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she'd blab it like it was something dirty. I know her. She's at the
roots of more rumors, Mary, than you or me ever heard of. She'd cut
off her left hind leg to spite me. I know her. Mean as a bitch."

There was a silence in the telephone. Then Lulu rasped anxiously,
"You wouldn't let on as something happened, would you? I mean
around Katie, if you just happened to bump into her somewhere."

"Lulu!" cried Mary, wounded and indignant. "What makes you
say those things! Sometimes I think you say things like that on pur-
pose to hurt me. Do you really believe I'd have any truck with that
big — bum — that old — she-devil!"

Lulu smacked her gum with agitated gusto, enjoying the stepped-
up tempo and the ardor of their speech, frowned fiercely in the tele-
phone booth, and said, "Well, honey, I just get so keyed up and out
of patience — you know how nervous I am — sometimes I don't think
I can trust a living soul."

"It isn't as if I was just anybody," said Mary huskily. She sounded
close to tears.

Lulu's gross face quivered. "I just read such terrible things about
people in the newspapers," she lamented in her stentorian way. "They's
so many stinkers in this world, Mary, you get where you don't even
trust your next of kin."

There were flickering sounds in the telephone, like rain on the
windows. Mary was weeping, feeling stale as a damp soda cracker,
damp as the saltcellars in towns by the sea. She hurt beneath her
breastbone, as if big muscles there ached.

With a spasm of guilty compassion, a flaring face, Lulu went to
work at making amends.

"Now, honey baby, I didn't mean to sound thataway. If I couldn't
trust you, who could I trust, now? No mother ever had a daughter
like you, sweetsie. You're an angel. You're good as gold to me."

Mary mopped her damp face with a tiny bundle of handkerchief,
blew her nose with a tiny scat.

Lulu was cheered and began to gloat again about the surprise in
store for Katie Mulholland. She easily forgot her little theatrical pre-
sentations, though Mary remembered with cumbrous pity and resent-
ment. Little scenes from the dramas of ancient Greeks, when Lulu's
emotion might foam like peroxide, thus cleansing her. Mary, too
often depressed to appreciate them — one more cross to bear in this
storming urban world of barbarisms —, endured them with a feeling
of hopelessness like the big soft muffled beat of a drum in some

69

Tschaikowsky symphony. (Sometimes she wept, in self-pity, when she heard a Tschaikowsky opus.)

Mary, pallid and wiser than her mother, said with wan warmth
over the telephone wire, "Don't get into any trouble, Lulu, will you,
for me?"

"Aw, don't you worry, my darling," barked Lulu.

"But I do," Mary murmured, holding the receiver against her breast and staring through the glass windows vacantly as she wondered what it would be like if Lulu were run over by a taxi, Mary left alone, an orphan, in the hostile city. "Huh? Huh?" said Lulu. When Mary did not respond, Lulu said, "Be seeing you, darling. Bye bye." Her forehead dewy with the fearful sweat, Mary started. "Bye, Lulu!" she yelped desperately.

They hung up the receivers and went their separate ways, Mary back to the high stool behind the cash register in the mirror-bathed bar, and Lulu tlot tlot tlot across the street, down the sidewalk, and in a corner door to work behind the lunch counter.

Lulu always went to the drugstore at noon, to enthrone in the splendor of the telephone booth, surrounded by the monstrous privacy of New York crowds. The fermenting big drugstores gave her new breath, a new view with rainbow-stemmed toothbrushes in platoons, phalanxes of perfume bottles, translucent plastic toys, and festooned sundaes.

A couple of Manhattan miles away Mary sat in the mirrory mauve and grey bar where people came to buy pieces of the dreamy fabric of sleep. The dark womb heaving, coughing, sighing. "Poor Lulu," Mary sighed. "Don't she have the bad breaks."

In her clearer moments even Mary knew that Lulu was stupid. Those green glassy eyes in that clown-powdered, pink-rouged face and that loud tough suet voice told everyone, Lulu is stupid.

Perhaps her hormones, perhaps her genes, and perhaps her life as a pliable-mettled child. Something had not functioned properly. Now there was little use expecting poetry, or even machiavellian wiles, from her, but you could clap her on the back for the game old girl she was.

