Free Exit Ghost by Philip Roth Page B

Clearly Billy couldn't begin to imagine that someone of my years might be asking about his young wife because his young wife was now all I could think about. There was my age to mislead him, and my eminence too. How could he possibly believe the worst about a writer he'd begun reading in high school? It was like meeting Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. How could the author of "The Song of Hiawatha" take a licentious interest in Jamie?
    To be on the safe side, I asked first about him.
    "Tell me about your family," I said.
    "Oh, I'm the only reading person in the family, but that doesn't matter; they're good people. In Philly now for four generations. My great-grandfather started the family business. He was from Odessa. His name was Sam. His customers called him Uncle Sam the Umbrella Man. He made and repaired umbrellas. My grandfather expanded into luggage. In the teens and the twenties, train travel boomed and suddenly everybody needed a piece of luggage. And people were traveling by ship, transatlantic ships. It was the era of the wardrobe trunk—you know, the big, heavy trunks people took on long journeys that opened up vertically and had hangers and drawers in them."
    "I know them well," I said. "And the others, the smaller black ones that opened up horizontally like a pirate's chest.
I had a trunk like that to go off to college with. Nearly everyone did. It was constructed of wood and the corners were sheathed in metal and the fancy ones were girdled with bands of embossed metal and the lock was brass and made to withstand an earthquake. You used to ship your trunk by Railway Express. You'd take it down to the train station and leave it with the clerk at the Railway Express desk. The guy at Newark's Penn Station in those days still wore the green eyeshade and kept his pencil tucked behind his ear. He'd weigh the trunk and you'd pay per pound and off your socks and underwear would go."
    "Yes, every city of any size had a luggage store, and the department stores all had luggage departments. It's airline stewardesses," Billy told me, "who revolutionized how Americans felt about luggage in the fifties—people saw that it could be light and chic. That's about when my father went into the business and modernized the store and changed the name to Davidoff's Fashionable Luggage. Until then, the place was still known by the original name, Samuel Davidoff and Sons. About this time along came the luggage on wheels—and that, vastly abridged, is the story of the luggage business. The full version runs to a thousand pages."
    "You're writing about the family business, are you?"
    He nodded and he shrugged and he sighed.
"And
the family. I'm trying to, anyway. I more or less grew up in the store. I've heard a thousand stories from my grandfather. Every time I go to see him I fill another notebook. I've got
stories enough to last a lifetime. But it's all a matter of how, isn't it? I mean, how you tell them."
    "And Jamie. How did she grow up?"
    And so he told me, lavishly expatiating on her accomplishments: about Kinkaid, the exclusive private school in Houston from which she'd graduated valedictorian; about her stellar academic career at Harvard, where she graduated summa cum laude; about River Oaks, the wealthy Houston neighborhood where her family lived; about the Houston Country Club, where she played tennis and swam and had come out as a debutante against her will; about the conventional mother she tried so hard to accommodate and the difficult father she could never please; about the favorite haunts she took Billy to visit when they first went together to Houston for Christmas; about the places where she played as a child that he wanted her to show him and the menacing beauty of the ugly Houston bayous at dawn and Jamie's defiantly swimming in the murky water with a wild older sister, who, he informed me, pronounced the word "buy-ohs," like the old Houstonians.
    I had simply asked him to tell me about her; what I'd gotten was