do,” I replied, and doggedly witty, doggedly clever, doggedly believing myself utterly impregnable, I got her finally to accede—I would rarely ever get her to do that again—and to walk down the block and sit with me in a booth in the window of Steinway’s. There the published young instructor presented his plumage in full, while Josie, quizzical and amused and flattered, said—in an ironic allusion to her powers to inflame—that she couldn’t figure out what I was so fervent about.
But I was fervent then about almost everything, and that evening fervent in the extreme because of those straight bourbons that I’d been drinking at the faculty-club party, where I was the university’s youngest new faculty member and arguably its happiest. If she couldn’t understand why the fervor had fastened on her it was because what I experienced at twenty-three as the power of a fascinating prototype felt to her at twenty-seven like the sum of all her impediments. The exoticism wasn’t solely in her prototypical blue-eyed blondness, though she was blue-eyed and very blond, a woman whose squarish, symmetrical face, no matter how worn down by furious combat, could still manage to look childlike and tomboyish in a woolen ski hat; it wasn’t in her prototypical gentile appearance, though she was gentile-looking in a volkisch way that recalled nothing of the breezy bearing of brainy Polly, with her sophisticated martinis and her sardonic refinement; it wasn’t in her Americanness either, though her speech and dress and manner made her a virtual ringer for the solid, energetic girl in the cheery movies about America’s heartland, a friend of Andy Hardy’s, a classmate of June Allyson’s, off to the prom in his jalopy with Carleton Carpenter. Though this hardly made her any less American, she was actually a small-town drunkard’s angry daughter, a young woman already haunted by grim sexual memories and oppressed by an inextinguishable resentment over the injustice of her origins; hampered at every turn by her earliest mistakes and driven by fearsome need to bouts of desperate deviousness, she was a more likely fair-haired heroine for the scrutiny of Ingmar Bergman than for the sunny fantasies of M-G-M.
What was exotic, then, wasn’t the prototypical embodiment of the Aryan gentile American woman—hundreds of young women no less prototypical had failed to excite my interest much at Bucknell—but, as I’d already sensed in Gordon’s restaurant back when she was still a newly divorced waitress with two small kids and I was a U of C graduate student, that she was that world’s victim, a dispossessed refugee from a sociobiological background to which my own was deemed, by both old- and new-world racial mythology, to be subservient, if not inferior. Had her father worked for the Metropolitan Life, he could have hoped to rise to be superintendent of agencies, or even dreamed of one day replacing the company president, whereas mine had deemed it necessary to risk our future in a business venture—and had the bad luck to come close to wrecking it—because the biggest financial institution in the world, the light of whose probity never failed, considered those of his religion best qualified for the lower levels of the corporate work force. Yet the fact was that her own father, a good-looking, former high school athlete named Smoky Jensen, had never been able to hold down a job successfully or give up the bottle and eventually wound up serving time for theft in a Florida jail, while my father, whose lack of education added to the handicap of his Jewish background, had by dint of his slavish energies and indestructible ambition reached a managerial rung on the Metropolitan Life hierarchy that, however insignificant in the company’s overall organizational scheme, represented a real triumph of individual will over institutional bias. It was in large part Smoky Jensen’s record as a father, a worker, a husband, and a citizen that
But I was fervent then about almost everything, and that evening fervent in the extreme because of those straight bourbons that I’d been drinking at the faculty-club party, where I was the university’s youngest new faculty member and arguably its happiest. If she couldn’t understand why the fervor had fastened on her it was because what I experienced at twenty-three as the power of a fascinating prototype felt to her at twenty-seven like the sum of all her impediments. The exoticism wasn’t solely in her prototypical blue-eyed blondness, though she was blue-eyed and very blond, a woman whose squarish, symmetrical face, no matter how worn down by furious combat, could still manage to look childlike and tomboyish in a woolen ski hat; it wasn’t in her prototypical gentile appearance, though she was gentile-looking in a volkisch way that recalled nothing of the breezy bearing of brainy Polly, with her sophisticated martinis and her sardonic refinement; it wasn’t in her Americanness either, though her speech and dress and manner made her a virtual ringer for the solid, energetic girl in the cheery movies about America’s heartland, a friend of Andy Hardy’s, a classmate of June Allyson’s, off to the prom in his jalopy with Carleton Carpenter. Though this hardly made her any less American, she was actually a small-town drunkard’s angry daughter, a young woman already haunted by grim sexual memories and oppressed by an inextinguishable resentment over the injustice of her origins; hampered at every turn by her earliest mistakes and driven by fearsome need to bouts of desperate deviousness, she was a more likely fair-haired heroine for the scrutiny of Ingmar Bergman than for the sunny fantasies of M-G-M.
What was exotic, then, wasn’t the prototypical embodiment of the Aryan gentile American woman—hundreds of young women no less prototypical had failed to excite my interest much at Bucknell—but, as I’d already sensed in Gordon’s restaurant back when she was still a newly divorced waitress with two small kids and I was a U of C graduate student, that she was that world’s victim, a dispossessed refugee from a sociobiological background to which my own was deemed, by both old- and new-world racial mythology, to be subservient, if not inferior. Had her father worked for the Metropolitan Life, he could have hoped to rise to be superintendent of agencies, or even dreamed of one day replacing the company president, whereas mine had deemed it necessary to risk our future in a business venture—and had the bad luck to come close to wrecking it—because the biggest financial institution in the world, the light of whose probity never failed, considered those of his religion best qualified for the lower levels of the corporate work force. Yet the fact was that her own father, a good-looking, former high school athlete named Smoky Jensen, had never been able to hold down a job successfully or give up the bottle and eventually wound up serving time for theft in a Florida jail, while my father, whose lack of education added to the handicap of his Jewish background, had by dint of his slavish energies and indestructible ambition reached a managerial rung on the Metropolitan Life hierarchy that, however insignificant in the company’s overall organizational scheme, represented a real triumph of individual will over institutional bias. It was in large part Smoky Jensen’s record as a father, a worker, a husband, and a citizen that
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