"Raise your right hand," said the Mayor of Avenue B, when there was partial quiet. "Now repeat after me: I, Carl Hoffman, do hereby promise to the best of my ability—"
"Why, sure!" approved the deep voice.
"To be a friend to any man, woman or child that needs a friend. So help me God!"
"Sure thing!" responded a hearty rumble.
The crowd once more applauded, and David noted that the hands which clapped longest were feminine.
The Mayor of Avenue A beamed upon the audience. "That's me," he said, with a grand upward sweep of his right arm. "I don't need to tell you what I'm goin' to do. I been doin' it for ten years. I guess my record'll do all the talkin' that's needed. But this much I'll say for myself: If anybody durin' this new year needs a friend and he don't chase himself around to the Pan-American Café and ask for Carl Hoffman—well, he deserves a lot more trouble than he's got!"
He went on and told how glad he was to see his friends, and how proud he was to be their Mayor, but through it all David was hearing only the oath of office and the Mayor's first few sentences; and when later the ushers began to clear away the chairs for dancing, and David slipped down to the street and walked homeward through the swirling snow, he still thought only of the Mayor's offer to the man who needed a friend.
The next day at eleven o'clock—he had figured the morning rush would be over by then—David approached the Pan-American Café. On the café's one side was a delicatessen store, displaying row on row of wurst to entice the Germans within, and on the other side a costumer's shop, its windows filled with suits of armour, night-mare masks, and gorgeous seventeenth-century court gowns of sateen, spangles and mosquito netting. The long glass front of the café was hung with holiday greens, among which appropriate signs informed the street that a Hungarian orchestra played nightly, that real German beer and indubitable Rhenish wine were purchasable within, and that a superlatively good dinner was to be had for only thirty cents.
David came to a pause at the café's storm-door. Doubts and fears that had been rising now stampeded him: the Mayor's talk was only platform talk; the Mayor was doubtless like all others who had refused him, insulted him. He walked up and down the avenue, passing and repassing the café and the narrow little shops that edged the sidewalk. Then he told himself that he had nothing to lose; another refusal would be merely another refusal. He summoned back his courage, delivered himself into its hands, and entered.
He found himself in a wide, long room, whose green walls were hung with signs of breweries and with placards announcing the balls of "The Carl Hoffman Association," "The Twin Brothers," "The Lady Orchids," and a dozen other social organisations of the neighbourhood. Six rows of tables, some marble-topped, some linen-covered, with chairs stacked upon them, stretched the length of the room. Among these black-jacketed waiters, armed with long mops, were scrubbing the linoleum-covered floor.