366
PARTISAN REVIEW
I SUppose it was Judith's conventional exclamation of admiring
wonder when Fenton announced the number of his own children
which did the mischief. "Five!" she had said, drawing down the
corners of her odd mouth, at once old-fashionedly innocent and
wicked, like something out of Rossetti or Swinburne. "Five! well I
never!"
I felt, or imagined I could feel her moved dimly, sexually by
such evidence of potency, and I said, "I have seven."
"Seven what?" Fenton asked, as everyone laughed. "Persian
cats?" Now, oddly enough, the only living thing over whose custody
my wife and I fought on parting was a Siamese cat of which she
is obscenely fond. My own feeling about animals is rather like my
attitude toward children, which is to say, a sense of manfully con–
trolled nausea; and I had made trouble over the beast for the trouble's
sake. But at that instant, among the tax blanks, I had found myself
wishing with
all
the passion of a child itself, longing for the treat
he has scornfully rejected for reasons he can no longer remember,
that I had had children-many of them! "No, really, seven chil–
dren. 'Seven infant darlings of a pigmy size.' I try to keep it dark–
it's a little embarrassing."
I produced from my wallet the picture I had taken last year,
standing with my sister, Mae, in the midst of her (really) seven
kids. It is all doctrinal with Mae; when she was still a Communist
(it was she who had talked me into joining briefly in '36 and I
have never forgiven her), she had four or five husbands and no
children; but now, having recognized the values of bourgeois life,
she is living in Kansas City and has brought forth seven infant
horrors in the midst of finishing a long study proving the wisdom of
John Quincy Adams's rebuttal of Tom Paine. "Seven. 'Seven lillies
in one garland wrought.' "
Judith, who had taken the photograph in hand, sighing, moved
over to the window into the light. "Seven! How cute they are! What
are they called?"
"I'm afraid it would just bore you."
"No, really." And when I kept stubbornly silent, "I have just
one of my own-a girl named Susan who's only ten months old, but
people take her for at least a year and a half, she's so big!" I felt
a sudden pang at learning that she was married and a mother;
