“What about your lovely wife and children?”

“They’re three thousand miles away,” he yawns, “and you’re right here. Don’t tell me you don’t like it. You can laugh. It doesn’t bother me. Go on, laugh like a witch. It arouses me. Can you tell me now you don’t like how I screw around in you?”

“That’s O.K. But why do you have to have such a pot belly? What do you have in there—quintuplets?”

“I’ll tell you why. When God made me a genius he said, ‘Johann Tobler, I have made you a genius and I am giving you a big pot belly so you shouldn’t be vain.’ There you have the answer.”

“How sweet. Is that what you tell every woman?”

“What do you think? You would like me to invent something special for you?”

“We,” he used to say when they first walked together in Garfield. “We are different. We don’t like foolish chatter, frills, extravagance, display of feelings. We are thinkers.” Both he and she were different from her mother in Budapest, who lived on flatteries, who dressed extravagantly, who was always preoccupied with her emotions. They were different from his family, different from anybody he could think of because practically all other people were vain, foolish, hypocritical. “We are different,” he said. His daughter detected a tinge of sadness and irritation—as if he were questioning why this was so, troubled by the fact that they were different—which offended her pride and created a distance between them. She wanted to remain apart, to be left alone. Paternal approval gave her certain liberties: an aloof man, an aloof daughter. But he was also a father: he worried why she didn’t care for her appearance, spent all her time alone, why didn’t she have a boyfriend? Why wasn’t she like other girls?—like the grocer’s red-haired daughter showing off her breasts, she would catch a man for sure before she was seventeen; or like the reform rabbi’s daughter who was high-minded, a brilliant student—but all in the service of femininity. He cited others, sometimes he was joking; he wouldn’t seriously want her to be like the receptionist at the hospital, with her perfect manicure, hair set and doll smile, sitting there just to attract a man. And certainly not like one of his patients he was describing. He didn’t want her to be like his mother and sisters. The world had changed. He didn’t know. He really didn’t know himself what was demanded of a woman in this new and changing world; what a woman should be, and his daughter in particular. It was a question on his mind he was asking himself and his daughter. Perhaps because she took too long to answer, he went on citing cases; or perhaps it was to relieve her, or simply because he was accustomed to her silence and accustomed to answering the questions addressed to her. Occasionally she spoke, and she startled him by her answers; so perhaps to spare himself her answers he went on thinking out loud about what a woman’s life used to be and what it could be under the present circumstances—a question that he could not bring to either theoretical or practical resolution. He always concluded by returning to his daughter approvingly, praising her seriousness, her kind of beauty which was not cheap or worldly. “We are different,” he always concluded, sometimes with a touch of theatricality, fusing pathos and irony in the sweep of a gesture, putting his arm around her shoulder as they walked.

There was the corner drugstore where the big kids hung out and where every lollypop- and ice cream–licking child aspired one day to spoon the sundae or banana split whose giant images were plastered on its windows. There was East Liberty with its three five-and-ten-cent stores, twelve movie houses, its soda fountains and slot machine joints, its stench of exhaust gas mingled with the smell of popcorn and sweet carbonated drinks, where everyone from the surrounding slums flocked evenings and weekends. And towering over the store windows and movie marquees, the giant cereal boxes, tires, tubes of toothpaste and the silly smiling faces of beer-drinking, soup-gobbling, car-satisfied men, women and children, the gods of America.

She wasn’t sure what he meant; she remembered that the little boy Petie was very important to the little girl she was. His face hadn’t changed much; the same skinny boy grown very tall; she is still surprised by the wide shoulders and his big feet; he is another person now and just like any other young man with whom she does not know what she feels or should feel. The same strangeness with Peter as with every other man, waiting for something to happen, to change in her, or change between them; never having known any other feeling; asking herself, “Can I love this man?” waiting for some impossible revelation or simply for a man to take hold of her and make her will-less.

“I don’t know what stories you’ve heard. Naturally I had many affairs. But it was all right, your father wanted it.”

“That’s very strange.”

“I’m serious. He encouraged me. I hope you will forgive me for saying that your father was a little neurotic. The first-generation Freudians, you know, were not properly analyzed. It gave him pleasure that I had affairs. He wanted to be the husband of the woman who had the most admirers.”

“And you?”

“I couldn’t help it, my dear,” Kamilla tells her sadly. “I went to the best psychoanalysts in Budapest and they told me that I had to have affairs to prove to my mother that I could have all the men. When I was a child my mother told me that I was so ugly no man would want me; therefore, you see, I had to make every man desire me, even though I had the most wonderful husband. This was the tragedy of my life. You can’t imagine how much I suffered. I was in analysis for fourteen years. We can’t change our nature,” she sighs. [...]

On Sundays he belonged to her; they did wonderful things together. Going on walks was what Sophie enjoyed most, more than going to the theater or the amusement park. She pulled him or stopped him. She marveled at her power over someone so much bigger, a man who earned money, owned a house—was this what the dog felt when she took him on walks?—this mad joy in running, jumping on and off all the ledges? Why couldn’t he run? The dog and she both went after his walking stick. They could ruffle him, they weren’t afraid. Could he make the dog behave at least? He made solemn and threatening faces, trying to get her to listen. He wanted to show her things, explain things. She wanted to play; she didn’t know what explanations did. He wanted to talk. She asked questions, why and what then and so what—made him grind out answers just to exercise power over him. Power and curiosity and wonder that this big man with a walking stick and bushy eyebrows who smoked cigarets could be pushed and pulled and made to talk and buy things for her, and she was happy till he spoiled it for her by putting it in words. “...why do you think I spend the one free afternoon of my week with you and buy you things, and why do you think I love you?” On and on about all that he did for her. And why? Why did he do all this for her? Because he was stupid. He put the words in her mouth. No, she only thought it and he said it. It was all right, he said and spoke about the laws of nature, the selfishness of children; they were all instruments of nature but he was resigned to it, he said, making it sound sad. Then she hopped and skipped and ran till she got rid of her anger.