48
PARTISAN REViEW
time now, and she was making ends meet. She really liked the discipline of
counting pennies, budgeting, and haviJlg a baby to worry over· Her
people, it turned out, had always been poor. But because she had com–
pany that evening she was putting on the dog. She bought little fancy
things for
~upper,
served thelll up daintily in her best dishes, and wanted
to talk about books.
"Do you expect your job to last," I asked. "Sure." "Sure?" "Well,
there's no use not, is there?" He had a way of lifting his arm and making
a gesture of gently keeping things down, of patting them smooth, with
his open palm.
It
is like the motion a handball player makes in tapping
a ball gently close against the wall that his opponent has hit from far
out with all his might. He was still reading the
Daily
SUTl,
the
Satur–
day
Evening
Post,
and he was still, dtspite the baby and the twenty-five
a week income, going out with the boys one or two nights a week and on
late Sunday mornings, for a game of handball or basketball. About the
only change I noticed was in his attitude towards her. His earlier worship
and later respect had been welded into one and transferred to the baby.
He objec.ted openly that ni;rht to her putting on the dog. He didn't believe
in that, he said to me, referring to her "classy" set up of the table for my
benefit. But she did. She did these doggy things with a certain earnest–
ness, and stubbornly, even when you suspected she knew you didn't like it
done.
\Vith a logic he would have respected had he been better informed,
his wages sank to eighteen a week. '-Vi thin two months he lost his job. But
she went out and got one.
J
t almost seemed that wht'never she really
wanted to she could get herself a job. She was ail excellent stenographer.
But he couldn't take care of the baby and they couldn't afford a nursery on
her eighteen a week. She left the child with his mother, but the child
was unhappy. He didn't lik-:: the arrangement and since they still had
a little-money (they had begun saving as soon as the cuts in his salary
began) he wanted her to quit work. But that was madness to her. Of
course it was madness, but so is unemployment, and to Tommy, the die–
hard practical one, the baby seemed far more real and important. But
she lost her job.
They moved into his mother's house, furniture and all, cluttering up
the place. She was ashamed and tight-lipped about it and he was un–
comfortable. He was one of the unemployed now, and he made a system–
atic thing of it, almost respectful of the fact. He made the rounds of
unemployment agencies, at
fir~t
every day, then three times a week.
He
signed up with the public relief-work agencies.
If
he made a remark now'
about conditions it would never be more than: "Sure, things are pretty
