CHAPTER III

  CHAPTER IV

  CHAPTER V

  CHAPTER VI

  CHAPTER VII

  CHAPTER VIII

  Excerpt from Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ALSO BY CALVIN TRILLIN

  COPYRIGHT

  For our grandchildren—

  Izzy and Toby and Rebecca and Nate

  I

  Now that it’s fashionable to reveal intimate details of married life, I can state publicly that my wife, Alice, has a weird predilection for limiting our family to three meals a day.

  —Alice, Let’s Eat

  There was one condolence letter that made me laugh. Naturally, a lot of them made me cry. Some of those, oddly enough, were from people who had never met Alice. They had become familiar with her as a character in books and magazine pieces I’d written—light books and magazine pieces about traveling or eating or family life. Virtually all those letters began in the same way, with a phrase like “Even though I never really knew Alice….” I was certain of what Alice’s response would have been. “They’re right about that,” she would have said. “They never knew me.”

  I once wrote that tales about writers’ families tend to have a relation to real life that can be expressed in terms of standard network-television fare, on a spectrum that goes from sitcoms to Lifetime movies, and that mine were sitcoms. Now that I think of it, maybe they were more like the Saturday-morning cartoons. Alice played the role of the mom—the voice of reason, the sensible person who kept everything on an even keel despite the antics of her marginally goofy husband. Years ago, at a conference of English teachers where we were both speakers, the professor who did the introductions said something like “Alice and Bud are like Burns and Allen, except she’s George and he’s Gracie.” Yes, of course, the role she played in my stories was based on the role she played in our family—our daughters and I sometimes called her T.M., which stood for The Mother—but she didn’t play it in the broad strokes of a sitcom mom. Also, she was never completely comfortable as the person who takes responsibility for keeping things on an even keel; that person inevitably misses out on some of the fun. (“I feel the need to break out of the role of straight person,” she said in a Nation review of Alice, Let’s Eat that cautioned readers against abandoning long-planned European vacations in order to scour the country for “the perfect roast polecat haunch.”) The sitcom presentation sometimes made her sound stern as well as wise, and she was anything but stern. She had something close to a child’s sense of wonderment. She was the only adult I ever knew who might respond to encountering a deer on a forest path by saying, “Wowsers!”

  Once, during a question-and-answer period that followed a speech I had given at the Herbst Theatre, in San Francisco, someone asked how Alice felt about the way she was portrayed in my books and articles. I said that she thought the portrayal made her sound like what she called “a dietitian in sensible shoes.” Then the same questioner asked if Alice was in the audience, and, when I said she was, he asked if she’d mind standing up. Alice stood. As usual, she looked smashing. She didn’t say anything. She just leaned over and took off one of her shoes—shoes that looked like they cost about the amount of money required in some places to tide a family of four over for a year or two—and, smiling, waved it in the air. She wasn’t a dietitian in sensible shoes, and she would have been right in saying that the people whose exposure to her had been through my stories didn’t know her. Still, in the weeks after she died I was touched by their letters. They may not have known her, but they knew how I felt about her. It surprised me that they had managed to divine that from reading stories that were essentially sitcoms. Even after I’d taken in most episodes of The Honeymooners, after all, it had never occurred to me to ponder the feelings Ralph Kramden must have had for Alice Kramden. Yet I got a lot of letters like the one from a young woman in New York who wrote that she sometimes looked at her boyfriend and thought, “But will he love me like Calvin loves Alice?”

