He turned toward his house and walked rapidly up to his stoop, and without hesitating hurried up on the porch and went inside. As he climbed the stairs to the bedroom he could see the scorn on Finkelstein’s face and he damned it out of his mind.

He slid in between the sheets. Gertrude moved and he knew she had been awake all the time.

‘What happened?’ she whispered.

‘They turned it over again.’

‘Did you get out and talk to them?’

She would have gone out and talked to them, he realized. And he resolved to gain that kind of understanding of them so that he could go up to them and say, ‘Now look, boys …’ and carry it off as though he were utterly ruthless and quite one with them.

‘They got away before I could get outside,’ he said.

‘You better go to that rally then,’ she decided definitely. ‘Are you going?’

‘Yes … sure,’ he said, and rolled onto his side and closed his eyes, quite as if there had never been any doubt.

Chapter Fifteen

IN more peaceful times it took the form of a desire to go fishing. When his wife and two children and his old father-in-law got too much for him, he had his wife pack his lunch, settled her in the store, and took the subway to Sheepshead Bay. There he avoided the big fishing boats that took out dozens of people, and rented a rowboat. The ocean is wide and he need only row a half mile out of the bay, drop his line, and enjoy ‘solitude, the golden graile of the city man.’

Lately, however, he did not like the idea of spending a day out of reach of his family. Even though they might not be able to get in touch with him as he wandered about the city, he would still be on land – the same land they lived on – and it would make him feel they were safer. So he left his wife on this Wednesday morning and took the subway out to Bushwick, where a big toy firm was located. There he made some purchases which he carried away with him in a long cardboard carton.

It had taken most of the morning to complete the trip and make the purchases and he was about to call it a day and take the subway home when he remembered something. It was the anniversary of his father’s burial.

Mr Finkelstein was not a religious man. Furthermore, he had buried his father some seventeen years ago and was not particularly attached to his memory any more. Despite the Law which requires the son to do homage at the elder’s grave at least once each year, Mr Finkelstein had not been to the grave in three, maybe four years–he did not remember exactly. This negligence was due chiefly to his lack of awe for the dead, rare among the Jews, and his intense preoccupation with the events of this world and the news of the day. To the dead he wished all good luck, but he saw no reason for standing before a stone in the cemetery and pretending that he was sorry. He despised all hypocrisy, and this weeping over people who had been dead for years was to him a travesty and he refused to have anything to do with it.