Already, the first year Eugene had known him he had discovered this strange quality in these people: they seemed to delight in jeering and jibing at one another; and at the same time their harsh mockery had in it an element of obscure and disquieting affection. At this time Abe was carrying on, week by week, a savage correspondence with another young Jew who had been graduated with him from the same class in high school. He always had in his pocket at least one of the letters this boy had written him, and he was for ever giving it to Eugene to read, and then insisting that he read his answer. In these letters they flew at each other with undisciplined ferocity, they hurled denunciation, mockery, and contempt at each other, and they seemed to exult in it. The tone of their letters was marked by an affectation of cold impersonality and austerity, and yet this obviously was only a threadbare cloak to the furious storm of personal insult and invective, the desire to crow over the other man and humiliate him, which seemed to delight them. “In your last letter,” one would write, “I see that the long-expected débâcle has now occurred. In our last year at high school I saw occasional gleams of adult intelligence in your otherwise infantile and adolescent intellect, and I had some hope of saving you, but I now see my hopes were wasted—your puerile remarks on Karl Marx, Anatole France, et al., show you up as the fat-headed bourgeois you always were, and I accordingly wash my hands of you. You reveal plainly that your intellect is incapable of grasping the issues involved in modern socialism: you are a romantic individualist and you will find everything you say elegantly embalmed in the works of the late Lord Byron, which is where you belong also: your mother should dress you up in a cowboy suit and give you a toy pistol to play with before you hurt yourself playing around with great big rough grown-up men.”
Abe would read Eugene one of these letters, grinning widely with Kike delight, lifting his grinning face and laughing softly, “Oh-ho-ho-ho-ho!” as he came to some particularly venomous insult.
“But who wrote you such a letter?” Eugene demanded.
“Oh, a guy I went to school with,” he answered, “a friend of mine!”
“A friend of yours! Is that the kind of letter that your friends write you?”
“Sure,” he said. “Why not? He’s a good guy. He doesn’t mean anything by it. He’s got bats in the belfry, that’s all. But wait till you see what I wrote him!” he cried, grinning exultantly as he took his own letter from his pocket. “Wait till you see what I call him! Oh-ho-ho-ho-ho!”—
