He turned off the highway where the log buildings of the little state park lay, and pulled to a stop at the edge of the river. A few yards ahead of the front tires the river lapped at the stony shore. He shut the motor off and they sat listening to the water gurgling among the rocks. He turned to her, knowing she was still angry. She was sitting with both hands clasped demurely in her lap. Maybe he ought to tell her about the block, and about his feeling.

‘Gert,’ he said.

With a hurt blinking of her eyes she turned to him.

No, he could not tell her. She would simply criticize him for not having gone in to Fred and raised hell the minute he had seen the garbage pail turned over. She would never understand why he had gone to Finkelstein then, and talked with the man about it. And he could not explain, because he knew that he himself no longer understood what kept him from making an honest plea for Fred’s recognition. But it was like begging the hotel man to let him in and he could not do it: he was not what his face meant to people, he simply was not.

‘Let’s see if they have clams. Come on,’ he said. He knew how she loved clams.

‘You can’t stand clams,’ she said.

‘I’ll watch you eat them.’

She managed a smile of forgiveness and touched his hand as they got out of the car. They strolled along the river in the sunshine and sat at a round table with a hole in the middle from which a big umbrella stuck out. She stared at the speckled river. He reached out and turned the umbrella.

A waiter came with a pad.

‘She’ll have some clams,’ Newman said.

The waiter asked him what he would have.

He opened his mouth to say he wasn’t eating, and then he saw the waiter’s face. A gray memory unfolded in his mind, and he realized that Jews did not eat clams.

‘I tell you … I believe I’ll have some too,’ he said.

The waiter went away. She was looking at him and he reached over again and picked at the thick wooden stem of the umbrella, digging his nails into the soft wood.

‘We’ll turn around and try up the road a few miles. There must be a place,’ he said quietly.

She nodded in complete agreement.

Chapter Fourteen

HOURS come when the familiar seems about to change its shape, verging on the strange and unexplored. He kept scanning the old factory streets of Long Island City through which they were driving on their way home early the next evening. He had never before noticed how many houses were boarded up as condemned, how much smoke hung in the air and how the setting sun made it sparkle like dew on the windshield. The forge shops and the gray slime dried on their sidewalks, the block-long factories and their slate-colored windows, the Negroes sitting on the broken steps of their wooden houses–the ghastly stillness of Sunday twilight and its sense of pause caught him and he saw it like a scene lifted up out of the world.