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By Root 6178 0

There wasn’t much else. In many respects we irritated each other. Some years ago at the Democratic convention in Atlantic City, that old pleasure-slum, we watched Hubert Humphrey pretending to relax with his delegation while Johnson dangled him, and something about the dinky desolation, the torn fibers of holiday gaiety provoked Hug-gins against me. We went out on the boardwalk and as we faced the horrid Atlantic, tamed here to saltwater taffy and the foam-like popcorn pushed by the sweeper’s brush, Huggins became disagreeable to me. Fearing no man and urging home his arguments with his white billy-goat beard, he made hostile comments on the book about Harry Hopkins I had published that spring. Huggins was covering the convention for the Women’s Wear Daily. A better journalist than I would ever be, he was also a famous bohemian dissenter and revolutionist. Why had I been so kind to the New Deal and seen so much merit in Hopkins? I was forever sneaking praises of the American system of government into my books. I was an apologist, a front man and stooge, practically an Andrei Vishinsky. At Atlantic City as elsewhere, he was informal in chino wash pants and tennis sneakers, tall, rosy, bearded, stammering, and argumentative.

I could actually see myself as I studied him on the boardwalk. In my eyes were specks of green and amber in which he might have seen whole aeons of sleep and waking. If he thought I disliked him he was wrong. I liked him better and better all the time. He was quite old now, and the unkind forces of human hydrostatics were beginning to make a strained and wrinkled bag of his face, but his color remained fresh and he was still the Harvard radical of the John Reed type, one of those ever-youthful lightweight high-spirited American intellectuals, faithful to his Marx or his Bakunin, to Isadora, Randolph Bourne, Lenin and Trotsky, Max Eastman, Cocteau, André Gide, the Ballets Russes, Eisenstein—the beautiful avant-garde pantheon of the good old days. He could no more give up his delightful ideological capital than the bonds he had inherited from his father.

In Kootz’s crowded gallery he was talking with several people. He knew how to carry on a conversation at a noisy cocktail party. Din and drink stimulated him. He was not perhaps too clear in the head, but the actual head I always appreciated. It was long and high, banked with well-brushed silver hair, the uneven ends of long strands giving a spiky effect at the back. Over his tall-man’s belly was a shirt of Merrymount stripes, broad crimson and diabolical purple, like the ribbons of the revelers’ Maypole. It came back to me that more than twenty years ago I had found myself at a beach party in Montauk, on Long Island, where Hug-gins, naked at one end of the log, discussed the Army McCarthy hearings with a lady sitting naked and astride opposite him. Hug-gins was speaking with a cigarette holder in his teeth, and his penis which lay before him on the water-smooth wood, expressed all the fluctuations of his interest. And while he was puffing and giving his views in a neighing stammer, his genital went back and forth like the slide of a trombone. You could never feel unfriendly toward a man of whom you kept such a memory.

He was uncomfortable with me at the gallery. He sensed the peculiarities of my perspective. I was not proud of the same. Moreover, I was more warmly friendly than he wanted me to be. If he was not too clear in the head, neither was I. I was full of unmastered intimations and transitional thoughts and I judged no one. As a matter of fact I was fighting the judgments I had made in my days of rashness. I told him I was glad to see him and that he looked well. This was no lie. His color was fresh and despite the increased grossness of his nose, the distortions of age, and the bee-stung swelling of his lips, I still liked his looks. The rube-constable chin beard he could have done without.

“Ah, Citrine, they let you out of Chicago? Going somewhere?”

“Abroad,” I said.

“Nice young lady you’re with. Terribly att-att-ractive.” Huggins’ fluency