forbearing man asked, setting a box of Kleenex discreetly before me on the desk, could I see that this showed my father had spent two hundred thousand dollars in the last year?
At the sight of the Kleenex I, who always tried to do as expected, began to cry.
âHas there been trouble? An illness maybe ⦠orâ¦?â Was there some other reason my father couldnât have spared a bit for my tuition? He looked at me with bafflement and concern. He was a ruddy WASP in corduroy trousers, whose handshake and ringing voice had come down to him through generations of wealth and confidenceâsuch blessings can cramp a manâs imagination. I went over the possible answers: Teddy had climbed up the ladder-back rocking chair, and when it started to tip, had clung to the television set, which came over on top of him. He needed twenty-two stitches. (Why does one boast of oneâs sutures? But one does.) The white pine that had towered beside the house, which Pop had been meaning to cut down, had come down of its own accord during an ice storm, smashing out the whole bedroom window. Days later Ma found a perfect birdâs nest on her dresser top among the scarves. And the demand for ping-pong balls was not what they had expected, but Pop insisted sales would âbounce back.â
That was the important thing, after allâto meet the vicissitudes with a smile. The sob that shook me arose from depths unfathomable. We were poor, poor, I insistedâmy mother cooked on a single burner because mice had taken over the rest of the stove, Sylvie did without orthodonture though her teeth were crowded into her face so that, in just the moment of perfect delight when a woman is most beautiful, she seemed to turn into a vampire. After all, it wasnât as if I were an only child; the others needed thingsâ shoes , for instance. A struggling ping-pong ball company absorbs cash like a sponge, everyone knew that. My God, if losing two hundred thousand dollars in a year didnât impoverish a family, what on earth would? Did he really think it was so important that I have the opportunity to explicate Sextonâs âBallad of the Lonely Masturbatorâ that I should take the bread out of childrenâs mouths?
He sighed, he checked the clock, he began again.
*Â Â Â *Â Â Â *
â IT IS, in fact, a lot more sensible for you to study âThe Ballad of the Lonely Masturbatorâ than for you to give up and go home,â Philippa said.
âWe canât afford this. They need me there.â
âWater safety!â she said.
âExcuse me?â
âWater safety, ever studied it? What do you do when someone is drowning? Or, no, what would you do if you saw a number of people, all drowning together in the middle of a lake?â
âSit on the bank reading âThe Ballad of the Lonely Masturbatorâ?â
âWell, better that than jumping in to join them!â she said. âThey are drowning in American anti-intellectualism!â
âGod, I thought it was debt.â
âSame, same!â she said. âYou could get a student loan. You should go forward, Beatrice.
âYou should not go home. If you want to understand the disintegration of the WASP tradition, youâd do better to read Robert Lowell.â
She was my thunderbolt; I loved to watch her teaching, her eyes darting as if thoughts were pinging back and forth in her head like badminton birdies, while she lit each cigarette from the last until there were too many birdies, and too many cigarettes, in play, and she blinked and shook the head to clear it, and rapped her pointer on the blackboard and asked, âMiss Wolfe, may we assume your full attention is focused on the text?â
It was, it was! âOkay,â I said, and rushed to the library to get Life Studies , and to the bank to get a loan.
*Â Â Â *Â Â Â *
IâD STARTED sleeping in Sidâs bed, since he was