Sonya Rudikoff
A BAROQUE AFFAIR
...
je
Sfay
mes perfidies.
-Phedre
Lucy knew all about him even before they met, but he
never told her anything to equal that first impression, so we might
begin there.
Donald Craven was a writer, an old friend of Professor Plaut's.
Lucy Doob met him at the Plauts' one night during her sophomore
year, when he came up from New York to lecture on the Baroque.
It was the only thing that interested
him,
he informed her.
It
ex–
plained his passion for Italy, where one found the greatest Baroque
of all. Mr. Craven assured Miss Doob that the best life was possible
only in a place of mad excrescence, and baldaquins and coffered
ceilings-if life were possible at all. Boston, for example, horrified
the sensibility. Lucy had always wondered why. Boston, Mr. Craven
said, was refined beyond the point of civilization. Lucy was quite
impressed to learn this. Further, she learned that an appreciation for
the Baroque must consort with a hatred for New England, and for
the neat, frigid, inauthentic eighteenth-century buildings of the col–
lege that was paying his expenses for a week end of lectures.
That night, in the Plauts' living room, he insisted on making his
own drink. Everyone else had whisky and soda, but Donald Craven
kept his own ingredients on a little table near his chair:
gin
and water,
which reminded
him
of growing up during Prohibition. He said that
was the only thing worth drinking. Lucy Doob asked him why he
didn't try syllabub, which was equally Baroque, and his interest in
her started from that.
The Plauts took no responsibility for any friendships inaugurated
in their living room, so they neither encouraged nor dissuaded Lucy
when this man wanted to walk her back to her room. Although the
Plauts were still interested in his ideas, they had known Craven long
