Read The Goddess of Small Victories for Free Online

mannequins to advertise theGödels’ success. After all, textiles were in the family history. Her husband had risen from being foreman in a clothing factory to directing its operations. I tended to be a bit approximate. Despite all my pains, something in my outfit always fell short: a laddered stocking, an ill-fashioned cuff, an off-color pair of gloves. But my fresh-out-of-bed look was exciting enough to Kurt that he spared me his mania. For Kurt, everything assumed extreme proportions, but he applied his sartorial terrorism only to himself. What I had first thought was snobbishness or a bourgeois holdover was a necessity of survival. Kurt wore his suits to face the world. Without them, he had no body. He put back on the paraphernalia of a human being every morning, and it had to be impeccable since it advertised his normality. I later understood that he had so little faith in his mental balance that he laid a grid of ordinariness over his life: a normal outfit, a normal house, a normal life. And I was an ordinary woman.

7
    “But it isn’t my birthday.” Adele hesitated to take off her cap. She didn’t want to expose her thinly thatched skull. Anna knelt down, pretending to search her bag for a mirror that she had already found. When she rose to her feet, Mrs. Gödel was wearing her present: a soft blue-gray turban.
    “You’re beautiful, Adele! You look like Simone de Beauvoir. It goes with your eyes.”
    The old lady looked at herself indulgently.
    “You called me by my first name. I don’t have a problem with that. But please stop resorting to it according to circumstances. I’m not senile.”
    She smoothed the tissue paper and folded it into a perfect square.
    “Gladys is bound to tell me that it makes me look old.”
    “Since when have you listened to the opinions of others?”
    “You think she’s harmless, but she’s a nuisance. She paws through my belongings.”
    “I think I’ve gotten the message.”
    “Gladys is secretly venomous. Seeing too much of her can kill you in the long run. She went through three husbands.”
    “She’s still on the prowl.”
    “Some women never have enough.”
    She wiped the mirror with her sleeve before giving it back to Anna.
    “So, what is the price tag on your generosity? I wasn’t born yesterday, young lady. Presents are always attached to a cost.”
    “It has nothing to do with the
Nachlass
. I’d like to ask you a personal question, if I may. I’ve been wondering … what you talked about with your husband.”
    “You’re always so apologetic. It’s exhausting.”
    Adele stored the folded paper in her bedside stand. Anna, not knowing what to do with her hands, tucked them between her thighs.
    “What do your parents do?”
    “They are both history professors.”
    “Rivals?”
    “Colleagues.”
    “So your parents were intellectuals, but when they went for a walk on Sunday, I’m sure they held hands.”
    “They talked to each other a lot.”
    She listened calmly to her lie. Had she been honest, Anna would have replaced “talked to” with “shouted at.” They competed over everything, even their child. The lectures of one answered an argument by the other, when they weren’t fighting outright. They waited for their daughter to enter the university before signing a tacit truce. Each had staked out a separate territory, large enough to provide a field for her greatness and his. She, Rachel, went to Berkeley and the West Coast, while George, closer to home, scaled Harvard’s walls. Anna stayed on in Princeton, alone in a town she had always wanted to leave.
    “How did they meet?”
    “They were students.”
    “Does it shock you that a woman like me ended up with a great mind like him?”
    “I see great minds all around me, and I’m not impressed by them. But your husband is a legend, even among the great and the good. He was known to be unusually hermetic.”
    “We were a couple. Don’t go digging beyond that.”
    “And you talked about his