A Fan's Notes by Frederick Exley

Author:Frederick Exley [Exley, Frederick]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Published: 2011-04-02T07:00:00+00:00

My father wrote a letter of appreciation to the people of Watertown from Ray Brook Sanatorium, dated January 6, 1945, and addressed to the editors of the Watertown Daily Times. On New Year’s Day six nights before, attended by much hoopla, there had been an Earl Exley Night basketball game, the proceeds of which had gone to my mother to help defray medical and other expenses. On the day he wrote the letter my father had seven months to live. Held in sway by worlds that never were, I had not gone to the game, having apprehensively hidden in a movie theater while it was being played. I hadn’t gone because rooming at Exeter with Farquarson III on the one hand and accepting charity on the other were too vexatiously incompatible. There was a moment when I might have gone, but on coming home from school one night I found my mother distraught at the news that the fund-raising committee was contemplating giving her the money as she needed it—twenty dollars here for groceries, thirty there for the doctors—that they were going to make of it something it didn’t have to be—charity with strings, generosity be grudged, kindness disfigured; and though some cooler, more sophisticated head eventually prevailed and persuaded the committee simply to turn the money over to my mother, that they were considering doing otherwise brought home to me the humiliation of charity, and I, who after all summered in quite other, more golden worlds, refused utterly to sit red-facedly in that packed gymnasium and allow people to beam their beneficence down upon me.

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