The New York Stories of Elizbeth Hardwick by Elizabeth Hardwick Read Free Book Online

changed, but I continued to go there frequently, perhaps more often than I should have because it made me neglect my work. Whenever I came home early, intending to stay in my room, I no sooner got settled than one of the ladies came in to talk to me. My most frequent visitor was a woman who wanted to tell me over and over about the fine position she had once had in the City Hall at Akron and the dramatic way in which she had been cheated out of it. When she started to talk I always excused myself from listening by saying that I had an appointment with the Hoffmanns. There was no real connection between the meaning of Dr. Hoffmann and my living among these pathetic, broken ladies, but I found that I always saw the two conditions as necessary to each other and I looked upon the apartment downstairs as a kind of repudiation of the life I was living. I fooled myself into believing Dr. Hoffmann was happier than my isolated acquaintances, which was ridiculous because he was only more interesting and intelligent. My reason told me that the comfort of his apartment, the presence there of more than one person, didn’t make any of his problems less painful. Symbolically he, too, had lost a fine position in Akron through a thousand relentless treacheries, and yet the exterior circumstances of his existence so well conformed to my idea of all life was supposed to hold for an adult that I persisted in thinking his household benefited by the fact that each stood in a set position to the other — wife, husband, father, daughter, etc. — and that they were, thereby, excluded from the kind of loneliness I saw about me and often felt myself. Dr. Hoffmann evidently had something of the same notion because he was always saying to me, as if to reassure me that I was welcome, “Ah, don’t stay up there by yourself.” He would make a round gesture with his arm to indicate that in his house there was a meaningful contrast to those rooms upstairs which were meant for single occupants.
    As the time passed Elsa became more and more ascetic and more and more dictatorial with her friends. Often I heard her on the telephone defending her belief that lipstick was the work of the devil. She applied herself diligently to her studies, but nothing seemed to relieve her unhappiness and discontent. The sad thing was that there was no way for the tension between Elsa and her father to dissipate itself, but an argument did occur one night that seemed to me significant, not so much in what it decided as in the fact that Dr. Hoffmann appeared to me to become aware then of the complexity of his nature and to see how it had ruled his family life.
    It was a bad night and a wet, unpleasant snow was falling outside. The wind was blowing furiously up Riverside Drive and New York was depressing. I had not been in the Hoffmann apartment for almost a week and I was more than a little anxious to learn how things were going there. Both the father and daughter seemed in low spirits when I entered and I could guess that Elsa was being more silent than usual and that her father was again desperate about her. He kept looking at her as if he were pleading for some unspecified favor.
    “How is Mrs. Hoffmann?” I asked, thinking of her good luck in being away from the wind and the cold.
    “Oh, she gets along as well as could be expected,” the doctor answered solemnly. “She writes that it is very cold in Germany and that she didn’t get the last package I sent her. She has always been delicate and I don’t see how she can survive the winter. Poor soul! It’s so hard on the very old and the very young.” He rubbed his hand over his forehead and sighed.
    “I’m sorry to hear about your mother, but I was really asking after your wife,” I said. Immediately I recognized my error.
    Dr. Hoffmann, with that fatal foolishness that was also his strength and nobility, had spoken in good faith and was unprepared for the ferocity with which his daughter turned upon him. Elsa