642
PARTISAN REVIEW
same lead-whited windows of a factory twenty times a month, and he
knew every empty lot between him and a destination. Arriving, he
could hang around hours for a six-bit commission or a piece of in–
formation. "Kotzie takes after my missis," he said. "He is
kaltblutig."
Sure I knew it was he himseU that did all the trumpeting, scream–
ing and stamping down in his flat, throwing things on the floor.
"And how is your brother?" he said intriguingly. "I under–
stand the little
maidelech
wet their pants for
him.
What is he
doing?"
As
a matter of fact I didn't know what Simon was up to these
days. He didn't tell me, nor did he seem curious as
to
what was
happening to me, having decided in
his
mind that I was nothing
but a handyman at Einhorn's.
Once I went with Dingbat to a party one of his fiancees was
giving and I met my brother with a Polish girl in a fur-trimmed
orange dress; he wore a big, smooth, check suit and looked hand–
some and sufficient to himself. He didn't stay long, and I had a feel–
ing that he didn't want to spend
his
evenings where I did. Or maybe
it was the kind of evening Dingbat made of
it
that didn't please
him,
Dingbat's recitations and hoarse parodies,
his
turkey girding and
obscene cackles that made the girls scream.
There were several months when Dingbat and I were very
thick. At parties I horsed around with him, goofy, his straight-man;
or I hugged and pitched on the porches and in backyards with
girls, exactly as he did. He took me under his protection in the
poolroom and we did some friendly boxing, at which I was never
much good, and played snooker-a little better- and hung about
there with the hoods and loudmouths. So that Grandma Lausch
would have thought that the very worst she had ever said about me let
me off too light, seeing me in the shoeshine seat above the green
tables, in a hat with diamond air holes cut in it and decorated with
brass kiss-me pins and Al Smith buttons, in sneakers and Mohawk
sweat shirt, there in the frying jazz and the buzz of baseball broad–
casts, the click of markers, butt thumping of cues, the spat-down
polly-seed shells and blue chalk crushed underfoot and dust of hand–
slickening talcum hanging in the air. Along with the blood-smelling
swaggeroos, recruits for mobs, automobile thieves, stick-up men,
sluggers and bouncers, punks with ambition to become torpedoes,
