Chapter Three
Some Secret Sorrow
The most thrilling sound for Jackson, growing up, was the shriek of train whistles in the night, and finally on January 9, 1925, he boarded a train himself and permanently (more or less) left behind that hated, beloved village where “everybody knew him and had always known him.” Within three months he was able to report that his many friends in Chicago had just given him a “perfectly wonderful” birthday, and moreover he’d gotten a job at Kroch’s—one of the largest bookstores in the world—working in the art department.1 Nothing if not personable (and vulnerable withal), Charlie was taken under the Kroch family’s wing: before long he was calling Adolph, the owner, Papa (“he’s a crotchety old bastard but an interesting and genuinely cultivated man”), and he would always feel tender toward Adolph’s sister-in-law, Lieschen, who became like a mother to him (“I truly love her”). His outward life, at least, was pleasantly regular: he enjoyed his job, and had time and energy left over to work on his fiction (along with occasional freelancing for The Chicagoan,2 a new magazine modeled after The New Yorker); Saturdays he got exercise by playing tennis in Highland Park, and afterward would eat lunch at the Murrain Hotel on the lake.
Nights seemed mostly a matter of making up for lost time—“sampling such Bohemian diversions as he could uncover,” as one journalist wrote. His old Newark friend Jack Burgess put a finer point on it, sixty-five years later, by observing that Charlie had fallen in with a group of “fairies” in Chicago; given that Burgess was able to identify (correctly) his steadiest companion, one assumes that Jackson was a little less inclined to dissemble, at least during these relatively liberated years of his life. Wasn’t that, after all, the main point of escaping to Chicago in the first place? Later, as a family man trying to remain sober and solvent, Jackson would often complain about his inability to “get outside of [him]self”—suggesting (on one level) the entombing self-consciousness of a man who’d grown up a “sissy” in the small-town America of that era. “He cultivated a technique of personality, and it worked,” Jackson wrote of Harry Harrison in A Second-Hand Life. “To all outward appearances it worked; and what else was needed beyond outward appearances? … but he knew—only he knew—that he was a prisoner.” As a connoisseur of Winesburg, Ohio, Jackson also knew that such a prisoner was apt to become warped, a “grotesque,” over time. In his early twenties, he wrote a revealing free-verse piece titled “Devil’s Dialogue,”3 in which a young man is mortified by the knowing smile of “a perfect stranger”:
“… The possible idea I could be
So shallow a mere stranger passing by
Could see in me the thing I most conceal!
—Why it should be, I’d give the world to know!
… Good Lord, I do my damnedest all the time,
And play the part so fully that I almost
Forget entirely my other self … ”
“I understand [the stranger replies],
Although I think you overdo the matter:
Such strict repression isn’t necessary.”
“It isn’t, huh?—that’s all you know about it!—
Try living in a small town for a while!”
“I know; but did you ever stop and think
What’s bound to happen if you will persist
In such subdued restraint, barring all else?
Nature is nature: you can’t change its course.”
“Why no, but you can stifle it.”
“Granted!—
But in the stifling, what else goes with it!—
All force, all power, all personality,
All spirit, fire, ambition—worse, all love!
And what is left?—a dull automaton! …
That’s what you will become, unless you change,
Unless you heed your natural desires.—
You’re still young yet, and so far this repression
Has had no serious damaging results;
But give it time—a few years more!—and see
The wreck of youth that you will have become:
At twenty-five a human mechanism,
Devoid of that ecstatic soul the gods
Bestow alone upon their favorite children.…
I cannot bear to see you made a slave,
Afraid to know or recognize yourself,
Living in fear, your own dread Frankenstein!”
To some extent Jackson would never be free of that fear, though part of him took considerable pains to heed the advice (often invoked) that Henry James allegedly gave the young Rupert Brooke: “Don’t be afraid to be happy.” And then, of course, “nature is nature” whether one fears it or not. As Jackson candidly explained to his daughter’s philosophy professor in 1964, “The slogan to solicit subscriptions [to Life] always said ‘Obey that impulse’—which is the story of my life, ought to be put on my tombstone (‘He obeyed that impulse’) and though at times it’s got me into a hell of a lot of trouble, much of it unprintable, it has at other times brought me a great deal of satisfaction and yes, even reward.”
