Wrong Information is Being Given Out at Princeton

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PEOPLE WERE ALREADY BEGINNING to forget we were veterans after the Second World War and that the government no longer owed us a living. Face-lifting, hair replacement, and breast enhancement hadn’t yet come into vogue and people still believed there were other kinds of contentment. Especially when television was just beginning to pleasantly paralyze the nation. The forces of commercialism and survival were hard at work doing a lot of us down, and I was at the time at a loose emotional end, as you might say, when she came into my life in the cold blue winter before Christmas. There’d been a couple of big snowfalls and icicles were hanging down from people’s windowsills.

It was a Sunday afternoon and I was standing in a friend’s ramshackle West Thirty-fourth Street apartment in a gray and dingy Garment District around the corner from one of the city’s biggest hotels, the New Yorker, and not far from the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel that went out westwards under the Hudson River, starting a highway all the way to California. I was always fond of knowing where I really was in New York, right down to the bedrock and subsoil. There wasn’t much heat in the building and the friend, whom I had got to know while we were on the same ship in the navy, had a log fire going in his fireplace and I was glad to be somewhere warm. Her name was Sylvia and her girlfriend called Ertha, and both arrived enclosed in a bunch of thick heavy sweaters. Sylvia’s top was in green and her friend in blue. Both were advocates of modern dance, and even with all the thick wool over them you could see they were athletically curvaceous.

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