1082
PARTISAN REVIEW
her.
If
wit and discontent don't necessarily go together, it wasn't from
the old woman that I learned it. She was impossible to satisfy. Kreines,
for example, on whom we could depend, Kreines who carried up the
coal when Mama was sick and who instructed Kotzie to make up
our prescriptions for nothing, she called "that trashy Hungarian,"
or "Hungarian pig." She called Kotzie, "the baked apple"; she called
Mrs. Kreines "the secret goose," Lubin "the shoemaker's son," the
dentist "the butcher," the butcher "the timid swindler." She detested
the dentist who had several times unsuccessfully tried to fit her with
teeth. She accused him of burning her gums when taking the im–
pressions. But then she tried to pull his hands away from her mouth.
I saw that happen: the stolid, square-framed Dr. Wernick whose
compact forearms could have held off a bear, painfully careful with
her, determined, concerned at her choked screams and enduring her
scratches. To see her struggle like that was no e'asy thing for me, and
Dr. Wernick was sorry to see me there, too, I know, but either Simon
or I had to squire her wherever she went. Here particularly she needed
a witness to Wernick's cruelty and clumsiness as well as a shoulder
to lean on when she went weakly home. Already at ten I was only a
little shorter than she and big enough to hold her small weight.
"You saw how he put his paws over my face so I couldn't
breathe?" she said. "God made him to be a butcher. Why did he be–
come a dentist? His hands are too heavy. The touch is everything to
a dentist.
If
his hands aren't right, he shouldn't be let practice. But
his wife worked hard to send him through school and made a dentist
of
him.
And I must go to him and be burned because of it."
The rest of us had to go to the dispensary, which was like the
dream of a multitude of dentists' chairs, hundreds of them in a space
as enormous as an armory, with green bowls designed in glass grapes,
drills lifted zig-zag as insects' legs, and gas flames on the porcelain
swivel trays-a thundery gloom in Harrison Street of limestone county
buildings and cumbersome red street-cars with metal grillwork on their
windows and monarchical iron whiskers of cow-catchers, front and
rear. They lumbered and clanged and their brake-tanks panted in the
slushy brown of a winter afternoon or the bare stone brown of a sum–
mer's, salted with ash, smoke 'and prairie dust, with long stops at the
clinics to let off clumpers, cripples, hunch-backs, brace-legs, crutch–
wielders, tooth and eye sufferers ,and all the rest. So before going with
