ISO
PARTISAN REVIEW
like apartment houses, sprawling into the yards of churches, huddling
in the sulphurous shadows of factories. And although everything was
new, made freshly for this especial period in the world's history, it
had a second-hand look. Houses, oil drums, busses, people seemed to
have been got at a fire sale.
There was a perpetual stirring in the lodging house. All the other
tenants were defense workers, and the walls of the corridors were
hung with warning pennants: "QUIET! BULLARD WORKER!
HELP HIM HELP WIN THE WAR!" At the most unseemly hours
-eleven at night, four in the morning-alarm clocks shrieked, taps
gushed, feet crunched over the gravel of the driveway to the never
ending stream of busses. The lodgers ranged from late adolescence
to early senility and they came.from all over. the country, from Har–
risburg, Pennsylvania; Pueblo, Colorado; Mobile; Galveston; Wil–
mington, Delaware. They lived three to a room and six to a bathroom
and because there were so many of them and their existence was so
migratory,
it
was impossible to tell them apart, to give them more
specific designations than "old" and "young," "male" and "fe–
male." Dr. Pakheiser from time to time received bits of information
about them from the Hungarian manageress, Mrs. Horvath. She
tossed them to him, dry and meatless, and did so without the least
good humor. On the first floor there was (or had been) a Sikorsky
worker who owned a fishing boat and on Sundays went to the Sound
for bass. A lady accountant at Remington Arms had left her electric
grill
on for six hours and the pan that had been on it melted down
to nothing, creating a fearful stink. A foreman at the Bunner Ritter
plant had been rejected by the army for ulcers of the stomach. A girl
at Chance Vought had, returning from a week-end in Massachusetts,
seen a trainload of prisoners of war passing through the station in
Providence and she had reported that they grinned shamelessly as
if
they were on a holiday. But the doctor did not know whether these
adventures belonged to current tenants or to former ones, and if he
had inquired further and had correctly assigned the histories to the
right names and faces, it would have served no purpose; by the time
he was sure of his ground, they would have packed up their suitcases
and moved away and immediately been replaced.
He was sympathetic with their restlessness but sternly held him–
self detached from it. Had he not done so, he, too, probably would
have wandered from one boarding house to the next like a sick person
constantly shifting about in his bed trying to find a comfortable posi–
tion for his aching bones. Refusing to think of himself as a "tran–
sient," pretending that there would never be an end to the war or to
