Other Men's Daughters Read Free

breakfast on a stool at Zum-Zum’s—toasted bacon rolls with strawberry jam, fresh orange juice, a terrific tonic after the winter of frozen cylinders out of the Minute Maid cans, two cups of coffee and the New York Times —lunch at the Faculty Club, sometimes with a colleague, and dinner at the Wirthaus where he had the same table every evening, just behind a little Korean gourmand who ate nine-course dinners. (“Where do they go?” he wondered.) The first week, he hit on an excellent golden Graves ; he drank most of the bottle every night. The waitress pointed him to the evening’s delicacies. It wasn’t unpleasant. Bolstered by thousands of meals with family and friends, he did not have the bachelor shame of solitary eating, and he could do without talk.
    After dinner, he walked the jammed, astonishing summer streets, then home, and in the silent house, watched television movies or read books of a sort he hadn’t read since his literary youth, Dante, Montaigne, Shakespeare.
    Longtime skeptic living in a sea of skepticism, Merriwether needed something more that summer. The Cambridge heat, swampy, intimate, almost visible, drained that energy which, most summers here, drove him down to the boathouse for a shell, or to running in sweatpants along the river. Now and then he did play tennis with his colleague Davison, but that energy which for years he’d at least partly dispensed in a thousand competitive games (even solitary rowing was competitive for him: he rowed against clogged arteries, against the clock), turned inward. “About time,” he thought. “But where to take it?”
    Day after day that summer, the Times obituary pages contained news of deaths which gripped his heart. The deaths were seldom of people he knew personally, yet they touched him deeply. People who were fixed stars in his cosmos of expectation were suddenly no more. Day after day another: Walter Gropius (whom he had passed for years in the Yard); Red Rolfe, his boyhood baseball hero; Senator Dirksen; Ho Chi Minh; the other Bauhaus great, Mies van der Rohe. There were many Harvard deaths: Woody Woodworth (from whom he’d taken a course in The Sonata), Lem Cleveland, Bob McCloskey. Almost every obituary section contained such loss for him. It was as if he were receiving piecemeal a devastating message.
    Against this drear subtraction surged the foam of the street, the—what could he call them?—kids, the young, girls, boys, the hippies, freaks, heads, the beauties and transfigured uglies from all over the world in every state of dress and undress. There were tonsured Buddhists in saffron saris, tinkling bells and chanting “Hare Krishna” on quarter-hour strolls through crowds; blonde Cherokees, fringed, feathered, dyed, pounding drums and playing flutes in Forbes Plaza; there were pubescent Mennonites, Shakers in flat hats and long dresses, Bowery bums, angelic longshoremen, Georgia belles in Leghorn hats, Hells Angels in leather vests. Thicker than bugs in a cornfield, the International Young, bare-chested, bare-legged, barefoot, walking, dragging, dancing, jogging, lying against the Coop pillars, sitting on the benches of the Mass Transit island while curly-headed Lenins hawked “underground” newspapers. A living museum of the self-possessed dispossessed.
    â€œWhat is it all about?” puzzled Dr. Merriwether, walking, absorbed, toward class, lab, home, or Holyoke Center. What is this terrific need to look special? Is it so hard to be anyone now? Why so much noise? Why were the demands on others so huge? Was it that there was so much expression in the world that one had to go further and further out to even think of oneself as a person? How he wished, how he wished.
    Poor Merriwether could not even get so simple a need to his lips—such simple physiology—he just drew them tight and peered in the bookstores at the bare-legged girls, stared at the flopping