80
PARTISAN REVIEW
flutter and feathers, iridescent as oil on a sheet of stagnant water,
drew Mr. Ennis' attention to the window again. In the yellow light
of an imagined beach, sea-crabs scuttled through the sand. The light
was yellow where the actual sunshine cut like a spade across the
street, though far away, where presently Mr. Ennis could watch the
evening hang, it was misty blue. And into the light of the terrace,
three floors below, a man came straddling with a red and green
beach chair already opened, looking like a wooden lobster cradled
in his arms. He set it down, gently, and into a tube at the back of the
chair he inserted a little parasol with a fringe. Then the man looked
up for a moment at the overcast from which wisps of sunlight pro–
truded like straws sticking down through the boards of a hayloft, and
went indoors. While Mr. Ennis watched, he felt rather than heard
Scotty's voice go on. Then another man came out and helped the
first one look at the weather. While they were craning their necks at
the sky, a third man waddled out with a beach chair and placed it
opposite the other one and then the three men went into a huddle,
the first man shrugging his shoulders and, with his elbows ag.ainst his
chest, spreading his hands out wide, the palms turned up, in the
classic gesture of doubt or indifference or despair. And then, as Mr.
Ennis grew tired of watching, Scotty's voice, saying" ... and not
only in Brooklyn but on any man's court, except for the fact that
Moon-face was too god-damned lazy to do .anything but sun him–
self on the beach all day," came fading in, as if he and Mr. Ennis
were in a train that had just that minute roared out of a tunnel.
"And guzzle whisky from a coke bottle," said Scotty, "which
made him about as useful a lifeguard as if he'd been a barrel of
Schenley's Reserve. That's how one of the girls got drowned, when
Lippy had taken off from the tower and was being pursued by song
birds at ten thousand feet. But oh what a lovely big son of a bitch he
was, with the slow, easy walk of a cat and a way of ambling all over
the court that fooled the hell out of you until you noticed that wher–
ever the ball was, there was Lippy first, cuffing it back like a
panther I saw in the Bronx Zoo, taking a crack at its cub. Good
enough, by God and Jesus, to lick a guy who turned out to be State
Champion, though you couldn't get Lippy into any of the matches
if you goosed him with a red-hot poker, either because he was too
lazy, or indifferent, or perhaps because the only courts he liked were
the ones I used to use myself out there on the edge of Coney where