A story Jackson wrote the year after he left Chicago, “Some Secret Sorrow,” suggests that he managed to find abundant trouble and satisfaction both while in the city, and also gives one a sense of the hazards faced by that generation of gay men, wherever they happened to be. “This strange, beautiful, sordid city,” the narrator, Sid, muses of Chicago. “Had I known of some of the things I was to come up against here … I should never have had the courage to come. The strength to combat life consisted, apparently, in not knowing what was going to happen.”4 The story is mostly composed of a long confession (“I’m continually cutting my own throat by telling too much”) given by Don,5 an artist who senses a kinship with Sid. As a boy, Don was sexually exploited by an older man and his friends, and thereafter went from one disastrous liaison to the next, until at last he “learned to stay more and more by [him]self and became reconciled to the fact that [he] was different from other people, and let it go at that.” Recently, though, he tried to pick up a man in Grant Park, and was almost beaten by an angry mob that gathered when the man began loudly denouncing him. Sid, for his part, reflects that Don seems oddly “a stranger” now that he’s told his story, and later ignores Don’s pathetic attempts to stay in touch. One senses the author divided himself pretty much equally between the two men—gave his desperate need for connection to Don, his wariness to Sid, and something of his self-loathing to both.
But what of the beautiful, satisfying aspects of being in Chicago? Obey that impulse: not for nothing was Jackson forever trying out, as a title, some version of Whitman’s “Native Moments”—a poem that celebrates “life coarse and rank”: “I am for those who believe in loose delights—I share the midnight orgies of young men.” Dorothea Straus wrote of her friend’s taste for “rough trade,” and in his 1953 meditation, “An Afternoon with Boris,” Jackson conceded that his acquaintances would be “aghast” if they knew something of his “compulsive excursions” into “the low and the lawless … even literally the unclean.” But then, he was his father’s son—never mind the priapic Williams side of the family—and such “excursions” provided, besides, a needed respite (“a revival or cleansing of the spirit”) from writerly cerebration. In the opening section of Farther and Wilder, set in the summer of 1947, Don Birnam thanks God he is “finally old enough to know that life’s problems [do] not consist of specialités like alcoholism, syphilis, drugs, promiscuity, and indiscriminate sexual drives toward male and female alike”; but meanwhile (around 1948 and ’49) the author himself was undergoing tests at Mary Hitchcock Hospital in New Hampshire for genital herpes and syphilis, the latter first contracted in the early 1930s (if one believes a discarded passage from The Lost Weekend), when he endured eleven days in a fever cabinet in hope of a cure.
Amid Chicago’s “Bohemian diversions,” then, it was probably a relief to find a kindly older man to spend the better part of one’s time with. Dr. Thorvald Lyngholm, a Danish osteopath, was thirty-six when Jackson met him on September 19, 1925 (a red-letter day duly noted in Jackson’s journal), and would remain at least on the periphery of his life for almost twenty years.6 In Farther and Wilder, Don Birnam names “Thorvald” as one of the few people he’s (almost) been able to love—this apart from the “selfless, pure, undemanding” love he bears his children—and Don of “Some Secret Sorrow” waxes nostalgic about the one time his feelings were requited by another man: “It was as though a veil had been stripped from my eyes and I could now see the whole truth about everything, and beauty where before had been, to me, only existence.” The most sustained tribute to Lyngholm in Jackson’s work is his appearance as an osteopath named Dan Linquist in an unfinished novella written in 1928, Three Flowers, inspired by the author’s maternal great-aunts at 414 Courtland Avenue in Syracuse.7 Dr. Linquist treats these oafish spinsters—terrified by their teenage niece’s pregnancy—with sweet forbearance, and his own “wholesome good-looks” are lovingly evoked: “In repose, his face seemed always as if he were thinking deeply and at the same time scenting the air. When he laughed or smiled, his serious mouth became miraculously boyish and charming, and little lines, of mirth rather than age, appeared below his eyes.… his good Scandinavian head was partly bald, but the hair that remained at the sides and top was fine and silky, of a light sand color.” In Jackson’s play The Loving Offenders—also unfinished (indeed hardly begun)—one of the characters was to be a thirty-five-year-old “doctor friend” who causes a scandal by accompanying the twenty-two-year-old Ralph to his older brother’s wedding.8 As for the actual Thor: five years later, in 1930, a friend in New York wrote as follows to Jackson’s tuberculosis sanatorium in Europe: “[Thor] feels very sad and deserted in your absence. If only he could acquire his vast wealth now I am sure he would fly over to you in a moment.” Thor was trying to supplement his (evidently meager) income as an osteopath by pitching, to libraries, a process for preserving newspapers in cellophane. “So I am not very sanguine at Thor being financially improved within a short time,” Charlie’s friend concluded.
