Caroline's Daughters by Alice Adams

with their table assignments. “Separate tables,” Caroline whispers to her husband. “What is this? Assignation time?” “Only if you’re lucky in the draw,” he whispers back.
    First, though, there is a lot of milling around in the hall. “Mingling.” Waiters pass through with trays of champagne glasses, other waiters with white-napkin-wrapped bottles, for instant refills. And white-lace-aproned maids proffer trays of hors d’oeuvres, which Caroline notes are surprisingly good.
    Everyone of course is at his or her most excessively dressed up: almost all the men in black tie (Ralph being one of the few in aplain dark business suit, that is as far as he will go: “I’m not renting a goddam uniform”). Older women wear long, extremely expensive dresses (what Caroline thinks of as Nancy Reagan dresses), with beaded or sequined tops, long swishy skirts. Long-legged young girls in pretty, short silk dresses, and high, high heels.
    Caroline is wearing red, a red silk dress from Lisbon that cost about thirty dollars, she recalls with some pleasure. But now that she is here she feels the dress to be somewhat inappropriate; she knew as she put it on that you do not wear red or black to weddings, or for that matter white—but she also thought to herself, What the hell, doesn’t anything go these days? Besides, this is not the actual wedding. She had under-estimated, though, the extreme, old-establishment conservatism of this group; stronger than any perfume is the reek of old money. But now once more Caroline thinks, What the hell? It’s really a great dress, for a woman my age I look great—or as great as possible, for me.
    And she is right, Caroline looks much better even than she thinks she does. She looks like a beautiful woman of sixty-five, or some years less, with her thick, swinging gray-blonde hair, her wide blue-green eyes and her smooth tan skin.
    From somewhere she hears band music, old music, what she believes is a Forties sound, and she thinks, Just as well I’m not seated with Ralph, I might end up having a good time in all this, and I don’t think it’s his scene at all, and he hates to dance.
    Married people should not be expected to go about so much together. Caroline had often thought this but has been unable to make any practical application of it, in any of her marriages. But it is quite unrealistic to expect two very separate, distinct and very different people to respond in similar ways to a given set of circumstances. To like the same people, the same parties. Even to want to go out together on the same given evening.
    She and Ralph seem to have struck some sort of a balance, though, which may be all you can expect? (Marriage is still in a very primitive stage of development, according to Sage, and Caroline agrees.) At this particular party, then, Ralph, who insisted that they come here, is not looking about with a scowl, while Caroline, the reluctantguest, is lured by faint strains of sentimental music, from her distant youth.
    The tables, of which there are thirty (Ralph counts), are in a long series of rooms, also marble—rooms all marble-pillared and bedecked with extraordinary flowers, down a small flight of stairs from the entrance hall. Somewhere there must also be a kitchen; in the course of things white-gloved waiters and busboys stream through, bearing trays of food (seven courses) and wines (five in all). Removing barely eaten food, on barely soiled dishes, and considerable untouched wine.
    In fact some of the “help” have a very good time with all the leftover wine, quite a few of the busboys and waiters and the maids, who are moonlighting from various restaurants, including Fiona’s. Many of them are in various sexual ways involved with each other, and they are mostly quite young, and they quite possibly have more fun in the long run than anyone present.
    (There is also in the kitchen, somewhat late that