So all through a militantly independent young adulthood Willy had been waiting. At last along came Eric Oberdorf, who radiated the same clear-eyed courage that shone from pictures of her father in the early sixties—before Charles joined the opposition in celebrating his own defeat. Willy had inherited her mother’s grace, and given it structure and purpose. Together she and Eric could rewrite history, which may have been what children were for.
As for Eric, Willy’s primary concern was that he might regard marriage, like his so far useless degree in mathematics, as an end in itself. Eric had a modular mind. He might not conceive of pro tennis as death row, but he thought of his life in blocks, and therefore as a series of little deaths. But Willy knew enough about the altar to be sure that marriage demarcated not only the successful completion of a project, but the beginning of another, far more demanding endeavor.
“Daddy, it’s Willy.”
“Hola!”
Willy let the receiver list. Her father had never forgiven her for majoring in Spanish. “You’re going to interpret for the UN?” he’d inquired dryly when informed of her decision. “No, I’ll sell veggie burritos in Flushing Meadow,” she’d snipped back. “Which by the time I finish this BA is the closest I’m going to get to the U.S. Open.” Her father held nothing more against Spanish people than against anyone—meaning he held a great deal against them, indeed. But he knew that she’d chosen an easy major to have maximum free time for the tennis team.
“Qué tal?” asked Willy.
“Nothing ever changes here, Willow, you know that.”
“You could always get old and die,” she recommended. “At least that would get it over with.”
“It’s important to keep something to look forward to.”
“Listen, I have someone I want you to meet.”
“Another brain surgeon?”
“Yes, he’s a tennis player, Daddy,” she said impatiently. “But with a degree from Princeton.”
“A tennis player with a degree!” he exclaimed. “You told me that was impossible.”
Willy almost hung up. If she could barely make it through this phone call, how was she going to survive the whole evening she proposed? “How about Friday night? We’ll take the seventwenty from Port Authority.”
“I’m sure I can squeeze you and your young man into my busy social calendar.”
“Listen, Daddy,” she added effortfully. “I really like this guy. Could you … be friendly?”
“Willow, I’m always—”
“I mean, don’t be quite such a gloomy Gus? Like, don’t rain on any parades for one night.”
“Gloomy! After an electrifying week of teaching budding car mechanics commonly confused words, I’m sure to be happy as a clam.”
“Oh, never mind,” said Willy, and hung up with a sigh.
“When you first talked about your father, I thought he was some working-class stiff,” Eric swung the Chateauneuf du Pape in its plastic bag, “not an English professor.”
“I’m sorry if I seem dismissive of his job,” Willy mumbled. “But that’s the product of careful coaching.”
They were standing in line at Gate 413. Willy was relieved that the bus was late. Her stomach knotting, she now wished they’d brought two bottles of wine.
“When I was a kid my father sensed I admired him,” Willy went on, “since any little girl would. I must have been—oh, eleven, alone with my father in the car. He explained that most of his classes could barely read, so if teachers were judged by the quality of their students my father was, I quote, ‘the bottom of the barrel.’ He announced that with a weird, vicious pleasure.”
“What’s his problem?” asked Eric as the line began to move. “Bloomfield College isn’t a great school, but it’s not disgraceful.”
“To Chuck Novinsky it is. I didn’t understand until I was fifteen. Nobody had told me. I was pottering in the attic when I found a box of duplicate hardbacks. Unappealing cover—plain; I think it was cheap. In the Beginning Was the Word, by Charles Novinsky.”
Eric chuckled. “A little inflated, if you don’t mind my saying so. What was it, criticism?”
Willy glanced at her fiancé in the light streaming through the door of Gate 413. A fresh feeling came off of him that had nothing to do with having ironed his shirt for the occasion. His mental basement wasn’t knee-deep in naysaying bilge; the storage in his parents’ ritzy East Side apartment wouldn’t breathe musty disillusionment.
“A novel,” she said sorrowfully, climbing into the bus and snuggling by a window. “Begpool Press, 1962—never heard of them.”
