Who Do You Think You Are

delicious.”
    Delicious seemed an odd word for Clifford to use. Perhaps he was drunk. Or perhaps, hating parties altogether as Jocelyn said he did, he had taken on a role; he was the sort of man who told a girl she looked delicious. He might be adept at disguises, as Rose thought she herself was getting to be. She went on talking to the writer and a man who taught English Literature of the Seventeenth Century. She too might have been poor and clever, radical and irreverent for all anybody could tell.
    A man and a girl were embracing passionately in the narrow hall. Whenever anybody wanted to get through, this couple had to separate but they continued looking at each other, and did not even close their mouths. The sight of those wet open mouths made Rose shiver. She had never been embraced like that in her life, never had her mouth opened like that. Patrick thought French-kissing was disgusting.
    A little bald man named Cyril had stationed himself outside the bathroom door, and was kissing any girl who came out, saying, “Welcome, sweetheart, so glad you could come, so glad you went.”
    “Cyril is awful,” the woman writer said. “Cyril thinks he has to try to act like a poet. He can’t think of anything to do but hang around the john and upset people. He thinks he’s outrageous.”
    “Is he a poet?” Rose said.
    The lecturer in English Literature said, “He told me he had burned all his poems.”
    “How flamboyant of him,” Rose said. She was delighted with herself for saying this, and with them for laughing.
    The lecturer began to think of Tom Swifties.
    “I can never think of any of those things,” said the writer mourn fully, “I care too much about language.”
    Loud voices were coming from the living room. Rose recognized Patrick’s voice, soaring over and subduing everyone else’s. She opened her mouth to say something, anything, to cover him up—she knew some disaster was on the way—but just then a tall, curly-haired, elated-looking man came through the hall, pushing the passionate couple unceremoniously apart, holding up his hands for attention.
    “Listen to this,” he said to the whole kitchen. “There’s this guy in the living room you wouldn’t believe him. Listen.”
    There must have been a conversation about Indians going on in the living room. Now Patrick had taken it over.
    “Take them away,” said Patrick. “Take them away from their parents as soon as they’re born and put them in a civilized environment and educate them and they will turn out just as good as whites any day.” No doubt he thought he was expressing liberal views. If they thought this was amazing, they should have got him on the execution of the Rosenbergs or the trial of Alger Hiss or the necessity for nuclear testing.
    Some girl said mildly, “Well, you know, there is their own culture.” “Their culture is done for,” said Patrick. “Kaput.” This was a word he was using a good deal right now. He could use some words, clichés, editorial phrases— massive reappraisal was one of them— with such relish and numbing authority that you would think he was their originator, or at least that the very fact of his using them gave them weight and luster.
    “They want to be civilized,” he said. “The smarter ones do.” “Well, perhaps they don’t consider they’re exactly uncivilized,” said the girl with an icy demureness that was lost on Patrick.
    “Some people need a push.”
    The self-congratulatory tones, the ripe admonishment, caused the man in the kitchen to throw up his hands, and wag his head in delight and disbelief. “This has got to be a Socred politician.”
    As a matter of fact Patrick did vote Social Credit.
    “Yes, well, like it or not,” he was saying, “they have to be dragged kicking and screaming into the twentieth century.”
    “Kicking and screaming?” someone repeated.
    “Kicking and screaming into the twentieth century,” said Patrick, who never minded saying anything again.
    “What an interesting expression. So humane as well.”
    Wouldn’t he understand now, that he was being cornered, being baited and laughed at? But Patrick, being cornered, could only grow more thunderous. Rose could not listen any longer. She headed for the back passage, which was full of all the boots, coats, bottles, tubs, toys, that Jocelyn and Clifford had pitched out of the way for the party. Thank God it was empty of people. She went out of the back door and stood burning and