0408
PARTISAN REVIEW
had found the old man slumped forward in his chair, unconscious,
although his eyes were open and his mouth smiled. The third time
this year that sort of thing had happened . . . He had still to find
out where his father got the drugs--from the Chinese house-boy
possibly, and this would make the third house-boy he had discharged
this year-but he thought the stuff more probably a left-over from
previous medical supplies that his father had hidden around some–
where, although they, he and Tony, had repeatedly ransacked the
cabinets in vain.
"Of course he hardly knows me," said the senora, "but he would
remember my parents."
The honest vehemence of the memory was fast ebbing from
her face; had laid waste its delicate style. She looked old, and so
tired that he again suggested sitting down. Side by side on the sofa
they discussed his father and her daughter.
"When I was a little girl people like your father were my con–
science walking around in elegant clothes ..."
-When I was a little girl I thought everybody else had two
navels,
said a second voice in his ear while the first voice went on:
"They were a reference, a dictionary that I always had open
before me. I could never doubt how a word like 'virtue,' for in–
stance, was spelled. I might spell it with a 'b' because I wanted to,
or without the 'e' because I thought it superfluous-but if I did I
knew very well what I was doing and that it was wrong. I had no
excuse. But young people now, like my poor Connie-"
"They have an excuse?" he suggested when she paused.
"Where's the dictionary they're to believe in?"
"How about the old ones?"
"And on whose authority-mine? Oh, I should have been to
poor Connie what people like your father were to me . . . You
think she's mad, don't you?"
"Don't you think she might be sick?"
"Not more than everybody else."
"- or unhappy."
"Well, yes. She so wants to play the reckless sophisticate, but
she has a conscience, poor girl, and it keeps her from doing the
right things."