(People who knew the two, mother and daughter, made mouths, hisses of horror: "Who would ever have thought that old kettle could produce such a daughter. She seems to be a nice girl, too," they ruminated.)

But most of the time, in a daze to combat the noise of the mad

70

menagerie in the bar around her, Mary thought the topography of Lulu, those coarse and queer contours, unfortunate physical encumbrances, a masquerade. For there were poetry and machiavellian wiles in Lulu! Mary, who had suffered a life of failures with Lulu, knew it must be so. There was also parsimony of soul. And Mary knew this also.

Mary worried about the Katie Mulholland-Lulu feud, because of the pecuniary threat to Lulu, for Mary herself hungered for the salvation of the golden coin.

Katie Mulholland was some kind of fascist. Mary said emphatically to Lulu, "She belongs with those people who were following Adolf Hitler." Katie did everything mean in her power to make Lulu quit her job. She talked loudly about Lulu to the customers, who were usually good Joes, truckmen and the like. "Aw, don't pay no attention to her. She's batty as they come." And Katie vigorously chewed her gum, the little pink ribbon in the iron-rooted auburn hair waggling over her temples.

Lulu told Mary some of the things Katie had said to her. They were hard to believe in their crudity, but Lulu hardly had the imagination to create them of thin air, though she might exaggerate them. Katie passionately fought Lulu all day long, like Winged Victory, Minerva, Revolutionary France, or something like that.

Lulu could not understand why Katie hated her. Reluctantly Lulu had let Katie singe and slash her into inflammable emotionality. "I don't know what ails that woman!" she complained to Mary. "She finds fault with everything I do. She takes exception to everything I say. It's getting so I can't open my mouth."

In the warm summer evening, as prearranged, Lulu met Mary at the Cherry Blossom, a Hungarian kind of restaurant with dollar dinners. It was seven o'clock, and daylight was still abroad. But the colors in the awnings were fading from red and green into dark and medium greys.

"Ed's going to meet us here," gushed Lulu, tasting the sweet triumph of possession here in front of the one person she longed always to impress with her worth, her Mary. Lulu folded her arms, elbows knobbed to table.

Mary's lips, if not actually smiling, seemed haunted by a smile. Bittersweet, tired but brave, she stripped the white soft gloves from her hands and sat with that misty mouth.

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"How're the bar flies? Swarming thick as ever?" said Lulu, eagerly leaning forward, her short huge legs making big swimming movements under the table.

"Thicker than ever," said Mary wanly, tapping the table with the tiny book of paper matches from the ash tray. "How's your feud?"

"Ai!" spat Lulu. "She's a divil. I don't know what ails her!" Lulu became sullen and nervous, rearing her head and gazing wildly around the room.

Mary was still. She had eyes like great pale buttons, and they stared as sightlessly as those of the blind. They were a faded tint of cerulean, kin to water under her thin-plucked sandy brows. Her skin was like a tan paraffin; it had a waxy glow. She knew she was homely. As an adolescent she had crumpled her heart into waste paper over the fashion magazines, and even today she envied their masklike faces, the boyish figures, and the theatrical garb on their slick pages. She too was beautiful and desirable in her own most inner sanctuary, where the real Mary dwelt, an exile. But every minute, as she grew older, she felt some of that imaginary beauty and desire grow cold and dead.

Lulu puffed in silence and scrutinized her daughter's enigmatic face. "You're looking better," she interrupted.

"If I could only sleep nights," said Mary wanly, restlessly rubbing her brow with her small pale hands.

"Ed and I got something to tell you," continued Lulu, flourishing her cigarette ponderously, her green button eyes bright with glad tidings.

Mary was teased, and seemed to glow a little in her pale pulseless way. Perhaps they were going to take her on a journey, give her something, change her fate.

Ed came plodding in, a bulgy hairless man whose nude flesh looked orangish, clean, beneath the yellowy light blaring from the cafe's ceiling. "Hi, Lou," he said quietly.

He put his arm around Mary and hugged her gently around the ribs. She liked this strange violation tingling her skin. His arm was warm and strong.

Her mind was always making her feel false. Now it greedily betrayed her own Lulu. Mary wondered nervously, "Does Ed love ME? Would Ed like to have ME, instead of Lulu?" And it was a little delicious to feel desired by someone strange.

