678
THALIA SELZ
I was twelve. No one told me much of anything I wanted .to
know. My father drove Joshua to the hospital and returned, silent
with gloom, to his law books. I hung about his study door. Back
and forth. Aimlessly pawing the threshold.
"Whatever-why-what do you think . . .?"
I couldn't get it out, but suddenly he shouted,
"Joshua was too damn weak, that's all! The race is to the
swift, the strong, the sonuvvabitching pigs who never even take
their brass knuckles off in the bathtub.
H~was--too-goddamÂ
weak,
for Christ's sake, Daphne! Now will you leave me alone and
get the hell out?"
I got: embarrassed, frightened, appalled by his tears. But
shamefacedly thanking the family gods that we were never, any of
us, really, in Joshua's way at least, weak.
Joshua was well-treated at the hospital. The chief resident
psychiatrist was a friend of my father's law-partner and anyhow,
he said, Joshua was one of the most amenable patients he had
ever had. Very soon we were allowed to visit
him.
I was frightened
the first time, but he took my ann and led me to a bench on the
hospital lawn where we talked pleasantly about my school work,
how they treated him, and what
books
I should bring him next
visit. When I left he called me "Betty Boop."
My mother went to see
him
tegularly once a week. How she
found time to add these visits to all the rest of her urgent scurrying,
I'll never know. My own appearances were irregular and I did not
look forward to them, but once there, with him, my arOO.ety
drained away and I was almost as happy as I had been watching
him work in the basement. I no longer believed I loved him;
in
a
way of course I didn't-I never had.
We talked about everything except the boxes. He said of
Vasiliki that "it was a kind of insanity even to have fallen for her."
I worked the toe of my oxford in the gravel, feeling I was
hearing something too old for me.
"Dangerously immature," he continued, like a pupil who
wants to please Teacher by giving the correct answer.
"Still ..." He paused with an expression of stunned wonder
on his face. "... what happened to me? What a dreamer I was!
What pitiful, magnificent visions they personify!"