“Did you read it?”
“I had a feeling that I shouldn’t mention the books to my father. So I sneaked up to the attic with a flashlight.”
“Was it any good?”
“I don’t know,” she puzzled.
Had her father’s book been any good? Naturally the novel had commented on the nature of literature, and there wasn’t a soul who wanted to read about that; likewise it celebrated the power of language, a power he now derided. The plot was playful, about a novelist whose every printed word came to life. (She loved it when a mixed metaphor gave rise to a grotesque behemoth slouching toward the narrator’s house until he frantically rewrote it.) But the prose clanked with thesaurus plunder, a whole paragraph conceived to accommodate stereotropism. Still, the slim volume seemed an eager, trusting effort and couldn’t have deserved the scathing reviews shoved down the side of the box.
“The reviews were hideous.” Willy shuddered. “All in local papers, fly-by-night magazines. Probably by young journalists trying to make a name for themselves, and so acrobatically snide. One reviewer called In the Beginning Was the Word so awful that it was ‘a bit of a giggle.’”
Newly curious, Willy had located a second box, where four different rubber-banded typescripts were crammed into water-logged cardboard, their pages folded and specked with roach eggs. She’d been reluctant to paw those reams, once treasure, now trash—thousands of offbeat adjectives mined from Roget’s, only to slump in this carton and rustle with insects. She’d scanned only the most recent manuscript, on top, heart-breakingly protected with “Copyright© 1967 by Charles Novinsky” on the title page.
The End of the Story had been more of a slog. The prose was dry and spare, recalling the cutting, droll sarcasm of the father she knew. The satire described a mythical population grown so vicarious that content was extinct. An automated world whose only work was entertainment divided between the watcher and the watched. Consequently, all art was reflexive: films concerned screenwriters, TV programs followed the “real lives” of sitcom actresses, and novels, the author noted with special disgust, exclusively detailed the puerile pencil-sharpening of literary hacks. The manuscript had left off on page 166 in the middle of a sentence. Little wonder; with its theme that storytelling was dead, the narrative dripped with such self-loathing that to finish such a book would be antithetical.
“That last manuscript was depressing,” said Willy. “He’d even worked the phrase ‘a bit of a giggle’ into the text. He was smarting. I’m not sure he’s smarting anymore, which is probably what’s wrong with him.”
“You think all those failed novels explain why he’s discouraged you from playing tennis?”
“I wouldn’t be that simplistic. I’d give my parents some credit for genuinely wanting to protect me. Original sin in my family is getting your hopes up.”
“Honey?” They’d been sitting on Willy’s bed; her mother had patted her hand. Willy was seventeen, and still feuding with her father over college. “Every young person wants to be a celebrated artist, a fashion model, or a big-name sports star. All but a very, very few end up working for IBM, or teaching youngsters who themselves want to be famous that they still have to learn to spell, like your father. And there’s nothing wrong with having an ordinary life. We’d just like you to be prepared. If you set your heart on being Chris Everest—”
“Evert,” Willy corrected, twa
nging her racket strings with her fingernails.
“We’re just afraid you’ll get hurt.”
“You’re afraid, all right.” Willy had stood and zipped her case. “Afraid I might make it.”
She’d stomped out; but later her father had been adamant.
“I have nothing against tennis,” he said, which was a bald-faced lie. “But as for going pro, you could as well announce that instead of earning a degree you’re taking your Christmas check to Las Vegas.”
“Max thinks I’m playing with more than a Christmas check,” she returned hotly.
“A gamble is a gamble, and this is a poor bet that will only pain you when you’re older. In my day we wanted to join the circus—”
“Or write a book,” Willy spat.
His double take was steady. “Or write a book,” he repeated coolly. “And then we grew up.”
“Spare me your adulthood.”
“I would if I could, Willow.” For a moment he sounded dolorous. “But you are not throwing away a college education for a childhood hobby, and that’s final.”
