PALE
VIRGINS SHROUDED IN SNOW
79
old Paradise Club, a spade girl in a peach-colored kimona that just
waved in the breeze, said, 'No, honey, ah ain' got no gole to sell,
but ah sho got something else you genlemen likes,' and he did.
It
got to be that some streets he couldn't touch twice or he'd have
taken out all the profits in trade, so he got home hot as a pistol and
r.aging for whisky. He was the guy I told you about, who picked up
this nurse his gang shagged and that swabbed them each,
faute de
mieux,
I suppose, with silver nitrate, and when they got back to the
bar wouldn't touch a drop of anything but lime coke with a cherry.
'I don't think it's nice for girls to go smelling of whisky,' she said.
What a build the guy had, moon-face and .all. He was the best
handball player in Coney."
"But the rich who have pocketed their winnings, why are they
so glum?" said Mr. Ennis, in whose mind the phrase had been
running since he read it.
And all that Mr. Ennis had had to do to make Scotty tilt that lean
Jimmy Walker face to one side and take off was to look up from the
dog-food advertisement he was writing and on which, among the
doodles, he had ballooned in only the one word "arf" and say, not so
much to Scotty as to the cold, yellow afternoon: "What are we
doing here?"
Mr. Ennis listened to Scotty without speaking a word or hearing
himself say any. To Scotty, the Little King, as he thought of Ennis,
the little man who might have been sitting behind a ticket window
labeled "Mr. Ennis" to annoy the anonymity, seemed to be listening
not with
his
ears at all but with the slightly exopthalmic, batrachian,
lipoid eyes that occasionally peered up from a pad and stared at
Scotty and having regarded the afternoon for a moment- or, on a
terrace three floors below, the Powers models in their furs and
violets catching for ten minutes the unseasonable sunlight of early
March, wet and with a smell of spring, just as likely to make the
pavements bloom with hurdy-gurdy waltzes as to blur the buildings
with an unseasonable mist of snow-looked down at the p.ad again.
There was the hanged man. There were matchstick men climbing
staircases that ascended through the sea. There was, recognizably,
Louis, the Art Director, smoking a reefer on the fire escape, twelve feet
tall. And Craig, the Account Executive, with the utterly unbelievable
little bottles in his hand, sniffing in a stable, happy among horses.
Suddenly onto the windowsill there settled a pigeon whose
