JOYCE CAROL OATES
585
his wife Virginia glanced at each other from time to time in their
home- how effortless it is, to put on a mutual front, to deceive ob–
servers . There is even a kind of pleasure in it.
By degrees the dining room becomes over-warm, the conver–
sation too intense. Cecilia would like to return to her hotel room but
cannot bring herself to move. Her head aches again, her breasts are
sore. Had her assailant pummelled them? . . . she can't recall.
Philip and Professor Eisenach and the shrill-voiced Rudolph are
discussing the Green Party, and the international peace movement,
and the hoax of the Hitler diary ("a disgraceful episode," the Pro–
fessor says, shaking his jowls, "brilliantly hilarious," says young
Rudolph), and Aryan mythology, and the manufacture of Nazi
memorabilia in the German Democratic Republic, for export to the
West. (This too is disgraceful, and cynical, says the Professor; but
Rudolph insists that it is justified-if idiots in the F. R. G. want to
buy such trash, and kindred idiots in the United States, why not sell
it to them? "Such arrangements are only good business," Rudolph
says.) They discuss the ironies of the new dream of German unity ("a
dream acknowledged only in the West," says Hans) , and the hunger
of all people for national heroes . . . for something truly
transcendent
in which to believe....
("So long as the 'transcendent' is also good business," Rudolph
cannot help quipping, a bad little boy at his elders' table .)
Cecilia drifts off into a dream and finds herself thinking of her
mother, but her mother is dead . . . and of her father . . . but, dear
God , her father is dead also: they died within eighteen months of
each other, during the confused time of Cecilia's "engagement."
When she rouses herself to attention the atmosphere has quickened
considerably . Hans is speaking passionately, his forehead oily with
perspiration ; August is speaking, laying a hand, hard, on Rudolph's
arm, to keep him from interrupting; Professor Eisenach warns sternly
of the "Fascistoid" left; the German woman Frau Lutz reminds them,
should they require reminding, that the students of the 1920s were
far more anti-Semitic than their teachers and parents- as, she be–
lieves, Dr. Schoen himself discussed in his excellent book.
Philip graciously accepts the woman's praise. He surprises his
listeners, Cecilia included, by rather contemptuously dismissing the
peace movement: after all, he lived through the sixties in the United
States, he'd been teaching at Harvard at the time, he'd had quite
enough of "youthful idealism."
Rudolph begins to speak loudly, excitedly, waving a forefinger.
