two children. The last was not so important. But it gave him a clearer view of each of the women to consider that they were perhaps alike. At least you could say of them that they were both extraordinary when they were disturbed (he had not forgotten his mother's screaming)--whatever the right word for it was. The winches began to rattle, a gate dropped resoundingly in the green wooden cove of the slip. The water turned yellow and white under the bows like stale city snow. The boat started back and then, with shut engines, glided in, bumping the weedy timbers. On the long hill beyond the arches of the sheds, the house fronts were suddenly present, and Leventhal, moving ashore in the crowd, heard the busses throbbing before the station. Philip again let him in. Recognizing his uncle he stood aside for him. "Where's Elena. Is she here?" Leventhal said, striding into the dining-room. "How's the boy?" "He's sleeping. Ma's downstairs using Villani's telephone. She said she'd be up right away." He turned to the kitchen, explaining from the doorway, "I was eating supper." "Go ahead, finish," said Leventhal. He walked restlessly round the room. Mickey was asleep; the second alarm seemed to be like the first. Touching the hall door, he debated whether to go into the child's room alone. No, it would be wiser not to; there was no telling how Elena would take it. It was shortly before sundown, and there were lights in the flats giving on the airshaft where the walls, for a short distance below the black cornice, were reddened by the sky. Leventhal went into the kitchen where Philip sat beside the table on a high stepstool. He had a bowl of dry cereal before him and he poured milk over it, digging up the flap of the milk carton with his thumbnail; he peeled and sliced a banana, sprinkled sugar over it, and flipped the skin into the sink with its pans and dishes. The paper frills along the shelves of the cupboard crackled in the current of the fan. It ran on the cabinet, sooty, with insectlike swiftness and a thrumming of its soft rubber blades; it suggested a fly hovering below the tarnish and heat of the ceiling and beside the scaling, many-jointed, curved pipes on which Elena hung rags to dry. The boy's knees were level with the tabletop, and he bent almost double as he ate, spreading his legs. Leventhal reflected that he had taken the stool instead of a chair because he felt the need to do something extreme in his presence. "I used to do stunts, too, when there was a visitor," he reminded himself. "And that is what I am here, a visitor." "Is this your whole supper?" he asked. "When it's hot like this, I never eat a lot." The boy had a rather precise way of speaking. "You ought to have bread and butter, and so on, and greens," said Leventhal. Philip interrupted his eating to look at his uncle briefly. "We don't cook much during the heat wave," he said. He set his feet on a higher rung and bent even lower. His hair had been newly cut, roughly clipped on top and shaved high up the back of his neck to a line above his large but delicately white ears. "What kind of a barber do you have?" Philip looked up again. "Oh, Jack McCaul on the block. We all go to him; Dad too, when he's home. I told him to cut it this way. I asked for a summer haircut." "They ought to take away the man's license for giving you one like that." He said this too forcefully and overshot his intended joke, and he paused and made an effort to find the right tone. "Oh, McCaul's all right," said Philip. "He takes care of us. I was waiting for the kid to get better so's we could go together. But Ma said I should go and have a trim before she had to buy me a fiddle to go with my hair. This haircut is all right for the weather. Last summer I got a baldie--all off." "Well, it's really okay." Leventhal watched him eat, penetrated with sympathy for him. "An independent little boy," he thought. "But how they treat him." He sat down by the window, unbuttoning his creased jacket, and
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