MONA FERMOYLE pitched her toque at the bedroom bureau, kicked off her pumps, and flexed her slim body restlessly on her narrow bed. She had come home from work, entered the front door without a word of greeting to her father or mother—and now Celia was at the foot of the bed, unpacking a heartful of mother-hen questions. “Would you like a little supper in bed? Have you got a headache, darling? Do you know that Emmett’s coming tonight?” Mona’s replies were undaughterly. No, she didn’t want any supper in bed. Yes, she knew that Emmett Burke was coming. No, she didn’t have a headache—headaches weren’t due for a week yet. Yes, no; no, yes. “Ma, for heaven’s sake lay off me, will you? I’m frazzled. Maybe it’s the job, maybe it’s the weather. I don’t know. It’s something. Shut the door.”
As Mona sat up to unfasten her garters, the tangled nature of that “something” flattened her out on the bed once more. Something? Everything! Job, Church, family, Emmett Burke, respectability, life in general. The plumbing-supply office with the Sani-enamel bowl in the window beside her typewriter; the bickering with Florrie; Celia’s solicitous clucking; the Thursday-night meetings of the Unmarried Women’s Sodality—and Emmett. His breathlets, speckled neckties, weekly haircuts, and monotonous monologues about K. of C. politics, and firing pins.
If he talks about firing pins tonight, thought Mona, I’ll throw his three-sixteenth-carat diamond on the sidewalk, and stamp on it.
Mona was engaged to Emmett now; at Christmastime he had given her the smallest possible yellow diamond, and received the smallest possible kiss in return. In certain quarters Emmett was considered a catch. Caramel-faced Lucy Curtin paled for him; Celia Fermoyle saw valuable deposits of piety and regularity in his chunky person; and Sister Bernadine, who had taught Emmett commercial geography in high school, was on record with the statement that he was the finest young man in the parish, and would have made a noble priest if only he had had it in him to learn just a noseful of Latin—which noseful Emmett could not acquire. So, on his return from war he was cast as a stanch lay pillar, and went to work in his father’s grocery store for nineteen-fifty a week.
Of this princely wage, Emmett deposited twelve dollars every Friday night in the Medford Co-operative Bank; when he had saved five hundred dollars he and Mona Fermoyle would get married. Emmett had it all figured out. “We’ll furnish a flat with that Four-Room $298.89 Love-Nest Special in Caldwell’s Furniture Store … Groceries won’t cost anything. The old man will come across with a five-dollar raise the day we get married, and off we go to Providence for our honeymoon, with a hundred biscuits in the old haversack. Register at a hotel and everything …”
At the prospect of her nuptial flight, now alarmingly near, Mona rolled over and punched her pillow. Tonight Emmett would claim a small advance in the shape of a good-night kiss, and the taste of Sen-Sen would be on her lips afterwards. Strange, if you loved someone, you didn’t care what his kisses tasted like. And no tightening up, either. You just lay your head back, and waited with your mouth quiet till it was covered, then sank into the bottomless dream, murmuring—or sometimes only thinking—“Benny darling … it’s been so long.”
At seven o’clock Mona sipped the cup of corn chowder that Celia brought up. She said “yes, no; no, yes,” to her mother’s questions, then listlessly began dressing. Her midweek date with Emmett being strictly nonfestive—a movie and sundae afterwards—it didn’t make much difference what she wore. The navy gabardine suit and batiste blouse would be good enough. At seven twenty-nine she heard Emmett’s familiar ring, a long and two shorts, kept him waiting about six minutes, then came clicking down the front stairs.
There stood Emmett in the parlor, barbered to the nines, wearing his brown suit (the blue serge came out on Sunday evenings), a fig-speckled tie, shoes shined with ox-blood polish, a new round hat in his hands, and a box of candy under his arm.
“Hi, Mona,” he said, in the too-eager way of a roulette player who doubts that his luck will hold. With clumsy carelessness he proffered the candy.
“Cavalier Brand, all cream centers,” he announced. “A special at Morgan’s.”
“Oh, chocolates. Thank you, Emmett.” Without looking at the box, Mona laid it on top of the piano.
“Where’re we stepping tonight?” Emmett’s question implied a boundless variety of entertainments—dancing on the Westminster roof, the floor show at Sirocco’s. But financially these were out of bounds. Emmett had exactly a dollar to spend, and Mona knew it.
“What’s down at the Alhambra?” she asked with no salt in the question.
“Vilma Vale in Canyon Love.”
“I hear that’s good,” said Celia, who had opened the box of candy and was munching a cream center.
“Canyon Love it is, then. Good night, Ma.”
With such non sequitur counsels as, “Have a good time,” “Be a good girl,” and “Get home early,” Celia Fermoyle put the sign of the cross on their young backs as they went down the front steps. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph protect them,” she breathed, watching them through the curtained window. “Emmett’s a good boy, Emmett is. He deserves a good, home-loving wife. It’ll be the happy day for me when Mona’s safely married to him.”
