786
PARTISAN REVIEW
quarter, the unambitious whores, the fourteen-year old world's cham–
pion tattooer, the joints-and over all the shuttling passage of gulls.
But it is not all defined by the waterfront; it invades your quiet ter–
ritory and you do not know it. In the washrooms of stations where
you make the train of your daily homecoming, the homeless drunk
swabby flushes his face with water, slaps it, leaning so close to the
mirror that his forehead bangs the glass lightly to the rhythm of his
blows; or where you stop for an after-theater drink, the place with
mirrors, some j.g. slips absurdly off his stool, but you do not laugh
being polite and almost sober), I could not help remembering my
first time drunk: Hal had taken me to Carrie's house for dinner, to
the center of his secret, and afterwards we had opened the liquor.
I must have been sixteen; I remember I was reading the
Cri–
tique ot Political Economy
and Aragon's
Red Front)
just then Eng–
lished by
E. E.
Cummings (we passed it hand to hand under desks in
Geometry class; the teacher was myopic, scared-and we, who, with
indifferent zeal, wrote stories about the
rive gauche
and poets and
pernod)
or at lunchtime yelled "Hug-a-dick!" from the second storey
windows of our school, despised her), still preferred ice-cream to beer,
myself to both, and shaved once a week the intolerable boy's mask
of my face.
Carrie (we called her that only in the boot-legged jest, and,
despite this whole history, I cannot write it yet without a sense of
secret insolence), Miss Carrie Overbury Stone, had been my Latin
teacher; she was a specialized type, a specimen rare then and that
does not now, I think, survive, except in the jokes with which some
no longer young revenge the pieties of their adolescence. There was
in her a quiet core of faith in authority, an assured expectation of
obedience and respect that gave those abstractions we were desperately
challenging,
in
her bland, firm presence, an irrefutable status which
we could not afford to remember behind her back.
To be sure, one can sense now the motives of respectable poverty
that drove her, the trivial story of a family suddenly gone, the lover
dead, and the slow accretion of boredom and inarticulate wretched–
ness as the days that did not move, moved without love through
the regimen of bells, the chalk and the young faces, anonymous under
their youth and their ignorance of death, toward death.
But as deep as our eye went then, she seemed a triumph of func-
