Beautiful Girl by Alice Adams Page A

dress, and she bridled at the annoyance in his tone. “Why not? It was up on your top shirt shelf.” At worst, in some atavistic Germanic way, Karen became coy. “Some old girl friend you haven’t told me about?” she said.
    Roger was holding the picture, blinking at it in the harsh light from Karen’s makeup lamp, holding it closer and closer to the bulb as though he would burn it if the picture did not reveal all that he wanted to know. He was not thinking about Karen.
    “She’s beautiful,” said Karen. She came to look over his shoulder, and pressed her cheek against his arm. She knew that he loved her.
    “She was Richard’s girl. Ellen. After that.” He pointed unnecessarily at the picture. “We were celebrating his money, after he finally sold his land. That was the night he met her.”
    Karen was quiet, looking at the peculiar girl, and at Richard, whom no large sums of money had cheered, and at jolly Roger.
    “What a creepy girl,” Roger said. “Richard’s worst. She finally had to be locked up. Probably still is.”
    “Oh.” Karen shuddered.
    Roger put the picture down with a heavy sigh. He was fatter now than when it was taken; his neck was deeply creased with fat, and his big cheeks drooped.
    Then abruptly he turned around and embraced Karen with unaccustomed vigor. “What’s for dinner?” he asked. “Did I smell what I think I did?”
    •  •  •
    Because Richard had been sick so much and had been tutored, he and Roger ended by finishing high school in the same June of 1943, and that July they entered Harvard together, two Southern 4-F’s in giddy wartime Cambridge, fat Roger, who also had a punctured eardrum, and thin sick Richard. They both reacted to that scene with an immediate and violent loneliness. Together they were completely isolated from all those uniforms, from the desperately gay urgency of that war, that bright New England climate.
    Roger’s fat and Richard’s illnesses had also isolated them in childhood; they were unpopular boys who spent most of their afternoons at home, reading or devising private games. But to be isolated and unpopular in a small town where everyone knows you is also to be surrounded—if not with warmth at least with a knowledge of your history. There is always the old lady approaching on the sidewalk who says, “Aren’t you Sophie Washington’s boys? I declare, the fat one is the living spit of your grandfather.” Or the mean little girl in the corner grocery store who chants softly, “Skinny and fat, skinny and fat, I never saw two brothers like that.”
    They had too an enormous retreat from the world: that huge house full of books everywhere. And the aging pale parents, Josiah and Sophie Washington, who had been and continued to be surprised at finding themselves parents, who retreated from parenthood to long conversations about the histories of other Southern families. “It was a perfect background for eccentrics of the future,” Richard later told Ellen.
    Both Roger and Richard had chosen history as their field of concentration at Harvard. During those summer afternoons, and into the gaudy fall, while R.O.T.C. units drilled in the Yard and pretty Radcliffe girls—in sloppy sweaters and skirts, white athletic socks and loafers—lounged on the steps of Widener Library, Richard and Roger studied furiously in their ground-floor rooms in Adams House, and at nightthey went to movies. Every night a movie, in suburbs as far-lying as the subway system would carry them, until one night when the only movie they had not seen twice was
I Wanted Wings
, in Arlington. So they stayed home and for a joke read chapters of
Lee’s Lieutenants
aloud to each other, which was not one of the texts for History I but which was the only book in the room they had not already read. It had been an off-to-college present from their not very imaginative mother. In stage Southern accents they read to each other about Fredericksburg and Chickamauga, Appomattox and