Seduced by Mrs. Robinson by Beverly Gray

Author:Beverly Gray
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2017-10-26T13:43:08+00:00

13

Untying the Knot

Sorry we won’t be able to invite you to the wedding, Benjamin, but the arrangements have been so rushed.

Ben sprints up the stairs of his rooming house, loaded down with gifts, as well as a large bouquet of white flowers. He enters his dimly lit room only to gasp in alarm. Looming large in the foreground is the ominous silhouette of a man smoking a long cigar. It’s Mr. Robinson, and he seems to view Ben’s misbehavior with his wife as a personal affront: “Do you have a special grudge against me? . . . Is there something I said that’s caused this contempt, or is it just things I stand for that you despise?”

With icy politesse, Mr. Robinson spells out the consequences of Ben’s transgression: He and his wife will be divorcing soon. Ben, completely missing the pain beneath Mr. Robinson’s words, expresses amazement. “Listen to me,” he insists. “What happened between Mrs. Robinson and me was nothing. It didn’t mean anything. We might just as well have been shaking hands.” Mr. Robinson’s voice drips with sarcasm: “Shaking hands! Well, that’s not saying much for my wife, is it?” Ben, still oblivious to the sorrows of an older generation, lays his cards on the table: “The point is—I don’t love your wife. I love your daughter, sir.”

At this latest indignity, Mr. Robinson springs to his feet and stares Ben down. His threat is palpable: “I think I can get you behind bars if you ever look at my daughter again.” Now that Elaine has been spirited out of Ben’s reach, “you’re to get her out of your filthy mind right now!” Fighting back tears of grief and anger, he adds (in a line inserted by Buck Henry to cap one of Charles Webb’s strongest scenes), “You’ll pardon me if I don’t shake hands with you.” In the doorway to Ben’s room, Mr. Robinson finally allows his voice to rise above its former careful modulation: “I think you are filth! I think you are scum! You are a degenerate!” Then he hurtles down the stairs, brushing past an eavesdropping Mr. McCleery. Under these circumstances, the landlord is hardly sympathetic to Benjamin’s desperate plea to give him change for the pay phone. (Remember those?) And so our hero races down the stairs and into the rain.

Since the start of The Graduate we’ve had the sense that Ben, living a fishbowl existence in his family home, is not truly understood by the members of his parents’ generation. He’s young, restless, and endearing, so we’re on his side. But the scene with Mr. Robinson—surely one of the film’s most poignant—reveals the extent to which Benjamin fails to recognize that his elders have legitimate emotions too. Failure to communicate is everywhere. The anguish implicit in Mr. Robinson’s fury suggests a powerful man whose carefully built domain is suddenly crumbling all around him. The old castle, it seems, is falling down. But because Ben cannot see beyond his own needs, Mr. Robinson’s words, like Paul Simon’s silent raindrops, have fallen in vain.

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