had felt pale, tall, stiff, cold, unusable. His back was hairy and humpily muscular across the shoulder blades and thickly sown, as if by a curse, with moles.
With a tact more crushing than brute forbidding her parents gradually made her love grotesque and untenable. She did not know how they did it: it was as if her parents and Peter communicated through her, without her knowing what was being said, until the No came from both sides, and met beneath her ribs. That schoolgirl ache, and all those cigarettes. Her senior year at Radcliffe, it had snowed and snowed; she remembered the twittering of the bicycles pushed on the paths, the song of unbuckled galoshes, the damp scarf around her neck, the fluttering of crystals, meek as thoughts, at the tall serene windows of the Fogg. She remembered the bleached light that had filled her room each morning before she awoke to the soreness in her chest.
Ken appeared, was taller than she, wanted her, was acceptable and was accepted on all sides; similarly, nagging mathematical problems abruptly crack open. Foxy could find no fault with him, and this challenged her, touched off her stubborndefiant streak. She felt between his handsomeness and intelligence a contradiction that might develop into the convoluted humor of her Jew. Ken looked like a rich boy and worked like a poor one. From Farmington, he was the only son of a Hartford lawyer who never lost a case. Foxy came to imagine his birth as cool and painless, without a tear or outcry. Nothing puzzled him. There were unknowns but no mysteries. After her own degrading miscalculation—for this was what her first romance must have been, it ended in such a flurry of misery—Foxy sought shelter in Ken’s weatherproof rightness. She accepted gratefully his simple superiority to other people. He was better-looking, better-thinking, a better machine. He was fallible only if he took her, on the basis of the cool poise her tallness had demanded, for another of the same breed.
She was, Elizabeth Fox from Bethesda, known to herself in terms of suppressed warmth. Applaudingly her adolescent heart had watched itself tug toward stray animals, lost children, forsaken heroines, and toward the bandaged wounded perambulating around the newly built hospital, with its ugly tall rows of windows like zipped zippers. They had moved from east Washington in the spring of 1941, as the hospital was being built. Her father was a career navy man, a lieutenant commander with some knowledge of engineering and an exaggerated sense of lineage. One of his grandfathers had been a Virginia soldier; the other, a New Jersey parson. He felt himself to be a gentleman and told Foxy, when she came to him at the age of twelve inspired to be a nurse, that she was too intelligent, that she would someday go to college. At Radcliffe, looking back, she supposed that her sense of deflected tenderness dated from her father’s long absences during World War II; the accident of global war had deprived her ofthe filial transition to heterosexual relationships free of slavishness, of the expiatory humiliations she goaded Peter to inflict. Now, herself married, milder and less mathematical in her self-analyses, she wondered if the sadness, the something broken and uncompleted in her upbringing, was not older than the war and belonged to the Depression, whose shadowy air of magnificent impotence, of trolley cars and sinusitis, still haunted the official mausoleums of Washington when she visited her mother. Perhaps the trouble had merely been that her mother, though shrewd and once pretty, had not been a gentlewoman, but a Maryland grocer’s daughter.
Foxy had no sooner married than her parents had gotten divorced. Her father, his thirty years of service expired, far from retiring, took a lucrative advisory job to the shipbuilding industry, and moved to San Diego. Her mother, as if defiantly showing that she too could navigate in the waters of prosperity, remarried: a wealthy Georgetown
With a tact more crushing than brute forbidding her parents gradually made her love grotesque and untenable. She did not know how they did it: it was as if her parents and Peter communicated through her, without her knowing what was being said, until the No came from both sides, and met beneath her ribs. That schoolgirl ache, and all those cigarettes. Her senior year at Radcliffe, it had snowed and snowed; she remembered the twittering of the bicycles pushed on the paths, the song of unbuckled galoshes, the damp scarf around her neck, the fluttering of crystals, meek as thoughts, at the tall serene windows of the Fogg. She remembered the bleached light that had filled her room each morning before she awoke to the soreness in her chest.
Ken appeared, was taller than she, wanted her, was acceptable and was accepted on all sides; similarly, nagging mathematical problems abruptly crack open. Foxy could find no fault with him, and this challenged her, touched off her stubborndefiant streak. She felt between his handsomeness and intelligence a contradiction that might develop into the convoluted humor of her Jew. Ken looked like a rich boy and worked like a poor one. From Farmington, he was the only son of a Hartford lawyer who never lost a case. Foxy came to imagine his birth as cool and painless, without a tear or outcry. Nothing puzzled him. There were unknowns but no mysteries. After her own degrading miscalculation—for this was what her first romance must have been, it ended in such a flurry of misery—Foxy sought shelter in Ken’s weatherproof rightness. She accepted gratefully his simple superiority to other people. He was better-looking, better-thinking, a better machine. He was fallible only if he took her, on the basis of the cool poise her tallness had demanded, for another of the same breed.
She was, Elizabeth Fox from Bethesda, known to herself in terms of suppressed warmth. Applaudingly her adolescent heart had watched itself tug toward stray animals, lost children, forsaken heroines, and toward the bandaged wounded perambulating around the newly built hospital, with its ugly tall rows of windows like zipped zippers. They had moved from east Washington in the spring of 1941, as the hospital was being built. Her father was a career navy man, a lieutenant commander with some knowledge of engineering and an exaggerated sense of lineage. One of his grandfathers had been a Virginia soldier; the other, a New Jersey parson. He felt himself to be a gentleman and told Foxy, when she came to him at the age of twelve inspired to be a nurse, that she was too intelligent, that she would someday go to college. At Radcliffe, looking back, she supposed that her sense of deflected tenderness dated from her father’s long absences during World War II; the accident of global war had deprived her ofthe filial transition to heterosexual relationships free of slavishness, of the expiatory humiliations she goaded Peter to inflict. Now, herself married, milder and less mathematical in her self-analyses, she wondered if the sadness, the something broken and uncompleted in her upbringing, was not older than the war and belonged to the Depression, whose shadowy air of magnificent impotence, of trolley cars and sinusitis, still haunted the official mausoleums of Washington when she visited her mother. Perhaps the trouble had merely been that her mother, though shrewd and once pretty, had not been a gentlewoman, but a Maryland grocer’s daughter.
Foxy had no sooner married than her parents had gotten divorced. Her father, his thirty years of service expired, far from retiring, took a lucrative advisory job to the shipbuilding industry, and moved to San Diego. Her mother, as if defiantly showing that she too could navigate in the waters of prosperity, remarried: a wealthy Georgetown
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