He also resumed a curious friendship that had begun three years before, when (in retreat from the Syracuse disaster) he’d taken a summer job as desk clerk at a posh hotel in Eastport, Maine. As he would later tell it in his “memoir in the form of a novel”—alternately titled The Royalist and Uncle Mr. Kember—he was reading one day on a pier at the yacht club when he noticed a distinguished older man reclining in the stern of his sailboat, also reading. “I say, young man,” the latter called, in a suave mid-Atlantic accent, “it seems you’re reading a Modern Library book, too.” As it happened (“a coincidence in a million”) they were both reading The Odyssey; the older man, delighted, took down the boy’s name and address and subsequently mailed him the enormous Medici Society edition of The Odyssey, with twenty gorgeous plates by the English painter William Russell Flint. “This comes to you over the wine-dark sea,” an enclosed card was inscribed, “from Telemachus of many counsels.”
This generous personage was a fifty-nine-year-old bachelor named Bronson Winthrop, a man of impressive wealth and pedigree who would prove the most important elder figure in Charlie’s all but fatherless life. Such a man, indeed, was far more in line with what Charlie would have liked in a forebear: “I’m afraid I don’t know the Vanderbilts,” Winthrop once remarked with a casual whiff of disdain, given that he (tacitly) considered them nouveau riche. He himself was descended from John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, though he’d inherited most of his property from his mother’s side of the family, the Manhattan Stuyvesants. Winthrop’s upbringing was almost breathtakingly cosmopolitan: born in Paris, he was educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, after which he took a two-year Grand Tour to Peking and points beyond. In 1891 he returned to the States and got his law degree at Columbia, joining the illustrious firm of Elihu Root; when the latter left to become Secretary of State in 1905, Winthrop and his best friend, Henry Stimson (Secretary of War in the Taft and FDR cabinets), became nominal heads of the firm. Except for some time off in 1898—when he traveled (with his lifelong valet, William) to Manila as an infantry captain in the Spanish-American War—Winthrop would, for the rest of his life, devotedly ride the train each morning to his office on Liberty Street in Lower Manhattan.
Stimson referred to his friend and law partner as the Exquisite: Winthrop entertained lavishly and often (“the silver of four generations on his table”), though he liked solitude, too, or so his considerable erudition would suggest. Some of this came from his father, Egerton, also a lawyer, whose enormous portrait by Sargent hung over the son’s drawing-room fireplace. A great friend of Edith Wharton,9 Egerton is best remembered as the model for snobbish Sillerton Jackson (an expert on “the scandals and mysteries that had smouldered under the unruffled surface of New York society”) in The Age of Innocence, though Wharton’s memoir, A Backward Glance, gives a more balanced view of the man. Egerton, she wrote, was “easily entangled in worldly trifles” to be sure, but he was also a great reader and art collector, as well as a wise confidant in personal matters: “Sternly exacting toward himself, he was humorously indulgent toward others”—a statement that rather precisely describes his son’s attitude, insofar as it was manifest in his relations with Charles Jackson.
Charlie had been in New York for a month or two when he retrieved Winthrop’s card from The Odyssey and gave him a call at his office. The older man promptly asked him to lunch at the Downtown Club, where the two sat talking about literature. Winthrop seemed “shocked” by the youth’s all but total ignorance of Latin and Greek, and even German and French, while Jackson explained that he had no formal education beyond high school. He did allow, however, that he knew something of Shakespeare, and the two began trying to stump each other (“Tell me, young man, the name of the play in which the following line appears … ”)10—a game they would resume over many postprandial coffees in Winthrop’s townhouse on East 72nd Street, or the mansion at his 450-acre estate on Long Island, Muttontown Meadows, where four men were employed each summer just to clear the riding paths and keep the park free of poison ivy. Charlie’s time in the Bloomer house on East Avenue in Newark could hardly have prepared him for the sheer luxurious eclecticism on display chez Winthrop: the Sèvres decorated porcelain and bronze-doré boudoir clocks, the Louis XV inlaid tulipwood serpentine-front commodes, the Chippendale carved mahogany and parcel-gilded gesso wall mirrors, the Fukien porcelain statuettes of Kuan Yin, the watercolors by Rowlandson, Rackham, Cruikshank, Leech, and the world’s largest collection of original Tenniel illustrations from Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. A lot of statuary, too—nude youths mostly (Achilles and Patroclus, frolicking satyrs and putti)—as well as a gallery of Winthrop’s various protégés over the years.
