· 48 ·

ON HER FATHER’S DEATH, and in the months afterward, Alicia shed many tears, though none in public, which was in itself a kind of homage. Joe Patterson, who had grown up in a world where male surrender to the so-called softer (i.e., female) emotions was disapproved of to the extent of being impermissible, had made a point of passing along this manly code to his three daughters, with many fatherly reiterations of his favorite story, the fable about the Spartan boy so fiercely tightlipped that he had stayed silent, uttering not a sound, nary a squeak, as a stolen fox he was hiding beneath his tunic chomped away at the brave lad’s innards. Elinor, the eldest, brief star of The Miracle, once the apple of his eye, had largely escaped or ignored his tidal pull, retreating into the genteel privacies of a Greenwich, Connecticut, haute-suburban lady. Josephine and especially Alicia, however, continued hearing their father’s voice in their ears, in their heads, remaining lifelong acolytes, devoted aspirants to the Spartan ethic.

Thus in the months after Patterson’s death, Alicia did her best to soldier on, dry eyed, uncomplaining and seemingly unemotional, despite the demise of the one person who had meant most to her in life. She also appeared to shrug off, at least on the surface, her illogical but nonetheless deep tribal disappointment at being bequeathed no ownership stake in her father’s Daily News, although the sensible part of her knew that, as the News was a subsidiary of the Chicago Tribune, he had no ownership stake to give her. Similarly, and around the same time, she presented a “civilized,” matter-of-fact response to another blow, also illogical though nonetheless strongly felt, which was the reappearance of those adventurous aristocratic Koenigswarters, also taking the long way back after the war, who finally showed up at Falaise to reclaim their children: little Patrick and Janka, in fact no longer so little, or so withdrawn, who had been living all the while at Falaise, going to school, closely managed of course by Nanny Davenport but also affectionately companionable to “Aunt Alicia,” who not entirely seriously, and yet seriously enough, had led herself to think that one day she might be able to adopt them. In fact, perhaps the one exception to all this ongoing, outward display of Spartan stoicism was when her dog Dinah died, of what might be called natural causes, at which point Alicia literally collapsed in grief, as if her various layers of pain and loss were for the moment subsumed in the death of the little spaniel, whose corpus she carried down to her place in Georgia, where she buried it beneath a marble headstone, overlooking the St. Mary’s River.

On her return she wandered about the house for a few days, “like a sleepwalker or a Tennessee Williams character,” as Stan Peckham observed. She tried telling Harry that she could no longer get out of bed in the morning, let alone leave the house; but Harry was predictably unsympathetic, offering (maybe cunningly, or just obtusely) to send one of his “young men” from 120 Broadway to help out in her absence. And so back to work she went, back to the office, back into her routine: so much to do just then if you were running a newspaper in Nassau County, a newspaper whose circulation was now fast approaching one hundred thousand, as once sleepy Long Island began stirring under the impetus of what would become the great postwar building boom; and while she was about it, out of the blue, as people say, for no reason at all as she wrote Josephine, she decided to pay a much-postponed and -avoided visit to her mother back in Illinois.

—

SHE MADE THE TRIP in late July 1947. In fact sister Josephine, married young and divorced, then married again to the painter Ivan Albright was herself living in Chicago, where she’d just had her third child and was planning to spend August with her mother, out at the old family house in Libertyville. Why not a family reunion of sorts, absent of course Poppa, and Elinor, who never went anywhere and surely wouldn’t show up? Of Alice Patterson’s three daughters, Alicia had been least in touch over the years, few face-to-face meetings, occasional letter writing; unsurprisingly, after her marriage to Harry Guggenheim, such a hard pill for her father to swallow, it turned out once again that her mother, tiny comme-il-faut Alice Patterson (who nearly always took an opposite tack from her ex-husband) got on splendidly with the beautifully mannered, augustan Mr. Guggenheim, the two of them periodically exchanging letters full of elegant mutual admiration, and fabulous little presents at Christmas. Still, Alicia had not been back to the Libertyville house for nearly twenty years, when she had been Mrs. James Simpson, one of the Lake Forest country club set.

Joe Patterson as painted by his son-in-law, Josephine’s husband, the artist Ivan Albright.

Since then obviously much had changed. Originally Joe Patterson’s Libertyville property ran to almost three hundred acres, and in addition to the main house included a large working barn, numerous outbuildings, and substantial cornfields. Before the war Josephine (in her own homage to her father’s agricultural aspirations) ran a commercially successful, small pig-and-dairy operation on the farming acreage. But when she remarried and moved back to the city, the farm property had been sold off, with the result that Alice Patterson’s domain was now reduced to the big house and its immediate environs. Even so, much was familiar; those stately elms, grown much taller and in full leaf, still lined the quarter-mile driveway, connecting to the wider asphalt county road. Her mother’s once prizewinning garden, perhaps no longer prizewinning but still handsome, remained at the end of the long, grass allée (once tended so stalwartly by Mr. McGregor, and now surely by someone else), where the old lily pond, dormant and brackish, suffered as always in the summer heat, watched over by the same sculpted bronze deer. The thick trimmed hedges stood in their accustomed places, perhaps less closely manicured but all the same impressive, that European touch; while off behind a semicircle of shrubbery, lay, or perhaps languished, Poppa’s old concrete swimming pool, once such a proud statement of up-to-date modernity in the chronically behind-the-times Midwest; and might that be the same faded, green-striped canvas awning hanging above the veranda, or at least one of its descendants?

