| >> |
12/29/11(Thu)00:40 No.5290387I never saw this great-uncle, but I’m supposed to look like him—with special reference to
the rather hard-boiled painting that hangs in father’s office I graduated from New Haven in
1915, just a quarter of a century after my father, and a little later I participated in that
delayed Teutonic migration known as the Great War. I enjoyed the counter-raid so
thoroughly that I came back restless. Instead of being the warm centre of the world, the
Middle West now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe—so I decided to go East and
learn the bond business. Everybody I knew was in the bond business, so I supposed it could
support one more single man. All my aunts and uncles talked it over as if they were
choosing a prep school for me, and finally said, “Why—ye—es,” with very grave, hesitant
faces. Father agreed to finance me for a year, and after various delays I came East,
permanently, I thought, in the spring of twenty-two.
The practical thing was to find rooms in the city, but it was a warm season, and I had just
left a country of wide lawns and friendly trees, so when a young man at the office suggested
that we take a house together in a commuting town, it sounded like a great idea. He found
the house, a weather-beaten cardboard bungalow at eighty a month, but at the last minute
the firm ordered him to Washington, and I went out to the country alone. I had a dog—at
least I had him for a few days until he ran away—and an old Dodge and a Finnish woman,
who made my bed and cooked breakfast and muttered Finnish wisdom to herself over the
electric stove.
It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more recently arrived than I,
stopped me on the road.
“How do you get to West Egg village?” he asked helplessly.
I told him. And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide, a pathfinder, an
original settler. He had casually conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood. |
