Stanley Elkin - Boswell

I notice that the paper mentions the family’s desire to omit flowers. I do not know what Edward’s favorite charity was, Mrs. Elwortham, but perhaps it would be all right if I made a contribution in Edward’s name to the Red Cross. In the meanwhile if there is anything I can do, please don’t hesitate to call on me. With all sympathy, I am…

Writing the check to the Red Cross and entering the figure on the stub was enormously satisfying to me. That’s the sort of thing I mean. Once I wrote a letter to the president of General Electric complaining about a refrigerator. I told him it wouldn’t make ice cubes and that butter melted in the tray.

Although these masquerades calmed me I saw that to continue with them would make me sick.

Late in that first year of our marriage, my son’s grandmother died. I talked my decision over with Margaret, though this was simply a courtesy. I am not one of your typical rich women’s husbands, always sneaking around the comers of his intentions. We have an understanding, Margaret and I, which is that under no circumstances am I ever to feel obligation. I consider taking things for granted part of the marriage agreement, a piece of the dowry. So a year after we were married, when I was thirty-three and he was eighteen, I sent for my son.

Whatever else may be wrong with me I am essentially a civilized man, and as such I enjoy my little scene now and then. I arranged this one with all the old style. I wired the boy a ticket on an executive flight. I sent him money and the address of the best tailor in St. Louis. A car met him at the airport. For the occasion I wore a smoking jacket for the first time in my life. “Boswell, you’re crazy,” Margaret said.

“How is that, my dear? As yet no real link has been established between smoking jackets and cancer.”

I also wore an ascot, flannel trousers, black silk hose and carpet slippers. I made Margaret put on a green taffeta dressing gown. The rustle was deafening, but we looked wonderful.

When the boy arrived I shook his hand and offered to make him a drink. “How are you, David?” I said. “Margaret, this is my son David.”

Margaret shook David’s hand. She has a strong, horsewoman’s handshake which would be advantageous to me in my business, if I had a business.

I stepped brightly to the bar whistling Noel Coward, and mixed drinks for us all. “Water, David? Soda?”

“That’s all right,” David said. “Whichever is easier.”

“Well, neither is terribly difficult, David.”

“Well, whichever is easier,” David said politely.

The problem had never occurred to me. “I think water is easier,” I said from behind the bar. “All you do is turn the tap.”

“Water is fine, thank you. I don’t want to put you to any trouble,” David said.

I wondered if my boy was capable of irony and watched him as I mixed the drinks.

I brought the drinks out with a flourish and stepped between Margaret and my son. I put my arms around their shoulders. “My big family,” I said expansively, looking from one to the other.

David smiled and raised his glass to his lips. It was the first time I had ever seen anyone swallow while smiling. Of course he was uneasy but I began to see that my son was one of those people who were constantly apologizing for their presence, treating themselves like an untidy bedroom through which a housewife reluctantly shows a guest to the toilet. Standing there before me, he seemed to be attempting to hide. There was something maidenly about him, as though he might be trying to cover his privates. David, I saw sadly, was not an ironist but a jerk. It was all my big family needed. I mean, it’s all well and good to play Noel Coward, and considered in one kind of light a sophisticated father and a dopey son have certain comic possibilities, but the fact is David was a disappointment. I had been hoping — illogically perhaps, considering my past treatment of him — for a different type, someone’s roommate at a good prep school, with trees in his past and summer places and a few years in a classy hotel off Central Park, a deep-chested lad who had been to Europe and spoke French and could get down a mountain on a pair of skis and didn’t smile when he swallowed. But the truth was David was scared stiff and looked a little Jewish.

“The trip was—” “Well, David, how was—”

“I’m sorry,” David said.

“No, no, go ahead.”

“No, please. You,” David said.

“Well, how was the trip?”

“The trip was very interesting,” David said.

“I see.”

“It was very interesting,” he said again, tentatively forceful.

I wondered what was so interesting about it. Probably the little paper sack, or the funny cellophane packages of butter and silverware, or the brochures, or the instructions for ditching at sea.

“They let you read magazines,” he said. “Fortune, U.S. News and World Report, everything. I don’t often get a chance to see those books.”

Why did things always turn out this way? There was something careless about people’s lives, something spontaneous in existence which spoiled it.

I had prepared a speech to make to David. It would have been a silly speech under the circumstances; now it was ridiculous. He wouldn’t know that, I thought, but Margaret would. I decided to give it anyway. Like most people it is impossible for me to change my plans. We are able to forgive and forget the past, able even to ignore the future, but let him beware who treads on our present.

“Now look here, David,” I began and immediately saw my mistake. Thinking I was about to reprimand him, David had jumped back. He looked guiltily down at the carpet, perhaps to see whether he had spilled any of his drink.

“No, no,” I said. “Look, David. I mean, listen, David, why don’t you sit down and relax?”

“It’s all right,” he said, “I can stand. I like to stand.”

“No, sit down,” I said.

“Well, I don’t want to make any trouble for you,” he said.

“Well, it’s not making any trouble for us if you sit down,” I said.

“If you’re sure it’s all right?” he said.

“Margaret, it’s all right if David sits down, isn’t it?”

“Just this once,” Margaret said.

David, who was wearing a sort of a grayish suit, chose a sort of grayish chair. He had a habit of putting his hands out of sight, like a nun. Once he was invisible I began again.

“What I want to say, David, is by way of apology and explanation.” At the word “apology” David moved his lips to make one. I rushed on, feeling lost and more sad in the presence of the real David than ever I had in dealing with the harmed, sensitive, prep school David of my imagination. “There’s too much talk about fathers and sons,” I said. “David, I don’t understand other people very well. The integrity of someone else’s identity is a mystery to me. I’m astonished by other people’s lives, David. For me, every human being is somehow like a man under arms, a good soldier. He seems so sure of his cause that I wonder if it ever occurs to him that he might have to die for it. What I respect in other people, I suppose, is their capacity for victory, their confidence that it will come. I know I wouldn’t want to go up against most of them. You’ve seen men. You’ve seen them coming at you down the sidewalk, taking up your space. You know what they’re like. There’s a lot of nonsense talked about human beings. If you believe it you might think the least little thing is capable of breaking people down. My God, David, that can’t be true. Do you think those guys on the executive flight are made of glass? Yet one hears every day of lives ruined by unhappy childhoods, broken homes, nervousness about the bomb, bad marriages, unrequited love. Those things are nothing, David.