The offer for a full fellowship did come, however, from the University of Pennsylvania, where Polly was to be a student too. There was also a fellowship from the graduate school of the University of Chicago. To Polly’s astonishment—and somewhat even to my own—I hardened my heart and took the one from Chicago.
The summer after graduation we met one day to have lunch in New York and ended up arguing in Penn Station, where finally I told her the truth—and with about as much finesse as I’d displayed attacking the Bucknellian: I was passionately involved with another girl, whom I had met at a Newark day camp where I was working till I left for Chicago. I saw Polly again just once, two years later—with Jeffrey Lindquist, her husband-to-be, a good-looking, gentlemanly geology professor from Penn—while we were all coincidentally visiting the Maurers up in Maine. She married Jeffrey the next year, and eventually Paula Lindquist became a professor of French at New York University. She was forty-seven when she died of cancer, in 1979, only a few months after I had been back to Bucknell to receive an honorary degree. During my two days in Lewisburg—where I stayed with Emeritus Professor Mildred Martin, who, for the processional march, accompanied me to the platform in her academic robes—I walked over to Mrs. Nellenback’s to look at those porch windows leading to my old first-floor room. Needless to say, they were fewer and smaller than I’d remembered. It could never have been easy, in any way, getting in and out of them.
Girl of My Dreams
I’d noticed her long before that evening in Chicago when I introduced myself out on the street and persuaded her to have a cup of coffee with me in Steinway’s drugstore, a university hangout only a few blocks from where she lived. Out of either shyness or savoir faire, I’d never in my life tried as blatantly to pick anybody up, which indicates not so much that fate had a hand in my trying now but that I was determined—as culturally inclined as I was psychologically resolved—to have my adventure with this woman who appeared to be the incarnation of a prototype.
In October 1956 I was not yet twenty-four, the Army was behind me, and my second published short story had been plucked from a tiny literary magazine and selected for Martha Foley’s Best American Short Stories of 1956. I was an instructor (as well as a Ph.D. candidate) at the University of Chicago, I was sporting a tan glen-plaid Brooks Brothers University Shop suit that I’d bought with Army separation pay in order to meet my college composition classes, and, having just come from a cocktail party at the Quadrangle Club for new faculty members, I had some four or five ounces of bourbon enkindling my flame. Roaring with confidence, then, and feeling absolutely free (“… they were drunken, young, and twenty … and they knew that they could never die.” T. Wolfe), I corralled her in the doorway of Woodworth’s bookstore and said something like, “But you must have a cup of coffee with me—I know all about you.” “Do you? What’s there to know?” “You used to be a waitress in Gordon’s.” Gordon’s was another university hangout, a restaurant just next door to Woodworth’s. “Was I?” she replied. “You have two small children.” “Do I?” “You come from Michigan.” “And how do you know that?” “I asked. One day at Gordon’s I saw your children with you. A little boy and a girl. About eight and six.” “And just why have you bothered to remember all this?” “You seemed young to have those kids. I asked somebody and they told me you were divorced. They told me you were once an undergraduate here.” “Not long enough for it to matter.” “They told me your name. Josie. I came here as a graduate student in ’54,” I told her—“I used to have lunch at Gordon’s. You waited on me and my friends.” “I’m afraid I don’t have that good a memory,” she said. “I
The summer after graduation we met one day to have lunch in New York and ended up arguing in Penn Station, where finally I told her the truth—and with about as much finesse as I’d displayed attacking the Bucknellian: I was passionately involved with another girl, whom I had met at a Newark day camp where I was working till I left for Chicago. I saw Polly again just once, two years later—with Jeffrey Lindquist, her husband-to-be, a good-looking, gentlemanly geology professor from Penn—while we were all coincidentally visiting the Maurers up in Maine. She married Jeffrey the next year, and eventually Paula Lindquist became a professor of French at New York University. She was forty-seven when she died of cancer, in 1979, only a few months after I had been back to Bucknell to receive an honorary degree. During my two days in Lewisburg—where I stayed with Emeritus Professor Mildred Martin, who, for the processional march, accompanied me to the platform in her academic robes—I walked over to Mrs. Nellenback’s to look at those porch windows leading to my old first-floor room. Needless to say, they were fewer and smaller than I’d remembered. It could never have been easy, in any way, getting in and out of them.
Girl of My Dreams
I’d noticed her long before that evening in Chicago when I introduced myself out on the street and persuaded her to have a cup of coffee with me in Steinway’s drugstore, a university hangout only a few blocks from where she lived. Out of either shyness or savoir faire, I’d never in my life tried as blatantly to pick anybody up, which indicates not so much that fate had a hand in my trying now but that I was determined—as culturally inclined as I was psychologically resolved—to have my adventure with this woman who appeared to be the incarnation of a prototype.
In October 1956 I was not yet twenty-four, the Army was behind me, and my second published short story had been plucked from a tiny literary magazine and selected for Martha Foley’s Best American Short Stories of 1956. I was an instructor (as well as a Ph.D. candidate) at the University of Chicago, I was sporting a tan glen-plaid Brooks Brothers University Shop suit that I’d bought with Army separation pay in order to meet my college composition classes, and, having just come from a cocktail party at the Quadrangle Club for new faculty members, I had some four or five ounces of bourbon enkindling my flame. Roaring with confidence, then, and feeling absolutely free (“… they were drunken, young, and twenty … and they knew that they could never die.” T. Wolfe), I corralled her in the doorway of Woodworth’s bookstore and said something like, “But you must have a cup of coffee with me—I know all about you.” “Do you? What’s there to know?” “You used to be a waitress in Gordon’s.” Gordon’s was another university hangout, a restaurant just next door to Woodworth’s. “Was I?” she replied. “You have two small children.” “Do I?” “You come from Michigan.” “And how do you know that?” “I asked. One day at Gordon’s I saw your children with you. A little boy and a girl. About eight and six.” “And just why have you bothered to remember all this?” “You seemed young to have those kids. I asked somebody and they told me you were divorced. They told me you were once an undergraduate here.” “Not long enough for it to matter.” “They told me your name. Josie. I came here as a graduate student in ’54,” I told her—“I used to have lunch at Gordon’s. You waited on me and my friends.” “I’m afraid I don’t have that good a memory,” she said. “I
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