Read Online The Blazing World by Siri Hustvedt - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Siri Hustvedt
Ads: Link
friendship. I do know that the passionate girl became a passionate woman, an omnivore driven by an immense appetite for ingesting as much learning as she possibly could. That hunger never left her. There were other forces that impeded her path.
I have a photograph of us taken when we were twelve or thirteen in my parents’ apartment on West Eighty-sixth Street. It requires no effort to return to the room. The apartment’s spaces live in my bones, but I must work harder to penetrate the young strangers in the snapshot. Tall Harry stands beside short Rachel. We are wearing cotton dresses, cinched at the waist by matching belts, and saddle shoes with anklets. Harriet’s hair is pulled back in a ponytail and mine is loose. Harriet’s body is blooming; mine is just beginning to bud. Neither of us looks comfortable in front of the camera, but we have acquiesced to the command “Cheese,” and the result is two strained, if not false, expressions. When I look at the picture now, I am struck by its banality, but also by how much it hides. As a vehicle of memory, it resists inner reality. The document of an instant, it records what we looked like then. The high feeling that ran between us, the secrecy of our confidences, the pact of friendship we made—all of that is missing.
Harriet and I were “good girls,” high-achieving, cooperative students who might as well have had gold and silver stars plastered to our foreheads; but my best friend’s character had a saintly streak I lacked, a rigid moral imperative that probably came from her Protestant father. I liked Professor Burden. Remote as he was, he was never less than kind to me, and when he talked to us, I remember that the corner of one side of his mouth would often move upward in an expression of amused irony, but he rarely showed his teeth. Unlike my expansive, loudmouthed father (who had his own problems), Harriet’s father was physically awkward, prone to self-conscious pats of his daughter’s arm or quick, hard hugs that were more like speeding collisions than expressions of affection. When he stood up from a chair, he seemed to rise for a long time, and when he was finally erect, he loomed over us, a rangy, thin, pale, balding being. He liked to expound to us on philosophy and politics in a language that was often beyond our comprehension, but Harriet would listen to him rapt, as if God himself were talking. I don’t remember any self-righteousness in his speeches. He believed in tolerance and academic freedom, and, like my own parents, he railed against the monstrosity that was the Red Scare. But it is not what is said that makes us who we are. More often it is what remains unspoken. Even as a girl I felt the coiled-up tension in the man as he sat in his large chair, his long fingers curled around a martini with two olives. As far as I could tell, his thoughts were usually elsewhere.
As little children during the war, Harriet and I had lived without our fathers, and we remembered their return. My father never saw combat, but Professor Burden had been part of an intelligence unit in Europe. According to Harriet, he had never said a word to her about it, not one word. Once, when she asked him about those years, he picked up a book and began to read, as if the words had never come out of her mouth. Before he went off to war, he married, and Harriet knew that her father had alienated his family because the girl of his dreams was Jewish. It wasn’t a permanent rift; the Burdens came to nominally accept Ruth Fine and their granddaughter, but the Burdens were snobs—pure and simple. No money, but heaps of old-money notions that included an unarticulated anti-Semitism. Although Harriet’s father had rejected the pinched world of his parents, he was nevertheless its product. He worked long hours, was meticulous, dutiful, and self-punishing. Praise for his wife and daughter was meted out in small, grudging doses. I never saw him irritable or angry, but then, his
I have a photograph of us taken when we were twelve or thirteen in my parents’ apartment on West Eighty-sixth Street. It requires no effort to return to the room. The apartment’s spaces live in my bones, but I must work harder to penetrate the young strangers in the snapshot. Tall Harry stands beside short Rachel. We are wearing cotton dresses, cinched at the waist by matching belts, and saddle shoes with anklets. Harriet’s hair is pulled back in a ponytail and mine is loose. Harriet’s body is blooming; mine is just beginning to bud. Neither of us looks comfortable in front of the camera, but we have acquiesced to the command “Cheese,” and the result is two strained, if not false, expressions. When I look at the picture now, I am struck by its banality, but also by how much it hides. As a vehicle of memory, it resists inner reality. The document of an instant, it records what we looked like then. The high feeling that ran between us, the secrecy of our confidences, the pact of friendship we made—all of that is missing.
Harriet and I were “good girls,” high-achieving, cooperative students who might as well have had gold and silver stars plastered to our foreheads; but my best friend’s character had a saintly streak I lacked, a rigid moral imperative that probably came from her Protestant father. I liked Professor Burden. Remote as he was, he was never less than kind to me, and when he talked to us, I remember that the corner of one side of his mouth would often move upward in an expression of amused irony, but he rarely showed his teeth. Unlike my expansive, loudmouthed father (who had his own problems), Harriet’s father was physically awkward, prone to self-conscious pats of his daughter’s arm or quick, hard hugs that were more like speeding collisions than expressions of affection. When he stood up from a chair, he seemed to rise for a long time, and when he was finally erect, he loomed over us, a rangy, thin, pale, balding being. He liked to expound to us on philosophy and politics in a language that was often beyond our comprehension, but Harriet would listen to him rapt, as if God himself were talking. I don’t remember any self-righteousness in his speeches. He believed in tolerance and academic freedom, and, like my own parents, he railed against the monstrosity that was the Red Scare. But it is not what is said that makes us who we are. More often it is what remains unspoken. Even as a girl I felt the coiled-up tension in the man as he sat in his large chair, his long fingers curled around a martini with two olives. As far as I could tell, his thoughts were usually elsewhere.
As little children during the war, Harriet and I had lived without our fathers, and we remembered their return. My father never saw combat, but Professor Burden had been part of an intelligence unit in Europe. According to Harriet, he had never said a word to her about it, not one word. Once, when she asked him about those years, he picked up a book and began to read, as if the words had never come out of her mouth. Before he went off to war, he married, and Harriet knew that her father had alienated his family because the girl of his dreams was Jewish. It wasn’t a permanent rift; the Burdens came to nominally accept Ruth Fine and their granddaughter, but the Burdens were snobs—pure and simple. No money, but heaps of old-money notions that included an unarticulated anti-Semitism. Although Harriet’s father had rejected the pinched world of his parents, he was nevertheless its product. He worked long hours, was meticulous, dutiful, and self-punishing. Praise for his wife and daughter was meted out in small, grudging doses. I never saw him irritable or angry, but then, his
Similar Books
