Caroline's Daughters by Alice Adams Page A

evening, a small group who help in an enterprise called No Waste; these people go around to “charity events” and huge banquets and enormous private parties like this one. By prearrangement, of course, they collect as much untouched food as possible, which they then take along to one of the shelters for homeless people, or a food distribution center for people at home with AIDS. Very few people know about this enterprise, so far.)
    One of the things that plague Caroline through that very long evening is the presence of so many half- (or less than half-) remembered faces. There are so many people who look quite familiar, and it is hard to tell in what context she might conceivably have known them: is that a woman whom she used to see in the Cal-Mart, or a social acquaintance, a person with whom she exchanged dinners, possibly, a long time back, in her proper Jim McAndrew days? Caroline kept up with a few Pacific Heights friends in her later time with Ralph, but not many. And even within a city sheer geography plays a very large part in the patterns of friendship, she has thought.
    Is that very pretty white-blonde young woman in black (did no one tell her not to?) just now dancing by, quite close to Caroline’stable (so close that Caroline notes a look of sheer panic, terror on that young face)—is that someone whom Caroline has met, or perhaps bought perfume from at Macy’s, or did she see her in Julius Kahn Playground, watching babies in the sandbox, with Liza? No way to know—or is she simply a type? An Eighties blonde, too thin, in astronomically expensive clothes; lots of heavy gold jewelry.
    At the large round table to which Caroline has found her way the same condition persists, vague familiarity all around, and now this applies not only to faces but to names: the names that she hears in the rounds of introductions are quite possibly all known to her, but there again it is also quite possible that she has only read them somewhere.
    And the noise level is so high, such a din of voices and plates and silverware and music, the somewhat conflicting sounds of a small band at either end of the room—so much noise that a true conversation would be quite out of the question, even if anyone could be sure whom he or she was addressing.
    But no conversation is fine with Caroline. She is perfectly content for the moment to smile and nod, to mouth what she hopes and trusts are the appropriate inanities—and no matter if they actually are not. She is content to eat quite a lot of the surprisingly excellent food. Lord God, this party must be costing the absolute earth, thinks Caroline, as she polishes off her mounded caviar, then spoons into the salmon mousse on endive.
    But what she really likes best is the music, so marvellously sappy, so quintessentially Forties.
    When Caroline was a girl, back in very conservative New Canaan, Connecticut, her mother, Molly Blair, a young widow, either was actually under considerable social suspicion, because of her actress profession, or else simply felt that to be the case. Being “English” was somehow helpful, although there seemed to be some ambiguity as to class, an ambiguity that Molly herself, from working-class Liverpool, did nothing to clear up. But Molly felt called upon to be very proper indeed, and extremely strict with her daughter. Thus Caroline, a big blonde, very eager adolescent, was not allowed togo to any of the racier faraway places to dance, not the Glen Island Casino, which was popular with some of her wilder friends, and surely not into New York, no dancing at LaRue or at the Plaza.
    However, in nearby Katonah, a scant hour’s drive away, there was a very nice little roadhouse (are there any roadhouses, these days, Caroline wonders?) with a small live band, on weekends. And Molly Blair, somewhat misguidedly, believed that going to dance in Katonah was perfectly okay, no trouble likely there. Or perhaps it was only the appearance of