  The letter that made me laugh was from Roger Wilkins. By the time of Alice’s death, Roger occupied a chair of history and American culture at George Mason University, but in the seventies he had been on the editorial board of The New York Times. In that period, I’d sometimes join the regular lunches he had with the late Richard Harris—a remarkable investigative reporter for The New Yorker who had the aggressively unsentimental worldview often found among people in his line of work. Alice and Roger became acquainted when she accompanied me to a conference I was covering in New Orleans. In off hours, when we’d gather around the hotel swimming pool, she and Roger sometimes had long, serious conversations. It wasn’t unusual for me to find Alice having long, serious conversations with people I’d been bantering with for years. She got engaged with people’s lives. If she said to a friend’s son or daughter, “How’s school?” she wasn’t just being polite; she wanted details, and she wasn’t shy about offering advice. If people we were visiting mentioned that they’d been thinking about renovating their house, Alice was right on the case, room by room. In such architectural conversations, she could get bossy, and sometimes I felt obliged to warn our hosts that one of her characteristic gestures—the gesture she used when she was saying something like “You have to open all of this up”—was remarkably similar to the gesture you’d use to toss money into the wind.

  She wasn’t among those whose response to tragedy or loss was limited to offering the conventional expressions of sympathy before moving on with their own lives. In 1988, an old friend phoned us to say that his grown daughter, a young woman we’d known since she was a child, had been raped by an intruder. This was a dozen years after Alice had been operated on for lung cancer, and among the things that she wrote to our friend’s daughter was that having lung cancer and being raped were comparable only in that both were what she called “realizations of our worst nightmares.” She said that there was some relief at surviving what you might have thought was not survivable. “No one would ever choose to have cancer or to be raped,” she wrote. “But you don’t get to choose, and it is possible at least to understand what Ernest Becker meant when he said something like ‘To live fully is to live with an awareness of the rumble of terror that underlies everything,’ or to begin to understand the line in ‘King Lear’—‘Ripeness is all.’ You might have chosen to become ripe less dramatically or dangerously, but you can still savor ripeness.” Alice had a large envelope in which she kept copies of letters like that—along with copies of some letters she had sent the girls and copies of poems we had written for her on birthdays and documents like the announcement of a prize for community service that Abigail, our older daughter, had been awarded at Yale and an astonishing letter of recommendation that a professor had provided for Sarah, our younger daughter, when she applied for her first job after getting her M.S.W. On the envelope was written “Important Stuff.”

  In his condolence letter, Roger talked partly about that engaged quality in Alice, but he also got around to her appearance. “She was nice and she was concerned and she was smart and when she talked to you, she was thinking about you, and, also, she was so very pretty,” he wrote in September of 2001, a few days after Alice died. “I always thought of you as a wonderful guy, but still I couldn’t figure out how you managed to get Alice. Harris once told me it was just dumb luck.” When I read that, I burst out laughing. Harris had nailed it again.

  II

  When approached by young people in search of wisdom about how they might go about linking up with someone with whom they are likely to enjoy a long and happy marriage, the only strategy I can divine from
what passed for my wife-seeking activities is “Wander into the right party.”

  —Family Man

  The party was thrown in late 1963 by Monocle, a doomed magazine of political satire. Monocle’s parties seemed to grow more elaborate as its financial situation became increasingly bleak. Three or four other couples with connections to Monocle met and eventually married; those unions, which we called “Monocle marriages” in our house, were all long-lasting. I have reminded the founder of Monocle—Victor Navasky, who is fortunate enough to have a Monocle marriage himself—that his brainchild proved to be more durable as a marriage brokerage than as a magazine. In Alice’s view, Monocle had existed in order to get everyone married, a project that might well require larger and larger parties, and, once that had occurred, it quite naturally folded.

  When I saw Alice at that Monocle party, she was wearing a hat. At least, I’ve always remembered her as wearing a hat. She later insisted that she’d never owned a hat of the sort I described. Maybe, but I can still see her in the hat—a white hat, cocked a bit to the side. Her cheeks were slightly flushed. She had blond hair, worn straight in those days, and a brow just a shade darker than her hair. (Our oldest grandchild, Isabelle Alice, who was born in 2002, has precisely that coloring, which may be one reason I sometimes have trouble taking my eyes off her.) Whether or not Alice was wearing a hat was not the only difference in the way we recalled that meeting. Alice’s father had grown up in rural North Carolina, in a Southern Baptist family named Stewart, but her mother was Jewish—a fact that was to come as a great relief to my own Jewish mother, once I reminded her that, according to the ancient Hebraic belief in matrilineal descent, anyone whose mother was Jewish is herself Jewish. Although some people thought that Alice looked like the quintessential shiksa, I always claimed that when I spotted her across the room that night I asked Navasky, “Who’s that cute little Jewish girl over by the punch bowl?” Alice always said that I’d made up that story and that, furthermore, there wasn’t any punch bowl.

