I had been a man before my time, and now I was being a baby after it, just laid there day after day and when I wasn’t being talked to, looked at the ceiling and saw a naked woman imprinted on it. Not Mrs. P., I hasten to say—nor the Indian females I had seen now and again without clothes though the Cheyenne is modest, and you take Nothing, had I come upon her bare it wouldn’t have been a striking experience—but rather a
Now that is a funny thing that come back to me from a time when it didn’t mean nothing. They put a blanket over it during services, and I can recall Bill sniggering and my sisters blushing, but to me it had been right dull: she was fat as to breast and hip, and had one meaty haunch crossed over the other so as to hide her loins. Her nipples was purple, that was all I could have said at the age I had been then, because they reminded me of plums.
But here she was on the ceiling of my bedroom. It went along with everything else in that house, I suppose, the image and not the reality: Mrs. Pendrake’s motherhood, the Reverend’s spiritual authority, Lavender’s freedom, and my woman who had never existed.
At last I got strong enough to take outside walks so long as I dressed warmly, for it was winter now with a fall or two of snow while I had been laid up. And then one afternoon when we had finished our dinner, the Reverend having so far as I was concerned outdone even his own record in laying waste a turkey singlehanded—for Mrs. P. took very little and I was still on soup—Mrs. Pendrake says: “Dear, it might be diverting for you to walk downtown with me. We might take a glass of soda water and buy some new clothes.”
I won’t go into the shopping, which Mrs. P. accomplished in amazingly short time for a woman though she bought a big load of stuff for both herself and me. I reckon she was about clothes like the Reverend was concerning food: gluttonous but tidy. Nevertheless, I wasn’t any too robust yet and even when well I get dizzy in shops. So she noticed that and says: “Now we’ll have our soda water.”
I had never been in the place we went, which had just been opened up while I was sick, pretty fancy with little marble tables and wire chairs and some brasswork, and there was a big marble bar and on it a vessel like a funeral urn which was silver-plated, with a cupid sitting on top and two elephants’ heads projecting from the bowl. In the base of this structure was six or seven knobs under which they’d put your glass, squirt some flavor into it, then stick it beneath an elephant’s trunk, turn his ear, and out would come the soda water.
I took an immediate dislike to the fellow who run the place, for he thought quite a lot of himself, wore a brocade waistcoat and a artificial flower in his lapel, and was mighty tall. I guess you’d say he was handsome by the light of some, clean-shaven and with black curly hair. He sure thought so, anyhow. What I didn’t like was the snooty manner in which he run a place where women and children went for refreshment.
Now this fellow would draw the soda himself, then put the glasses on a silvered tray which a small colored boy who was dressed like a little Arab, turban and balloon pants, would tote to your table. I tipped the kid a penny the Reverend give me, and he wasn’t in the least grateful for it, just bit it to see if it was genuine, and put it in his curly-toed shoe. I done that because I wanted to play the grown man at this point and escort Mrs. P. rather than vice versa, for I was almost sixteen. I was shorter than her while walking, but seated here we was about the same size.
She got the idea, for Mrs. Pendrake knew every minute the exact situation when it come to male and female, and without calling attention to it she slipped me a dollar so I could pay the bill when time came.
It was perfect for about two minutes, me and her together like that, and she called me “dear” a good deal and the cherry-flavored soda that she drunk left a flush on her underlip. I had never seen anything more lovely than her fair face between the fur hat and collar. She and I, we just cared for each other and hated everybody else in the soda shop and maybe the rest of the world thrown in.
Then over comes that bastardly proprietor sneering with his front teeth, though he means it as a smile I reckon, and says to Mrs. P.: “Maybe Buster would like to eat a cake.” He didn’t talk cultivated like her or ignorant like me, just cheap. He was also the first man I had ever saw who didn’t give way before Mrs. Pendrake, but looked at her insolent with his eyelids falling.
In return she faltered towards him, then said to me: “This is Mr. Kane, Jack.”
