82
PARTISAN REVIEW
Mr. Fisher did not regard the step he was taking as something
that lay beyond the progression of tricycles, mastoid operations per–
formed by the best surgeons, summer camps, and later, expensive
bungalow colonies with the prosperous young men emerging after
dusk to take over the porches.
If
he had fallen into error, it could
be blamed upon the false economy that sent his daughter, she who
could match the breasts and legs of any chosen for the Sunday maga–
zine sections, to the particular college which lay merely a half-hour
off by subway.
At first, he had been uncertain of H enrietta's feelings for Mor–
decai Karp. They had met, as he learned, not from her, but from
whisperings of phone conversation that filtered through his bedroom
door, at a forum on
The Role of the Artist in a Pocket-Size Culture .
During the question period, Mordecai arose to obtain a simple point
of information and then, true to his nature, remained on his feet a
full twenty minutes to berate the speaker. ("In one frail body St.
Thomas and Sidney Hook together," Henrietta had said.) The
shuffle of the crowd to the exit, a few words together and then the
cafeteria, where all that was Mordecai Karp exposed itself, naked
and quivering, over the spice-tray. And the first time at the house
he had seemed incapable of speech, till snatching with impossibly long
fingers at the box of glazed fruits, he embarked upon the proposition
that, surrounded by such furniture, normal human beings are made
ready for the coming of the crematoriums.
"Did you look at him?" Mrs. Fisher wailed later. "Didn't you
feel like crying for those wrists?"
"Only the wrists?" Mr. Fisher had sallied, imitating his favor–
ite comedian. "I've seen better dressing on a tuna fish salad."
But one evening, while his wife helped Henrietta dress, pleading
all the time for an account of wherein she had sinned as a mother,
Mr. Fisher drew out for Mordecai the small, peeling carton of stories
and poems which concerned his misadventures as a young immigrant
in search of an unknown uncle. "The face we seek," Mordecai had
said, after disposing of rhyme scheme and narrative, "is seldom the
face we come upon. Anyway, we are all strangers, and it is only in
the mass grave of history that we are brought together."
In some way struck by this, Mr. Fisher was spun along the
grooves of thought reserved usually for the morning subway, where
