Man Who Was Late Read Online Free

social life? The family home in Jersey City was easy enough to reach from Park or Fifth Avenue, but where, in that dusty street of red row houses, was the tennis court or pool in which Ben’s friends might disport themselves, and were those parents, starved for the presence of their strange, furtively obsessed only child, of a mind to receive those friends with the equanimity and graceful ease Ben might have wished?
    I used to amuse myself—and perhaps Ben as well—by rehearsing with him scenes that would have gone with the life he was beginning to live so successfully. For instance: His truly good-looking mother and father, in their worn but easeful togs, relax after the day’s toil. They are happy that Ben and his merry band of revelers stop by unannounced. In a matter-of-fact, casual way the father is offering a choice of drinks—perhaps slivovitz (nothing wrong with being true toone’s ethnic habits) and martinis shaken by Ben upon paternal urging; the old man is telling dryly humorous stories of prewar courtroom triumphs, with just a hint of disparagement, drawing therefrom lessons for today’s humbler activities. Meanwhile, the mother flirtatiously upbraids a young man for never coming to see her alone or—stroke of genius!—explains to an attentive Rachel when a gardenia begins to need repotting.
    The reality—I knew Ben’s parents and sometimes actually took the train to Jersey City without Ben’s urging—was less comical. Irretrievably diminished by America, the severe, confident civil-law pleader now operated a small insurance business for a clientele of immigrant friends; his once-languid wife answered the telephone and pored over claim forms in the downstairs office. Love and pride (who else had a son like Ben, if only he would be reasonable?), confusion about the road that brilliant son had taken, and dread of the road ahead of them—thin days dragging on in that decaying place until some final bad end—no, these were not themes Ben cared to have developed for the general public. A friend such as I sufficed.
    The mother had the good luck to die first. In the two years of his ultimate loneliness, the father’s principal distraction was Ben’s divorce: a chance for the old courtroom fox to guide and restrain his impetuous banker son. One might have thought the whole thing would be simple enough. Rachel and Ben had had no children together, and, what with her own and her first husband’s money, Rachel did not think it really worthwhile to press a man with no capital for alimony. But an unexpected element envenomed the proceedings. Itturned out that while Ben was willing to be convinced that Rachel was through with him, in his opinion that fact was an insufficient reason for severing his ties with Sarah and Rebecca. He held that these raven-haired matching adolescents were his daughters in fact, if not in law. Did not Rachel know that he would not, he could not have others? This deficiency had been, after all, at the time when it mattered, one of his prime qualities: explosion upon explosion within her, torrents of effluvia mixing, and no fear of conception! Now he wanted wages for the hours he alone had spent on their care—changing diapers, pulling on snowsuits, sliding down icy hills, pacing past dinosaur displays, reading aloud—greater in number than Rachel’s and all the nurses’, mother’s helpers’, and babysitters’ hours combined. And he had conquered and kept their love; of this he was sure. His lawyer would prove it; justice had to prevail. Ben’s father listened. He heard the twins. He claimed a world record for listening to Rachel. In the end, there was no trial, but there was (as Ben’s Wall Street lawyer put it) a deal: so long as the twins wished, they would spend part of their vacations with Ben, there would be dinners with him, and, if schoolwork allowed, perhaps occasional weekends. In this way Ben came to think that, however high the waves might billow around him, the