Jackson realized that his own generation was apt to look “with raised eyebrows” on Winthrop’s indulgence toward certain young men, though he insisted that the man’s “key” trait was his innocence. Indeed, the only thing Winthrop was importunate about—vis-à-vis Charlie, at least—was his beloved Plato: “All through the Twenty’s Mr. Winthrop was at me to read Plato,” Jackson wrote his daughter Kate (middle name: Winthrop) in 1964, “it was something I had to read otherwise I would be all but imbalanced, and he even bought me a small set in the Jowett translation—in vain. I didn’t or couldn’t connect; I was not a thinker in those days, I was a feeler, rather, and thus got into a lot of emotional scrapes.… I see now why Mr. Winthrop pressed me so long to read Plato … [he was] trying to help me.” Nor was Winthrop only interested in conveying, say, how an older man’s passion for a promising youth might be transmuted into a higher spiritual force, but also how a wise man faces death, à la Socrates in The Apology (“It is pretty grand in its simplicity,” he wrote Charlie). Jackson, for his part, urged Winthrop to read comparatively racy stuff such as Compton Mackenzie’s Vestal Fire, about a bearded pederast (Count Bob) who moons over his fetching young secretary, Carlo. “It is a curious book isn’t it,” Winthrop calmly responded. “As you say the world has changed.” And meanwhile, too, Charlie introduced his new mentor to Dr. Lyngholm, who endeavored to cure the man’s cold with an osteopathic maneuver that “fairly throttled [him]”: “my cold disappeared,” Winthrop wrote, “but whether it was the black magic or a cough mixture which a milder practitioner gave me I cannot tell.”
Charlie’s life was more strenuous than ever, now that his indefatigable brother was in town. The previous summer he’d worked at a hotel in the Berkshires, where, after a long day of tennis, he developed a sharp pain under his right shoulder that began to worsen the following winter; also he was coughing a lot and felt exhausted all the time. Still, he pushed himself harder than ever: he put in long hours at a Womrath branch bookstore on Broadway, while at night (whatever his other diversions) he steadily worked at his writing. His “Chekhov phase”—or at least that part of it involving Russian (or Russian-like) scenes and characters—was coming to an end; now that he no longer lived in Arcadia, he felt a great compulsion to evoke the place in all its galling beauty and sordid, small-minded humanity.
Three Flowers transplants his spinster great-aunts from Syracuse to the smallest house on Grant Street in Arcadia, where each Sunday they make a dutiful round of their neighbors to discuss the relative coldness of the winter, the prospects for a good corn crop, and “just who really was paying off the mortgage for that widow-woman near Boulder Hill.” Relegated to a cot in the maid’s room is their teenage niece, Evelyn, a spiteful reminder of their dead sister (Evelyn’s mother), whom they never forgave for leaving home to marry a worthless man. One night Evelyn is stricken by a mysterious illness, and it falls to the kindly Dr. Linquist to explain to the sisters that the girl has been binding her stomach to conceal a pregnancy, and will probably give birth to a stillborn child (“and oddly enough it was this fact, of all that he had advanced, which seemed to cheer the sisters”). The novella peters out around page 30, when the sisters take the doctor into their confidence with “passionate outpourings” about their empty, ignorant lives—at which point Jackson switches from dialogue to indirect description, except for the oldest sister’s one-line lament, “Life might of been different for us if—if—if things had been different.” Whatever implausible “outpourings” preceded this pathetic tautology remain a mystery to the reader, and apparently to Jackson, too, who stalled at essentially the same point in the story when he tried to rewrite it as a three-act play.