On the whole the main house looked better from the outside: its red-brick, three-story facade presented a fine Georgian face to the world; the David Adler entrance hall remained imposing with its glistening gray marble. But farther inside, all was not so bien, as Alice Patterson might have put it: The chintz on the living room furniture, whose once-fashionable chic her father had been fond of protesting by repeatedly sitting on it in his wet bathing suit, looked threadbare and badly faded; carpets were frayed and worn; the library, her father’s favorite part of the house, had the sad look of a room no one entered, dusty books all in a jumble. Worse still, the inner workings of the large house were in obvious disrepair, with evidence of leaks in the roof, brown water coughing out of rusty pipes, numerous warped and creaking floorboards, all clearly beyond the capacity of her mother’s elderly chauffeur-handyman, John, to stay abreast of; and reminiscent of an earlier time, two also elderly Swedish farm women, thinly disguised as domestics, moved thickly in and out of the rooms, attempting to take care of Josephine and her two children, plus new baby; and now Alicia.

Josephine’s children called Alice Patterson “Gaga,” and tried hard (usually in vain) to behave correctly in her small, imperial presence. Alicia called her “Mother,” and even at forty-one tried less consistently to behave correctly, conscious that as her father’s favorite daughter she was never going to gain complete approval. Soon after arriving, in one of those forced attempts to be lightly self-deprecating, when she remarked that she still didn’t know where the linen closet was in Falaise, her mother took the admission seriously, which it partly was, and pointedly observed that knowing the location of your linen closet should be “more important to a woman than working at other things” outside the home. For mutual solace, Josephine and Alicia shared the same room, with its open window, the warm air that never stirred, and often the same bed (into which the baby was periodically brought for feeding), giggling together like sisters on a sleepover, missing their father—who had been mostly absent from their childhoods and was now permanently absent—and wishing their mother might become a little easier to be around.

Then, as such things happen, with no plan, with seeming randomness, on the last weekend in August, which was also the last weekend of Alicia’s visit, her mother unknowingly set in motion a sequence of casual, commonplace events that would turn out to have a marked, indeed transformative effect on the remainder of Alicia’s life. The first was Alice Patterson’s decision to give a cocktail party at her Libertyville house; nothing too elaborate, just cocktails and tea sandwiches: a little late-summer hospitality in honor of her daughter visiting from the east, and perhaps also a signal from Alice to old friends in the area that she herself had not vanished from the earth. The second was her notion to invite Ellen Borden Stevenson and her husband, lately moved to the area, Ellen being one of the Chicago Bordens (the Borden dairy people), a contemporary of Alicia’s, both girls having made their debuts in the same year, her husband being a personable lawyer named Adlai Ewing Stevenson, from a newspaper publishing family downstate in Bloomington; then, ultimately perhaps the most consequential choice was Ellen Stevenson’s, to send Adlai and not come to the party herself.

In fact Adlai Stevenson and Alicia Patterson had known each other for years, though in that mostly offhand, abstract way of young people, ships passing in the night; when she was nineteen and he twenty-five, at one of those Scott Fitzgerald–era, Chicago winter dances, they had briefly flirted, kissed in one of the hotel corridors, then gone their separate ways, he to Princeton, a social marriage, a conventional Chicago legal career, interrupted by military service in the navy. On that late August afternoon in 1947, she was forty-one, with hints of gray in her hair and faint lines on her face; he was forty-seven, with more than a slight paunch and a balding pate. Both of them were married, each with different strains, challenges, obligations. Both of them still possessed ample quantities of, call it what you will, charisma, personal magnetism, sex appeal. Sister Josephine, who was quick to notice such things, long remembered the sight of the two of them, Alicia and Ellen Stevenson’s husband, standing in the lee of one of the hedges, both holding drinks, talking, two people at a cocktail party, herself not thinking much of anything about it. Then a while later, when she looked again, they were still there talking, the same two people, drinks, maybe a cigarette in somebody’s hand, but now she thought. There was something, you could tell there was something.

What had they been talking about so intently that Labor Day afternoon, on the lawn of the old Patterson house? When Josephine asked her sister after the party, Alicia at first replied, “I don’t know,” which struck even Alicia as so unlikely; then she said they’d been talking about politics, specifically about Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, the wartime Allied Supreme Commander, lately everybody’s favorite dark-horse candidate for the U.S. presidency, though no one yet knew which party he’d declare for. Alicia told Adlai she didn’t care on whose ticket Eisenhower campaigned, as long as he ran. Adlai strongly agreed: Eisenhower had the experience, the credentials, plus a winning smile; he couldn’t lose. Just then Alicia seemed to be the more confident of the two, the more firmly positioned: Alicia Patterson Guggenheim, just dropping in from New York and Long Island, Joe Patterson’s daughter, herself a publisher of a growing newspaper. By contrast, Stevenson self-admittedly was floundering, at a loss about what to do, about his marriage, his unsatisfying, midlevel legal career. In fact, they had apparently talked as much, or more, about Stevenson’s future as about presidential politics. He told her he was working hard to put together a consortium to buy the Chicago Daily News, hoping to get back into newspapers, say good-bye to the law; should he, shouldn’t he? For a woman such as Alicia Patterson, perpetually surrounded by know-it-all fathers, husbands, editors, pretty much all men, there was surely something appealing, novel, intriguing, in this interesting, intelligent, clearly capable man, with an engaging, almost malleable manner, seemingly so willing to listen. As she later recalled the conversation, she told him “to take the bit in his teeth,” which is what people said in the days before they could more simply urge, “Just go for it.” Long afterward Josephine would still remember the look of those two figures on her mother’s lawn that day: “Alicia wearing a silk print dress, some kind of hat, Adlai in one of those seersucker suits like all the other men, but with a bald head and a big grin, and she with her head cocked, looking up at him, as if he were tall.”