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

dominated by his mother and, since his father was hardly ever mentioned, it seemed reasonable to assume he hadn’t had a father in the most necessary and vital emotional sense. And, I went on, this abiding vacancy in his feeling and experience had led him, at a time when most of his contemporaries accepted the opposite view, to seek his fulfillment in a Heavenly Father.
    Before going to bed I looked out of the window. It had stopped snowing and the Drive was almost deserted except for the buses that went by from time to time. As I stood there I saw Dr. Hoffmann walking below. I recognized his posture and when he stopped to cross under the streetlight I got a glimpse of his face, but I couldn’t see him clearly enough to know what mood he might be in. Acknowledging again Dr. Hoffmann’s physical existence — there he was below me, walking alone, breathing, thinking, perhaps suffering — I became dissatisfied with the way in which I had tried to organize his personality. What good did it do me to know that he was, as they say, searching for a father? I lacked specific details of his experience and even if I had known him forever I could never have felt certain of my abstraction.
    Not long afterward I met the young man from Kentucky on the street and he was very cool to me. That was no surprise because our contempt for each other had never been violated except on that afternoon at the Hoffmanns, and that was, in his case, like a brief but violent drunkenness which he could not account for. Again we were forced to recognize the great differences in our temperament, divergencies which had manifest themselves long, long ago. He knew me, I’m sorry to say, for what I had been in college: the village atheist and Stalin fan. (He did not know I had repented about Stalin if not about God.) I had always found him unbearably tedious, but, to be truthful, I suppose I might have endured his dullness if it had not been for his piety. Now it was a relief to get back to this natural distaste for each other and I somehow felt he was more real today than he had been at the Hoffmanns. We had hardly exchanged a word before I noted that he had also repudiated Dr. Hoffmann and that his flirtation with liberalism had suffered a rude disenchantment. Strangely enough I soon began to see that the primary disappointment with Dr. Hoffmann centered around the fact that the doctor and I got along so well. I at first found this difficult to accept, but then my friend had always taken important steps under the influence of the most irrelevant prejudices. He wasn’t interested in me because I had nothing to do with his life, but I think he unconsciously demanded that Dr. Hoffmann and I should have been divided by my lack of belief in the principles which governed Dr. Hoffmann’s understanding of the world. The fact that we had remained friendly seemed to tell him more about Dr. Hoffmann than about me — and perhaps he was right.
    He said to me, “What do you talk to Dr. Hoffmann about? Religion?”
    “Religion?” I said. “We have never discussed that seriously.” I could not explain this, but it was true. “We talk mostly about politics and people.”
    “Are you still in doubt about Dr. Hoffmann’s belief in God?”
    “Certainly,” I said, “but that’s merely a private opinion.”
    My friend gave me a weak smile and departed. I felt quite angry with him, but I suppose the real truth was that we were both angry with Dr. Hoffmann. My friend and I knew where we stood with each other, but neither of us had a clear idea of Dr. Hoffmann. I was suddenly weary of researches into the problem of the doctor’s religious faith, even though I didn’t feel I had been entirely unsuccessful. There was that sad business about his mother and nothing he could say or do would alter the fact that his past and present were overcast by her ominous and insatiable shadow. Illogically perhaps, my knowledge of Dr. Hoffmann’s participation in this prevalent