PARTISAN REVIEW
there was another opening and closing of the door and a second voice,
a man's voice, spoke. There was, as well, a rattle of metal and now
Rose constructed a picture: someone was
ill
and someone else was
bringing a tray to the sick-bed. But the important fact was that she
must revise her general notion of the household: it included a man.
Yet why could it not be a doctor, summoned hastily because one of
the old ladies had eaten unwisely at the inn? She regretted that she
had not scrutinized her neighbors more closely to see if they bore
any marks of frailty in the color of the skin or the look about the
nose. She sighed and went to the window to pull down the shade for
it had grown dark, and once again the electric car served her, for
here it came, a silent, .absurd box, round the corner and on its way
toward the Mill Dam. "They have gone for the prescription," she
said happily, and she saw a peaked spinster lying in a bed, another
peaked one operating the simple machinery of the car. And she as–
sured herself that the driver must, indeed must be one of the chil–
dren's great-aunts for no man in his right mind would be seen in
such a thing in this day and age.
When she had pulled the bottle-green blinds and turned on her
two lamps, no brighter than candle flames, she was momentarily
disgusted with herself for spending so much time conjecturing on
unseen and unknown people. She was as bad as her mother who
could search a whole evening through for the inner meanings of a
neighbor's greeting when they had not been on speaking terms for
weeks or the impertinence of a salesgirl in the five and ten. So she
tried to forget about the other house and to go back to the man in
the yellow ascot but he was suddenly gone altogether and instead
of him she could only see her real father, Joseph Fabrizio, who would
be having a holiday today like everyone else and who, stupid and
cynical, would be shambling about the house out West where even
the hopvines at the windows were limp and unclean. Her father wore
a black coat-sweater from
J.
C. Penney's and a spotty gray cap and
Army store pants and miner's shoes studded with cleats that tore up
the linoleum and made a brash racket. The putrefied smell of sugar
beets clung to him constantly even after a bath which he took only
once in a month of Sundays. She did not know one good thing about
her father except that when she was very small she had been de–
lighted to hear him sing "Juanita" and "Valencia" in a tenor voice
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