Huyler’s; there’s a comfortable fudgy odor mixed with the smell of nickel and wellwiped marble outside the door, and the smell of cooking chocolate curls warmly from the gratings under the windows. Black and orange crêpepaper favors for Hallowe’en. He is just going in when he thinks of the Mirror place two blocks further up, those little silver steamengines and automobiles they give you with your change. I’ll hurry; on rollerskates it’d take less time, you could escape from bandits, thugs, holdup-men, on rollerskates, shooting over your shoulder with a long automatic, bing… one of em down! that’s the worst of em, bing… there’s another; the rollerskates are magic rollerskates, whee… up the brick walls of the houses, over the roofs, vaulting chimneys, up the Flatiron Building, scooting across the cables of Brooklyn Bridge.
Mirror candies; this time he goes in without hesitating. He stands at the counter a while before anyone comes to wait on him. ‘Please a pound of sixty cents a pound mixed chocolate creams,’ he rattled off. She is a blond lady, a little crosseyed, and looks at him spitefully without answering. ‘Please I’m in a hurry if you dont mind.’
‘All right, everybody in their turn,’ she snaps. He stands blinking at her with flaming cheeks. She pushes him a box all wrapped up with a check on it ‘Pay at the desk.’ I’m not going to cry. The lady at the desk is small and gray-haired. She takes his dollar through a little door like the little doors little animals go in and out of in the Small Mammal House. The cash register makes a cheerful tinkle, glad to get the money. A quarter, a dime, a nickel and a little cup, is that forty cents? But only a little cup instead of a steamengine or an automobile. He picks up the money and leaves the little cup and hurries out with the box under his arm. Mother’ll say I’ve been too long. He walks home looking straight ahead of him, smarting from the meanness of the blond lady.
‘Ha… been out abuyin candy,’ said the lighthaired bellhop. ‘I’ll give you some if you come up later,’ whispered Jimmy as he passed. The brass rods rang when he kicked them running up the stairs. Outside the chocolatecolored door that had 503 on it in white enameled letters he remembered his rubbers. He set the candy on the floor and pulled them on over his damp shoes. Lucky Muddy wasn’t waiting for him with the door open. Maybe she’d seen him coming from the window.
‘Mother.’ She wasn’t in the sittingroom. He was terrified. She’d gone out, she’d gone away. ‘Mother!’
‘Come here dear,’ came her voice weakly from the bedroom.
He pulled off his hat and raincoat and rushed in. ‘Mother what’s the matter?’
‘Nothing honey… I’ve a headache that’s all, a terrible headache… Put some cologne on a handkerchief and put it on my head nicely, and dont please dear get it in my eye the way you did last time.’
She lay on the bed in a skyblue wadded wrapper. Her face was purplish pale. The silky salmoncolored teagown hung limp over a chair; on the floor lay her corsets in a tangle of pink strings. Jimmy put the wet handkerchief carefully on her forehead. The cologne reeked strong, prickling his nostrils as he leaned over her.
‘That’s so good,’ came her voice feebly. ‘Dear call up Aunt Emily, Riverside 2466, and ask her if she can come round this evening. I want to talk to her… Oh my head’s bursting.’
His heart thumping terribly and tears blearing his eyes he went to the telephone. Aunt Emily’s voice came unexpectedly soon.
‘Aunt Emily mother’s kinder sick… She wants you to come around… She’s coming right away mother dear,’ he shouted, ‘isn’t that fine? She’s coming right around.’ He tiptoed back into his mother’s room, picked up the corset and the teagown and hung them in the wardrobe.
‘Deary’ came her frail voice ‘take the hairpins out of my hair, they hurt my head… Oh honeyboy I feel as if my head would burst…’ He felt gently through her brown hair that was silkier than the teagown and pulled out the hairpins.
‘Ou dont, you are hurting me.’
‘Mother I didn’t mean to.’
Aunt Emily, thin in a blue mackintosh thrown over her evening dress, hurried into the room, her thin mouth in a pucker of sympathy. She saw her sister lying twisted with pain on the bed and the skinny whitefaced boy in short pants standing beside her with his hands full of hairpins.
‘What is it Lil?’ she asked quietly.
‘My dear something terrible’s the matter with me,’ came Lily Herf’s voice in a gasping hiss.
‘James,’ said Aunt Emily harshly, ‘you must run off to bed… Mother needs perfect quiet.’
‘Good night muddy dear,’ he said.
Aunt Emily patted him on the back. ‘Dont worry James I’ll attend to everything.’ She went to the telephone and began calling a number in a low precise voice.
The box of candy was on the parlor table; Jimmy felt guilty when he put it under his arm. As he passed the bookcase he snatched out a volume of the American Cyclopædia and tucked it under the other arm. His aunt did not notice when he went out the door. The dungeon gates opened. Outside was an Arab stallion and two trusty retainers waiting to speed him across the border to freedom. Three doors down was his room. It was stuffed with silent chunky darkness. The light switched on obediently lighting up the cabin of the schooner Mary Stuart. All right Captain weigh anchor and set your course for the Windward Isles and dont let me be disturbed before dawn; I have important papers to peruse. He tore off his clothes and knelt beside the bed in his pyjamas. Nowilayme-downtosleep Ipraythelordmysoultokeep Ifishoulddiebeforeiwake Ipraythelordmysoultotake.
Then he opened the box of candy and set the pillows together at the end of the bed under the light. His teeth broke through the chocolate into a squashysweet filling. Let’s see…
A the first of the vowels, the first letter in all written alphabets except the Amharic or Abyssinian, of which it is the thirteenth, and the Runic of which it is the tenth…
Darn it that’s a hairy one.
AA, Aachen (see Aix-la-Chapelle)
Aardvark…
Gee he’s funny looking…
(orycteropus capensis), a plantigrade animal of the class mammalia, order edentata, peculiar to Africa.
Abd,
Abd-el-halim, an Egyptian prince, son of Mehmet Ali and a white slave woman…
His cheeks burned as he read:
The Queen of the White Slaves.
Abdomen (lat. of undetermined etymology)… the lower part of the body included between the level of the diaphragm and that of the pelvis…
Abelard… The relation of master and pupil was not long preserved. A warmer sentiment than esteem filled their hearts and the unlimited opportunities of intercourse which were afforded them by the canon who confided in Abelard’s age (he was now almost forty), and in his public character, were fatal to the peace of both. The condition of Heloise was on the point of betraying their intimacy… Fulbert now abandoned himself to a transport of savage vindictiveness… burst into Abelard’s chamber with a band of ruffians and gratified his revenge by inflicting on him an atrocious mutilation…