Youngblood Hawke by Herman Wouk

Author:Herman Wouk [Wouk, Herman]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: RosettaBooks
Published: 2018-07-15T04:00:00+00:00

5

In panic one usually does the least sensible thing. Frieda Winter was a hard woman to panic, but being found in Hawke's bed by Hawke's mother had knocked apart her self-possession, so she had insisted that Hawke bring his mother to Paul's birthday dinner. Frieda knew only one method of carrying off her life, a method that had served for many years—total bland pretense that nothing wrong was ever going on; and by instinct that was the method she seized on to join together the broken pieces of the adultery which for her had become part of her normal existence, her chief pleasure in a life of pleasure. It was a terrible mistake, and she knew it as soon as Mrs. Hawke walked into her house, but by then nothing could be done.

The Winter family was assembled in the living room, and it occurred to Hawke that this was the first time he had seen them all together except in the painting on the dining-room wall. The least real of the lot was Bennett, the oldest son, a chubby boy of twelve in the painting, and now a junior at Yale. Hawke had met him only two or three times in brief chance encounters. He was fully as tall as Hawke and seemed still to be growing; a lean broad-shouldered youngster, with his father's long jaw; dressed to the perfection of advanced collegiate taste, which at the moment leaned to stringy ties, dark suits, pink shirts with tiny collars, and oversize purplish shoes. Whether from shyness or sullenness he hardly ever spoke to Hawke. Tonight after jumping to his feet for the introduction to Mrs. Hawke he dropped on a hard chair and sat round-shouldered, wringing immense bony hands between bony knees. The fat older daughter seemed to have given up the struggle to shine, between her effulgent mother and her younger sister, who at fifteen had bloomed out with a figure like Frieda's, a sharp puckish manner, and sparkling eyes. The older one was doing the unpainted straight-haired esthete in flat shoes and thick dark stockings.

Frieda's husband pushed himself heavily out of his armchair to greet the guests. His mustache was now completely white, and the bag under his chin was a fat thick pouch sharply marked off at the jaws. The illness that had put him back on a rice diet showed in the bluish tinge of his skin. "Well, how's the wolf of Wall Street?" he said, measuring Hawke as usual with a glance of half-suppressed irony. "You seem to have come around pretty well. Frieda had you at death's door."

"He was mighty sick," Hawke's mother said. "Art needs a wife to take care of him, that's what he needs."

"Ah well, it's an old problem, Mrs. Hawke, domesticating the artist," Winter said. "Typically they don't domesticate, they shake themselves to pieces or burn themselves up with their own excess energy. The Poe and Baudelaire pattern. Of course there are also the mellow old married word-grinders, the Trollopes, the Tennysons, the Thomas Manns.

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