Passion and Affect by Laurie Colwin

Author:Laurie Colwin
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781497673731
Publisher: Open Road Media

the man who jumped into the water

DURING THE ONLY SERIOUSLY bad year of his business, Charlie Hartz bought the old Berkely house and installed himself, Flossie his wife, and their child Minna in it. It was an old, enormous house, built in the early 1900’s by a local millionaire. It had gray gables, five fireplaces, oak paneling, leaded-glass windows, and fifteen rooms for the three of them to live in. At the time my parents met them, they were cramped into four of the fifteen rooms while plasterers, carpenters, electricians, and painters brought the house down and put it back together.

The next year, when his business was in better order and the house was complete, Charlie spent six months designing a swimming pool, and during the winter, when everyone said he was crazy to begin digging, Charlie and a crew of five dug, laid, and finished it. It was a bit shorter than a full-size Olympic pool, and it was very deep, except for a couple of yards at one end shallow enough for Minna, who was six, to learn how to swim, and for Flossie’s friends—the “bosom dippers,” Charlie called them—who were not up for serious swimming. It was said to be a miracle of construction, because of the angle and the slope and the fact that it was built between small swells in the ground. It had a bronze frog on one side that spat water, and the border and sides were inlaid with blue-and-white Mexican tiles with flowers on them, and that was miracle enough for me. After serious consultation with the diving pro at the country club, Charlie put in a low board and a high dive that was slightly lower than a standard high jump.

My sister and Charlie spent hours diving, to the horror of Flossie and my mother, who thought that constant diving would do something to their hearing and sinuses. My sister was the better diver. She dove like some sleek bird—or the way diving might be done in an ideal water world. Charlie was forty-two at the time, and getting vaguely soft, and he dove with a solemn clumsiness. He was very determined about it. They had a general competition to see who could do the fanciest dives, and a personal competition in which one would stand on the high board and one on the low. The object of this game was to see if they could hit the water at the same time. One of them would call out the name of a dive, and they would have to correct for the difference in height and spring. This amused them endlessly. My sister was twenty-one at the time, and sullen. Except for her beau, Willis, who was clerking for the D.A., Charlie Hartz was one of the few people she liked. Since I had just turned seventeen, we didn’t have much to say to each other, and since neither of us had quite stopped battling our parents, we had nothing much to say to them.

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