362
RICHARD G. STERN
Mter all, she let her boys grow up in this hotel, went gladly to
restaurants, avoided kitchen work. Maybe Mendel had not had much
from her. He hadn't had much period. A monk amidst the barrage of
Eighty-Sixth Street. Cheapskate, but no quibbler.
As
for Lepidus, he
was the blackest of the black, yes, nasty, cigar-chewing, scoffer, crook,
a hurrier and worrier-of others.
If
she had riled him, well and good.
If
Mendel had pushed him, he deserved
it.
She spoke the truth, always
had, had no reason not to.
So it was over, and Milligan wrote it up.
Accidental.
Miss
Swindleman went back to her den.
Things were not the same. No. An opening had been made. What
does one do about an opening? Send a postcard of the Empire State
Building to oneself? Go to Mendel's room and say, "Mendel. I saved
you. Now save me. I'm yours. Be mine"?
Or even, think more gently, speak more kindly-"blank cold,
anti-semitischer virgin-whore." "No, Lepidus"-cash checks more
readily, make up delinquent quarters from one's own purse?
Possibly.
The opening was a wound in Miss Swindleman. Days passed, and
embarrassment at defending Mendel was all she could stuff in to stop
the raw ache. She was altered, but alteration had nowhere to go.
The incident had altered Mendel much more. He grew thinner,
whiter. He no longer sat in the lobby. More and more frequent were
the calls to Sheffrin for borscht and pastrami. Two or three times he
came down for coffee and English muffins in The Nook. He bought a
TV set, and the bellhops reported that it was on from Garroway to the
Anthem. There was no more work, and no visitors except a monthly
call from Burton, the timetable son, who, like his father, never frowned
or smiled, and whose only non-ambulatory motion was the Adam's
Apple popping up and down in his neck as he swallowed unuttered
words. So Mendel passed on in his own den-pneumonia, TB, heart.
Everything hit him at once.
The day after he died, she took the first notice of her Collection
that she had taken since the 'hearing,' six months before. It was in
wretched shape. The pasteboards were rotting: gnarled scabs of string
dripped from the edges, odd swellings humped the boards where drafts
and radiator heat had attacked the fibers. She called the bellboys and
told them to take it out to the garbage heap. The wandering was over.