He also resorted to both genres for his Arcadian bildungsroman, Simple Simon, though the novel (unlike the play) survives only as a couple of promising fragments and a few notes in his journal.11 Whereas the play focuses almost entirely on the protagonist’s rut as the local editor of the Arcadia Courier, the novel covers the same character’s earlier years as a sensitive adolescent with no interest in sports or girls12—a time when his only friends were Bettina and the odd discontented matron (“childless married women whose husbands are good providers and who have nothing to do”). One of these is Mrs. Crandall, whose “high sarcastic sense of humor” is endearing at first, but proves mostly a matter of idle, self-indulgent bitterness: “In small towns there are always a few people whose quasi-rebellious spirits find an outlet in ridiculing their village and bemoaning the fact that fate has placed them among such a mess of morons.” While Arcadia is hardly ideal for such would-be intellectuals, Jackson nicely suggests how Mrs. Crandall becomes her own worst enemy (among many). Wasting the better part of her wit on cursing the darkness—especially her well-meaning boob of a husband (a model Arcadian, naturally)—she suffers the inevitable nervous breakdown, which gives her gleeful neighbors an excuse to spread the rumor she’s taking dope. Finally, “recovered,” she’s reduced to a misanthropic shell (“Ligeia in cap and bells”). As for Simple Simon the play, it soon becomes bogged down in dithering conversations about whether or not Freddie will test himself in the wider world, and there is little of the novel’s more nuanced satire. Freddie, in effect, is a preening ninny who lets himself be flattered by rubes on the one hand, and browbeaten by the insufferably high-minded Janet (the Bettina character) on the other. “If Love is a city, then you and I are only living in the suburbs,” the latter declaims at one point. “I once hoped that we could move into the heart of it together.”
In the midst of these labors, Jackson began spitting up blood in the morning—though he was loath to mention it, lest he be returned to Newark. On April 27, 1928, however, he hemorrhaged while attending the theater (“rais[ing] three mouthfuls of blood,” his doctor carefully noted), and was taken to Bellevue. Within a couple of weeks, his tubercular right lung had been collapsed via pneumothorax—an injection of air between the ribs, the common (if questionable) treatment in those preantibiotic days—and he was left with nothing to do but lie there and wait.
At last, in July, he was sent to Devitt’s Camp, a sixty-acre sanatorium in western Pennsylvania (“in the heart of the White Deer Mountains”) started by an idealistic physician named William Devitt, a great believer in fresh air, fresh food, sunbaths, and virtuous living very much in general. It was a spartan life: the 128 patients lived two to a cabin—unheated except for a small potbellied stove—and slept on open-air porches in all weathers. Naturally Jackson considered writing a novel about the experience, to be titled The Dark Confinement, which hardly suggests the more larkish side of things. “Remember the night the three of us killed a couple quarts of wine,” a fellow patient wrote Jackson many years later. “And the bare footprint in the dried puddle of wine on the floor next morning?” Such a telltale spoor would have provoked bitter reproof from Dr. Devitt, though perhaps he was apt to be lenient in Jackson’s case, seeing as how the poor young man had abruptly become bald in just that one year.
Meanwhile he’d given his brother Fred a letter of introduction to Mr. Winthrop, thinking the two might hit it off despite an ostensible lack of common interests, as they did (“and thereby hangs a tale,” Charlie would write, “a tale, indeed, that was to influence our lives for almost the next eighteen years”). During their first lunch together, Winthrop asked the delightful Boom whether he was enjoying his studies at the League, and the youth replied that while life on the whole was certainly agreeable, he’d recently decided he’d rather do something along the lines of design or decoration, ideally under the tutelage of the great (but expensive) Winold Reiss. Mr. Winthrop thought it might be arranged. A few weeks later, alas, Boom was visiting Charlie—for whose benefit he vivaciously demonstrated Angna Enters’s “Field Day” dance, which he’d seen the night before—when he suddenly hemorrhaged. (“I didn’t tell her this last part,” Charlie later reported, having eventually met Miss Enters in Hollywood.) Soon the two brothers were sharing a large room in the basement of the Devitt’s Camp hospital, as their condition was deemed rather grave: “sick as we were,” Charlie noted, “the two of us had the time of our lives.”
