If his name had been Angelo Utrillo, I would have suggested Fermi. He
wouldn't have known who Fermi was, but my explanation would have filled
him with pride. And if it had been Michael Riority, I would have tried
De Valera.
"Babe Ruth," I repeated when I paid my fare. "Did the _Mirror_ and
the _News_ give Freud a double-page spread? The greatest mind in the
twentieth century. Greatest Jew since Jesus. We should be proud to
live in the same age. But what are we proud of? Babe Ruth. Baseball's
okay--but the way people act about it certainly shows what's wrong with
people."
"You're right, Mac."
I tipped him a quarter. Money wasn't going to be useful to me much
longer.
Then I felt sick.
The money I possessed--the insurance--the money that might come from
my books and perhaps from the posthumous sale of a few stories to the
movies--would be all there was
for my wife
daughter
my wife's mother
and some others.
I had two rooms--a bedroom and parlor. Sleep and reading in bed were
thus kept separate from work, from the two hundred and eighteen pages
of my serial which had to be cut sheet by sheet, line by line, to fit
the precise requirements of a weekly magazine. This small suite was on
the sixteenth floor. Here, the street sounds became boogie-woogie--set
to rhythm by bouncing back and forth between the walls of Madison
Avenue. Here the smell of the city was less toxic. And here the eye
ranged over rooftops. My draperies, flowered and lined with sateen,
moved now against the dark-green embrasures of the window--not in a
breeze but in the upward eddy of diurnal heat. The yellow roses with
which the management had greeted me dangled in their vase. I wondered
whether to cut their stems or throw them out. If Ricky, my wife, had
accompanied me, there would have been two dozen roses--and she would
have known about the stems. I propped open the door to the hall with a
book. Air sucked through the crack.
In a big mirror, over the mantel, over the chunks of topaz glass that
represented coals in the artificial fireplace, I could see myself.
Strained and pallid, sweat showing at the armpits of my dark-blue
gabardine jacket.