They have just fallen in love. She has been crying because she is upset about her father’s shock treatment, which her mother has just written a long letter to tell her about. So far (she and Norm do not know each other very well), he finds her tears both touching and attractive. “It really upsets you, doesn’t it,” he says, and he strokes her long just-curled brown hair.
Norm is the first of a series of those very intelligent, affectionate, and mildly but interestingly evasive Jewish boys who imagine that being gentile makes Louisa stronger than their mothers (she eventually marries Michael, to whom Norman introduces her—Michael with the worst of all possible mothers); they imagine that she will protect them with her Episcopal magic.
They are in Cambridge; it is April, 1945. Norm’s room in Lowell House, at Harvard. A soft April by theCharles heightened by tremors from the war. Norm’s touch is soft. He is a thin, dark boy, in khaki pants and a crisp seersucker coat. He is 4-F because of a bad ear. He has taken off his tie, and some thin black hair shows at his neck. He wears horn-rimmed glasses. The curtains on his window are in five shades of gray, light to dark, and there are reproductions of Cézanne, Dufy, and Klee on his walls. He is studying architecture at the School of Design. He is right; the idea of her father having shock treatment upsets Louisa very much, although she is not sure what electric shock is.
And she is not sure why she is so upset; she would have said that she did not like her father, Jack, who owns vast acres of tobacco fields, who drinks too much and makes loud awful jokes about Jews and Negroes and Yankees. She does not remember liking him at all since she was very young and he taught her to swim, one summer at Virginia Beach, before they built the pool at home. She wonders if it is an idea, the idea called Father, that moves her to tears. (She does not like her mother much, either, not yet—poor languid Caroline.)
She has stopped crying and she and Norm begin to kiss. His mouth tastes of tobacco.
Norm believes that Louisa is what she presents herself as: a pretty, tall girl, walking across the Yard in loafers and white athletic socks, a pleated gray flannel skirt and a large pink sweater, pearls—a girl who laughs a lot, who knows a lot of people and says “Hi” as she walks from Widener to Emerson Hall, where he is waiting before the class on the English lyric, 4-B. He does not know that she is really in love with the professor, himself a poet, a tall blond man in very English clothes, an English voice. The professor reminds Louisa a great deal of her father’s psychiatrist, Kenneth Mills, a great family friend.
One night (also at Virginia Beach) Louisa went swimming alone with the psychiatrist. (Who on earth allowedthat? A nubile eighteen-year-old girl and a forty-one-year-old thickening man.) And in the hot black night, on the hard sand, she revealed to him (since he was a psychiatrist) what was ruining her with guilt and confusion: she had been making love (is that the word she used?—no matter) with a young doctor in Boston, an intern at Mass. General, whom she thinks does not really like her very much, certainly is not in love with her. With that confession she and the doctor fell upon each other wildly. Their passion was not consummated, so to speak, that night—in fact, not until much later (during, in fact, her love affair with Norm Goldman), when he (the psychiatrist) came to Boston and in his room at the Ritz there was a violent hurried collision of their flesh, if anyone calls that a consummation—hurried because he expected his wife back from shopping, and she did come back, just after his zipping up and Louisa’s smoothing down of clothes. The wife and Louisa never liked each other, but they were strongly linked as enemies. “Hey, there, Louisa, you’re looking mighty pretty. You young girls are so cute without any lipstick. I could never get away with
Bill Pronzini, Barry N. Malzberg