FROM AN AUTUMN JOURNAL
71
show it at the library." His ingenuousness reaches even Lady-in–
Charge. She would like to continue the attack but can think of no
means. "Mark your party !" She thrusts a slip at the girl and returns
to her ledger, while the girl backs away so precipitantly that she
knocks into the protruding stomach of a bystander. Flushed and mis–
erable, she giggles, "I feel guilty." I am annoyed with myself for hav–
ing stood by so quietly throughout this nasty display, as must be
several other people waiting in line, for there is a hum of encourage–
ment as the girl goes into the booth and again as she searches for
the box in which to deposit her slip.
This meeting-up with weakness and malice suddenly vested
with authority is of course the stuff of which our bad dreams are
now made. I find myself thinking, suppose I
had
intervened and
rebuked Lady-in-Charge for bullying a first voter instead of help–
ing her. What then? And the answer fantasy supplies is a sudden
violent explosion of nameless forces in the room-the cop on duty
arresting me for disturbing the peace, the population rising against
me, shouting me down as a red, a menace, a writer for
PARTISAN
REVIEW! Yet I am not one, like so many of my liberal friends, to
be
momently expecting the dark masses to roll down from the
hills....
All the time I have watched these ladies I have tried to deter–
mine their political affiliations. I should like to think that Lady-in–
Charge is the Republican representative, but then who of the group
is
the Democrat-can it be that remarkable red-wigged creature who
winks
so knowingly and lewdly at various registrants and who makes
such a persistent business of arranging her scarf of monkey fur ?
What denomination wears monkey fur in 1952?
October 13
I haven't looked at Thurber's "The War Between Men and
Women" in almost twenty years and I sometimes wonder if I remem–
ber it accurately, with each passing moment it becomes so much
more of an historical curiosity. Where are the high-spirited snipers
of yesteryear- the rambunctious ladies who, having lost their faith
in the legal devices of feminism, still had the smell of power in
their nostrils and such an endless ingenuity in harassing the enemy?
