He turned on the top step and walked down, his muscles twitching like little wounded snakes, and walking away from Fred’s porch he thought his heart would crack in his chest. With a slow, measured step, calculated to demonstrate his defiance, he went down Fred’s path to the sidewalk, then turned left in his time and as he came to his own path he heard Fred’s screen door angrily slamming. At the sound he stopped in front of his porch.

Before him stood his house. ‘Gertrude, dear, we’re going to have to stand and fight it out here.’

Turning away from his house he started to stroll. And passing the identical houses with their silent square windows staring at him he newly realized that there was a long stretch of pitch darkness here between the two street lights, for the trees hung low over the sidewalk. Here he could not even make out the curbing of the sidewalk. He was walking in a long closet. Aleese! Aleese! The high heaving cry flew around his head as he strolled. Police!

Supposing now from up ahead there, armed forms should plunge up to his face. Help, help! Who would come out to him from behind the Venetian blinds? Who?

Strolling, he stared. Everybody on the block must either have seen or been told about his garbage pail. None of them ever mentioned it to him, even those he met on the trains going to work.

Aleese! She could have been murdered, clubbed to death out here that night. No one would have dared outdoors to help, to even say she was a human being. Because all of them watching from their windows knew she was not white …

But he was white. A white man, a neighbor. He belonged here. Or did he ? Undoubtedly they all knew the rumor by now. Newman is a Jew. An attack upon him would prove it to them. Notice the name – Newman. Of course – Newman! Who would come out in the darkness of the night to fight off thugs for his sake? Who would come out, for instance, to help Finkelstein? Finkelstein. They had him hooked up with Finkelstein. He knew he would never come out and risk a broken nose for Finkelstein. He knew he would remain behind his Venetian blinds saying to himself that Finkelstein should have moved away when he knew they were after him, that a beating was not so horrible to the Jew because he had been born expecting it. As it was not so horrible for that woman, who was accustomed to attack because she had never in her life been safe. It was not so horrible for them, it was a natural thing for them … ‘In other words when you look at me you don’t see me. What do you see?’