"This is one of the times when my father told me to remember the giants," she said.
I raised my eyebrows.
"My father was professor of philosophy at Wesleyan," she explained. "He always said that it was impossible to imagine anything so big that there wasn't something else bigger. He said that it stood to reason that somewhere in the universe there was a race of giants so big that it took them a million years to draw a breath. He said when things seemed difficult just to think about that."
"Sounds like the Navy Department," I observed. "Was he the one who argued that there might be several sexes? Frank told me something—"
She smiled. "Yes. That was when I was adolescent and having crushes about boys. He said that somewhere there must be a place where, Instead of two, there were six or seven sexes. He suggested that falling in love under those conditions was really complicated. He was a nice man," she added. "He's dead."
"Your father sounds like a right guy," I remarked. "Frank said—"
"How do I know you're telling the truth?" she suddenly interrupted. "What proof have you?"
Here I was on home-ground. "Frank thought of that. He told me to remind you that you have a mole on your left hip, that you're nuts about Prokofiev, that you don't think much of Ernest Hemingway as an author and—"
"The louse!" she exclaimed. "Oh, I know I oughtn't to talk about him this way if he's dead but I didn't dream men told each other—"
I pulled out my fountain pen and wrote my Jacklin signature rapidly across the back of the drink-card. I pushed it at her across the table.