790
PARTISAN REVIEW
filth of the mind beneath that fair exterior, that child's brow, that
lamb's eye, that-Christ, I give her precisely- nothing!"
I laughed.
"Oh laugh, you bourgeois in disguise. The virtues of the un–
tempted! I hold her arm; I sit next to or across from her; I smile.
I kissed her once. Forgive me, Father!"
He stopped to do an elaborate version of what he took to be
pious grovelling in the middle of the crowded sidewalk, and an old
woman, half-blind behind her packages, careened off his rump.
"Madame," he whispered into her ear, stooping with her as she picked
up her scattered oranges, "your slip is showing!" And she watched
down the street the exaggerated motions of our arms against the low
sun.
((Meshuggah,"
we could hear her mutter,
((toit meshuggah,
crazy ones!"
But I would not leave it. "You don't," I had a poor vocabulary
for most things not insolent in those days; the traditional words
that make ethical discourse possible I handled like obscenities,
"I
mean,
don't you feel a demand on you for some reciprocal-well, to
'love' her?"
"I do
noll
Oh, I'm sorry for her in a way, but she's a mean
and ignorant old bag, and you know it. It's enough I give her some–
thing to practice her dammed-up love on before it chokes her. Hell,
how many sons love their mothers? Mostly I think she's old and
scared, and now at least she won't have to die alone-she thinks."
Rehearsing this, I am able to believe that he must have loved her
a little, that he lied out of that dark, trivial compulsion which drove
him always to demean his motives, to seem rather thoroughly foul
than a little the fool. So later when the Moscow Trials and Spain
had made Stalinism impossible for anyone politically literate and no
scoundrel, Hal continued grinding out for Radcliffe alumnae those
·'Soggy little Morality Plays at the end of which some hoarse Party
functionary would appeal improbably for funds to keep the boys of
the Lincoln Battalion in cigarettes; and to my explanation, my pro–
tests, he would turn a shrug. That shrug had grown for him his
essential response, not the traditional Jewish shrug, sly, incorruptible,
comic with its self-inclusive contempt, but a parody of that. mocking
its mockeries, a little smug. "I know things aren't exactly kosher;
don't be a chump! But who controls
all
the real channels of the kind
