PARTISAN REVIEW
mocker, who mocked in that lopsided pursuit, he could no longer tell.
Someone laughed and he began to tremble. In a moment the cripple
would touch him.
He almost yielded then, paid for the offensive coincidence the
price named; but when he wheeled nervously, a nickel in his hand,
the boy automatically winced, ducking behind the protective crook of
an elbow. Warren had not intended violence, but he could not refuse
the cue of that habitual response. "Get the hell out of here!" he
shouted in his thin, tremulous voice. "Go on! Beat it!"
It sounded in his own ears as
if
he were reading someone else's
lines, but the cripple stopped short, swaying against the palpable
closing dark. "A penny, mister. Oney a penny, mister."
"Beat it!" Warren yelled, furious at the whole comedy, his
fraud and shame, and now the uncustomary bout of violence in the
unmitigated heat, "or I'll call a cop."
"Awrr," the boy said retreating slowly, "I didn't do nothing."
And Warren moved from him, his head jerking with the renewed
emphasis of his limp, almost jaunty (a sense of victory moved him
dimly) against what was now night; but his hands trembled and the
nickel slipped from his damp fingers into the shadowy gutter. The
boy, humped again over the railing, did not notice.
Out of the cripple's sight, Warren stopped to mop his forehead,
the backs of his hands, his neck with a large white handkerchief that
he flung from him abruptly, disgusted with its dampness. His heart
thumped idiotically in the interior dark of his breast; he felt its blind
thud with the gesture of one about to sing. "Imprecise engine," he
addressed it secretly, "knock it off!" Looking closely, one could have
seen his lips move, but the casual watcher noted only the operatic
gesture without context. "Thumper, thumper, be through!" he con–
cluded and spat into the friendly rubble beside the curb: a dented
orange, a toy auto without wheels, an inexplicable puddle, and his
abandoned handkerchief (perhaps the nickel).
He had known, and then retreat had been still open, that he
should not have come:
A.
The neighborhood-behind the sober
drabness of these streets one sensed an ulterior hysteria, as if some
doctrinaire insistence, dreamed in walk-up third floor flats, compelled
them toward illicit metaphors of bohemia and retreat.
B.
It was hot,
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