354
RICHARD G. STERN
vlSlt there if only to be able to flaunt the experience before the
excluded yehudim.
Miss Swindleman understood the desire to flaunt experience
before these wanderers. Experience was a fact, like family, like money,
which had to be respected. Not that it marked superiority. Miss
Swindleman didn't believe in superiority. There were only greater
or lesser collections of fact. She was concerned with the arrangement
of the few facts under her control because that was the human task,
to fend off the disorderly, the ugly, the crooked. It was why she never
turned her back on a Jew when she was in her den. "Get thee before
me, Israel." She surveyed their avaricious assaults on order through
the peeling bronze staves which never vouchsafed them more than
partial views of her.
It was why she classified her own partial views, those nickel
two-by-fours, classified them by area, type, color- the blue fjords, the
checkerboards of Scotland, highland, lowland. They were not an altar,
but a demonstration that the world could be put into shape, and too,
that there were things beyond unsteady checks, paid-up phone bills,
change for a clanked quarter thrown like an insult under staves.
Stability and place were there amidst the wild shuffling, amidst the
packed suitcases, the scarred trunks, the taxis to Pier 40.
Miss Swindleman could spot traveler-types as they signed the
Register. They signed both easily and wearily. Half the few couples
who stayed in the Winthrop traveled; about a third of the widows,
three-eighths of the widowers. Under forty didn't count. She'd prob–
ably not received more than ten cards from guests under forty, usually
children who had lived with widowed parents (not more than twenty
regulars in her more than thirty years). She once got a Blenheim
Palace from a pock-marked Mettenleiter, and had discarded a repeat
of Sugarloaf Mountain from a Baer twin, but that was all that was
memorable.
Nothing of course from the two boys of Harvey Mendel, though
they were in the Winthrop for fifteen years after she came. She was
the only person in the hotel-probably including Mendel-who re- .
membered their mother. Ina Mendel, a name like a sigh, a nice Jewish
woman who talked to her in a flutey little voice. No traveler, but
nonetheless had once bought her a postcard of the Roman Forum
before being told that only mailed postcards were pasted up. Ina took
