The New York Stories of Elizbeth Hardwick Read Online Free PDF Page A

household extraordinarily attractive. I met Dr. Hoffmann by accident. One day as I was entering the building I heard my name called and turned around to meet a young man from Kentucky who was studying at the theological seminary where Dr. Hoffmann held a post. I had known this friend was in New York but we had never made an effort to see each other because we hadn’t been compatible in Kentucky. At college he had been an overbearing and sanctimonious young man who had never distinguished himself in anything except as captain of the debating team, in which capacity he delivered energetic arguments on safe subjects. Also, he was a member of the Presbyterian church to which my family belonged and I used to get very impatient with my mother’s accounts of his brilliance in Sunday School and the fine way he represented our young people’s group at the Vacation Bible Study Conference held in North Carolina every summer. Whenever I attacked him as a fool, my mother always maintained that I didn’t like him because he wasn’t fast like the other young men in the town. It was certainly true that he wasn’t very spirited, but that was merely a matter of choice because the church was very lax on social questions and prided itself, I thought, on being too sophisticated to condemn horse racing from the pulpit and on the fact that the minister was more likely to be stirred to eloquence by Lloyd C. Douglas’s latest book than by hellfire and damnation. We left the delineation of the vivid results of enmity with God to the crude Baptists.
    I saw immediately that the young man from Kentucky hadn’t changed much, though he had become a little more self-consciously sedate. He spoke with extreme care and always seemed to be searching his mind for some epigrammatic nonsense that would relieve him of the obligation to pursue any thought beyond two sentences, unless he had engineered the conversational turn himself. His attempts at wit had always been forced and he had now become one of those boring people who tell anecdotes about historical personages. I could hardly make a statement without his interrupting to repeat what Mark Twain, Will Rogers, or G.K. Chesterton had said upon a similar subject.
    It was this friend who asked me to go to Dr. Hoffmann’s for a sort of open house which the doctor occasionally held for students. I wasn’t averse to dropping in on my neighbors, especially since the affair was very informal and it wasn’t necessary to have an invitation, but I was puzzled that my friend should be anxious to take me along. During the course of the afternoon I came to the conclusion that he had fallen under the influence of Dr. Hoffmann and wanted to let me know that he had somewhat altered his opinions on a few of the issues that had separated us in college. He seemed to go out of his way to talk loudly enough for me to hear him say he thought the Negroes were treated shamefully in the South and once he even drew me aside and stated that perhaps we weren’t so far apart now because he considered himself a Christian Socialist. But he was still as dull as ever and I suspected he was no more popular in the theological school than he had been at home.
    Because of a friend who had studied under him in Germany and who admired him extravagantly, I had read some of Dr. Hoffmann’s writings and was anxious to observe him. From the first I approached him as a rather romantic figure and I suppose I somewhat exaggerated the uniqueness of his personality. More than anything else I wondered how he could endure his students. Dr. Hoffmann had a youth of intense political activity behind him; he had been thrown out of his own country and in America had come to be considered a sort of symbolic representation of the potential virtues in the German character. His philosophy was a mixture of Christian despair — he was famous for an interpretation of original sin — and political idealism, but I could not understand either position in his