“Do you think he had a point?” asked Eric.
“Now you, too?” Willy groaned. “My father didn’t have a problem with tennis when a sports scholarship covered my tuition, did he?”
“It’s just, I still don’t understand why after three years at UConn you dropped out.”
“My father didn’t want me to have credentials to rely on after I’d made a name for myself in tennis. He wanted me to have a degree for when I fell on my face. I had to drop out and turn pro. To finish college was to believe him.”
Eric smoothed her hand, uncomfortably like her mother.
“What I still can’t get over,” Willy gazed out the window at the darkening buildup of industrial New Jersey, “is he taught me to play. When I was little, we hit three times a week. We had a great time.”
“So why the hostility?”
“I could say he was mad that I’ve beaten him since I was ten. But I don’t think so. I found trouncing my father upsetting. He seemed to find it marvelous.”
The memory remained a queer color. They were playing at that lumpy macadam court nearest Willy’s house. She didn’t remember the game itself, only standing on the baseline after match point feeling dazed. Her father had come toward her in wonderment, climbing over the net instead of going around the post as if approaching an apparition that might vanish. He knelt at her feet, his voice hushed. “You have something special, Willow. I don’t know where you got it; not from me. But you be careful, and don’t let anybody take it away.”
Her mother bustling from the car broke the spell. “Chuck, whatever are you doing on the ground? Dinner’s been ready for an hour.”
Her father spread his hands. “She beat me.”
“That’s nice, dear. She’s a regular little whirlybird with that racket, isn’t she? Now, no dawdling, you two. The potatoes—”
“Colleen, you don’t understand,” he said irritably. “I didn’t let her. Ten years old, can you believe it? And I tried. I gave it my best shot.”
“Chuck,” her mother scolded. “You’ll give her a swelled head.”
Yet at the very point her father recognized that his second daughter was gifted he began to stand in her way. He found fewer afternoons after work to hit. He refused to cover her dues for the Montclair Country Club, and Willy was forced to collect balls for tips to pay her way. Half the players she fetched for didn’t really want a ballgirl, and she became something halfway between mascot and pest. Arguments over entering local junior tournaments that “interfered with her schoolwork” were incessant.
The antagonism came to a head on Willy’s sixteenth birthday. She sat before the usual sagging cake; her mother never quite went all the way in cooking, and had whipped the egg whites for the coconut icing to insufficient peak. As the whites subsided to raw slime, the icing slurped down the sides with a dispiritedness that encapsulated the Novinsky gestalt. Likewise each fallen layer was lined with a streak of dense, rubbery sad cake, as if nothing in this household was destined to rise from perpetual depression. Before her lay a single envelope, labeled Wilhemena.
She should have known better, but it was May; Willy leapt to the conclusion that inside was at last permission to attend the Vitas Gerulaitis tennis camp in Queens. When she ripped open the envelope, her face fell as noticeably as the cake.
“This way Gert gets her birthday present early,” her father blustered. “But you’re not quite old enough to go alone.”
The offer of three weeks in Europe with her dreary older sister could as well have been an all-expenses-paid to Newark. Willy mashed a bite of cake with her fork. “There are only three places I want to go in Europe,” she delivered levelly. “Roland Garros, the Foro Italico, and the All England Club—on tour. Other than that, I have no intention of spending three weeks of the best weather of the year shuffling through moldy museums with Gert.”
Conventionally her father used composure as a weapon. This time he turned crimson, knocking back his chair and barking that Willy was thankless, that at her age he’d have given his eyeteeth—
Willy had learned icy calm at his own knee. “If you can afford to send me to Europe,” she’d pushed away her uneaten cake, “you can afford to send me to tennis camp.”
Once at camp, Willy instinctively gravitated to the scholarship kids, and lied that she came from poor white trash. The fib came easily; Walnut Street constituted poverty of a kind. Yet there was something inevitable about her family’s low emotional income, and Willy didn’t know what besides bitterness she might expect from her father. His own hopes had been crushed. How could she insist that he be generous in defeat when she herself decried gracious losers as insincere?
