Living Room Read Online Free PDF Page B

hand, yellowed and browned, dropped in the wind, they presaged to Hartman a sad time of year, a winter to be humped like a load on the back.
    But it now being another May God had let him live to see, he walked with the stride of a younger man, his eyes ravenous for the daffodils and the early tulips and the grass green and level from the first cutting, and it occurred to him that he ought to have the talk with Shirley that he had been having off and on in his own head.
    “Shirley, it’s a beautiful day. I hope you’re not going to get angry at me.”
    He felt disarmed by her laughter. Maybe another time?
    Finding courage he said, “When you were born, I wanted you to be a boy.” He waited for an adverse reaction. None came. “You understand,” he continued, “I come from a former time. For a person like me, to wish for a boy is natural.”
    “Yes, Pop.”
    “I want you to be what you want to be. I don’t want to interfere.”
    “What are you trying to say, Pop?”
    “Oh,” he sighed, “when you write papers for school, you say things in just the right way. For me, even talk is so hard to be exact in.”
    “Try.”
    He looked into her face. “I’m glad you’re a girl.”
    She waited.
    “You’re too pretty to be a boy.”
    Shirley laughed.
    “In my day girls grew up mainly to get married as fast as possible. I don’t want you to feel that is what you should do to please me. Of course I would be happier, especially God forbid I should die, to know that you had someone to take care of you.”
    “Like you?”
    “No, no, better. I didn’t do too good a job, a father, alone.”
    “Pop,” she said, taking his hands, “you did fine. I can take care of myself.”
    “You mean you’re not going to get married?!”
    “Pop, I want to find myself before I find someone else, if you know what I mean.”
    “Would you like me to buy you an ice cream?”
    “Pop, I didn’t mean to upset you.”
    “How is an ice cream upset?”
    “When you get nervous about me, you always buy me an ice cream.”
    “I swear on your mother’s grave I’m not upset. Believe me, I want to see things from your way. But please try a minute to see things from mine.” He clasped his own hands hard. “I’m past fifty. My own mother and father were dead by fifty. I have responsibilities. If I should die—”
    “Pop, is it possible for a Jew to think ‘If I should live’ instead of ‘If I should die’?”
    “Just like Rosalie, you make me feel that I’m the child.”
    “You’re not, Pop. But neither am I.”
    Philip Hartman looked into his fifteen-year-old daughter’s intelligent eyes, looked at how tall she was, nearly his height and not yet full grown, the shape of a woman now, and knew he was making a discovery he should have made before.
    Finally he said, “If only Rosalie were alive to see.”
    *
    Philip Hartman’s daughter, at age sixteen, was one of fifteen hundred students in her school who were requested to take a test administered by a team of psychologists from the Board of Education. As part of the effort of the time to eliminate surprise from the world, it was a new kind of I.Q. test, all the students were told, which graded not only relative aptitude and intelligence but the possibility of realizing the indicated potential. Shirley scored highest in her class of thirty-two. Her teacher, Mrs. Calcagni, who Shirley characterized to her friends as an “Uncle Tom in womanface,” hated girls who, in her view, “tried to be smarter than everybody,” which meant smarter than the boys, too. When Shirley’s test score proved to be eleven percent higher than the next highest, Mrs. Calcagni accused Shirley of having cheated. Shirley was retested alone in an empty office adjoining the principal’s office, watched over by a monitor, and scored four points higher than she had previously simply by being familiar with the test. This put her at the top not just of her class but of the entire school.
    When Philip