But Mary did not love Ed. Ed was too peculiar — plump and without hair. She wanted something less glabrous and more conven-

72

tional. It was bad enough to bear her mother's maiden name. It was
bad enough to be an old maid. Convention was the golden word. "I
must discourage him," she thought virtuously, "before we hurt Lulu."

The waiter with the calm thickbearded dogface and small, black,
and beady eyes had been toadying to a stout woman with a black
moustache and bluish, purplish, white hair set into a perfect formal
pattern of rolls, sweeps, and rhinestone combs. As perfect as a wig
in Marie Antoinette's day. It was sassy; it seemed to announce, "One
hundred dollars and six hours in the making."

"Why do they do it?" Mary cried indignantly. "I see so many old
women all made up like that!"

"Jews —" interpolated Lulu.

"Not necessarily," said Ed, perfunctorily.

The woman had a shrewd masculine air. A fat and amiable ruddy
man in a suit of great black and white plaid, big rubies and black onyx
on his fat hirsute fingers, lolled at her side, basking in the splendor.

Ed popped his delicate fingers and summoned the waiter forth.
Lulu was proud to see that Ed was not to be "walked over" by anyone.
She simpered over her brawny folded arms at Mary across the table.

Ed held out his cigarette, slowly poked it between his clean bare
lips. Mary and Lulu watched the waiter strike a match and light the
white, quivering, expectant little cigarette, which led its separate exis-
tence stuck out from the soft smooth flesh — feeding it flame with a
little manual flourish done with conscious artistry. Remember the
tip, the waiter's flourish seemed to warn them.

It was a warm galing spring evening, full of breeze eddies which
made the paper napkins dance in ghostly bravura ballet, the awning
flap gently like sails. A block and a half away the East River boiled
by.

The evening was spent with talk of Ed, by Ed, and for Ed. Lulu
folded her muscular arms repeatedly and leaned forward with bright
eyes to catch his words of wisdom, then, breaking posture, sat up
straight to approve them monotonously. "That's right, you tell em,
Ed's right, listen to Ed ..."

She urged him on like a baseball fan. "Yeah, tell Mary about that,
Ed. I think it's just stunning." She shook a long worm ash off the
cigarette into her plate, her lips puckering judiciously under her earn-
est frown. "Say, Ed, why don't you tell Mary about you and me?"

To this last urgent inquiry Ed responded, gazing enigmatically
across the laden table at the startled, tremulous Mary, "How would

73

you like me for a father, Mary?” His soft low voice was casual. His
eyes raked hers with expressionless boldness.

"So this is what Lulu meant," the hapless and overawed girl thought.
She wondered frenziedly, "What is Ed's pose?" Lulu was frisking in
her chair like an excited puppy. Ed, forty-one-year Ed, following
Mary's horrified gaze, smiled damply on Lulu. "What cha think,
Mary!" cried Lulu.

A large last chunk of meat was traveling slowly down Mary's lone-
ly esophagus, hurting her as it went.

"Yes, what do you think, Mary?" echoed Ed, smiling with quiet oil.

Flustered, her hand groped among glasses, spoons, and ash trays
like a lost creature. "Why, Ed, I think — that would be—well, all
right!" she murmured huskily, chokily. "Why, it'd be swell!" she
forced herself to cry desperately. And then she sat throbbing with
anguish.

Through the rest of the guilty evening her brain thundered with
loose troops of electrical phantasms. What had been transparent was
umbra.

When the chicken paprika and the ice cream were down their
working throats, flushed with vile coffee, Lulu told Mary that she was
going home to bed with a headache.

Long ago Lulu and Mary had taken separate rooms in different
neighborhoods because, as Lulu explained so augustly, "It wasn't good
for a kid like Mary to have no private life. We useta quarrel. We
don't quarrel no more, do we, Mary?"

Mary, smiling her sweet, brave, and famished smile for her un-
motherly but fast-riveted crony, knew that Lulu was telling a broad lie
but did not mind. She valued Lulu's pride in her own innocence and
high mind.

Lulu trudged sturdily among the tables to the powder room. Ed
sat strangely nervous as Mary stared past him with eyes blank as sau-
cers. He said with difficulty and a nervous laugh, "There's only one
Lulu." Mary looked at him incredulously. Was he making sport of
Lulu?

