The Great Man Read Online Free PDF

her own earnestness.
    “Not bad,” Teddy said. “Just a little boring.”
    There was a brief, pointed silence. Lila nibbled her roll, then set it carefully back down on the plate. She was a large woman, but she still felt and behaved like the sylph she had once been. Her gestures were miniature, girlish; she wore a gauzy dress that reminded Teddy a little of the “frocks” they had affected when they were freshmen and sophomores at Vassar and had worshiped the campus phantom of the young Edna St. Vincent Millay. Now (more than half a century later) she wore a blue shawl and house slippers with her gauzy dress, but she still looked girlish. Tendrils of her curly pure white neck-length hair stuck to her cheeks and neck in the humidity. Her dress had long, filmy sleeves; Teddy knew she was embarrassed by her arms, which were more sagging and wrinkled than the rest of her skin, which had aged very little. She also knew that Lila took special pains to appear young whenever one of her sons was coming over with the grandchildren; Joe was coming today, her baby, her favorite. Teddy also did the same with her daughters, tried to seem young and alive when she saw them, tried to hide the signs of age as best she could; as mothers, they didn’t want their children to think of them as decrepit, needy, without the ability to help them. But Lila didn’t have to worry. At the moment, she looked like a fat, hot, beautiful baby.
    Lila Emerson had been a scholarship girl from a rural Maine family, the youngest daughter of a Presbyterian minister, thirsting to soak up every drop of academic bohemia she could absorb. She’d been instantly intrigued by her roommate, Claire St. Cloud, whose father was rich and English and whose mother had died when Claire was a small child, like the parents of certain heroines of James, Austen, and Brontë, not to mention Frances Hodgson Burnett, Lila’s favorite writer as a girl. Claire was outspoken, extremely smart without being an egghead, confident, unapologetically sexual. Lila was shy, bookish, reserved, and alight with the desire to flee her cage, itching for mischief. She had seduced Claire into being her friend by letting her glimpse hints of the person Lila might become and tempting her with the power to coax that person into being. It was Lila who had given Teddy her nickname; Teddy was half girl, half boy, Lila liked to say, so the androgynous toy-bear name suited her. In homage to Millay, Lila had sewn them both dresses in shades of fawn, ecru, pastel yellow—sleeveless for spring and long-sleeved for winter—which they’d worn with ballet slippers or Greek goddess sandals, bead necklaces or arm bracelets, depending on the season. They had danced on the lawn in them, burbled off to classes, run up the stairs of their dormitory to their room, and, a few times, stripped them off each other.
    Teddy had matter-of-factly, with frank lust, initiated these occasional trysts, and Lila was too hot with her own need for subversiveness to resist, or to pay full attention to what her body was doing. Although it wasn’t really so subversive when you thought about it; women’s schools had always been full of affairs between girls who went on to have husbands and children. But at the time, it had seemed to Lila’s puritanical New England soul like the wickedest of transgressions. And their schoolgirl sex, innocent and laughing as it was, had cemented her undying passion for Teddy. When Teddy had to leave Vassar in the winter of their sophomore year, Lila had suffered a mild nervous breakdown and almost had to take a semester off.
    “More coffee?” asked Lila.
    “But then in the end,” said Teddy, “I found him…sympathetic. I don’t know why. Maybe because he lives in Queens….”
    Lila refilled Teddy’s coffee cup. Teddy was such a reverse snob; she wasn’t going to touch that comment about Queens.
    “The funniest thing, though—I had a call two days ago from another would-be Oscar