The Friend of Women and Other Stories Read Online Free PDF

undemonstrative, in a shared life, each fully aware that an impassive demeanor, a tight control of temper, a habit of checking every initial impulse, need not indicate any inability to love, to hate, to admire, or even to scorn. Elias was a handsome man, of a strong lean figure, calm, evaluating gray eyes, a firm, authoritative nose, a high, pale brow, and a receding hairline. From his office in the prominent Wall Street law firm of which he was a senior but largely inactive partner, he wisely and benevolently ruled his inherited empire: the family trust company, the vast Idaho ranch, the Bernard Foundation, and the very reputable political and scholarly quarterly the
New Orange Review,
named for an early Dutch designation of New York. Elias’s goal in life, never articulated but deeply felt, was to inculcate whatever clear sense his fine mind possessed into a world sadly inclined to take the wrong turn. Through all the media available to him he tried, in every public issue, to take a rational stand.
    Sometimes his daughter thought he went too far. For example, she criticized him for accepting a trusteeship of her school, thus seemingly endorsing its stingy quota for Jewish students, or even, as she put it, endorsing any quota at all.
    â€œYou know they’re just after your money,” she pointed out in the blunt way that attended their discussions. “They want to add a top floor for a new gym, and their drive has bogged down.”
    â€œI’m aware of that, Letty, and I’m ready to help out. They need that new gym badly. And don’t forget it’s a first-class school. Otherwise I’d hardly send you there, even if your mother is an alum. Eventually that quota will fall. As you know, I’m a great one for not rushing things. Time often does the trick, and a great deal of bitterness is saved.”
    â€œLike your old theory that slavery would have died a natural death without the Civil War. But would it have?”
    â€œWasn’t saving six hundred thousand lives worth taking a chance?”
    But Letty agreed with her father’s sister, Aunt Rhoda, who criticized him for sometimes giving parties where no Jews were invited. At all her famous dinner parties, the very social Rhoda always included a respectable percentage of Jews—though neither she nor her brother ever entered a temple except for a wedding or a funeral. But Elias scoffed at his sister’s little rule as “racist.”
    Letty also felt that he was wrong in preserving his marriage to her mother, though she never voiced this. She felt strongly that each of her parents would have lived a franker and freer life apart from each other. Their extreme incompatibility was painfully evident, though her father’s behavior with his wife was irreproachably polite and overly considerate. Fanny Bernard had everything she wanted, and she had certainly seen to it that her life was as comfortable as money could make it, but she nonetheless chafed under the scorn that she rightly suspected her husband felt for her vanity and triviality. She was fond of Letty and liked to complain to her about all the little things that went wrong in her life, but she always knew that her daughter’s firm alliance with her father constituted a bond that she could never in the slightest degree weaken, and that Letty’s sympathy was based on duty and indeed on something dangerously close to pity. For Letty knew that despite her mother’s fancy clothes, fine jewels, and sparkling foreign town cars, the latter would only have been truly happy had she lived in the mauve decade with other ladies in big plumed hats and Irish lace strutting down the peacock gallery of the Waldorf-Astoria.
    Of course, Letty likewise knew that her own plainness in face, dress, and general attitude was distressing to her mother, but the latter had long given up trying to change her, and had learned, however regretfully, that she was not fated to play any