PARTISAN REVIEW
381
unconcern, the perfidy was complete. Mother Munch was left
in
the
lurch.
Perfidia always held fast to her vision of the 1940s, a time
when she was talked out of her childhood and subtly prepared for
that dark night of the womb in which she must linger till the meno–
pause.
It
was a time of commitment and War, clearing the table
momentarily of a previously dispassionate existence. And somewhere
after the War (her Mother warned) she would bleed from the loins,
to do penance for being born a girl. The War had taken all the boys
away (including Father Munch, who returned quickly with shards
of exploded metal in his thigh ) and the women were barren and
empty for a time. "The horror of a world without men," cried Mother
Munch, in such a manner as to leave no question but that Perfidia
was guilty of it.
And, after the War, Father Munch would have no sons what
with his mangled thigh, and the woman-child was stretched to the
borders of her life. There at the edge she was to accept responsibility
for this final outrage against history and drift into a melancholia
which would pursue her through all the journeys back to her center.
At age nine she lost her innocence to a migraine headache which
served her up spent to her impending womanhood. This pain hung
on her eyes like fishweights, pressing their soft jelly
in
an illicit caress.
And yet, it was not to be spoken of. Too much suffering had al–
ready spread from the contagion of her existence. There was Father
Munch, taking her for long walks
in
the woods, limping his postwar
limp, hardly speaking aloud, muttering to himself and wiping the
occasional tear. The mine blast had lifted
him
skyward, and now he
thought he floated over the 1940s
in
a slow leak, soon to spread–
eagle thud on the infected marshes of his life.
Still, something remained with her of these desperate afternoons,
some vague hint of sentiment in the aftermath of the War.
It
was as
if coherence was a fact, not a luxury, the men were home, babies
were appearing on .the landscape and the mediocrity of the coming
decade had not yet cast its tentacles.
Perfidia dreamed of the day she would have long legs and wear
broad-shouldered gowns.
A memory of razors clings in the wedges where her eyebrows
have been removed. "Prince Kropotkin" had shaved them himself,