  She was, as Roger Wilkins later wrote, so very pretty, but that wasn’t the first thing that struck me about her; it might have come as much as two or three seconds later. My first impression was that she looked more alive than anyone I’d ever seen. She seemed to glow. For one reason or another, I barely got to speak to her that evening. Two weeks later, though, after doing some intelligence work and juggling some obligations and dismissing as hearsay the vague impression of one mutual acquaintance that Alice was virtually engaged, I dashed back from a remote suburb to a party that I figured she’d be attending. So I couldn’t claim that I just wandered into that second party; in romantic matters, even those who need to depend mainly on dumb luck are usually up to one or two deliberate moves. At the second party, I did get to talk to her quite a lot. In fact, I must have hardly shut up. I was like a lounge comic who had been informed that a booker for The Tonight Show was in the audience. Recalling that party in later years, Alice would sometimes say, “You have never again been as funny as you were that night.”

  “You mean I peaked in December of 1963?” I’d say, twenty or even thirty years later.

  “I’m afraid so.”

  But I never stopped trying to match that evening—not just trying to entertain her but trying to impress her. Decades later—after we had been married for more than thirty-five years, after our girls were grown—I still wanted to impress her. I still knew that if I ever disappointed her in some fundamental way—if I ever caused her to conclude that, after all was said and done, she should have said no when, at the end of that desperate comedy routine, I asked her if we could have dinner sometime—I would have been devastated.

  A year before Alice died, I read an obituary in The New York Times of Mary Francis, who had been married to the English mystery novelist Dick Francis for fifty-three years. “I don’t think I shall write again other than letters now,” Dick Francis was quoted as saying. “So much of my work was her.” Apparently, Mary Francis had been such an active participant in her husband’s work, particularly in the matter of research, that he considered the novels a joint effort. She had been well educated, and Dick Francis was conscious of being a novelist who had left school at fifteen to become a jockey. The article implied that he might not be able to produce a book without her help. But I read his reluctance to write novels without her another way. As I understood what he was saying, she was the one he’d been trying to impress.

  I showed Alice everything I wrote in rough draft—partly because I valued her opinion but partly because I hoped to impress her. If the piece was meant to be funny, the sound of laughter from the next room was a great reward. The dedication of the first book I wrote after I’d met her, a collection of comic short stories, said, until I decided that the last few words were too corny, “These stories were written for Alice—to make her giggle.” When I wrote in the dedication of a book “For Alice,” I meant it literally. In that sense, the headline on her obituary in the Times was literally true, as well as in the correct order: it described her as “Educator, Author and Muse.” When Alice died, I was going over the galleys of a novel about parking in New York—a subject so silly that I think I would have hesitated to submit the book to a publisher if she hadn’t, somewhat to her surprise, liked it. When the novel was published, the dedication said, “I wrote this for Alice. Actually, I wrote everything for Alice.”

  III

  A Conversation with Someone Who Can’t Believe That Alice Is Fifty

  “No way,” you say.

  “It simply cannot be.

  I would have guessed

  That barmen often ask her for I.D.”

  “I know, I know.

  She has that youthful glow

  That still gives young men vapors.

  She’s fifty, though.

  I’ve seen her papers.”

