WANDERERS
353
monthly settlements. She never did, but the strain of guardianship
showed in her face.
The Winthrop too showed strain: the rutting plaster showed it,
the bursting waterpipes, the splintering toilet seats, the ripping carpets.
And the management! No more the quiet little Jew, Oppenheim,
who'd moseyed noiselessly in the corridors her first twelve years, and
then, fifty if he was a day, and weak as the cocktails the surviving
goyim drank in the Peacock Room at five o'clock-shoring their ghetto
within the ghetto--he was drafted away in 'forty-five to be replaced
by a perfect 4F, the hunchback and supreme yeller, Nagel, a 'black
Jew,' oily, welching, eavesdropping, and mean-eyed as the shua bird
Doctor Mockus had mailed her ten years ago from the Faeroe Islands.
Board Six.
With the onset of the Jews, though, Miss Swindleman had con–
ceived her life's mission: their assimilation. Assimilation to the ways
and manners of the older stock which she represented and which gave
names to the invaded hotels of Eighty-Sixth Street, the Pieter Stuy–
vesant, the Governor Brewster, the Dorchester
Arms,
the Winthrop.
Every check she eyed, every sum she re-added contributed to their
education, to the enforcement of the rules of western life, rules to which
no amount of traveling could educate them.
They were great travelers, great postcard-senders. She'd started
her collection one day after Roosevelt beat Landon, when three post–
cards from three different continents showed up in her mail. Board
One had gone up, and the Jews traveled to fill it. Over the years, war
or no war, the boards filled with twisted,
six-wor~
cards from Sfax
and Borneo, Tarsus, Rhodes, Rio, and Auckland. The fjords ran a
blue storm down Board Three; the statuary of Board Five made up
a great museum; and there were enough exotic, mean-eyed animals–
they loved killers-to stock a Bronx Zoo.
If
she'd used "repeats," the
Taj Mahals alone could have replaced the slums of New York; but
the eye which spotted the delinquent fifteen cents in Milton L.
Bungalow'S monthly was ruthless about filtering repetition from the
world's views and could spot a familiar bend of the Trondheim fjord
as quickly as a native. There were few places on the traveled earth
to which Miss Swindleman lacked some sort of key. Even the Arab
countries were well-represented. Not only had the Jews traveled there
before the war, but the Winthrop's few voyaging goyim liked to
