TEMPTATIONS OF DR. HOFFMANN
415
continued to go there frequently, perhaps more often than I should
have because it made me neglect my work. Whenever I came home
early, intending to stay in my room, I no sooner got settled than one
of the ladies came in to talk to me. My most frequent visitor was a
woman who wanted to tell me over and over about the fine position
she had once had in the City Hall at Akron and the dramatic way
in which she had been cheated out of it. When she started to talk I
always excused myself from listening by saying that I had an appoint–
ment with the Hoffmanns. There was no real connection between the
meaning of Dr. Hoffmann and my living among these pathetic,
broken ladies, but I found that I always saw the two conditions as
necessary to each other and I looked upon the apartment down–
stairs as a kind of repudiation of the life I was living. I fooled myself
into believing Dr. Hoffmann was happier than my isolated
acquaintances, which was ridiculous because he was only more inter–
esting and intelligent. My reason told me that the comfort of his
apartment, the presence there of more than one person, didn't make
any of his problems less painful. Symbolically he, too, had lost a fine
position in Akron through a thousand relentless treacheries, and yet
the exterior circumstances of his existence so well conformed to my
idea of all life was supposed to hold for an adult that I persisted in
thinking his household benefited by the fact that each stood in a set
position to the other-wife, husband, father, daughter, etc.-and
that they were, thereby, excluded from the kind of loneliness I saw
about me and often felt myself. Dr. Hoffmann evidently had some–
thing of the same notion because he was always saying to me, as if
to reassure me that I was welcome, "Ah, don't stay up there by
yourself." He would make a round gesture with his arm to indicate
that in his house there was a meaningful contrast to those rooms up–
stairs which were meant for single occupants.
As
the time passed Elsa became more and more ascetic and more
and more dictatorial with her friends. Often I heard her on the tele–
phone defending her belief that lipstick was the work of the devil.
She applied herself diligently to her studies, but nothing seemed to re–
lieve her unhappiness and discontent. The sad thing was that there
was no way for the tension between Elsa and her father to dissipate
itself, but an argument did occur one night that seemed to me sig–
nificant, not so much in what it decided as in the fact that Dr. Hoff–
mann appeared to me to become aware then of the complexity of
his nature and to see how it had ruled his family life.
It
was a bad night and a wet, unpleasant snow was falling out-
