50
PARTISAN REVIEW
The Henrik Hudson Parkway is admirable as an experience in
smoothly moving solid geometry, but my feeling about it as we bored
along in the evening was principally that They could have it. This feeling
became full and profane as we entered the big traffic that flows down the
elevated west side highway, with .the tail lights of that solid, elastic stream
of cars looking each like a little red coal being .transported politely to
Hell. Credentials. The metallic rumble and vibration of that thorough·
fare can
be
physically painful. At 19th Street we were decanted out of it
and dodged south and west through the maze of streets, seeing among other
things a gang of kids shooting craps under a street light. The fr{)nt hall
of our apartmeat house, when we got there, looked as if it had been altered
in all proportions while we were away. Our ears were still singing and
it
took us twenty-four hours to get over thinking that the whole place had
been magicked. Certainly it was no longer ours.
The night before we left New York we had a warm, well-knit time
with some friends at a pleasant, expensive place. New York is perhaps
the place for that kind of festivity, which is properly rare. As to what
I
think about New York in the large, there is no need to insist on it.
II.
I do not remember whether Henry Adams wrote very much about
early autumn in WashingtoD, but it is a finer season there than the spring
of which he did, memorably, write.
It
is the season in whose still warm
nights you should walk slowly along the streets where the
~egroes
live in
their doorways and in the little yards, dark, dark without the glimmer of
faces, without lights in the houses, silent often or merely audible as
if
the
whole street sighed. It is the season in which you should sit on a bench
in Lafayette Park in the sun, seeing the sun on the peaceful lawns of the
White House, watching the squirrels ripple across the grass and the pigeons
walk on the paths with their pecking motion.
We had no time to do these things.
Except for the traffic, which was more crowded and crosswise than
ever, the city seemed not much changed. On the roads leading in there
were new drive-in eating places, very elaborate and brisk, with enormous
parking areas, like those around Los Angeles. Hot Shoppes, they were
called. I wonder if the President ever stopped at a Hot Shoppe. The
hamburgers were very good.
On
Friday morning I went to the press conference. The big anteroom
was about half full of reporters, which makes a good many reporters,
among them a goodlooking girl in a dark suit who seemed to be a new one.
The two I knew were T., just back from the Willkie train (disclaiming loss
of voice), and
J.,
down from New York on one of his occasional visits,
looking things over with his usual genial, sinoidal expression. One of the
plainclot}les guards came up quietly to make sure of his identity. Other·
wise the guards were extremely unobtrusive. Obtruding for them, I sup-
