After my husband left me — you did not know that we are separated, and thought that perhaps I was a widow, or even that I went behind my husband’s back, that otherwise I could not possibly have “taken up,” to the limited extent that I did “take up” with your father, but there, I think, you underrate your father, or underrate me — I found Dad’s sympathy and understanding immensely important, whatever that sympathy and understanding may on his part have been inspired by. (I do not impute his motives. If Harris Towers is suspicious, I at least am not. Let that much be said for me.) There are no dirty old men, only lonely and frightened ones. As there are lonely women. (And lonely sons?) But I had not meant to impose my thoughts on you so abruptly and formidably. My pen, I fear, carries me away.
I had meant to talk to you. But your position, as lifeguard, intimidated me. What would it have looked like? A woman. A young lifeguard? I’d have been better off, if that was in my mind, at the Oak Street Beach, though I would, let’s face it, have had stiffer competition at the Oak Street Beach than at Harris Towers. All the more reason to avoid you here. For these arguments would have been the first ones made by my — our — good neighbors. That’s why I think it a good thing that this Indian Summer of ours must soon end. (Despite the fact that I personally enjoy hot weather and always have. I am one of those who would rather burn than freeze.) You will be able to return to your studies, and I will be able to be your friend on a more ladylike scale — befitting our ages. (I know I’m older, forty-four to your thirty-seven, but there is, when you come right down to it, a less telling difference in our ages — yours and mine — than there was in mine and Dad’s.) So I am glad, as I say, that the season must end, that even now cold air is moving down from Canada, that there’s snow in the Rockies, that passes in the western mountains are already closed. It will be our turn soon — I mean Chicago’s — and when this heat is broken, then perhaps…
Though that’s selfish. When I think of the many old people here and realize that for some of them it may be the last warmth they will ever know — save for fevers, save for deceptive flushes — I must, in all frankness, pull in my own desires somewhat, abate my wishes. Yet one cannot live with such premises, can one? One must neither gloat over one’s food nor pretend an abstract sorrow that it is not in someone else’s mouth. I have never forced dinners down my child’s mouth by telling her that the starving children of Europe would be grateful to have such food. In that respect, at least, I am no “Jewish Mother.” Which, incidentally, brings me around to a question I have been meaning to ask you since we first met. Have you read Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth? If not, it is highly readable and I strongly recommend it to you. The chances are, however, that you have already read it. My feeling is that while it is very funny, Sophie really rather spoils the book. I do not deny for a moment that such persons exist, though in all probability they exist in no greater numbers than stingy Scotchmen or stupid Polacks. Yet even if they existed en masse their thinking is so superficial that surely no work in which they play so central a role can be really important. Characters should be profound. At least that’s my feeling. I don’t recall seeing this point made in any of the reviews I read, though perhaps in the more learned journals some critics have already said the same thing. If you know of such viewpoints I wish you would let me know about them as it is always a pleasure to see one’s own ideas confirmed and expressed more articulately than one can quite manage oneself. Still, I may be all wet about this. A film I enjoyed and can heartily recommend is Mike Nichols’ Jules Feiffer’s “Carnal Knowledge.” There the characters are all Portnoys — though without their Sophies — who seem hung up in the same way that Alexander was, yet I laughed and laughed it rang so true. Men are sometimes such babies. (How odd it is that “Babe” should be exactly the term used by certain kinds of men when referring to their women!) I was in any event very pleased to see such a strong film from Nichols after his disappointing “Catch-22.”
Do let me know what you think of some of my opinions as I am anxious to have your views on these matters.
Very truly yours,
Evelyn
P.S. I have been looking high and low for the key to Dad’s — your — apartment. So far I have not had much luck, but something has just occurred to me about where I may have left it, and I am pretty certain I will soon be able to lay my hands on it.
She has it, Preminger thought; she has the key. She’s only waiting to see how I respond to her letter. He would have called her up at once or gone down the hall and knocked on her door, but slow and easy does it, he cautioned himself. He didn’t want to frighten her. He’d play it her way. He would say that he quite understood, that he had guessed her feelings and for just such reasons as she had elucidated in her letter he had held back and not made any overtures to her at the swimming pool, that he had the same reservations she had about Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth and that while he too had enjoyed “Carnal Knowledge,” she made a mistake if she thought that all men were like that. Some were capable of quite mature relationships. He liked to think that he was one. If she did happen to find the key she must be in no hurry to get it back to him. There was no reason for her to try to send it through the mails. She could, if she liked, bring it over at her convenience. She knew his hours at the pool. Otherwise he was always in, rarely out. He had not known her husband had left her. That was a shock. He couldn’t understand a man who could be that thoughtless with a woman as obviously thoughtful and superior as herself.
He wrote all this out very carefully, making several drafts before he was satisfied, then went to the phone and dictated it to Western Union.
In the summer’s last days the heat lost its nerve and the temperature, like a failed expedition, began a hasty retreat down the slopes, but the South Tower pool was more crowded than ever, thick with people who had not been in it all summer and who now, in the last week it would be open, found themselves rummaging its waters and equipment, the Styrofoam kickboards, striped polo balls and outlandish toys. Last-flingers — some of them actually on vacation — who out of some deep sentimental instinct, like people who crowd aboard a train they have never ridden but which is about to be taken out of service, they squeezed their feet into rubber flippers, scurried to do one last memorable milestone lap, one final dive, kissed the snorkel, cruised on ribbed, rubber air mattresses. Yet despite this element of the frantic, their overall mood was mellow with reconciliation and detail.
Beside them at poolside, his distinguishing characteristics as their lifeguard worn thin (as on ocean voyages the initial mysteries of ship and crew diminish with custom and ultimately accommodate themselves to that democracy of voyagers, passenger and sailor both drawing near land, and it suddenly occurs to you that the deck steward also has an address and the captain hand luggage), easy now because here it is autumn and no one has drowned or been seriously in trouble (so he’d saved them after all, standing by like a peacetime army), his pith helmet and whistle nothing more now than bits of eccentric jewelry, Preminger melded into their midst, listening, hearing them, never so comfortable (unless it was driving in that limousine to his father’s funeral), nothing on his mind save their voices, monitoring their babble like a ham of the domestic, listening so hard that he was able to pick out individual conversations.