The snowflakes frolicked about the Swede's face, which was growing larger and more brilliantly red by the minute. He hit at them, as though they were a flight of insects sent to plague him. It did no good. They came from every hand until, seeing a bar, he fled from the white swarm inside, where patrons looked with impolite interest at his high buttered countenance. He got into the telephone booth, after only one drink, and dialed. — I came out in this blizzard to find a doctor but I don't know any doctors. .
(—My doctor's away. . on vacation… in prison… I can't think which. . The tone was vague.
He dialed three more numbers, got no answer, and returned to the bar to try to think of telephone numbers.
— Nothing?
— Nothing. Nothing at all, except this. . wet, said Maude, standing against the door she had closed behind her. Snow crystals melted and dripped from her coat to the floor. — I had to come home in a taxicab.
— The same judge?
— Oh yes, and I almost hate him even though he does look like Daddy.
— That's a good sound reason itself.
— Arny please don't be cruel, not today. It's Christmas Eve, Arny. I feel so awful. Even when my doctor said, Does she look like she's malingering to you? Would you undergo an operation on your spine if you were malingering? And their lawyer said he was sorry but. . Oh Arny, I get so tired.
— Do you want a drink?
— No. My doctor gave me some morphine. Are you drinking this early?
— Just a couple before I have to start drinking at the party.
— Arny I wish you wouldn't drink so much. Have you filled out the papers?
— What papers?
— The papers. You know, the ones for the… I can't pronounce
it, for Sweden.
He planned to fill out these papers, declaring their fitness as parents, after the party. Now he poured the last of a bottle of whisky into his glass and sat down slowly, making a wry face, supporting the lower part of his abdomen with a hand inside his trouser pocket.
— I'm hungry, he said abruptly. — I didn't have any lunch.
— Do you want some spaghetti? Maude said vaguely.
— Spaghetti in the middle of the afternoon? he mumbled, as she went toward the kitchen. But what Maude thought was spaghetti turned out to be a box of waxed paper. She offered salad; but they were out of whisky. When he went out for some, she sped him with, — But get a quart, there's something sinful about a pint of whisky.
— Sinful?
— Well, naughty. . She sat down wearily, and had hardly managed to assume that suspended look of a passenger on a railway train which came over her when alone, when the telephone and the doorbell both rang at once. She shuddered right through her frame, put out a hand in each direction, and finally got to the door. But when she'd let Herschel in, and picked up the telephone, all she could say was, — What?
(—Baby do you know a doctor? I need a doctor. — A bone doctor? Maude managed. She looked helplessly at Herschel.
(—I've just had the most terrible accident. .
— Baby are you in the hospital? Herschel answered, taking the thing.
(—No but I will be, if you'll just tell me a doctor.
— But where are you, baby? I always told you this would happen, no one can drive the way you do and go on living in this world. . (—But it isn't an automobile accident, I have sunstroke.
— Who is this? (—It's me.
— Oh you! I thought it was you-know-who. Sunstroke? Are you drinking?
(—Second-degree burns at the very least, stop asking sillies.
— Listen baby we're going to a party. You just come there and we'll find you the cutest little doll-doctor you ever! Now listen, here's the address. .
And when he'd hung up, Herschel turned to Maude. — And I've had the most. . just most day, you cannot dream where I woke up! Can you tell I have this shirt on inside out?
— Who was that? Maude asked, motioning at the telephone.
— It was Rudy, I think he'd been in an auto crash, or something. He said the strangest things, he must have hit his head, and so I just told him to come right along to Esther's cocktail, baby is there a clean shirt? Because I can't possibly go anywhere in this. He followed her into the bedroom, where Maude opened a bureau drawer and took out Arny's last clean shirt.
When Arny arrived, with a full quart by the throat, Herschel was already revealing his latest arcanum: —Chavenet. It really doesn't mean anything, but it's familiar to everybody if you say it quickly. They mention a painter's style, you nod and say, Rather. . chavenet, or, He's rather derivative of, Chavenet wouldn't you say? Spending the summer? Yes, in the south of France, a little villa near Chavenet. Poets, movie stars, perfume. . shavenay, Herschel brayed becomingly.
The evening of this feast day, for so it was, perennially addressed to SS Adam and Eve, and the 40 Maidens martyred at Antioch, was brisk or cold, according to one's resources. The people in the streets had not changed; most of them, certainly, were the same people who might be seen passing the same points with the same expressions at the same hour on almost any of the three hundred sixty-five feast days of the year. Nevertheless, something had happened. There was a quality in the air which every passing figure seemed to intensify, a professional quality, as everyone became more consciously, more insistently, what the better part of the time he either pretended, or was forced to pretend himself to be. This was as true for each quantum in the bustling stream of anonymity, moving forth in an urgency of its own, as it was for such prodigies of the tyranny of public service as the policemen offering expressionless faces cut and weathered in the authority of red stone, and their contraries, a porous group in uniforms of low saturation and low brilliance gathered round something on the sidewalk before the American Bible Society, an object so compelling that it gave their diligent chaos the air of order. It appeared to be a gigantic male Heidi.
— Cross the arms on the chest, Maurice. All right there, get his feet. Wait a minute, don't lift yet until I tell you.
The policemen, busy elsewhere attending the smooth functioning of that oppressive mechanism which they called law and order, looked as unlikely of ever being seen in any other combination of lip, nostril, and cold eye, badge, uniform, and circumstance, as Saint-Gaudens' statue of the Puritan; in the same way the Boy Scouts hazarded neither past nor future, heirs to all the ages and the foremost files of time notwithstanding, they composed and expressed a pattern endowed with permanency.
— Look out f'his head, you want to break something?
— How'd it get so red?
— He's red all the way down. I looked.
— So how'd he get that way?
— You tell us, your father's a doctor.