"Lulu's a grand person," Mary said in a low bitter voice.

"Yes, yes, she certainly is," Ed said hastily, and then, in a sort of
earthquakery, turned sideways in his chair and gazed wildly out of
the window at passersby.

"He's just a big phony," Mary thought sadly. Everybody was a
phony these days. It was like the common cold.

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Lulu returned gustily. "Let's go, Jackson!" she said to Ed. On the sidewalk she turned and enfolded Mary. Mary kissed Lulu goodnight on the bulging though soft cheek and squeezed the big coarse mannish hands with a great spasm of pity.

Then Ed put his soft and pulpy, ephemeral hand forward. It lay
like a stick of butter in Mary's own little paw.

Lulu, of course, went home with Ed for drinks and play in the fine
bachelor flat.

Mary sighed as she watched them go. The short square bulks of
their backs. Then she stiffened resolutely. "Well, life is too short for
worrying," she murmured aloud. "Lulu is happy, anyway."

She laboriously climbed into the crosstown bus and came face to
face with herself. As she sat nebulous in contemplation of her own
life, the bus lurched across the blocks and avenues behind the spurt-
ing automobiles and taxis.

She began to dream of late rescue by the tardy prince.

"Home" was a cubbyhole on a fourth story in a tenement. A place
where she might be lonely in peace. She walked up three flights of
stairs and opened her door on the blast of bottled heat, walked to the
window and opened the sash, threw her raincoat and pocketbook on
the narrow single bed.

It was only ten o'clock, so she settled with her stack of woman's
magazines and steadily perused the stories. Pretty Vicky, harassed by
the cold, sophisticated Elaine, had to choose between Drake, with his
millions, and blithe footloose Tom. She read about quiet beautiful
Noel, toast of continents, and her tragic marriage to the saturnine
Nicholas, her eventual salvation in the arms of the young farmer,
Angus Dunn. But for the grace of God, Mary was pretty Vicky and
quiet Noel!

The movie magazine informed her that brave, tragic Joan Crawford had not lost her sense of humor. Tyrone Power might wander, but he always came home to his women. Alan Ladd had been washed by hell's fire, but credited it for his newborn character. Elizabeth Taylor was a darling, and Greer Garson was not a hasbeen.

The movie magazine began to slow her brain with sludge and
sickness. She threw it in the wastepaper basket, feeling bewildered
and disappointed with a life of such inequalities.

She turned on her tiny plastic radio for the mystery serials and the
program of Victor Herbert and Sigmund Romberg melodies. She
sewed a new hem in her old black satin slip while she listened.

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At twelve-thirty someone rang her bell. In dismay she listened until it sharply spurted again. Lulu, in trouble? Some drunken sailor seeking port? Some mawkish idiot come to pounce and rape? She remembered the big Negro who stared muttering at her bosom. The two slimy young Italo-Americans leering at her.

She pressed the buzzer, cautiously opened her door, and tiptoed swiftly across the hall to the stair rail.

At first there was nothing to be seen in the dim and smoky depth.

Terrified, she tried to shout an inquiry, but the words stuck in her throat. Her mouth seemed dry, her lips paperish. When voices had shouted up in the past they had seemed muffled, as from a deep jar. Mail man, ice man, none of these tonight.

Then she saw the silent hand descend with perfect speed upon the bottom railing, deep below. A chill ran fleet along her spine. She waited without breath. The tiny, perfect hand rested motionlessly on that first slanted railing. Uncanny as a blonde tarantula, it sat, poised and spectral. Like a superstition, it awaited its own power.

Paralyzed she waited, afraid to identify herself, even by stirring for whatever it was that lay in wait for her.

She had visions of a monster blocking the lower passageway like an octopus and crawling, close to the wall, with a dreadful motion, up the successive flights of stairs. Slithering. With a glazed eye she motionlessly watched both the hand and the stairs below for the slightest shadowy movement.

Finally, after what seemed about fortyfive minutes to her, the young man who lived one floor below her came home, and Mary, faint with relief, shuddering into calm, called out precisely, "Who is that downstairs, please?"

"Oh, some old rummy," he threw off, glancing up. His cheeks looked rouged.

"Thank you," she said dispassionately and disappeared.

