About Alice Read Online Free

flair.
    The sight of her sends young men’s hearts askew.
    So how come she remembers World War II?
    Around that time, while we were spending the weekend at a place we had in New Jersey, Alice returned from an annual trip she made to a plant nursery and said, “Well, it’s happened.”
    â€œWhat’s happened?”
    â€œI got a speeding ticket,” she said. “It was the same cop who gave me a warning in the same spot when I went to get the plants last year.”
    â€œBut I think maybe that’s what a warning means,” I said. “If you do it again in the same place, they’re pretty much obligated to give you a ticket, even if you’re an absolute knockout.”
    She seemed not to have heard that. “I guess I’ve lost my looks,” she said.
    â€œI hear they’re taking in a lot of gay cops these days,” I said. “We’re all in favor of that, of course, but it’s bound to change the whole equation.”
    She smiled. She didn’t laugh, but she smiled.

IV
Having a family intellectual available, I can always arrange to have words like “holistic” or “heuristics” translated if it should prove absolutely necessary—if they turn up on a road sign, for instance, or on a menu or on a visa application.
    â€”Uncivil Liberties
    Sometime in the late sixties, I happened to mention to an older writer at
The New Yorker
that I showed Alice my rough drafts. He told me, in an avuncular way, that this was unwise. He pointed out that the response to a rough draft hoped for by any writer, even one who knew full well the weaknesses of the manuscript he’d just handed over, was “Brilliant! Don’t change a word!” Honest responses on a regular basis, he said, would be a strain on any marriage, and he had no doubt that honest responses were what I’d get from Alice. He was right about that: there were times when I could actually hear a sigh as she read a draft, a sign that the report was not going to be cheerful. Once, as I was leaving town for a reporting trip, I gave her the rough draft of a book I’d done on a college classmate of mine. When I returned, I found that she had written me a two- or three-page memo that made the case, in some detail, that the book would be much improved if I’d write it less as an observer and more as someone who had a lot in common with the subject. I pretty much started the book over again. When I was informed by the older writer that my marriage would profit from my being willing to forgo Alice’s help, I told him that what he’d said made a lot of sense, but that it was too late for me to take his advice. I said, “If I thought that there was any chance I could get along without it, I would.”
    It wasn’t as if I had married a biologist or a financial analyst. Alice had a particular talent for reading people’s manuscripts and offering constructive criticism; she regularly did it for friends, including one who had written a sixteen-hundred-page novel. (She suggested some cuts.) She had a great eye, and, like Mary Francis, she was better educated than her husband. She had spent a year in the graduate program in English at Yale. She had copyedited books at Random House. She taught English and composition in college for years. She had designed the content for an educational-television series about the writing process. When she felt she had something to say, she became a writer herself, often on the subject of coping with serious illness. I regularly run into people who tell me how deeply affected they were by “Of Dragons and Garden Peas,” a 1981
New England Journal of Medicine
piece by Alice that’s still used in some medical-school courses; or by a
New Yorker
piece that she wrote in 2001 about the decisions that had to be made a decade earlier after a collection of symptoms seemed to indicate a recurrence of the cancer she’d had in 1976; or