WILL AND WAY
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theatre balcony (I was just a kid then) when that big one sat down
beside me. Seeing them in the newsreels rioting and throwing bricks
in their own dingy streets, it makes you afraid. There seem to be so
many of them. But, one at a time, they're not so frightening once
you get really close. They deserve all the rights they can get, she
concluded.
3.
As
day followed night, which was followed by day, all spent
in riotous pleasures, Miss Flatface sometimes wondered if she still
deserved her name. But Mr. Obscenity proved a stem taskmaster.
He would not allow her near a mirror. He refused to answer any
questions about her appearance, her talents, or her destiny.
Never once did she think of her mother, the widow of a rail–
road engineer and now living in St. Louis, not even to the extent
of wishing to send her a postcard. Occasionally, very occasionally,
he thought of Jim and the three children. Had he sold the Olds–
mobile, she wondered. He wouldn't need two cars. . . . But there
was no turning back.
"You have some power," she said to Mr. Obscenity one day.
"But why are people afraid of you?" The spirits of Henry Adams
and Stephen Crane whispered hoarsely in her ears, beckoning and
forbidding. But was it forbidden to ask questions?
It
shouldn't be!
Not in a free country.
" I mean, how did you get Jim to let me go so easy?"
Mr. Obscenity did not reply. He was plunged deep in Miss
Flatface, elementary position. He merely placed a pillow over her
animated visage.
She flung off the pillow. "And Honest Abe?" she said, looking
up into his calm faraway eyes. "Why was
he
afraid of you?" Still
no answer. "He's bigger- I mean taller- than you."
Mr. Obscenity continued to leaf, as it were, through her body.
A
gale of wind, premonitory of something, had just come up. Some–
where a shutter was banging against a wall.
Miss Flatface's attention began to wander. She watched a fly
sipping at a puddle of cold coffee on the nighttable. Next the label
on Mr. Obscenity's new tan jodhpurs, heaped on the floor, caught
