"Hattie."
"Come up to my dressing room," she said, as matter-of-factly as if her brain were a clock ticking off the words.
They walked up an iron staircase of unreality. Fantastic stairs. Wisps of gloom. Singing pains in her climbing legs like a piano key hit very hard and held down with a pressing forefinger. She could listen to her pain. That was her thought as she climbed. How the irrelevant little ideas would slide about in her sudden chaos. She must concentrate now. Terribly. Morton was back.
His hand, a smooth glabrous one full of clutch, riding up the banister. It could have been picked off, finger by finger. It was that kind of a hand. But after each lift, another finger would have curled back again. Morton's hand, ascending the dark like a soul on a string in a burlesque show.
Face to face. The electric bulb in her dressing room was incased in a wire like a baseball mask. A burning prison of light. Fat sticks of grease paint with the grain of Hattie's flesh printed on the daub end. Furiously brown cheesecloth. An open jar of cream (chocolate) with the gesture of the gouge in it. A woolly black wig on a shelf, its kinks seeming to crawl. There was a rim of Hattie au natural left around her lips. It made of her mouth a comedy blubber, her own rather firm lips sliding about somewhere in the lightish swamp. That was all of Hattie that looked out. Except her eyes. They were good gray eyes with popping whites now, because of a trick of blackening the lids. But the irises were in their pools, inviolate.
"Well, Hattie, I reckon I'd have known you even under black."
"I thought you were in Rio."
"Got to hankering after the States, Hattie."
"I read of a Morris Sebree died in Brazil. Sometimes I used to think maybe it might have been a misprint—and—that—you—were—the—one."
"No, no. 'Live and kickin'. Been up around here a good while."