“German, sonny.”
“I like French better’n German,” Gurdy yawned, waving a leg in the air and went on, “I think Broadway’s ugly.”
“You’re right,” said Mark, enchanted by such taste.
Yet Carlson really liked to stroll on Broadway and Cora Boyle had often led Mark for dusty hours through this complexity of hesitant, garrulous people, along these sidewalks where there was nothing to be seen. He rubbed his jaw and thought of Paris, viewed last summer, of the long, swooping street at Winchester gilt in an afterglow. Oh, after dark Broadway was tolerable! Then the revolving people were shapes of no consequence and, with a little mist, these lights were aqueous, flotillas of shimmering points on a hovering, uncertain vastness. Now, the roadway was a dappled smear of bodies wheeled and bodies shod. The sidewalks writhed, unseemly. But Cora Boyle liked it. The pretty, black haired dancer just then lodged at Mark’s cost had rooms overlooking the new width above Forty Second Street. And she liked that.... And she liked the scenery of “Red Winter.” Poor stuff, he thought. He cursed scene painters. Charles Frohman had heard of a fellow who’d studied the art in Berlin and made astonishing sets. He must telephone Frohman and get the man’s name. He was tired. “Red Winter” had tired him. The leading woman had a way of saying “California” through her nose that had vexed him all week. A poor play. His head was full of jagged swift ideas, of memories; Eddie Bernamer milking a young cow against a sulphur wall and laughing when Mark tried to sketch him on the fly leaf of an algebra; Cora Boyle swaggering into Rector’s in a blue dress; Clyde Fitch telling little Margaret that her name was Margot; Stanford White shouting with laughter because Mark softened the ch of “architecture.” Why hadn’t they given White a billion dollars and let him build the whole city into charms of tranquil, columnar symmetry?... Gurdy knew that his uncle was oppressed. When Mark thought hard he stroked the scar on his jaw. Gurdy wanted to talk, now, and tossed a leg over Mark’s black, rocky knee.
“What’re you thinkin’ about, Mark?”
“Just bosh. What’s Margot been doing all day?”
“Havin’ a bellyache.”
That terrified Mark. He sweated suddenly and called through the tube bidding the driver hurry. Spinal meningitis, he read, began with nausea. But when he ran into the panelled library of his house Margot was playing with her largest doll and the angular governess assured him, in simple French, that a pill had set things right. Margot lifted her black eyes and said, rubbing her stomach, “I was ill, papa,” in her leisurely way.
“Ate breakfast too fast,” Gurdy said, in grim displeasure, watching Mark double his lean height and begin to cuddle Margot.
Margot stared at her cousin with an aggrieved, brief pout and then wound herself into Mark’s lap. The large doll was named Aunt Sadie for Mrs. Bernamer. Margot said, “Miss Converse fixed Aunt Sadie’s drawers, papa,” and her brown face rippled as she displayed three stitches. Then she righted the doll and gazed at Mark devotedly, solemnly, preening her starched skirt of pink linen. Pink went with her black hair and her tawny skin. Mark touched a roaming mesh of her hair and her face rippled once more. Her skin had this amber haze like the water of a pool in the pine forest behind the farm. In that pool he had bathed with her father through endless afternoons, idling on until other boys lagged off and the shadows were ink on the crumbled ocher clay of the margin where pink boneset grew. And now Joe was dead and his blackhaired wife was dead ... an unskilled cook before marriage, half Irish, half Italian, a good, sleepy woman who ate with her knife and wore a chaplet blessed for her Roman mother by some Pope. Margot would never know them. He kissed her hair. She was this warm bubble enclosed in his arms.