Mary doublelocked the door to her room and settled in bed with magazines and a large wedge of soft cake, which tasted like powdered sugar and oleomargarine, and sponge rubber, to calm her hopping nerves. Meanwhile her alerted brain was rapidly making plans for her, in case an emergency ever came her way. She could dart up to the roof and run across the city block on roofs, like an Irish revolutionary. She could bang the door of her room, lock it, pile bureau, chair, and bed against it — but if it were gangsters they could shoot through with deadly spray of tommyguns. Gangsters were scary

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people, they liked to see the innocent suffer. She could climb out onto the open fire escape, where some midnight policeman or altruistic passerby might see her.

About half an hour had passed when she began to hear the ominous dragging mounting the stairs, and her shallow calm fled.

She steeled herself and glanced nervously, yearningly at the lock. She had never understood its workings. It was only cold metal and grease, so she did not trust it. She had heard how some talented men could feel a lock's nerves with bare fingers and coax it open. A diabolical mind could use this lock knowledge in sinister ways.

Thus her imagination brought her only horror. Still as a mouse she sat and waited, longing for the dragging to pass her by.

Scrape, scratch, slough, and drag, something came down the little hall to the very foot of her door, where, unaccountably, it stopped. Her heart pounded so loud she was sure it could be heard outside.

There was heavy breathing right outside the door, as if lions and tigers circulated there with hungry breath.

She was powerless to move, utterly unprepared for what came.

"Open that door."

And the silence rang.

"You dirty bum. OPEN THAT DOOR."

A tight bloodcurdling little yell. A key came rattling and slithering into the keyhole, where it was plied in vain.

Mary had shrunken until each of her internal organs was an affecting, roast peanut. Her brain was a monotonous agony as it sought release. She looked at the window and the top of the fire escape railing. Could she make it in time, before the lock or the wood gave way? Her dreamy body lay in a spell.

Whatever it was that had bawled in that sexless, inhuman way, began to bam on the door with the hands or claws and then to kick it with metallic-sounding feet.

"Open this door. You ungrateful wretch. OPEN THIS DOOR."

"O, I'd just like to get my hands on you, just once! O, after all I did for you! You whore! If I could just once!"

"Why, I took you in after your husband divorced you. You didn't even have a radio. Not even a broom! When you was sick I bathed you like you was a baby. Everybody knows your husband divorced you for drunkenness!"

"For two years, for two years, I supported you. I left you a dollar every day, right there on the table to buy you rum. And you treat

77

me this way! O, you little two-bit whore! You owe me five hundred
and fifty dollars!"

Bam, bam, bam!

"Yes, you do! You most certainly do!"

Bam, bam, bam!

"If you don't open this door, you little fool, I'll just tear it down!
I'll get me a pick ax! I'll break that lock to pieces!"

Bam, bam! Crash! Crack! "OPEN THAT DOOR." Bang. Bam.

Somehow there came about a long silence, like snow singing on
the out-of-doors. Mary was extraordinarily dizzy. She rose and
swayed quietly. The root muscles of her eyes ached as if her eyes
were going to twiddle backwards, leaving only white blanks to view.

Outside there was a bumping, thumping, and swishing about on
the floor. Finally again that little voice was raised in a tight yell. It
grew fainter and fainter.

"YER GONNER SUFFER FOR THIS. O, YES, YER GONNER SUFFER."

"Like I been suffering. THREE YEARS FROM NOW YER GONNER BE LYING OUT ON THE COLD FLOOR. NAKED. WITH NO COVER. WITH NOT EVEN A PILLOW. AND DO YOU THINK I'LL HAVE PITY ON YOU?"

"HA HA! HA!"

"NOT ONE TEAR WILL I SHED OVER YOU."

"O, no. I won't have pity on you."

"Yer gonner get yours, lady. You wait and see."

Soon, from the invisible, there came a faint sputtery, rhythmic
snore.

With masticated, raw nerves, Mary ran to the window and des-
perately gazed out. "I've waited long enough," she thought wildly.

Impulsively, defiantly, she climbed out onto the dark fire escape
grating. Then she peered down terrorstricken on dark bobbling heads
and shapes.

