454
PARTISAN REVIEW
moving. I was uncomfortable, and had nothing to say.
"Don't
hate
me, Milton!" she cried, looking at me in sudden alarm,
and then, "But you have to
go!
You only have to go, and I thought
you hated me." Taking me by the arm, she led me to the door.
"I'll wait for you here," she said, "don't worry."
"I'm not worried, it's just that-"
"You foolish boy,
go
and be done with it!"
Later, we walked out into the back yard that was already full of
drinkers and talkers under the invisible clotheslines which hung like
concealed hazards in the dark. Judith knew the location of each one,
and she would cry "duck!" just in time for us to crouch down together,
run through, as though we were crossing into enemy territory. From one
of the apartments, the radio was blaring the revolutionary pseudo-blues
of Leadbelly and Josh White, and the Songs of Spain from the Lincoln
Battalion.
The war in Spain!
It
was as if nothing else counted, as if my life
ever since had been only a masquerade that had fooled no one. I looked
down at the girl beside me, scarcely past twenty, and I recalled what
I had been sure once I would never forget: the self-pity, the melancholy,
the horror of being young. And I longed for the pleasant ennui of
maturity, even for the time of my marriage. "I'm a haunted house to–
night. For Christ sake, exorcise me!"
She laughed doubtfully, and together we ducked around one corner
of the house, out of sight of the rest. Standing in a narrow lane, beside
the untidy hedge of the neighboring garden, we hid like children who
creep off to enjoy their small loot. I pressed Judith back against the
peeling siding of the house, as I might have embraced a girl at sixteen;
but she responded with that atrocious assault I could never really re–
member. "Darling, darling," she gasped between kisses, "I thought you
hated me. I thought you would never come."
Just then, lights flashed on in the darkened house beyond the
hedge, and a head, thrust from an upper window, began to scream,
more in hysteria than in real anger,
((Drunks! Trollops! Get out of my
flower beds. I'll call the police! I know what you're up to down there.
Drunken no-goods! Get aut!"
The sudden blaze of light, the mad voice and the frantic head
frightened me as I have not been frightened in thirty years. I could
feel my heart pound as if I were really the child I had been playing,
really, in the child's absolute sense,
caught!
I could scarcely keep from
crying out, "Please, momma, I'm not doing anything!" But Judith was
pulling me back into her own yard, terrified and trembling; and there
a half-dozen faces turned to stare at us, silent and uncertain.
