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never tell—if there happens to be a sympathy-hunting young wife at the other end—just how the balm may find expression. That deep gaze Herz had given me then was explained: he hadn’t been looking for a motive, he’d come up with one. Perhaps he did not see what Libby might give to me quite so clearly as he saw what he thought I could give to Libby, and what she might accept. But that had been enough to force him to rule me out as a friend or aid. And it was enough, I decided, to persuade me to rule myself out. We would each have to work out the problems of family life within the confines of the family in which the problem had arisen. I only hoped for Herz’s wife that she would come through her tribulations with her energy and her complexion undamaged. Both, I discovered, had touched me more than I had thought.

    We come now to an interlude about which there is not too much that need be explained. The girl’s name was Marjorie Howells and she was in revolt against Kenosha, Wisconsin. For several months she had been sitting beside me in Bibliography, and the morningthat I was rejected by Paul Herz, I happened to run into her in the library. I was feeling at the time somewhat superfluous—and here was this girl, very pretty, albeit a little overhealthy. I did not know, when I asked her to have a beer with me that night, that she was in revolt against Kenosha, Wisconsin; I only believed that few complications could thrive behind such a perfect set of teeth. We had many beers, it turned out, and after a while she was looking across at me with flames flashing in her eyes, and asking me how it felt to be a Jew in America. I asked her how it felt to be a Protestant in America—and she told me. It was very dry and very typical. Jews, she explained, were different. Marge’s father, a white-haired investor in Chicago, of whom she showed me a rather intimidating photograph (high tariff written all over his face)—her father thought Jews were different too, but Margie thought they were different from the way her father thought they were different. When I told her that in 1948 my own father had been chairman of an organization called New York City Professional Men for, Wallace, I only fed the furnace. It wound up that I could not say anything that did not produce in her a larger and larger passion for me and my background: even the fact that the living room of my family’s apartment looked out over Central Park seemed to impress her disproportionately. Halvah and Harvard and Henry Wallace—I suppose I cut an exotic figure. We wound up back in my apartment with no lights on and my sense of reality—as happens in the dark—out the window. It was all as typical as Protestantism: I held the girl and kissed her and soon enough the two of us were revolting against Kenosha as though Caligula himself were city manager. Margie had spent four years at Northwestern and later in the night we got in our licks against that bourgeois institution too. When we spoke again I teased her about her image of me—me, a delicious specimen of Hebraic, Marxist exotica—which was not exactly my image of myself. But by then teasing was only another endearment.
    Margie said, “I’d like to stay with you.”
    “You can stay,” I said.
    “Can I?”
    “Yes.”
    “Shouldn’t we go back and get some things?”
    “I have eggs and orange juice,” I assured her.
    “I meant stay,” she said. “Really stay.”
    I spoke then not only for Kenosha but for all small towns everywhere. “Marge, we hardly know each other.”
    “We can be happy as kings,” she said, very sweetly.
    “What do you need to get?”
    “Do you have Breck shampoo?”
    “No.”
    “I want to get my Breck and my Olivetti. I have an electric frying pan,” she said, a little breathlessly.
    “I have gas,” I pointed out.
    “Electric cooks perfect eggs,” she told me. “Oh I want to eat so many breakfasts here.”
    So we drove to Margie’s room and she packed a suitcase