380
PARTISAN REVIEW
cup. Finally she sighed, "Poor Jake. I'm sure he hadn't suspected how
things are."
Father raised his eyebrows. After a moment he shook
his
head
emphatically and said that Mother was reading things into this in–
cident. "The girl's just tired tonight," he said. "She doesn't give a
snap for the boy."
Mother shook her head with equal emphasis. "No. Grace told me
before she left." She replaced her cup in its saucer but continued
for several seconds to hold to its handle with her thumb and fore–
finger. "I must say I thought Bill Evers had long since passed out of
her head. There
was
a time when young girls confided such pro–
longed crushes in their mothers."
From somewhere in the front part of the house we could hear
Uncle Jake's voice apologizing and entreating. Eventually we began
to hear Virginia Am1 reassuring him. And I recalled then how in
front of the church one Sunday, after services, I had
be~n
tugging at
Uncle Jake's hand, trying to pull him away from a crowd of men
who were talking foxhound and bird dog. My eyes, as I tugged, were
on an old negro man who wa<> selling bags of peanuts on the street
corner. I saw that the vendor was closing the lid to the primitive cart
that he pushed and was preparing to move to another corner. I tugged
at Uncle Jake's hand and turned to beg him to come along. But upon
turning my eyes to .him I saw that he had somehow managed to slip
my hand into that of a strange man; and he and all the others were
standing about laughing at me.
With a violent jerk I had broken loose and had run off down
the street in a beastly rage. When Uncle Jake finally caught me he
held me and knelt on one knee before me imploring humbly that I
forgive him (instead of cajoling as most men would have done). And
silently I began to blame myself for not having realized that the
hand I had been pulling on had a hardness and coarseness about it
that I should have distinguished from that of my gentle uncle's.
"Poor Jake." Mother used to say that Father was "an omnivorous
reader," and I would say myself when I was nine or ten that she and
he were both "omnivorous talkers" when they were alone together.
They talked about everything and everyone under the sun. They didn't
talk especially kindly or unkindly about people, but I felt that in the
years of their married life they had certainly left nothing that came
into either of their heads unsaid. I was sometimes surprised to hear
them speak with such detachment of Virginia Ann or Brother or
Uncle Jake. "Poor Jake," Father would say, "he's really incapable
