Mrs. Wally is blubbering in her handkerchief and trying to hold a kid on her lap at the same time. Two more are hanging onto her chair, and about six others are standing around the room sucking their thumbs and looking wide-eyed at Joe and me.
"It was p-payday," she blurts, the tears streaming down her fat cheeks. "Wally c-comes home drunk and all I do was quietly ask him for his paycheck. And that's the last I see of him. I d-don't know w-what got into him!"
Anybody with half an eye, I thought, could piece together what had happened. Wally probably had one or two at Schultz's bar and got to feeling sorry for himself and then when he got home, he walked into a hornet's nest. Nine kids bawling or running around and Mrs. Wally nagging the life out of him. He must have wondered if it was worth it, then found a quarter in his pocket and walked around the corner to the nearest Paradise booth. Whisht—and Wally's worries are a thing of the past.
Joe and I get the idea at the same time and we chase down to the nearest booth. I took one look at the screen and blushed. Wally had some pretty wild ideas.
On the way home, I tried to talk Joe into tearing the machines down. "How do you know where it's going to end, Joe?" I argues. "You can't tell who's well-adjusted and who isn't any more. And besides, some of those who ain't have contributed just as much to life as those who are. Maybe even more."
"I'm going to leave them up," Joe says grimly. "The world will be better off without a lot of neurotics running around."
"You won't think it over, Joe?"
"No," he says, "and to prove it, I'm going to spend the next two weeks in New York looking for backing to put up Paradise booths all across the country."
"What does Marge think?" I ask.
"Hang Marge!" he says.