LITMIR.BIZ

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      There was another pause before he continued. “I must confess I didn’t expect to meet anyone at the convention quite so congenial. We have a great many interests in common, and she seems able to ignore the reserve which has sometimes been attributed to me, probably justly, since I’m so much the opposite of a well-traveled person and feel just a little ill at ease in gatherings of this nature. She made me forget my years whenever we engaged in conversation. I’ve never felt capable of forgetting my age for very long, and I’m afraid I’ve never wanted to be thought of as the kind of impetuous elderly gentleman who allows himself to be flattered when such a mistake is made by an attractive young lady.”

      The phone conversation was not interrupted at this point by yet another pause, but for a moment so many incredible thoughts were passing through my mind that I failed to pay strict attention to what he was saying.

      At that time Howard was only thirty-two and Sonia was seven years older—and he had mentioned her age in his letter! But it was not in the least unusual for anyone, elderly or otherwise, to refer to a woman of thirty-nine as an “attractive young lady.” Young as I was in the early 1920s, that sort of gallantry was so common that I occasionally found myself thinking of stunningly beautiful women older than Sonia in precisely that way—and not always out of gallantry. This did not mean I was attracted more by older women than by younger ones, but to me a stunningly beautiful woman has always seemed ageless.

      No—it was not that which set my thoughts whirling, for by this time I was thoroughly familiar through our correspondence with Howard’s “old gentleman” pretense. What seemed incredible to me was the indisputable fact that Howard, despite his puritanical scruples, had become the invited guest of an “unchaperoned” young lady at her Brooklyn apartment!

      I had no way of knowing that she was “unchaperoned,” but the assumption seemed warranted somehow, and when one jumps to that kind of conclusion it can sometimes carry as much conviction as an established fact. If I had paid just a little more attention to his words at this point, enlightenment would have come more quickly than it did. But it came quickly enough.

      “Samuelus is sharing the apartment with me, and Sonia is staying with a neighbor in another apartment on the same floor. He’s also here on a temporary visit, to explore some employment prospects which Sonia feels should be looked into. He has been planning to leave Cleveland—he isn’t as attached to that burg as I am to Providence—and settle in New York permanently. It would be a very sensible move and I’ve told him so.”

      I had never met Samuel Loveman, but Howard had corresponded with him for several years. Since there was no amateur journalist whose name HPL failed to Latinize after the exchange of several letters, the “Samuelus” did not surprise me. At that time I knew of Loveman only as a gifted young poet, although for Howard he had attained the extremely advanced age which sets a man in his middle thirties quite apart from such youngsters as myself.

      Howard was talking very rapidly now.

      “Why don’t you come over! Samuelus is out now, making an inspection tour of Prospect Park. But he’ll be back in time for dinner. Sonia is doing some shopping and also some marketing, in preparation for a five-course meal that she may feel has gone unappreciated when she glances at my platter. The old gentleman eats sparingly at all times. But Samuelus has a hearty appetite and consumes nearly everything that is placed before him. I encourage him in this, and hope that Sonia will not notice how much food goes back to the kitchen unconsumed. Her cooking is so excellent and she devotes so much time to the preparation of a meal that I try to make up for what I lack in gustatory appreciation with the most effusive kind of praise. Effusive it may be, but that does not mean that it is not sincere. But you will soon discover for yourself what a superb cook she is.”

      Quite obviously Howard was not the kind of man a woman could hope to ensorcell through her culinary gifts alone!

      Although I did not pause in my reply, I must do so here to elaborate a bit on what passed through my mind when he informed me without preamble that he had become the guest of a woman he had only recently met. Such thoughts had occurred to me only because he had made clear in his letters exactly how he felt about the setting aside of all conventional attitudes in the realm of sex. What Calvin Coolidge once said about sin, “I am not for it,” would have been just as applicable to the way Howard felt about what has sometimes been called a Victorian hangup in that particular realm. Only with Howard, it was not precisely a hangup.

      Actually Howard had no hangups whatsoever in a strict sense, because his standards of deportment were basic to his very nature. Puritan traditions he respected and adhered to, but the prudish trappings of Victorian convention he regarded as quite laughable—at least insofar as they were prudish. When Victorian conventions were completely in accord with his inner convictions, defying them would have made no sense to him. But in his correspondence he made his dislike for the entire Victorian era—including its residual spillover in America as late as the early 1920s—so unmistakably plain that my testimony is not needed to confirm it. It is too much a matter of firmly established biographical record.

      But I was not concerned with such matters that morning, for they had little to do with HPL’s totally unexpected phone call.

      “I’ll start right off,” I told him. “I should be there in about one hour.”

      “Sonia’s out now, as I’ve said, but she’ll be back well before two-thirty at the latest. She’s looking forward to meeting you,” he added. “She’s read two of your stories.”

      “I hope you didn’t talk her into liking them, against her better judgment.”

      “There was no need. She thought they were splendid,” Howard said, and then continued: “She has a daughter about your age. I was careful not to tell her I have two grandsons who have the foolish idea they are young Casanovas.”

      “I’ll be careful to give her the contrary impression,” I assured him. “That’s not such a good idea with some girls, though. Is she stunningly beautiful?”

      “What a decadent generation this is! Is that the first thing you think about when you meet a very sensible, attractive young lady?”

      I had not intended to end that phone call on a note of levity. But HPL had surprised me a little by engaging in the amiable sort of chiding which up to that time was of fairly rare occurrence in his letters. One never knows anyone well until one has met him in person, and from that moment his correspondence will often take on a more exuberant kind of informality.

      Parkside Avenue is far out in Brooklyn, almost as far as the more distant regions of historic Flatbush and the sea-bright traceries of Coney Island which never fail to bring to mind some New England seacoast town. I have never otherwise cared too much for Brooklyn, but have always preferred it to the vast, sprawling wasteland of the Bronx, where there is little of an associational nature that appeals to me. Just the thought of meeting HPL for the first time, however, blurred all distinctions between the boroughs.

      Sonia resided in a four room, first floor apartment in a red brick building not more than four stories in height, and Howard was sitting on one of the two stone walls that ran from the entrance to the street and enclosed a small garden of flowering plants.

      As I approached the apartment house there was no one else in sight, and I was certain it was HPL even before I was close enough to recognize him from the two photographs he had sent me. At that time he had grown quite stout, for a normally lean man about five-eleven in height. (He often referred to his weight at that period as ridiculous and was glad that he had succeeded in becoming lean again some two years later.) He looked a great deal older than thirty-two, and his rather settled, fortyish aspect struck me as at least more in accord with his “elderly gentleman” pretense than the distinctly collegiate look which not a few men manage to retain until the onset of middle age.

      It was only when he rose and grasped my hand in greeting that I realized there was still a certain boyishness about him that could not be concealed. It was particularly noticeable in the region of his eyes, and his voice was not that of a middle-aged man.

      “Belknapius!” he said, quite

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