63-4
PARTISAN REVIEW
everything. There was a good circulation of frankness and a lot of
respect going back and forth. Also a lot of despicable things. Be this as
it might, the topic inside the railed space of benches or at the pinochle
game in the side office annex, was mostly business-receiverships,
amortizations, wills and practically nothing else.
As
rigor
is
the theme
of Labrador, breathing of the summits of the Andes, space to the
Cornish miner who lies in a seam under the sea. And, on the walls,
insurance posters of people in the despair of fire-traps and the under–
mining of rats in the beams, housewives bringing down the pantry
shelves in their fall. Which all goes to show how you couldn't avoid
the question of inheritances. Was the old Commissioner fond of me?
While Mrs. Einhorn was a kindly woman ordinarily, now and again
she gave me a glance that suggested Sarah and the son of Hagar.
Notwithstanding that there was nothing to worry about. Nothing.
I wasn't of the blood, and the old man had dynastic ideas, too.
And I wasn't trying to worm my way into any legacy and get any
part of what was coming to her son Arthur. Sure the old man was
fond of me; he stroked my shoulder, gave me tips and thought of
me no further.
But he and Einhorn were an enigma to Tillie. Her pharaoh–
bobbed hair grew out of a head mostly physically endowed; she
couldn't ever tell what they might take it into their minds to do. And
especially her husband, he was so supple, fertile and changeable. She
worshipfully obeyed him and did his biddings and errands just as the
rest of us did. He'd send her to City Hall with requests for informa–
tion from the Recorder's office or the license bureau; he wrote notes,
because she could never explain what he wanted and she brought
back the information written out by a clerk. To get her out of the
way when he was up to something, he sent her to visit her brother
on the South Side, an all-day junket on the streetcars. To be sure she'd
be
good and gone; and what's more, she knew it.
But now suppose we're at lunchtime, in Einhorn's specimen
day. Mrs. Einhorn didn't like to bother in the kitchen and favored
ready-made or easy meals, delicatessen, canned salmon with onion
and vinegar, or hamburger and fried potatoes. And these hamburgers
weren't the flat lunch-wagon jobs, eked out with cornmeal, but big
pieces of meat souped up with plenty of garlic and fried to black–
ness. Covered with horse-radish and chili sauce, they didn't go
