1086
PARTISAN REVIEW
our father as a marble legged Olympian. She had sewed button-holes
in a coat factory in a Wells Street loft and he was a laundry driver–
there wasn't even so much as a picture of him left when he blew. But
she does have a place among such women by the deeper right of
con~
tinual payment. And as for vengeance from a woman, Grandma
Lausch was there to administer the penalties under the standards of
legitimacy, representing the main body of married womankind.
Still the old lady had a heart. I don't mean to say she didn't. She
was tyrannical and a snob about her Odessa lustre of servants and
governesses, but though she had been a success herself she knew
what it was to fall down through susceptibility. I afterwards began
to realize this when I read some of the novels she used to send me to
the library for. She taught me the Russian alphabet for that purpose.
Once a year she read
Anna Karenina
and
Eugene Onegin.
Occasion–
ally I got into hot water by bringing a book she didn't want. "How
many times do I have to tell you,
if
it doesn't say
roman
I don't want
it. You didn't look inside. Are your fingers too weak to open the book?
Then they should be too weak to play ball or pick your nose. For
that you've got strength.
Boshe!
you haven't got the brains of a cat,
to walk two miles and bring me a book about religion because it says
Tolstoi on the cover."
The old
grande dame,
I don't want to be misrepresenting her. She
was suspicious of what could have been, given one wrong stitch of
heredity, a family vice by which we could have been exploited. She
didn't want to read Tolstoi on religion. She didn't trust him as a
family man because the Countess had had such trouble with him.
But although she never went to the synagogue, ate bread on Pass–
over, sent mama to the pork butcher where meat was cheaper, loved
canned lobster and other forbidden food, she was not an atheist and
flee-thinker. Mr. Anticol, the old junky she called (search me why)
"Rame~es"-after
the city named with Pithom in the Scriptures,
maybe; no telling what her inspirations were-was that. A real rebel
tc God. Icy and canny, she would listen to what he had to say and
wouldn't declare herself. He was ruddy and gloomy, his leathery serge
cap made him flat-headed and his alley calls for rags, old iron–
reeks a line,
he sung it-made him gravel voiced and gruff. He had
tough hair and brows and despising brown eyes; he was a studious,
