Word: drunkards
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...York." There are "no more open sewers, no more flies, no more rats." "Nobody is arrogant here, nobody is grabby, nobody feels himself above or below anybody else." The whole population is "identically dressed in blue cotton." "Nightclubs and brothels have gone," and there is "not one drunkard." Pedicab operators are so content that they no longer quarrel and shout; when "two bicycles or pedicabs collide, those involved exchange smiles." Every morning, all the ministerial bureaucrats "line up in front of the administration buildings" and perform calisthenics -"mildly incongruous," perhaps, but "nothing [is] more reasonable than the principle of compulsory...
...setting is Pine Island, Me., a summer retreat and a kind of "perverted Garden of Eden from which one was expelled for the sin of poverty." Among the unexpelled nouveau poor are the Hunters, who eke out their stay as genteel innkeepers. Fortyish Bart Hunter is an existentially minded drunkard whose most cutting insult is to call someone "cheerful." His disillusioned wife Sylvia once took him for a big social cheese, but now knows him for an ineffectual mouse. Their son John, a taut, brooding boy of 14, and his nondescript little sister round out the unhappy Hunter clan...
...Gentile is a drunkard...
...drunkard he is, Drink he must, Because he is a Gentile...
Gradually, through the musings of other mourners, the answer emerges. A gentle drunkard, Machek's brother-in-law, dreamily remembers how Stanislaw came to the U.S., how he became foreman in a knitting mill, fathered five daughters. Stella herself appears, a slut (or so it seems) newly married to a fat cloak-and-suiter. As details of her childhood come into focus, the reader approaches the shattered central figure of Stanislaw Machek...