166
PARTISAN REVIEW
come back. They seem so tame. They eat out of your hand, don't
they?"
"That bird won't come back," said the boy.
a!
know what hap–
pened to him. That cat got him. You get a bird tame and if it gets
out anybody can catch it." The cold, accusing face began to contract
in a childish pucker and tears hindered the next words: "That
damned cat ate my bird!" He wrenched the mattress out of
his
mo–
ther's hands and flung it back onto the springs and flung himself
upon it, sobbing maniacally. "And if I catch that cat, I'll kill it! I'll
kill it! I'll kill it!"
The doctor flushed with embarrassment at this display, un–
checked by the mother who merely stood smiling beside the bed. In
time, the tantrum spent itself and Freddie lay shaking, face down on
the naked bed. In the quiet, Mrs. Horvath, deceptively matter-of-fact,
said, "Doctor, did you read that book by the doctor of Hitler? He
say Hitler don't like women, only men? You think that true, Doctor?"
He could not chart her course, begun so remotely. He stalled,
took off his glasses and put them on again. She went on. "I hate
Hit–
ler, Doctor. But I do not believe all what they say. This book I buy
in the drug store for one dollar ninety eight cents. I think
a,
Jew write
the book out of madness for what Hitler do to Je.;..,s."
If
only he could turn his leaden flesh and carry it up the stairs
to his own room and lock the door upon these savages! There rest,
there drink his dubonnet, there be at home! But a score of weights
held him immobile, facing the barbarous woman and he listened to
her: 'I hate Hitler," she repeated. "I like Jews. But if you're mad
you don't all times tell the truth, isn't it? So this doctor in this book
I got say Hitrer like men. You know? What you think of that, Doc–
tor?" She went on and on. Unskilled as were her thrusts, they were
direct. And when at last she was finished and had dismissed him (did
she, he wondered, in her marvellously malicious mind think that per–
haps
he
was the "doctor of Hitler"? Or that
he
did not like women,
only men?) he felt trampled upon. Actually he ached and when he
got to his room, he was sure he was coming down with something.
Never in all these three years had his loneliness been so acute. It
8prained his whole body, buried his faculties so deeply that sensation,
if
it came at all, was ambiguous and incomplete. Impassively, he ac–
cepted the anonymous voices of machines: radios, motor boats, fac–
tory whistles, trains, a random bomber. They came to him thickly
insulated so that,· shrill or loud as they might really be, they did not
penetrate
his
mind but lay,
all
of them together, in a humming mass
on the threshold. His thoughts faltered like sleep-burdened eyes or
