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coffee pouring like sap from every corner where an aunt knitted, the beds’ blue clouds of comfort forbidden in the daytime too, the cakes and the sips of kümmel, and the ripe indigestions of dusk. It all came back to him from the awful concaves of those Sunday afternoons.
    “Oh, the Mutti has her bad legs—and how are the girls?”
    The “girls” were the Judge’s maiden elder sisters, who lived now in a large apartment house built on that very site; August himself must live somewhere near it.
    “Very well, thank you. Just the same.” And indeed they were—like the Mutti’s legs, which even back then had been varicosed with comfort and her own mutton fat. Friendship between the two families, mostly on the distaff side, had really been a matter of housekeeping sympathies. The Judge’s grandfather, as thick in his own way as his neighbor, had never seemed to see that beyond an occasional glass of Manken schnapps, the society of the editor of the Staats-Zeitung , the German consul-general, plus the Rupperts and Piels, the Heides and the Muschenheims, those brewers, candy millionaires and hotel operators, was—very politely—not for him. But young Simon had only had to be with the women and children, and the maids too, to hear another undercurrent already, perhaps in the same way that only yesterday his own twelve-year-old daughter had claimed to see a Hitler-face in the small, pugnacious scowl of a rose.
    His grandfather had stood by the Mankens during the 1914 wartime, when whole blocks of “Kraut” windows had been smashed, the Mannixes’ own along with theirs, and everything German from Wagner to knitting from the left had been removed from the repertory of living. Whether or not August remembered this, tonight he had come to stand at attention, even to bow as he had been taught—at a “triumph.”
    “And how are things in Yorkville, August?”
    “Not so good. Business going down, riffraff coming in the Turnverein, the district club too. Why you don’t come down to the neighborhood, one day? We could use a smart man like your father was, like you. You were a smart boy, Simon. You had better luck than our Putzi.”
    To compare the Judge’s “luck” with Putzi the forger’s could still be a father’s pathetic arrogance. To claim a share of that luck was no old man’s naïveté, but the bluntest statement of what was felt to be sentimentally owed. Taken together, these could well be the beginnings of just that German national character which now and then had to help the world militarily to an understanding of it. But Manken’s other sad, city-park phrase—the neighborhood—could still strike a chord. “The girls, my sisters, live in that house now, August, did you know? The one which was put up on the old block.”
    The big head inclined deeply, its gray hair brush-cut in a mode which had long preceded the GI’s. Manken’s wing collar and black silk tie with gold-headed stickpin, a mask of comedy with a diamond in its stretched jaws, brought back other segments of that majestic household—fanged bearskin rugs, beetling cupboards and the snarling Orientalia which was thought to be imperial. “Mutti likes the elevators too. We share rooms not far from there, with Gusti. He has a fine wife.” He sighed, for whatever contradiction? “You do not bring yours?”
    The Judge, eye level with the stickpin, raised his glance sharply. Nothing had been intended; it was just a question of thumbs.
    “Regards home, Mr. Manken,” he said gently, and was about to thank him and move on when a disturbance at the gold-and-red-portiered end of the ballroom drew his attention. Down at that end, heads were turning from some rumor. A hollow-eyed servingman in green livery was coming toward him, carrying no salver but the very emissary of disaster; before the man came near the Judge had raked through most possibles in their likely order—first Mirriam, in a smashed mirror of alternatives, then David, hurt from