THE MAN IN THE BROOKS BROTHERS SHIRT
(Continued from page 288)
out in the club car, from stupidity, but from a restless and perennially
hopeful curiosity.
Actually, she decided, it was the combination of provincialism and
adventurousness that did the trick. This man
was
the frontier, though the
American frontier had closed, she knew, forever, somewhere out in Oregon
in her father's day. Her father, when that door had shut, had remained
on the inside. In his youth, as she had learned to her surprise, from some
yellowed newspaper clippings her aunt had forgotten in an old bureau
drawer, he had been some kind of wildcat radical, full of workmen's com–
pensation laws and state ownership of utilities; but he had long ago
hardened into a corporation lawyer, Eastern style. She remembered how
once she had challenged him with those clippings, thinking to shame him
with the betrayal of ideals and how calmly he had retorted, "Things were
different then." "But you fought the
railroads,"
she had insisted. "And
now you're their lawyer.'' "You had to fight the railroads in those days,"
he had 8nswered innocently, and her aunt had put in, with her ineffable
plebeian sententiousness, .'"{our father always stands for what is right."
But she saw now that her father had honestly perceived no contradiction
between the two sets of attitudes, which was the real proof that it was not
he, so much as the times, that had changed.
Yet this man she was sitting with had somehow survived, like a lonely
dinosaur, from that former day. It was not even a ·true survival, for if he
was, as he said, forty-one, that would make him thirty years younger than
her father, and he would be barely able to recall the Golden Age of
American imperialism, to which, nevertheless, he plainly belonged. Look–
ing at him, she thought of other young empires and recalled the Roman
busts in the Metropolitan, marble faces of business men, shockingly rugged
and modern and recognizable after the smooth tranquillity of the Greeks.
Those early business men had been omnivorous, too, great readers, eaters,
travelers, collectors, and, at the beginning, provincial also, small-town
men newly admitted into world-citizenship, faintly uneasy but feeling
their oats.
In the course of this analysis she had glided all the way from aversion
to tenderness. She saw the man now as a man without a country, and felt
a desire to reinstate him. But where? The best she could do was com–
municate to him a sense of his own isolation and grandeur. She could
ensconce him in the dignity of sadness.
Meanwhile, the man had grown almost boisterously merry. It was
late afternoon; the lunch things had long ago been taken away; and the
bottle was nearly empty. Outside the flat yellow farm-land went by, com–
fortably dotted with haystacks; the drought and the cow-bones strewn over
the Dust Bowl seemed remote as a surrealist painting. Other passengers
still paused to look in at the open door on their way to the club car, but
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