THALIA SELZ
379
he handed him his key; then, with his hand still on the desk blot–
ter, the clerk leaned toward him and whispered, "Your rna's sick;
the police just took her and your pa to the hospital."
In
fact, she was dead. She had died a few seconds earlier, in
the back of the paddy wagon, and when her husband, who was
sitting beside the stretcher, sensed it and pounded on the barred
window behind the driver's seat, the police veered about and
drove to the morgue instead. To Hartford's surprise, the name on
the death certificate read
Bridget Anderson.
She really had been
named Bridget, after all.
A few months after his mother's death he was stamping the
date on a library card-for by this time he was working in a
branch library in St. Louis, where his father was trying to find
work as a solo-when a short, middle-aged woman with black
hair and eyes asked him if they had any Greek books. Carefully
trying not to notice the plump bosom showing in a dusky,
golden hemicircle above her bodice, Hartford led the way back to
the shelves which bore the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey,
the odes of
Pindar, the complete extant plays of Euripides but no Aristo–
phanes (whom the Library Board ·deemed shockingly vulgar),
the history of the Peloponnesian Wars, the
Anabasis,
Aristotle's
Poetics
and Plato's
Apology
and
Crito,
all in the original Greek.
' 'I'm sorry. That's all we have," mumbled Hartford in his
own
apologia,
abashed to discover that if he didn't gaze at her
bosom, he would have to look into a boldly pretty face or down
at her skirt which, though descending modestly to her ankles in
the fashion of the day, must certainly conceal her privates. Hart–
ford was even more afraid to look at her face than her bosom, but
staring at all those layers of black poplin over her privates was
out of the question, so his eyes settled helplessly on the bosom.
" Ochee!"
said the lady, vigorously throwing her head back
in what he was later to learn was the Greek gesture of denial.
"This the ancient Greek. I want it the modern Greek."
Her name was Mrs. Nausicaa Paleologos. She was thirty–
five years old and a widow. What else did Hartford need? He
hadn't known he needed those things until the sum total of those
things took him to a Greek ice cream parlor where she drank
"Greek" (actually Turkish) coffee while Hartford ate a double
strawberry sundae swathed in whipped cream, draped in nuts,
and crowned with a maraschino cherry.
