214
PARTISAN REVIEW
piece of furniture and dragging or carrying it to the steps. Simoo
found the man's black eyes upon him again."
"What the devil could I have done with that key," he mut·
tered, feeling about in his pockets. "Do you know that nobody'•
been upstairs for years. The floor is liable to collapse. Ha, ha!
If
it does, then I'm the one to catch it!"
He ran inside, rummaged in a drawer and found the two
keys on a silver ring. The separate entrance to the second floor
had been installed at the time of his father's wedding; the key·
ring had belonged to his father; for a moment Simon stared at it
unbelievingly and then, still wearing his opera cape and Homburg
hat, brought it out to Wiley Bey, who was staggering up the stain
with a mattress slung over his head. Here, Simon stopped
and
thought: But this is absurd. I'm giving this creature my father's
key. Am I or am I not the lord of the manor? But all the humor
and reality had gone out of it, and when the Negro popped
his
head from under the mattress, transfixing him with his extra·
ordinary black eyes, Simon hastened to unlock the door, pushed
it back on its rusty hinges and helped the man carry his burden
upstairs. And when he went down again it seemed quite
natura~
indeed necessary, to pick up a bedpost and take it to the woman
who stood waiting on the porch. And then to handle one end of
a chest of drawers while the Negro, grasping the other end, grunted
"Steady now, right, left, now we got it." ... Simon was
unused
to physical labor. His muscles soon began to ache unbearably.
Moreover, in manoeuvring a rope-bound crate through the door·
way, he painfully crushed his fingers against the jamb. Yet he
continued feverishly to shuttle between sidewalk and stairs.
Why? He thought of nothing. Once, one of the women, a
tall flat-faced creature with her kinky hair braided into pigtails,
murmured: "You are very kind." For the rest, the three women
maintained their mysterious silence. Wiley Bey thanked him
gravely, but after a while seemed to forget that he was there.
In fact, were it not for his febrile insistence, Simon would not
have been able to help at all. Yet he could not go away: the
whole feeling of this strange event was too unclear. On the one
hand, intermittently, he was carried away by an unaccustomed
elan of generosity and fraternity, a kind of drunkenness. He
babbled incessantly, he laughed for little or no reason, and asked
