MARYLIN (who had the mysterious little jerk in her laugh of a very young child): "Getaway, you're the biggest case!"
GETAWAY (wild to amuse her further): "Hocus pocus, Salamagundi! I smell the blood of an ice-cream sundae!"
MARYLIN (hands to her hips and her laughter full of the jerks):
"Getaway, stop your monkeyshines. The cop has his eye on you!"
GETAWAY (sobered): "C'm on!"
Therein lay some of the wonder of her freshet laughter. Because to Marylin a police officer was not merely a uniformed mentor of the law, designed chiefly to hold up traffic for her passing, and with his night stick strike security into her heart as she hurried home of short, wintry evenings. A little procession of him and his equally dread brother, the plain-clothes man, had significantly patrolled the days of her childhood.
Once her mother, who had come home from a shopping expedition with the inside pocket of her voluminous cape full of a harvest of the sheerest of baby things to match Marylin's blond loveliness—batiste—a whole bolt of Brussels lace—had bitten the thumb of a policeman until it hung, because he had surprised her horribly by stepping in through the fire escape as she was unwinding the Brussels lace.
Another time, from her mother's trembling knee, she had seen her father in a crowded courtroom standing between two uniforms, four fingers peeping over each of his shoulders!
A uniform had shot her father from the underpinnings of the freight car. Her mother had died with the phantom of one marching across her delirium. Even opposite the long, narrow, and exceedingly respectable rooming house in which she now dwelt a uniform had stood for several days lately, contemplatively.
There was a menacing flicker of them almost across her eyeballs, so close they lay to her experience, and yet how she could laugh when Getaway made a feint toward the one on her beat, straightening up into exaggerated decorum as the eye of the law, noting his approach, focused.
"Getaway," said Marylin, hop-skipping to keep up with him now, "why has old Deady got his eye on you nowadays?"