Quiet drunks went slumping by as directionlessly as windmills,
pinwheels. Dark yellow and orange taxis scudded around the corners
and zoomed down the avenue like night racers. A few steady, sober
people walked under the grating, the respectable. A noisy drunk
tried to fight a bus. He stood in front of it, haranguing, for about
fifteen minutes and then wobbled from in front of it while people
shouted at him.

Finally a silent buoy cop came walking by beneath her. "Police!"

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she cried. Five or six of these tiny and thin gull cries from her starv-
ing throat. Then he looked up at her with an inscrutable, pale, tiny
face, made her a reassuring motion with his microscopic gloved hand,
and entered the hallway downstairs.

She scrambled like some flamboyant tomboy to press the buzzer.
When she heard his weighted foot encroaching on the stairs she opened
the door swiftly and peered out, wonderfully emboldened.

An old woman lay on her back on the floor, legs stretched out
stiff in front of her and belly steep, an arm thrown up against her
eyes.

"Who you got here?" said the policeman brusquely.

"I don't know," whispered Mary, shakily.

She began to sob helplessly, her underlip making wild little bob-
bles she could no longer control. She made her speech plain with
much labor, as her voice kept dying out and coming back in hoarse
blasts. She felt despicable. "She's been bang—she's been beating —
on my door — and yelling — for hours and hours!"

The policeman craned his neck in a cursory "examination of the premises." He gazed heavenward, a queerness passing on his immaculate young face as he considered the possibility of the old woman's residence in this building.

"Ever seen her likes before?" he said curtly.

"Oh, no," Mary protested faintly.

"You have a phone?" he flung at her over his dense young shoul-
der.

"O, no," she repeated stupidly, her hand pulling the skin of her
downy throat to express uselessness.

"Okay," he said finally. "It's all right. Go to bed, lady. I'll have some of the boys up shortly to remove this old bag." He rapidly ran down the stairs with an evenly pebbled leg motion.

Mary waited up until they came again. She listened behind the
cracked door to their grunts and terse low comments as their cooper-
ative effort raised the unconscious one. She looked after their re-
treating forms as they carried the heavy bloated form down the long
narrow stairways.

Their stalwart backs and calm measured baritones had reassured
her. She doublechecked the door, put the bureau against it to stump
fate, turned out the little bedlamp, and fell exhausted into the bed
trough, where she twisted and turned, the baleful red reflection of the
neon sign on the drugstore across the street blinking on and off on

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her walls. She dozed and woke when dawn was a faint dilution of the dark. She dozed and woke again when dawn was luminous in the window. Gratefully she then slept.

She woke at nine to a hurried little knock at the door. A gaunt and ghostly girl stood outside, her dark eyes flashing feverishly, averted.

"I came to offer apologies for my mother's behavior last night," she muttered queerly. "I live upstairs over you, you know," she added. She kept putting one foot out in the opposite direction, as if she were ready to depart any instant. "My mother must have thought your room was mine. She was so drunk, poor old thing, you know."

Speechlessly Mary pulled the fold of her kimono tighter around her body.

The girl nodded idiotically, twisting her fingers in the blouse bow over her breastbone. "Yes, I would have come down," she continued listlessly, "but, well —" She hesitated and then added smoothly, "But I was so tired. So very tired."

Then, in complete contradiction of her expressionlessness, she leaned her head against the outer wall and began to sob quietly.

"Oh," said Mary, terribly stirred at the sight of such defeat. "Oh, don't do that there! Come on in, come inside and sit down for a minute."

The girl sat hunched over in the chair, her thin shoulders working with sobs, her spine a knotty centipede under the pulled white rayon blouse. Her bare face seemed both lavender and pink, bumpy, screened with fluid tears running down the promontories of nose, lip, and cheek.

Because the girl was homely, Mary found her pretty. There was an endearing awkwardness, delicacy of gesture, aneurhythmy of the whole. It was rarely Mary saw another girl's fathoms.

"I should have come down and got her," the girl croaked, and gasped so loudly she almost hiccups. Her hands hung limp on her knee caps. "I know I should have. It's just that she's so terrible. She follows me everywhere I go. I have to move from every place. She comes and torments me and bangs and shouts and writes terrible things all over my walls."

"She's my mother, you know."

"That's awful," murmured Mary. "Here, use my Kleenex."

