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

equanimity of skillful salesmen.
    “I’ll have to talk to you about that sometime,” he said. We had now reached the door of my apartment and after a few strained attempts at civility we said goodbye.
    I felt ashamed immediately because it was clearly not my duty to dissuade this boy and, furthermore, it was arrogant of me to take for granted that he and Dr. Hoffmann and the rest really didn’t have faith. I again thought of Dr. Hoffmann with his liberal magazines, his devotion to radical causes, and I couldn’t help but conclude that no matter what the man believed his source of action was the assumption that we are good or bad according to the luck of our worldly situation. I remembered his pleasant, heavy face, his generous sociability, and the singular brilliance with which he was credited. In thinking of him I realized that I had already begun to seek an explanation for his religiosity, that I was treating it as an eccentric character trait like, for instance, hypochondria. Though I had known him only a few hours, I couldn’t quite imagine him on his knees.
    It took about a month for my friendship with the Hoffmanns to become established. When I ran into them in the hall we arranged meetings and after a while I felt completely at ease in their home — so much so that I was closer to them than to anyone I knew in New York that year. It wasn’t altogether strange that our friendship developed so rapidly. Though they were involved in the ordinary social obligations attendant upon a professorship and Dr. Hoffmann was quite busy with his writings, his lectures, and his committees, they still found time for me and kept asking me back. I discovered several reasons for this and one was that Dr. Hoffmann, like many contemporary religious people, was not really happy unless he was in the company of nonbelievers. Most of his colleagues and nearly all of his students bored him. The students tended to look upon their work as vocational training and Dr. Hoffmann often made little jokes about the seminary as a place for acting lessons, since many of the boys seemed more anxious to perfect their “delivery” than to pursue religious and philosophical studies. Also, I suspected he missed participation in political movements that had urgency and he used to tell me about fistfights between the Nazi and anti-Nazi students in Germany with such nostalgia that I was rather astonished. He had been in America since 1936 and was quite a success here, but one could not fail to sense that his personality was far from fulfilled by his life. The areas of emptiness he revealed struck me so deeply that I became absorbed in his private life and often forgot the perplexing matter of his religious convictions. Indeed it was hard for me to remember that he was a believer, because he no more demonstrated, except in a professional way, that crucial difference between him and me than a lawyer can be said to indicate a highly personal sense of justice by applying himself to his cases.
    Another reason Dr. Hoffmann allowed so much of his time to be taken up by friends was that he was by nature enormously convivial. I became more and more conscious of his great need for diversion, so conscious in fact that I underestimated the other side of him until I heard one of his lectures. As a teacher he was aloof and solemn and wonderfully impressive. His lectures, like some of the sermons he gave me to read, were best when he was most mystical and theoretical. Once I told his wife that I thought his real flair for literary composition, the beautiful, wild tone that got into the expression of his thoughts, came from his reluctance to mention God in any specific sense. She made no comment upon my observation and I don’t know whether or not I understood him correctly. At first I accepted Dr. Hoffmann’s conviviality uncritically, until I began to notice there was something wrong in his relation to his wife and daughter. When I was the only outsider present I