The object of her thoughts suddenly exploded in outraged sensibilities.
"Listen to this!" he commanded, pushing his glasses back up where they belonged.
"'The ancient Romans were really hip to all kinds of modern jazz. Like their houses had central heat, hot and cold running water, and you could flush the johns, and since they dug being clean so much, they had great big public bathrooms where everybody grooved together a couple of times a day.'"
"Well, didn't they?" Sandy teased. She put the last plate in the drainer, dried her hands and came in to join him on the blue couch.
"Technically, yes. At least the wealthiest classes had all that; but this jive-talking illiterate makes it sound as if everyone had oil furnaces in the basement and electric water heaters on every floor. And the Romans didn't bathe every day just because they 'dug being clean so much'!"
He scrawled a bitter comment across the top of the unfortunate theme and added a grade: C for facts; F- minus for composition. "And how the hell he ever passed English 1.1 is beyond me," he muttered. From the lofty height of his twenty-four years came fretful predictions for the imminent demise of education.
Sandy knelt beside him and gently smoothed his hair as he picked up another paper and began to read.
"Sensuous old Romans," she murmured. "All that bathing just for the fun of it."
Her fingers moved down to the nape of his neck and hesitated provocatively. David Wade's breathing quickened, but he kept his eyes firmly fixed on the papers before him.
She leaned away then and casually twisted her long golden hair into an enchanting topknot. "As long as you're working, I think I'll go take a shower myself."
Her tone was innocent, but her dimples beguiled as she loosened the top button of her blouse. David abandoned his papers and pulled her down to him. She laughed, pretended to pull away; yet all her struggles only seemed to twist her into more kissable positions. Somehow in the next few minutes his glasses became entangled in her hair, but neither noticed.
"Want me to soap your back?" he murmured, nibbling a dainty pink ear.
"What about those themes? What'll you tell Professor Simpson tomorrow?"
"The truth," he grinned, feeling a joyous virility rising within. "'The woman tempted me, and the fruit I did eat thereof-or however that quotation goes!"
As the subway roared away from Franklin Avenue, Harley Harris roused himself enough to wonder which Seventh Avenue express he was on. The evening rush hour was long past, and he nearly had the car to himself, but he'd been riding and changing trains so aimlessly these last few hours that he'd lost track. Flatbush or New Lots, which was it? The interior sign by the door was broken. Jammed permanently at Pelham Bay. No help there.
The door at the end of the car opened, and an emaciated drunk weaved through. Swaying with the motion of the train, he steadied himself on the pole beside Harley, and a fetid smell of cheap wine and urine settled around them. The drunk wore a dingy overcoat three sizes too large, baggy green pants and brand-new black-and-white sneakers. His gray crew cut was a month late for the barber's chair, and he did not appear to have a shirt or teeth.
"Gimme a dollar," he told Harley.
The boy slid down to the end of the empty bench. The drunk followed, stumbling from one overhead strap to another till he dangled in front of Harley again. "Gimme a dollar," he repeated.
Harley Harris stared straight ahead, ignoring him.
"How 'bout a quarter, then?" asked the drunk.
"Leave me alone!" Harley said shrilly.
The drunk lost his handhold and half lurched, half fell the length of the car, fetching up by a pair of well-dressed matrons who appeared to be coming home from an afternoon of shopping followed by dinner out. One carried a dress box from Lane Bryant, the other a smaller Saks box. Both regarded the unshaven, ill-smelling derelict with distinct disapproval.
"Gimme a dollar," Harley heard him say.
"Go to hell," advised the first matron.
The second followed with an explicit but anatomically impossible suggestion. Shocked, the drunk retreated to a corner seat, muttering to himself.
Harley looked at his watch. Almost ten. He'd had nothing to eat since a hot dog and bagel at Grand Central his third or fourth time through. When had that been? Two o'clock? Three? And there was his old man expecting him at three to help lay out the summer display windows for the Susie-Lynne stores. He'd probably be standing on his head by now.
Every time he thought about what he'd done, Harley Harris felt queasy. Nauman had it coming to him, he told himself; but the anger that had fueled him earlier had dissipated, and now he was wondering if maybe he'd acted too hastily. Too drastically. If only he'd waited and made Nauman talk to him, artist to artist.
That's what his old man was always saying: "Harley, you don't think what you're doing till you've done it."
The train slowed down, stopped, and the two matrons got off.
"They weren't no ladies," the drunk confided to the car at large, but Harley Harris was twisting to look for signs.
Kingston. Good, he was on the New Lots train after all. Home was only five minutes away, and dinner would have been saved for him. Suddenly he felt like a small boy again. Mom would cry and smear her glasses; the old man would storm and rage, but Harley was too tired to care anymore.
I'll tell Pop, he thought, Pop'll figure out what I should do.
All his life Pop had told him what to do. Post-graduate work had been his first rebellion; and now his heart sank even lower, knowing what his stern father would probably make him do.
8
MADIGAN'S was another relic of New York 's bygone days, a sort of unofficial memorial to a lustier, roughneck age. Located in a seamy section near the docks south of Fourteenth Street, the tavern had outlasted wars, depressions, recessions, Prohibition and several attempts at urban renewal. Its original customers had been sailors, draymen and Irish stevedores working on the piers; and for the first eighty years of its existence only one female had ever been served there: Madame Ernestine Schumann-Heink.
The famous opera star had just disembarked from the ship that had returned her to America for another season at the Metropolitan when the horse drawing her carriage went lame practically on Madigan's threshold. It was late fall with a chill rain falling. His chivalry appealed to, Francis Madigan (son of 'Daddy' Madigan, the founder) had reluctantly offered his tavern as a waiting room for her party while another horse was being fetched.
There were dark looks upon her entrance; two or three old-timers standing at the long mahogany bar had muttered into their ale about 'petticoat patronage' and • with ostentatious rudeness had given her r their backs. But the great contralto was then at the height of her powers and had accurately sized up her 'house'-child's play to a woman who would still be able to sing in Das Rheingold when she was sixty-four.
She began with the few Celtic lullabies at her disposal and, when those were exhausted, switched to the sweetest German songs in her repertoire. The language barrier evaporated-sentimentality has never needed translation-and soon the most hardbitten stevedores were weeping into their glasses. (Empty glasses, one might add, since no one had wanted to break the spell to order.) For over an hour the majestic Schumann-Heink held them in the palm of her queenly hand until at last she expressed fatigue and impatience at the nonarrival of a fresh horse; whereupon a dozen strong men hitched themselves to her carriage and pulled it through the rain all the way to her hotel on Seventh Avenue.
"Shure and she was a foine lady," said the pragmatic Francis Madigan, tallying up the evening's lost revenues, "but women do be taking a man's mind off his drinking."