638
PARTISAN REVIEW
wherever he liked. I imagine women weren't very angry when he
saluted them
in
this style because he picked out whatever each of
them herself prized most-breasts, hair, hips, legs and all the little
secrets and connivances with which she emphasized her own good
things.
You couldn't rightly say
it
was a common letch he had; it
was a sort of Solomonic regard of an old chief. With his spotty big
old hands, he felt up the married and the unmarried ones, and even
the little girls for what they promised, and nobody ever was of–
fended by it or by the names he gave, names like "The Tangerines,"
or "The Little Sled," "Mad:ame Yesteryear," "The Six-Foot Dove."
The grand old gentleman. Satisfied and gratified. You could feel
from the net pleasantness he carried what there had been between
him and women now old or dead whom he recognized, probably, and
greeted
in
these different people.
His sons didn't share this quality. Of course you don't expect
younger men to have this kind of evening-Mississippi serenity, but
there wasn't much disinterestedness or contemplation in either of
them. There was perhaps more of it in Dingbat than in his brother.
There scarcely was a time when Dingbat wasn't engaged to a nice
girl.
He scrubbed himself and dressed himself to go to see her in
a desperate, cracked rage of earnest respect. Sometimes he would
look ready to cry from devotion, and in his preparations he ran out of
the perfumed bathroom, clean s1f.rched shirt open on his skinny
hairiness, to remind me to fetch the corsage from Bluegren's. He could
never do enough for these girls and never thought himself good enough
for them. And the more he respected them the more he ran with
tramps he picked up at Guyon's Paradise and took to the Forest
Preserves in the Stutz, or to a little Wilson Avenue hotel that
Karas-Holloway owned. But Friday evenings, at family dinner, there
was often a fiancee, now a piano teacher, now a dress designer or
bookkeeper, or simply a home girl, wearing an engagement ring and
other presents; and Dingbat with a necktie, tense and daffy, homage–
fully calling her "Honey," "Isabel, han," "Janice, dear," in his hoarse,
thin, black voice.
Einhorn, however, didn't have such sentiments at
all,
whatever
sentiments he entertained about different things. He took the joking
liberties his father did, but the jokes didn't have the same ring; which
isn't to say that they weren't funny but that he cast himself forward
