To See You Again by Alice Adams

active heavy pressure on her heart, so that she closes her eyes for a moment. Then she opens them, facing it, admitting to herself: That girl in the dining room reminded me of Susanna, in Cambridge, almost thirty years ago. Not long after we were married, which of course made it worse.
      •  •  •
    What happened was this:
    In the late Forties, in Cambridge, Yvonne was viewed as a smart, attractive but not really pretty French woman. A widow? Divorced? No one knew for sure. She had heavy dark hair, a husky voice and a way of starting sentences with an “Ah!” that sounded like a tiny bark. Some people were surprised to find her married to Matthew Vann, a glamorous man, admired for having fought in Spain as well as for his great good looks, a man as distinguished as he was rich. Then a beautiful young Radcliffe girl who wanted to become a dancer, and for all anyone knew eventually became one—a golden California girl, Susanna—fell in love with Matthew, and he with her. But Yvonne wouldn’t let him go, and so nothing came of it. That was all.
    Thus went the story that circulated like a lively winter germ through the areas of Cambridge adjacent to Harvard Square, up and down Brattle Street, Linnaean, Garden Street and Massachusetts Avenue, and finally over to Hillside Place, where Yvonne and Matthew then were living.
    But that is not, exactly, how it was. It went more like this:
    “You won’t believe me, but I think a very young girl has fallen in love with me,” Matthew said to Yvonne one night, near the end of their dinner of
lapin au moutarde
, a specialty of Yvonne’s which she always thenceforward connected unpleasantly with that night, although she continued to make it from time to time. (Silly not to, really.) Then Matthew laughed, a little awkward, embarrassed. “It does seem unlikely.”
    “Not at all.” Yvonne’s tone was light, the words automatic. Her accent was still very French. “You are a most handsome man,” she said.
    “You might remember her. We met her at the Emorys’. Susanna something, from California. I’ve kept seeing her inWidener, and now she says she wants to help me with my research.” He laughed, more embarrassed yet.
    Yvonne experienced a wave of fury, which she quickly brought under control, breathing regularly and taking a small sip of wine. Of course she remembered the girl: long dark-gold hair and sunny, tawny skin; bad clothes, but not needing good clothes with that long lovely neck; a stiff, rather self-conscious dancer’s walk; lovely long hands, beautifully controlled. Anyone would fall in love with her.
    In those days, while Yvonne did her own work at the Fogg, Matthew was combining supervision of the factory he had inherited, in Waltham, with the musicologist’s career that he had chosen. The research he had mentioned was for his book on Boccherini, for which they would later spend a year in Italy. They had married after a wildly passionate affair, during which Yvonne had managed to wrest Matthew away from poor Flossie, his alcoholic first wife, now long since dead in Tennessee.
    And, thinking over the problem of Susanna, one thing that Yvonne said silently to her rival was: You can’t have him; I’ve already been through too much for Matthew. Also, in her exceptionally clearheaded way, Yvonne
knew
Matthew, in a way that violent love can sometimes preclude. She knew that he would not take Susanna to bed unless he had decided to break with Yvonne—this out of a strong and somewhat aberrant New England sense of honor, and also out of sexual shyness, unusual in so handsome, so sensual a man. Yvonne herself had had to resort to a kind of seduction by force. But a young, proud girl could not know of such tactics.
    Yvonne was right. Matthew did not have an affair with Susanna; he probably never saw her outside of Widener, except for an intense cup of coffee at Hayes-Bickford, where they were noticed together. However, Matthew suffered severely,and that was how