"My father divorced her, she stayed so drunk. When she was sick I bathed her like a baby. She left me to live with an old souse when I was nineteen. When he kicked her out, I took her in. For two

80

years I supported her. I left her a dollar every day on the table so she could buy her rum. Then I had to leave her. She was driving me mad. She repeated everything I said to her like she was me.

"She'd fight me like a cat. She even threw my little Swiss clock at me. It broke into little pieces. It was a nice clock. A boy gave it to me for my birthday. She was jealous of him, so she used to follow him to work and pester him all morning. I don't know what happened to him. He quit calling up.

"Now she follows me. How she found out I was here, I don't know. She must have called the place I work. Maybe my landlady at the other place told her. My landlady seemed to blame me for the condition she'd find my mother in."

"I try to tell people about it, but they won't listen. They don't believe you when you say, My mother's a bum, a drunken devil. They say, Why don't you try to take better care of the old lady? Why don't you take her to a good doctor? If they only knew all I've tried. They think you're unnatural when you try to get rid of her. I got fired one day last month from my job in a big department store. My mother came and told them lies about me. The manager said he couldn't trust anyone like me to wait on customers. He said I was crazy to treat my old mother the way I did."

The girl's stamina had given out. She sat quietly and involuntarily sobbing. Her mind seemed to have blanked out, for she gazed around her with frightened eyes, lost in the labyrinth of her own words. "O, God," she groaned, "I shouldn't have said anything to you about all this. You don't want to know anything about all this. Why should I bother you?"

"You poor thing," Mary said weakly. "You mustn't feel like that." Her fingers fidgeted a little at the puffed shoulder of the girl's sleeve, but at once withdrew like frightened mice to the back of the chair.

"Well," said the girl bitterly, her eyes glittering as she rose from the chair, "I'll take off before I do more mischief. You're good, but nobody can help me. You've probably got troubles a hundred times worse. I'm just a poor sap, that's all." Her face grew hard. "Sorry I dragged you into all this. I hope it won't happen again."

"Awww," said Mary distressed.

This touched the girl on a tender spot. She turned toward Mary with a buttery ghost of a smile. "Now, now!" she said. "Forget it, kid!"

It was kind blasphemy. Mary smiled timidly. "I hope everything will be all right."

81

"Oh, sure it will!" the girl boshed shortly. "So long." She went down the stairs with a sluggish gait, a slim, long figure in a shiny severe black tailored suit. Mary thought her heroic.

A little while later Mary heard a dragging on the steps. She peeked out as the old woman's head came bobbing into view through the railings. The old woman was weeping noisily, "Ooh hoo hoo hoo." Mary quietly closed the door and locked it. The old woman passed by and entered on the next flight of stairs.

When Mary left her room to go to work at eleven, she could hear the old woman fluttering like a bird caught in an interior, beating futilely at her daughter's door.

"Why didn't the police put her in some hospital ward for alcoholics?" Mary wondered irritably. "Why don't the police try to clean up New York?"

She went down the stair hatches moodily, feeling that nothing was incorruptible, that the world was a hopeless dump.

Mary had a terrible headache this morning, and as she squinted along the shiny streets under the pursuit of the daystar, she thought her head would drop off her straining neck. She ate two aspirin tablets as she washed down her waffles in the lunchroom. "Christ, what a day," she sighed bleakly, leaning her head against a hand and staring lusterlessly out the window at sidewalk pandemonium.

She got to work fifteen minutes late, her head full of muffled thunder. As she distributed the new bills and coin in the cleaned-out cash register, the girl in the back office summoned her to the telephone. Yawning, Mary slouched through the swinging door and seized the receiver.

It was Lulu. Her voice was staccato. "I got to see you, Mary," she stuttered. "I got something terrible to tell you. Meet me tonight at Oglethorpe's."

Mary half slept on her high stool. The afternoon slipped by, thundering, buzzing, and whispering in the deteriorated nautiluses of her ears. When finally the sixty ticking minutes between six and seven had elapsed and the night cashier, a nightblooming cereus of a girl, had come, Mary eased her sore hidebound muscles off the wooden seat, feeling so tired she could hardly locomote. She moved like a slug to the back closet for her little jacket and sloughed out the side entrance into the screaming night.

Oglethorpe's was crowded with the many-faced, brilliant-frocked,