Since having discovered her father’s secret body of work slowly rotting in the attic like a murdered corpse, Willy envisioned the young, determined Charles Novinsky as a different person altogether. She stood sentinel over the innocent predecessor, fending off ridicule from the mordant man he became. She cherished her picture of the stranger: a tirelessly ebullient aesthete, bursting with ideas, destined to become a great writer. This was her real father. The ornery Chuck Novinsky she grew up with was an impostor. In paging through those mildewed manuscripts, Willy could as well have unearthed documentation that she was adopted.
Maybe Chuck in adulthood was attempting to remedy his own parents’ optimism on his account, which he described as a kind of abuse. Willy’s grandparents had been hardworking Eastern European stock whose modest dry-cleaning business had grown prosperous by the fifties. Their unanticipated comfort, and the classically American structure of their lives whereby this year was always better than last, encouraged them to buy wholesale into the country’s claim that any boy could be president. They must have lauded little Charlie’s lucid first few words, taped his poems to the refrigerator door, and cooed to relatives about his editorship of the high school paper. Alfred A. Knopf anxiously awaited. Willy’s father blamed his parents for having sold him a bill of goods, a mistake he would not repeat with his own children, who were raised to glower squarely at the low, unremarkable horizon that humped outside the windows of their frumpy New Jersey house.
Her mother, however, had preserved a girlish purity, which Willy happened upon when she was twelve. Her tennis game rained out, Willy came home earlier than expected. Hot-blooded salsa music pounded from the living room. Willy peeked through the doorway to find her mother in bare feet and leggings; the ancient black leotard was a little tired, and falling off her shoulders. She was switching her hips in figure eights, and snaking her arms in S’s. Eyes shut, she slithered into a full split. Wow. She could still bring both thighs to the floor. Though the choreography was eclectic—Desi Arnaz meets Twyla Tharp—she was actually a pretty hot dancer.
When Willy whistled, her mother shrieked, then blushed and fumbled to turn off the stereo at once. Willy was immediately sorry that she’d given her presence away; she should have treated herself to
a longer show, slunk off, then theatrically slammed the front door a second time. Willy wanted Mama to keep her secret. Colleen O’Hara’s dreams of being a dancer had been conceived in private, and in private they remained intact. No wonder she urged Willy to play tennis just for fun. Colleen herself preserved a few minutes a day as a première danseuse, and she wanted at least the same secluded limelight for her daughter. The afternoon’s improvisation had mimed urgently to her second child: keep within you the tiny court where you are queen; be a star in the night sky of your own eyes closed. If it weren’t for me, that box of In the Beginning Was the Word would have been carted long ago to the dump, or burned gleefully as fire starter. Your father bared his heart for an instant, to have it dashed against his sleeve. Shut anything dear to you safe from the catcalls of strangers; only dance when the house is empty.
Willy and Eric disembarked at the corner of Walnut, a leafy, stable street of Second Empires and Dutch Colonials. Nothing about the humble but attractive neighborhood was intrinsically dour. Clutching Eric’s hand, Willy dragged her feet. “I should warn you about the house,” she said. “It’s brown.”
The house was brown. It was brown outside, it was brown inside. When her parents first bought the two-story Queen Anne, they spoke of replacing the chocolate wall-to-wall carpet and ripping off the cheap umber paneling that made the rooms look cheerless and small. But the very oppression of the interior steeped its residents in lassitude, and their grand renovation schemes dwindled. Faced with objectionable decor that was bothersome to revamp, it was more expedient to revamp their tastes instead. Her parents now claimed they liked brown-everything, and had invested in matching mahogany furniture and beige drapes. That redecoration was all talk was hardly surprising: they were both given to vague propositions, but never suggested cleaning out the garage this Saturday. Her parents had mumbled for years about traveling to Japan, but the only trips her father could be troubled to take were those that actively conflicted with his daughter’s tennis matches.