Mona, knowing that her mother was mumbling pieties behind the curtain, and realizing that the whole population of Woodlawn Avenue was peeping through similar curtains, wanted to smash Emmett’s new round hat over his ears, and run shrieking down the street.
She wanted to go dancing with someone she loved, but that being impossible, she walked circumspectly through Medford Square with Emmett holding her by the arm as though he were a sheriff, telling her all about the firing pin on the Springfield rifle—what a good long, strong, classy, nifty, pip of a firing pin it was. And once, when his stream of small-arms enthusiasm slackened for a moment, he promised that he’d take her to Rappaciutti’s after the show and buy her a banana split.
Canyon Love was no masterpiece, but at least it brought tears, and when you get tears, you get a very good thing. Streaming from his blue eyes, Emmett’s tears were a delicious solvent to delivery-wagon cares and the pangs of underprized love. In the warm lassitude of the darkened theater his hand closed wistfully over Mona’s fingers. She did not object, and Emmett sat choking with weepy bliss until the organist, with a good-night fillip, crashed into The Sheik of Araby. The house lights flashed shamelessly on, and the dream collapsed.
“Geeze,” said Emmett (whose single vice was that one interjection of familiarity with the name of the Second Person of the Trinity), “that was a good show. Always get a good show at the Alhambra. Better’n the Plaza, but the ventilation’s not so good. They got the best organ, though. Some organ. I hear it cost ten thousand bucks. …” He lingered in his seat, for although the lights had forced him to drop Mona’s hand, he was still glowing with the treacly warmth of Canyon Love. The theater was emptying rapidly, and Mona prodded her escort.
“Let’s get going, or we’ll be locked in for the night.”
“That wouldn’t be such tough luck, would it?” This was the most suggestive thing that Emmett had ever said, and because Mona made no answer, he considered himself rebuked for his “freshness.” He was about to apologize, when he remembered that he still had the big gesture of the evening ahead of him … the banana split. He waxed resilient, big.
“Well, let’s gumshoe over to Rappaciutti’s and line up for the banana split I been promising you. …”
Again Mona failed to blow back the feather of repartee; again Emmett was disconcerted. She could put him out of gear so easily, with or without a word. Everything would be rolling along beautifully, then, with no preliminary flutter, the illusion of companionship would crackle and fade. And always Emmett would suffer in puzzlement before making the fatal mistake of asking:
“What’s the matter with you anyway, Mona?”
Mona couldn’t have told him, because she didn’t precisely know. She only knew that the organ music and picture had twisted her up into a taut E string yearning for excitement and novelty. She wanted to be taken somewhere (not to Rappaciutti’s) in a rolling limousine; she wanted to sink back into upholstery, or perhaps into the arms of—well, certainly not Emmett Burke—and be helped out at a café where a canopy ran from the curb to the front door. She wanted to be led through a roomful of brilliant and beautiful evening creatures to the edge of a wide dancing floor by a Benny Rampell whom she could never stop loving, no matter how hard she tried.
Actually she said: “You give me the heebie jeebies, asking all the time. ‘What’s the matter?’ Nothing’s the matter. Everything’s the mat—Oh, let’s get over to Rappaciutti’s. …”
“Yes, we better go there. They got better banana splits than the Palace, too. That’s what you wanted, wasn’t it … a banana split?”
Rappaciutti’s was a combined fruit store and ice-cream parlor, with little half booths in the rear. Mount Vesuvius erupted blotchily on your left, and gondolas plied traditionally on your right. As they entered, a player piano with a violin attachment whirled wirily through Dardanella. The booths were filled, so they took a table beside the mechanical violin. Privacy—try and get it, thought Mona. But suppose you did get it, what then? Meanwhile Emmett, luxuriating in the role of free spender, was sounding off to the waiter.
“Bring us two of the biggest banana splits in the place. Vanilla and strawberry ice cream for me, with lots of goo. What kind’ll you have, Monny?”
Dreading the silence of Mona’s face, Emmett gazed about the room, spotting acquaintances at every table. A red-haired blade in the furthest booth shouted, “How’d you like that last clinch?” and Emmett shot back, “Eva, burn my shoes!” A general laugh confirmed Emmett’s private opinion that he could be a riot if he set his mind to it. Only Mona’s rigid mouth troubled him. When the sticky sundaes were brought, he ate his hurriedly, scraped the dish, and said with openhanded largeness:
“Guess I’ll try another. How ’bout you, Mona?”
“No more for me. Let’s get out of here.”
