LEONARD KRIEGEL
391
Where nothing was natural, nothing was unnatural either. His
mother would not have died so defiantly if his father had taken her
off to Bedford . In New York, it was acceptable to go from party to
party , play to play, dinner to dinner-and all the time her body
being eaten away at by something demanding and relentless and
uncompromising. It was a source of vanity for his mother, dying as
she had lived, holding on to a hard, simple rage. All her life, like so
many people living in the co-op, she had been an injustice collector.
Her
poetry,
her
politics,
her
Left,
her
New York-invectives slashing
against time. Accusation and betrayal, plot and counterplot-and
the new enemy, the cancer, on whom to place the world and its
burdens.
Was that to be his fate, too? As the apartment and the Royal
portable were now his. Was he, too, destined to die bitterly, over–
whelmed by absence, refusing rabbis and prayers and hospitals? No
solace allowed! Like a slogan from those dead times. Why , then,
can't he leave the old wars and the old people to each other? Why
listen to the old anarchist with skin like rice paper or the party stal–
wart who believes,
qllieves,
that the Soviets cannot be anti-Semitic
because it is forbidden by their constitution?
Embracing past and present, he leans now across Miriam and
embraces the flesh and perfume he knows so well. He opens the door
with his key . He is starting over in New York. He points inside,
gently pushes her to where she willingly goes. Then he kicks the door
closed behind him, as her hands grab his shoulders and her lips find
his neck. He stands holding her, relishing the ease with which he can
slip into the past and wait for the remembered gestures to spring
loose the child in his soul.
Money in the bank and dollars on the table . For his father
anyway . Lost dreams of childhood wrapped in a language of bitter
retribution. And who understood the lure of money better than a
good union man? Who could better describe the old men of his own
time, sitting in the sun on Knox Place? The war ended, and the talk
of socialism, of capitalism's inevitable decline, of Tito's split with
Stalin - bad for the millennial coming, which they still await in 1950
with sour breath held thick to hope - bad for the struggle of Negroes
(not yet blacks in those still-universalist days), bad for Polish syn–
dicalists , one-eyed folksingers, Irish seamen who paid dues
both
to
the NMU and the IWW, unemployed machinists expelled from the
