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the hotel as if they were on the Number One Float. Two hours later
they'd be back, soiled with blots of stuffing and cranberry sauce, their
faces bloated with self-satisfaction at having a family dinner at a
Downtown hotel.
"Mr. Mendel," she said to him after one of the expeditions. "You
should try our Thanksgiving dinner here some day. Forty-six birds
they cooked this year." (Jewish syntax had crept up on her twenty
years ago, and she relaxed into it. She wasn't interested in self–
preservation. )
Mendel had sent one of his blue-blank stares through her staves.
"Family obligations, Miss Schwindleman. Nothing to do about it," and
he floated upstairs, followed by the nuts.
Miss Swindleman objected to more than Mendel's cheapness and
third-rate vanity. She objected to his fixity. There he'd sit in the
lobby, three sofas, six armchairs, stand-up lamps, Gelb's cigar counter,
bent Jews going up and down in the two elevators night and day, the
blue and gold elevator men, her bright postcards, a little tropical island
in the Eighty-sixth Street cold, plunked down there for no reason but
to allow amphibious transients to crawl across it before they dived back
down into the ocean. Shelter? Home? Reservoir? A sour little hotel
whose only real distinction was her flash of the world and her
disciplined hand on the financial wheel. In the midst of this discipline
sat that unsmiling, waiting, staring Mendel, isolated like a monk in a
burlesque show. It wasn't until the day Lepidus went out the window
that she understood all this about him.
Lepidus was one of Mendel's three visitors. The other two were
his brother Philip, reportedly a bookie, and Mrs. Minnie Schlag, a
hirsute, muscular woman who for years was thought to be the unlikely
means of satisfying whatever passion resided in him. It turned out,
however, that Mrs. Schlag and Mendel did nothing more passionate
together than play pinochle. A bellhop looked in through a hole in
the plaster and saw them humped over the coffee table, Mendel in
suspenders and Mrs. Schlag in a blouse which showed an arm like
the ones on the statues in the Oslo gardens. (Board Five.) Every
other Saturday Mrs. Schlag turned up for pinochle at the Winthrop,
and once a month on Thursdays, as Sonny told Lester, Mendel went
to the Schlags for poker with Dr. Schlag, the bone man, Simon
Gabrilowitsch, a bassoonist and reputed cousin of the great pianist,
