WANDERERS
361
her postcards from a world she understood nothing of. Years he had
taken insults from family, wife, bosses, sons, doormen, policemen,
waiters, inhuman cabbies, but now and then, once in a great while,
he had to strike out. The Jews had a history of taking it. Nevertheless,
sometimes they turned. The Maccabees. Suez. Jews were not Hindus,
not cheek-turners. For humanity, for peace, for an end to persecution,
they rose up. Lepidus wouldn't stop; he got hotter and hotter. He,
Mendel, caught fire and gave him a push. One push. The window
sidings were weak, Lepidus was small, and solid. Out he went into
the middle of Eighty-sixth Street under the nose of Lester knifing a
tail feather from a pigeon. Out he went, like garbage from a Puerto
Rican window. Unpremeditated, unintended, the victim victimizing,
and being victimized thereby.
Miss Swindleman, looking up at the detective without the protec–
tion of her staves, minus the glowing backdrop of her Collection,
smaller, chaired, sworn- though without Bible-to honesty, a
gray–
girl from the Ozarks up in the bejewed city, thought back thirty
years. Every morning she walked through Central Park to the Hotel.
Every year it seemed bigger to her. This morning, all the familiar
trees were there, branched in snow, imploring the New York sky to
spare them. Bushes and shrubs were turned into crystal chandeliers,
the buds alive somewhere in them, unseen but living in the icy beads,
waiting. Walking in her furred galoshes around the Reservoir, she'd
looked through the crackling trees toward the General Motors
sign
flashing "8: 23," and thought that she had not one single postcard
in her collection from New York. It would have been perfectly all
right to send herself one, for, after all, she'd traveled from her home
and was still a visitor in this place, as much a wanderer as the poor
black Jews she served and governed. Frescos from Ravenna, bark–
colored farmers from Sierra Leone, twisted statues from Rotterdam,
skyscrapers from Milan, mountains, rivers, pyramids, but nothing of
this city where she and almost everyone else she knew was a wanderer.
Her stopover, Mendel's stopover, this old-line hotel was rotting, facade
intact, but pipes going-a geyser had burst from a flushed toilet only
last week- and the wanderers were the only thing that sustained it,
these deprived people, harboring their small-time leisure, their miser–
able quarters. Mendel was one of the best. Polite, quiet, he hurt no
one that didn't hurt him much more. The wife had seemed a good
one, but who knew? Behind the flutter she could have given plenty.
