222
PARTISAN REVIEW
nuts. And then, too, over these same curbs and gutters only a few months
hence shovel and plow will raise mountain ranges of snow, heaped high
around the trunks of these trees whose skeleton winter twigs must then
rattle and scratch at the glouring skies-what slopes though for jumping
and sliding and pelting! But now the little man shows no inclination for
play. In fact, as we bring our telescopic gaze more directly to bear, we
observe his cheeks to be smudged with ineffectively-knuckled tears.
We are permitted to know why. Within the red brick Rhine Castle of
Sigsbee School, all turreted and quoined and porticoed in trim of white
limestone on its sprinkled and mowed hillock-whence our modern
Djinns have long since whisked it away, to conjure in its place a block of
quadrilaterals in hue at once glaring and sickly like slime on a dying pond
and fixed by grids of corroding aluminum slats-within, then, when it was
still a castle, Dick had been despatched from his sunny kindergarten room
to mount the heavily paneled and banistered cavern of dark stairwell
between the steepled newel posts in eerie silence to the office of Miss
Hoeksma the nurse.
As he lay on her long black leather couch, knees drawn up, she let fall
first into one ear then the other warm oil from her eye-dropper. At the
foot of the couch, a chart on the wall pictured a human being about his
own height displaying its red and blue insides wi th rows of black printing
up and down around it. He managed a bitter pill. Not once had he cried
until she sat him up and hugged him against her starched white breast next
to the Red Cross pin. Her eyes so close were two pale blue glassies, frac–
tures of light within them, and her yellow hair was tied like a rope around
her head where the sail of her cap perched. Had she not been so dreadful–
ly near to him, had her clean fingers been less bluntly, squarely pink-nailed,
he might have desperately loved her. But her clari ty shone like a search–
light into the murkiness of his own being, glaring on the black mysterious
core of his guil t-she would see it as plain as the exposed stomach of the
figure on the wall and if he could not make it out himself he felt it sure–
ly enough, guilt and shame like some horrid growth to be concealed at all
costs. Was not his earache a sign of it, whatever it was? But in a lightning
flash gone before it could regis ter, the pressure of love for her broke, burs t
away in a hidden down-rush of hatred and both were gone forever.
Her instructions, we can easily imagine, confused him. Surely she
would never knowingly have sent the child off alone to an empty house!
But so he took her words. Out one of the big brass-handled double oaken
doors he made his way, slowly enough. Far atop the white flagpole almost
into our own exalted if sublunary sphere flaps good old Stars and Stripes.
I can say that he felt much as a creeping mouse might feel on some grander
granite porch if the portals of one of your great cathedrals swung closed
