CYNTHIA OZICK
399
glad there was no Jewish catechism. Was she a backslider?
Anyhow she felt tested. Sometimes she spoke of Jesus to the
children. She looked around-her great eyes wheeled-and saw
that everyone in the living room was a Jew.
There were Jews in the dining room too, but the unruffled,
devil-may-care kind: the humorists, the painters, film reviewers
who went off to studio showings of " Screw on Screen" on the eve
of the Day of Atonement. Mostly there were Gentiles in the
dining room. Nearly the whole cake was gone. She took the last
piece, cubed it on a paper plate, and carried it back to the living
room. She blamed Feingold, he was having one of his spasms of
fanaticism. Everyone normal, everyone with sense-the human–
ists and humorists, for instance-would want to keep away.
What was he now, after all, but one of those boring autodidacts
who spew out everything they read? He was doing it for spite,
because no one had come. There he was, telling about the blood–
libel. Little Hugh of Lincoln. How in London, in 1279, Jews
were torn to pieces by horses, on a charge of having crucified a
Christian child. How in 1285, in Munich, a mob burned down a
synagogue on the same pretext. At Eastertime in Mainz two years
earlier. Three centuries of beatified child martyrs, some of them
figments, all called "Little Saints." The Holy Nino of La–
Guardia. Feingold was crazed by these tales, he drank them like a
vampire. Lucy stuck a square of chocolate cake in his mouth to
shut him up. Feingold was waiting for a voice. The friend from
the Seminary, pragmatic, licked off his bit of cake hungrily. It
was a cake sent from home, packed by his wife in a plastic bag, to
make sure there was something to eat.
It
was a guaranteed no–
lard cake. They were all ravenous. The fire crumpled out in big
paper cinders.
The friend from the Seminary had brought a friend. Lucy
examined him: she knew how to give catechisms of her own, she
was not a novelist for nothing. She catechized and catalogued: a
refugee. Fingers like long wax candles, snuffed at the nails.
Black sockets: was he blind?
It
was hard to tell where the eyes
were under that ledge of skull. Skull for a head, but such a
cushioned mouth, such lips, such orderly expressive teeth. Such
