84
PART ISAN REV I EW
week end, and by Monday the few pieces of stuffed cabbage will
have grown dry and too sour for my taste.. .."
He came with a valise and three shopping bags, and they feared
to question how he had managed on the subway. The new portable
typewriter offered itself upon the desk, set off by a scratch pad and
a tiny vase, pencil-filled. Ignoring these, he asked for thumbtacks and
stepped fullshod upon the bed to mount a poorly toned Rouault, some
faded movie still and-of all things !- six or eight playing cards whose
unshamed fronts bore witness to the martyrology of a naked Negress
beneath an awesome Great Dane.
"Only
at night will I walk the
streets," he explained, "perhaps for an occasional egg-cream, and these
will serve to remind me of the quality of life in our time."
Much of his working day they could only guess at. When he
took his mail-a few magazines on the Occult, and Physical Culture
pamphlets where the eternal brass-armed men smiled with strange
sweetness as they half-turned in their jockstraps-or permitted the
airing of his room, the secretions of sleep seemed to glow in his eyes
and paste the uncurling hair in stiff dead strands above his ears. Mrs.
Fisher, carrying in the plates of guava jelly and cheese on lightly
salted crackers for his evening hours would grovel before the door
till he was framed within the keyhole. Sometimes, she thought, when
his
back filled her eye, he was looking over-long at the playing cards,
but of this she was not sure. More often, he would fix himself upon
the daybed and pluck at the newspapers (always from the back begin–
ning) to ravish what could only be the comic page.
Yet, when relatives came, newly married cousins from the edges
of Brooklyn, uncles and aunts with cake-boxes who had risen early
in New Jersey for the long drive, eating raisins and cracking nuts
carefully over the bridge table, he would emerge, Mordecai, to fasten
himself upon them, eager and swift before the prod of conversation.
With the fruit bowl passing from hand to hand he would discuss the
rise of a new movie star, the unexpected divorce hinted by a column–
ist, or ingenious ways to soften a cheap cut of meat. Stunned by him,
they would look upon Henrietta, to watch her eyes give off a deadly
certainty which betrayed all that she had been for them as a child .
Away from his business one day and dwelling on the thought
that he could afford this and more, Mr. Fisher in a bathrobe sat
listening to a famous young married couple analyze the recent rise
