The Mall is full of couples, families waiting for the music to begin. It smells of children and dress-shields and talcum powder. A balloonman passes them trailing red and yellow and pink balloons like a great inverted bunch of grapes behind him. “Oh buy me a balloon.” The words are out of her mouth before she can stop them.
“Hay you gimme one of each color.... And how about one of those gold ones? No keep the change.”
Ellen put the strings of the balloons into the dirtsticky hands of three little monkeyfaced girls in red tarns. Each balloon caught a crescent of violet glare from the arclight.
“Aw you like children, Elaine, dont you? I like a woman to like children.”
Ellen sits numb at a table on the terrace of the Casino. A hot gust of foodsmell and the rhythm of a band playing He’s a Ragpicker swirls chokingly about her; now and then she butters a scrap of roll and puts it in her mouth. She feels very helpless, caught like a fly in his sticky trickling sentences.
“There’s nobody else in New York could have got me to walk that far, I’ll tell you that.... I walked too much in the old days, do you understand, used to sell papers when I was a kid and run errands for Schwartz’s Toystore ... on my feet all day except when I was in nightschool. I thought I was going to be a lawyer, all us East Side fellers
thought we were goin to be lawyers. Then I worked as an usher one summer at the Irving Place and got the theater bug.... Not such a bad hunch it turned out to be, but it’s too uncertain. Now I dont care any more, only want to cover my losses. That’s the trouble with me. I’m thirtyfive an I dont care any more. Ten years ago I was still only a kind of clerk in old man Erlanger’s office, and now there’s lots of em whose shoes I used to shine in the old days’d be real glad of the opportunity to sweep my floors on West Forty-eighth.... Tonight I can take you anywhere in New York, I dont care how expensive or how chic it is ... an in the old days us kids used to think it was paradise if we had five plunks to take a couple of girls down to the Island.... I bet all that was different with you Elaine.... But what I want to do is get that old feelin back, understand?... Where shall we go?”
“Why dont we go down to Coney Island then? I’ve never been?
“It’s a pretty rough crowd ... still we can just ride round. Let’s do it. I’ll go phone for the car.”
Ellen sits alone looking down into her coffeecup. She puts a lump of sugar on her spoon, dips it in the coffee and pops it into her mouth where she crunches it slowly, rubbing the grains of sugar against the roof of her mouth with her tongue. The orchestra is playing a tango.