Beautiful Girl by Alice Adams

Richard, who was staring at his brother with a gaze that was at the same time stern and full of an immoderate love. Between them, recessed into half shadow, was the long-necked beautiful dark girl, who was looking at Richard as though she thought he was either marvelous or crazy. Or perhaps she herself looked crazy. In the bright flat light her collar made an odd shadow on her cheek, and her eyes were a strange shape—very narrow and long, like fish.
    Karen sighed heavily, and then sneezed from the dust. Although of German extraction she was a poor housekeeper, and did not like to be reminded of that fact, of which both the dust and the presence of that picture on an untouched shelf did remind her. Retreating from the closet, she put the picture on her husband’s dressing table, meaning to ask him about it that night. She was a big dark handsome girl, descended from successful generations of Berlin bankers; her father, the last of the line, had come to San Francisco in the Twenties, well before Hitler, and had been prominent in the founding of a local bank. Karen had already, in ten years of marriage to Roger, produced five sons, five stalwart big Washingtons who did not remember their difficult doomed Southern uncle, Uncle Richard, cartons of whose books were still unpacked in the basement.
    Karen remembered Richard very well, and she thought of him for a great deal of that day as she moved about the enormous unwieldy and expensive house on Pacific Street, bought when Richard died and they inherited his money. The house from its northern windows had mammoth views of the Bay, and the bridge, Sausalito, the hills of Marin County. That day, that March, there were threatening rain clouds, a shifting kaleidoscope of them, an infinite variety of grays.
    Karen had felt and still did feel an uncomfortable mixture of emotions in regard to Richard, one of which was certainly the guilty impatience of the healthy with the sick.Richard had been born with a defective heart, ten months after Roger’s healthy and very normal birth, and had suffered greatly during his lifetime. But beyond his irremediable physical pain he had seemed, somehow, to choose to be lonely and miserable. He lived in a strange hotel even after he got his money; he was given to isolated, hopeless love affairs, generally with crazy girls. (“Affairs with psychopaths are a marvelous substitute for intimacy,” he had been heard to say.) He only bought books and records; his clothes were impossible.
    Like many very secure and contented people, Karen tended to be somewhat unimaginative about the needs, emotional and otherwise, of those who were not content, of those who were in fact miserable. To her credit she knew this, and so she sighed as she moved incompetently about her house with the vacuum cleaner; she sighed for Richard and for her own failure to have understood or in any way to have helped him.
    Karen’s deficiencies as a housekeeper were more than made up for by her abilities as a cook, or so her greedy husband and most of their greedy friends thought. That afternoon, as heavy dark rains enshrouded the city and the Bay, Karen made a superior moussaka, which was one of Roger’s favorites. It had also been a favorite of Richard’s, and she was pleased to remember that she had at least done that for him.
    Then, just as she had finished, from upstairs she heard the youngest child begin to whimper, waking up from his nap, and she went up to get him, to bathe and dress him before the older boys all tumbled home from school.
    The maid would come at three and stay until after dinner, since Roger liked a formal evening meal.
    Karen was dressing, and lost in a long skirt that she tried to pull down over big breasts, down over her increasing thighs, when Roger came in and asked her about the picture.
    “What’s that doing out here?” “Here” was “heah”; Roger had kept his Southern voice, though less strongly than Richard had.
    Her head came out of the