Rhoda, in short, was “a remarkably interesting woman,” as her future husband would be the first to acknowledge—though how these two should come to be married was a puzzle, to put it mildly. As Dorothea Straus observed, they seemed “totally unrelated”: Rhoda “was as monosyllabic and repressed as [Charlie] was voluble and dramatic. She was tall and straight, with wide features, a fair complexion, and smiling blue [hazel] eyes that expressed endurance rather than merriment.” She would have much to endure, and would endure it with a kind of workmanlike stoicism. This, after all, was her style: where her husband was a dandy who favored bow ties and tailored suits, Rhoda wore clothes for comfort (“their children often spoke of a gray-and-white number she was fond of as her ‘Puritan’ dress”) and refused to touch up her colorless hair with even a slight auburn rinse. Their friend Max Wylie considered her “the finest woman [he] ever knew”: calm, scrupulous, eminently sensible and literal-minded—a compendium of things Charlie was not, and thus either the perfect or worst imaginable mate (or something of both). “Had there ever been such a thing [as intimacy] between them, even at the beginning?” Don wonders of his wife, Helen, in Farther and Wilder. “Not, at least, as he understood the word and had experienced the feeling himself, with so many others.” Time and again, for the next forty years, an exalted Charlie would endeavor to share with Rhoda one of his many passions—Schubert’s “Trout” Quintet, say, or a passage from Mann—and presently find her snoring or glancing furtively at box scores (she was crazy about baseball), and it would occur to him, again, but with renewed bemusement every time, that “neither one of them, actually, was the kind of person the other even liked.”
Be that as it may, Charlie’s budding friendship with the taciturn but attractive young woman was only one aspect of his relative good fortune. Now that Boom was also at Devitt’s, Mr. Winthrop had begun showering the two with “fantastic gifts”: bed jackets and bathrobes and lap rugs of luxurious camel’s hair, cashmere sweaters and bed socks, two electric heaters, a portable Victrola, calf-bound editions of Shakespeare and Jowett’s Dialogues of Plato, and charge accounts at Brentano’s and the Liberty Music Shop. One weekend Mr. Winthrop came down to see how the boys were getting along, and was “shocked” by what struck him as an almost ghastly squalor: “Why, it’s monstrous! Monstrous!” he muttered, though Boom and Charlie did their best to assure him that they were all but perfectly content. Mr. Winthrop would have none of it, insisting they find a more suitable place immediately.
To be sure, while Boom had much improved, Charlie’s condition continued to deteriorate: over the last few months his weight had dropped from 142 to 125, he was running a constant fever that hovered around 102, and fluid had to be drained from his pleura every day. Thus the brothers returned to Newark on July 1, 1929, and Charlie began seeing a doctor in Rochester, John J. Lloyd, who decided to permanently collapse the patient’s right lung by severing his phrenic nerve. Awaiting the operation at Rochester General, Charlie wrote a poem suggesting a bleak prognosis:
Come for him in the night,
And take him from his bed …
The snow is as white as white …
The blood is as red as red …
Heap the dirt over his head,
Pack the earth firm and tight …
The snow is as white as white …
And so on, for five lugubrious quatrains. Happily the operation seemed to go well enough, and though he’d been told to expect at least a year of bed rest, Charlie rallied and was up and about in less than two weeks.
One of the nice things about sanatorium life was that Jackson had all the time in the world to read: the Bible (“I kept a notebook on it just as literature”), more Russian novels, and all seven volumes of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. The last became a lifelong favorite, though his most important discovery that summer was Thomas Mann, whose Death in Venice he’d skimmed at Kroch’s four years earlier and deemed “highbrow” in a bad way, because of the stilted translation and lack of dialogue. But now, as he convalesced from his phrenectomy—and waited for a place to open up at a sanatorium in New Mexico—Jackson was persuaded to read The Magic Mountain because it was all about his illness: “It is true I learned a good deal about tuberculosis,” he later wrote, “but I learned a great deal more about art, about politics, about science, about psychology, about Europe, and about myself.” Longing to breathe the same rarefied air as Hans Castorp—and perhaps find a humanistic mentor such as Settembrini, to say nothing of the various Dionysians and ideologues that compose the rest of the cast—Charlie decided that he and Boom simply had to go to one of the elegant sanatoria in Davos, Switzerland. (“What!” their German doctor, Hans Staub, would exclaim shortly after their arrival. “You read Der Zauberberg and then come to Davos? Don’t you know that that terrible book—so krankhaft, so morbide—keeps hundreds and thousands of people away from Davos every year? … Crazy Americans!”)
Mr. Winthrop only wanted what was best for them, and readily agreed to foot the bill. Newark, meanwhile, was in an uproar. Poor Herb was besieged with questions about Charlie and Fred’s mysterious benefactor, whom Bob delicately characterized as “a kind friend” for public consumption. Among family she was a good deal more acerbic, darkly insinuating that an old reprobate had “taken a shine” to her disreputable brothers-in-law.
