“Some do and some don’t. My dad used to wear chin whiskers, but he didn’t look like the monkey-faced Irishmen on the stage with inverted clay pipes between their teeth. Doesn’t your father wear a beard? Oh, you’ll find a peddler or two still clinging to the whiskers.”
“Well, but most of ’em are rather loud. I know even in New York, at the cafés they seemed conspicuous.”
“By gravy, I’m going to suspect you of being a member of the Trick Track Tribe,” laughed McCall. He seized a pillow and amused himself by throwing it up and down. “Well, the first time I went to Levin’s, I also had a feeling that I’d meet only peddlers, pawnbrokers and clothing salesmen. But that idea is like the idea that a man visiting an Irishman’s house will find pigs in the parlor and meet only hod-carriers, politicians and policemen. You wouldn’t associate with a poor white, would you?”
“Certainly not.”
“Then why should Levin associate with a peddler? I haven’t anything against a peddler especially, only I mean that Jews have social classes just as anybody else has. Jacob Schiff or Louis Brandeis wouldn’t associate with—”
“Oh, shut up!” laughed Robert, throwing a towel at him. “For Levin’s sake I’ll eat a pound of garlic. And, by the way, I’d like to have you show me the answers that Father Callahan gives to those questions; I’d just like to know.”
Robert had decided to write Griffith regarding certain phases of the Tribe’s campaign which were not clear to him, and if the Knights of Columbus were really not in politics, he would inquire about that phase of the campaign also.
“Have you started your big novel yet?” asked Robert.
McCall paused in the midst of a series of abdominal exercises, which consisted of alternately raising and lowering his legs.
“No,” he said. “What gave you that idea?”