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Occasionally I would chide Winter about his great love. 'As a former 157-pounder, it must be nice, Severin, to involve yourself in a field that's changed one pound in ten years.'
'What about history?' he'd say. 'How many pounds has civilization changed? I'd guess about four ounces since Jesus, about half an ounce since Marx.'
Winter was an educated man, of course his German was perfect, and evidently he was a good teacher - though there is some evidence that native speakers of a foreign language don't always make the best teachers. He was a good wrestling coach, but the way he got the job was a fluke. He was hired to teach German, but he never missed a wrestling practice and rather quickly became an unofficial assistant to the head coach, a thunkish heavyweight from Minnesota who'd been both a Big Ten and national champion at the time Winter wrestled for Iowa. The ex-heavyweight shortly dropped dead of a heart attack while he was demonstrating a setup for the fireman's carry. (Winter said, 'I thought he looked like he was setting it up all wrong.') Caught in midseason without a coach, the Athletic Department asked Winter to fill in. He told Edith it had been his secret ambition. His team finished the season so strongly that he was salaried as head coach for the next year, creating only a small, unuttered scandal among the more petty faculty who were envious of his double pay. It was only his enemies in the Division of Lan
guage and Literature who made any claim that Winter gave less than enough time to his German students because of his new work load. Naturally this disgruntlement was never expressed to his face. Enrollment in German actually soared, since Winter required every member of the wrestling team to take his language.
Winter claimed that wrestling helped him as a German teacher (but he would claim that it helped everything he did - indeed, he claimed it aloud and in various company, his hand on Edith's sleek bottom, shouldering her off-balance and jarring her drink: 'It makes everything work a little better!').
Their affection for each other seemed real, if strange. The first night Utch and I had dinner with them we drove home very curious about them.
'God, I think he looks like a troll,' I told Utch.
'I think you like how she looks,' Utch said.
'He's almost grotesque,' I said, 'like a giant dwarf ...'
'I know you,' Utch said; she put her heavy hand on my thigh. 'You go for her kind, the bones in the face - the breeding, you would say.'
'He has almost no neck,' I said.
'He's very handsome.'
'You find him attractive?' I asked her.
'Oh ja, more dan dat.'
'More than that,' I corrected her.
'Ja,' Utch said, 'and you find her attractive, too?'
'Oh ja, more dan dat,' I said. Her strong hand squeezed me; we laughed.
'You know what?' she said. 'He does all the cooking.'
I will say that Severin was no savage at preparing food - only at eating it. After dinner we sat in their living room; their sofa curved around a coffee table where we had brandy. Winter was still ravaging the fruit and cheese, popping grapes, slashing pears - gobs of Brie on bread and chunks of Gorgonzola. He continued with his dinner wine, to chase his brandy. Utch was sleepy. She put her bare foot on the coffee table and Winter seized it at the ankle, looking at her calf as if it were meat to be deboned.
'Look at that leg!' he cried. 'Look at the width of that ankle, the spread of that foot!' He said something to Utch in German which made her laugh; she wasn't angry or embarrassed at all. 'Look at that calf. This is peasant stuff,' Winter said. 'This is the foot of the fields! This is the leg that outran the armies!' He spoke more German; he clearly approved of Utch's sturdy body. She was shorter than he - only five feet six inches. She was rounded, full-hipped, full-breasted, with a curve at her belly and muscular legs. Utch had a rump a child could sit on when she was standing up, but she had no fat on her; she was hard. She had that broad face of Central Europe: high cheekbones, a heavy jaw and a wide mouth with thin lips.
Utch spoke some German to Severin; it was pleasant listening to their singsong Viennese dialect, though I wished I could understand them. When he let go of her leg, she left it on the table.
I picked up the candle and lit Edith's cigarette, then my own. Neither Utch nor Severin smoked. 'I understand that you write,' I said to Edith.
She smiled at me. Of course I knew, then, where her smile was from and where we all were going. I had seen only one smile as confident as Edith's before, and Edith's smile was even more heedless and alluring than the one on the postcard of the angel called 'The Smile of Reims'.
2
Scouting Reports: Edith [126-pound class]
EDITH FULLER LEFT PREP school in her senior year to go with her parents to Paris. They were the New York Fullers and there was no strife connected with the move; Edith was happy to leave, and her father said that she should not waste her time on education when she could live in Paris. She went to a good school there, and when her parents returned to New York, she chose to travel in Europe. When she returned to the States to go to college, her mother registered disappointment that Edith was 'suppressing her natural beauty in an unnatural way, just to look like a writer'. For two years at Sarah Lawrence, Edith looked like a writer - causing the only friction with her parents that ever existed. Actually, she really looked as if she was still traveling in Europe; being a writer had nothing to do with it. When her father died suddenly she left Sarah Lawrence and joined her mother in New York. Seeing no reason to upset her mother further, she took up the cause of caring for her 'natural beauty' again, and found that she could still write.
Edith was instrumental in finding her mother a job - not that any of the New York Fullers ever needed a job, but her mother needed to have something to do. One of Edith's boyfriends directed the New Acquisitions Department at the Museum of Modern Art, and since both Edith and her mother had been would-be art history majors (neither of them ever finished college) and there was interesting volunteer work in the New Acquisitions Department, the matter was easily arranged.
All of Edith's boyfriends had interesting jobs of one kind or another. She had never dated a college boy when she was in college; she enjoyed and appealed to older men. The boyfriend at the Modern was thirty-four at the time; Edith was twenty-one.
She spent six months in New York keeping her mother company. One night she asked her to come see a movie with her, but her mother said, 'Oh, I really couldn't, Edith. I have much too much to do.' So Edith felt free to go back to Europe.
'Please don't feel you have to look like a writer, dear,' her mother told her, but Edith was over that. There were friends in Paris from the Fullers' year there; she could have a room in someone's nice house; she could write; and there would be interesting things to do at night. She was a serious young girl who had never worried anybody, she was leaving behind no serious boyfriend in America, and she wasn't rushing to Europe to meet one. She had never had a serious boyfriend, and though, as she later told me, she did think - in the back of her mind as she left New York - that this might be the time to 'have the experience of really falling in love with someone,' she wanted to finish a good piece of writing first. She admitted that she'd had no idea what that piece of writing was going to be, any more than she'd 'bothered very hard to imagine what that first real lover would be like.' She had slept with only two men before, one of them the man who was at the Modern. 'I didn't do it to get Mommy the job,' Edith told me. 'She would have gotten the job all by herself.' He was married, he had two children, and he told Edith he wanted to leave his wife for her. Edith stopped sleeping with him; she didn't want him to leave his wife.
