The coffee set my nerves dancing like a swarm of gnats, without bringing relief from the deadness, the ache, the recollection of sleep in every cell—fatiguing sleep—and the yearn for youth's restful slumber.
I dialed Paul's Brooklyn number on the private line.
The phone rattled in his heat-trap and not even a ghost took it up to listen.
Lint on the divan—lint and threads—and I began to pick compulsively.
Nothing much in the papers.
The airlift.
(How could we, the American people, take pride in our freight flights when we had permitted ourselves to be euchered into the extravagance—only to meet force again in sillier forms? The effort was without dignity, without principle, without understanding, without sense.)
The pennant race.
(I remembered Babe Ruth.)