Sometimes I sense that to put real confidence in my memory I have to get to the end of all rememberings. That seems to say that I forego remembering. And now that strikes me as an accurate description of what it is to have confidence in one's memory.
          --Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason

I remember more about the archaic servants' bells in apartment 7-F, which I was so thrilled about when we moved there. In most rooms they were push-buttons, as I've mentioned before, but in the dining room you rang by pushing a big metal plate under the dining room rug. I seem to recall having seen it once, but I'm not sure: I have a sense of its being surprisingly ugly and not the continuous surface I'd imagined it was. But I'd only have seen it when we moved out (or perhaps if we ever changed the rug in the dining room), so I'm not sure I ever did. The rug that covered it was probably 8x10 and the heavy dining room table was above it, though once my parents moved the table out of the way for a party. More about that party in a moment. What I remember about the bell was the fun I could have with my parents and sister first, then when they got both irritated with me and habituated to the prank, the fun I had making my friends think there was someone at the door. Because you could hear the bell just fine: which sort of obviated what I now realize it was used for: making the servants appear as if by a kind of magical discretion at just the right moment of the meal, the way they do in the movies.

My memory of this bell, which I can't have thought of for decades, despite the way I would worm my way down in the chair -- the black leather chair with studs! what I thought of when I read about points de capitons in Lacan years later -- is partly how awkward it was to get it to ring. I remember feeling with my bare and therefore slightly shortened foot for the tell-tale projections that were part of its mechanism, like the projections you feel for now in a Barney doll to make it talk or sing. The dining room bell was so much more interesting than Barney. I must have been still fairly small, because I sat on the long side of the table, so only had to reach halfway across the shadow of its width. I remember the pleasure of finding one of those projections, having it under foot, and sitting there quietly, cherishing the power to ring.

I remembered the bell again because there's a similar one in A Slight Case of Murder, a wonderful Edward G. Robinson movie, with zesty and farcial screenplay by Damon Runyan. Jane Bryan, who plays Robinson's wife, tries to summon servants who have gone to move some dead bodies around and are unavailable. Robinson says, "Ring again." We haven't seen her ringing. But then she says, "If I ring any harder I'll put my foor through the floor." So this must have been a very well-known feature of apartments or houses at the time, and not only upper class or upper middle class. When I saw the scene in the movie, it all came back.

And this prompted me to remember this party which was attended by friends and friends of friends of my parents, including a very genial man whom I quite liked -- to my surprise, because he had two hooks for arms. And he was married, to someone he'd met after losing his arms, trying to defuse a land-mine for the Israeli Defense Forces. I wonder was that 1948? It might have been 1967: I think this party was after the six-day war. He was probably in his fifties or sixties though. But who knows -- maybe he was just in his early thirties. He was very jovial. My memory of him at the party is fixed not so much because he was there as because a few days later my parents went to another occasion with him, and my father told me that he'd really put his foot in his mouth, by telling one of his favorite jokes: "It's gangrene; we've got to amputate your leg." "Oh my God." After the operation: "I have good news and bad news. " "Ok, Doctor, give me the bad news first." "We cut off the wrong leg." "Oh my God! Well what can the good news possibly be?" "The other leg is healing." (I think his wife was a doctor. Now that I think of this, I think she might have cared for him professionally. A belated Great War story.)

I was shocked by my father's bad judgment, and asked him how this guy had responded. My father shook his head in pleasant disbelief and said, "He laughed harder than anyone." I loved that.

posted by william 11:17 PM
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