  —Family Man

  It had never occurred to me that being pretty involved complications. It wasn’t the sort of problem I’d ever had to face. Of course, there are also plenty of advantages to being pretty. I once wrote that when we were in Italy I always referred to Alice as la principessa because it tended to improve the service in hotels, but she was often treated like a princess even when I hadn’t implied a royal connection. Like a lot of attractive women, she regularly drove over the speed limit, secure in the knowledge that every policeman who had ever stopped her for speeding had given her a warning rather than a summons. At parties, she often attracted what I called “guys smoking pipes,” who wanted to impress her with their suavity or intellectual range. “He wasn’t smoking a pipe, by the way,” she’d say, knowing just which guy I was talking about when I mentioned “that guy with a pipe” as we discussed a party on the way home. “In fact, I can’t remember any of those ‘guys smoking pipes’ who actually were smoking pipes.”

  “Is that right?” I’d say. “I could have sworn he was tamping down the tobacco, or whatever they do, when he made that remark about the flaws in Derrida’s thinking.”

  I wasn’t surprised that Alice attracted guys with pipes. They didn’t mean any harm, and I’m hardly in a position to criticize people for trying to impress her. What did surprise me—it still puzzles me—was that some men were hostile to her before she’d said any more than “Nice to meet you.” Every once in a while, some man who’d just met Alice—I remember a lawyer in the South of France, for instance, and a financier in Manhattan—seemed intent on being contentious or even offensive from the start. In St. Urbain’s Horseman, which may be my favorite Mordecai Richler novel, the protagonist assumes that men who responded offensively to the beautiful woman he married were “wreaking vengeance for a rejection they anticipated but were too cowardly to risk.” That might have explained why some men seemed angry at the sight of Alice, but it didn’t explain the response of others—the lawyer in France, for instance, who was gay. Why would he be interested in some sort of preemptive strike?

  It was easier to explain the quieter but more common hostility from some wo
men. Not long after we were married, I told Alice I’d noticed something about her response to couples we met: when she said something like “That was fun; I hope we see them again,” the female half of the couple was likely to be, in addition to her other qualities, physically attractive. I had been under the impression—an impression that I’d probably picked up from Hollywood movies about Hollywood—that the presence of two particularly attractive women at dinner produced a competitive tension that could interfere with digestion. “Do you feel more comfortable with attractive women because you don’t have to worry about being resented?” I asked. She looked at me as if I’d intruded on something that was meant to be private.

  The normal complications of prettiness were exacerbated by the fact that Alice didn’t look like who she was. At first meeting, her looks—particularly when coupled with clothes of the sort that no dietitian had ever worn and the superficial facts of her background (Westchester County, Wellesley)—could make people expect someone who acted pampered or snooty. Among people who went to public high schools in the fifties, as we both did, pretty girls weren’t expected to be smart or even especially nice. Pretty was enough. Alice always insisted that in high school she wasn’t known as the class beauty but, embarrassingly enough, as the class brain—an embarrassment that was memorialized in her high-school yearbook by the pairing of her picture with a picture of the smartest boy in the class, a geeky slide-rule specialist in the days before the computer age saved geeky boys from eternal damnation. She often mentioned that in high school she’d been rejected at the cheerleading tryouts year after year and that, presumably because of her reputation as the class brain, she was virtually never asked out.

  Her parents hadn’t been able to afford any serious pampering. She grew up among prosperous suburbanites in a family that was always in precarious shape financially. Her father, who had left North Carolina as a teenager and never returned, was an inventor, self-taught. In the thirties, he had hit the jackpot with some early coin-changers for vending machines. He got an office in the Empire State Building, where, as it happened, Alice’s mother was working in the secretarial pool. They bought a large stone house, with an elaborate swimming pool and a basement bowling alley, in Greenhaven—an expensive Westchester community on Long Island Sound whose residents, in Alice’s childhood memories, were exquisitely conscious of their material possessions and of having a couple of neighbors whose names resonated in Hollywood. But the company Alice’s father founded to manufacture and market his inventions went under at about the time she was born. He never hit the jackpot again. As far as I can tell, he got by after that mostly with research-and-development money from a series of investors. Until the Stewarts moved to a more modest place, in Harrison, when Alice was about thirteen, they held on to the big house only by renting it during the summer while Alice went to a sleep-away camp, chosen partly for its reasonable fees, and her parents lived in a sublet apartment.