DIANA TRILLING
351
the class. Two were as ill-informed as I, but the third was not only intelli–
gent but probably the best student in the college. Lionel had spoken of
her at home. She was also beautiful and, as I had gathered, more than a
little attracted to her instructor. She quickly guessed that I was Lionel's
wife and that I was ignorant of my subject and set about torturing me. By
the end of the evening I had vowed never again to teach.
The economic breakdown in the country was at last becoming real to
us. In the Village we had lived at the classless edge of bohemia, nibbling
at its seductions. We foolishly supposed that if we rejected the economic
authority of the society, we were immune to its dangers. Now it was be–
ing
borne in upon us that with or without our assent, we were part of the
economic and social organization and were to be spared none of its actu–
ality.
Lionel's father's fur business had always been precarious, but at its
worst he had been able to maintain some kind of footing, however slip–
pery.
Now, with the crash of the market, he was unable to meet his rent
and modest payroll; the business soon ground to a halt. My father's fate
was less predictable but no less extreme. In an expanding economy he had
taken a large bank loan to build a new wing to his factory. The market
collapsed, and his collateral became worthless. The bank took over his
business: my father was removed, and my brother was installed in his
place as head of the company. My father's dignity as he confronted the
loss
of everything he had worked for gave his ruin an added dimension of
pathos. For the time that remained to him, he and my sister lived on his
paid-up life insurance. The insurance had been meant for his children,
and it was painful for him to use it. He felt that the money was not
rightfully his. Soon he developed heart disease, and for the next three
years
he quietly waited for death.
Lionel's family had no paid-up life insurance to live on; his father had
tak.en out his insurance at an unusually late age, and it had not accumu–
lated any cash value. When I first knew Lionel's parents, before the col–
lapse of his father's business, I thought of Lionel's mother and father as
essentially timid people, eager to please. Now, in adversity, they seemed
CO
become inordinately self-willed. All our first winter on upper
Claremont Avenue, Lionel's father battled with us over his insurance.
Neither he nor we had the money with which to meet the premiums, but
he
was determined to hold on to his policies. We spent similarly futile
hours of argument about the disposition of his precious shells, the outer
pnnents of his fur-lined coats. Several dozen of them remained in his in-
1tIltory. The policies and the shells, the shells and the policies: Lionel's
idler's celebration of his two assets, as he called them, became the litany
ti
our first year uptown. When he at last yielded to our urging and con–
lalted to their sale, it was as if he had yielded on life itself He began to
