A Salinger story that's about one single word

J.D. Salinger's Down at the Dinghy, 5th entry in his collection Nine Stories, is a sly little piece - I almost said slight little piece - more accessible, traditional in form, and tendentious than his other pieces in the collection (wondering if it was his earliest written?). Only four characters, and in the great short story tradition it contains only one action and one location and a very short time span, maybe 20 minutes. An interesting narrative invention, though, is the way he shifts the focus, or perhaps focuses in, over the course of the story: it starts with two middle-aged women, servants - maid and cook or maid and housekeeper of some sort? - talking over the table about their employers and about other matters - they're in some kind of lakeside summer home, and one (the maid?) is heading back to the city (NYC), and the other is a local. Their conversation touches on the peculiarity and difficulty of the four-year-old boy of the household. Then the mom enters the kitchen, smoking - 25, with the outrageous name of Boo Boo; they talk about the boy and his propensity to run away from home - improbably, even in Manhattan, where "the whole police force" was out looking for him once and found him at night in Central Park. So this is a troubled, yet precocious and independent-minded kid - in other words, a Salinger character. Mom goes out to the dock where she locates child in the dinghy, and tries to coax him back to the house - he had promised to stop running away, etc. She engages in some play talk, pretending to be an admiral, and at last the kid tells why he ran away: because one of the women called his father a "kike." Boo Boo keeps her cool, especially when she realizes child thinks a kike is something you fly in the sky on a string. OK, so what's happening here: we are with a family that seems to be the stereotypical WASP-patrician class, right down to the preppy nickname, and we learn at the very end that they are Jewish - and that they stir up hatred and animosity and obviously anti-Semitism. We also learn that Boo Boo is "nee Glass," that is, part of the family that dominates almost all of Salinger's fiction throughout his brief writing career - Jewish by blood, but "passing." (Her married name is Tannenbaum - which I think may have inspired that insufferable movie about a Glass-like family, The Royal Tannenbaums?) There is a sense that the boy - whom we barely see and don't "meet" till the last pages of the story, is the main character of the story - he has discerned something about himself and his family that his parents have not, or have pushed aside. Though he doesn't know the meaning of the term, he senses the vitriol and the ostracism, and knows that in the maid's bitterness and anger there as a statement about class - and perhaps about the very way the Tannenbaums treat their "help" - we have no idea what provoked the comment. Malicious though it may be, is there some basis for her bitterness? It's an odd story that hinges on one single word.