Word: esther
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...General Motors Institute to earn while he learned-a month in a Cadillac plant, a month in class studying mechanical engineering. Cadillac thought him so bright that it hired him as a full-time engineer in 1933. Cole celebrated by marrying his home-town sweetheart, blonde, blue-eyed Esther Engman...
...Cole's salary and bonus approach $300,000. He likes to spend it, lives in a palatial $250,000 stone-and-glass lakeside house, dresses in hand-needled $175 suits that have fancy cuffs on the sleeves. With Wife Esther, Son David, 22 (an engineering student at Michigan), and Daughter Martha, 18 (a freshman at Michigan State), he shares three boats, four Chevies (one for each member of the family) and five TV-sets (two in color), which Cole watches "only to see if I can sharpen up the Chevy commercials...
...observed that European women "make a man feel 20 feet tall. I just don't get that satisfaction from the American female. She's reluctant to say anything inspiring to me about my appearance or abilities or talents or whatever." It was all so odd that Hostess Esther Williams, an athletic sort and no clinging vine, was moved to comment on one male's observation: "I don't believe he believes a word that he's saying...
...ruled by Reese's dotty grandmother, everyone knows the forms by heart. Schools, colleges, clothes, jobs and "marriage partners" all fit an ingrained pattern, and most of the Parmelee grandchildren, clustered with their families around the central money pile, like the arrangement well enough. Reese's wife Esther, who grew up knowing the smell but not the taste of money, venerates the forms as if they were sacraments. To be well bred is to be ill bedded, she thinks, and so she is frigid. But when Reese undertakes a Long Island fling with another man's wife...
Novelist Auchincloss, who has written this sort of book before (The Great World and Timothy Colt, Venus in Sparta), knows his forms and his upper-crust Long Islanders. His description of Esther and the other Parmelee Cove women pursuing the adulterers like a chorus of Eumenides has the rasp of accurate reporting. But if Reese's predicament is real, he himself is sometimes the sort of hero scissored by children from the backs of cereal boxes. His incessant wrestling with the devil is a little sophomoric, and his escape from Parmelee Cove shows the limits of even the best...