The walk home was not a success. Emmett tried hard, but the thing eluded him. Even a skillful, humorous, articulate man would have found Mona difficult, and Emmett Burke was none of these. Down the tree-shaded vista of Maple Street he spoke of the new pool table the K. of C.’s had just installed. Passing lilacs in bloom, he described a tenth-inning rally that the Red Sox had made last Saturday in Cleveland. The blue arc light at the corner of Highland Avenue blinked unpityingly down on a stocky young man trying to explain the bolt action of a Springfield rifle to a slender young woman who was thinking of someone else.
Crunching up the gravelly walk to the Fermoyle back door, Emmett furtively popped a Sen-Sen into his mouth, in preparation for the goodnight kiss. Mona dreaded the stiff embrace, and yet she wanted to be kissed. Not by Emmett or anyone else in Medford, but by a splendid lover on a wide silk bed—a lover who would not take breathlets or talk eternally about firing pins and K. of C. politics. When he spoke, his conversation would come nearer to herself, the lovely center of romantic imaginings. It would flutter about her on soft wings, strokingly, caressingly, as fantasy lovers should. He would be a master of illusion, himself an illusion, lost now, relinquished forever by her promise to Stephen.
In the shadow of the back porch, Emmett nerved himself for the climax of the evening. Expectant, long patient, he was about to claim his good-night kiss. As Mona reached down for the key under the doormat, his lavender-scented breath caught her full on the mouth. She took it passively. A fellow deserved something for the money he’d spent and the good time he’d been trying to give you. She heard Celia wheezing asthmatically at the window above them. Love’s young dream? Scarcely. With a strained good night Mona opened the back door and let herself into the kitchen. …
She heard Emmett shuffling down the gravel walk in dejected perplexity.
It isn’t his fault … altogether, she thought as she was climbing the back stairs. But it’s no use. I can’t stand it any longer. I can’t marry him.
She flung her hat down and sat on the edge of her narrow bed. She had tried so hard to follow Stephen’s advice! “Pick out a fine young Catholic and go steady with him,” Stephen had counseled. For more than a year Mona had “gone steady” with Emmett Burke, and now she knew that she hated Emmett and everything else in Medford. Job, Church, family, life in general. “I’ve got to get away from here,” she said to the small oval face in her mirror.
She rummaged in the top drawer of her bureau for a piece of paper and a pencil stub. Words did not come easily to Mona Fermoyle. She had so few of them. On the piece of paper she scrawled two lines: “Dear Mother and Father, I’m going away. Please don’t try to follow me. Mona.”
She packed her bag, waited till the house was asleep, then stole down the front stairs, and took the last trolley into Boston.
MONA’S DISAPPEARANCE was a mortal blow to Din and Celia. At first they put hopeful ads in the papers: “Mona, come home. We are all grieving.” At the end of three months Din took upon himself the shame of reporting her to the police as missing. Novenas were made for her return, but neither the police nor the loving prayers brought her back. Celia waited for the letter that never came; at every footstep in the front hall she would start up from her chair or turn expectantly from her tasks. In the evening Din’s voice and movements, subdued by grief, ended in silent staring at his aftersupper Globe. Even Bernie’s warblings took on a soft melancholy; night after night he rendered pianissimo the theme song of the household:
The chairs in the parlor all miss you,
The folks ask me why you don’t call,
Our whole house is blue,
They want you, only you,
But I miss you mo-ost of all.
“For God’s sake, Bernie, play something more cheerful. What is this, a morgue?” That would be Florrie, barging and nagging more shrewishly than ever. Secretly, she blamed herself for driving Mona from the house, but because open acknowledgment of guilt was impossible, Florrie scourged everyone else, especially Al McManus, with the whip of her own remorse.
Though she and Al slept in the same bed, Florrie had not spoken to her husband for three months. In a flight of financial wizardry, Al had withdrawn eight hundred dollars from their joint savings account and given it to Ponzi for a quick profit. A week later, Ponzi’s paranoid mansion of finance crashed. But the more dreaded crash came when Florrie landed both physically and verbally on her husband. Locking him in their bedroom, she belabored his cowering body with her feet and fingernails, then let her tongue cut to ribbons all that was left of his manhood. All night long she raged; with morning came a cold, contemptuous silence that she had not broken since.
As a filial chore Stephen went home on his nights off, but all joy had been squeezed from the visits. His only escape from the gloomy downstairs tensions was in the quiet refuge of Ellen’s room. Here, as if in a sanctuary, Ellen had fortified herself against the assault of illness and the still more harrowing knowledge of family unhappiness. Slowly her strength was coming back; for an hour or two every day she could sit by her window overlooking the fences and rhubarb patches in the back yards of Woodlawn Avenue. But her vision was not outward; prayer and contemplation made her life a sequence of ecstatic stillnesses. In her conversations with Stephen she was cheerful, even optimistic, as tubercular patients often are. She would make brave small plans for the future: visits to neighboring churches when she grew a bit stronger, some laundering of sacristy linens perhaps. No task was too humble if offered in His name.
Ellen loved poetry and would sometimes read to her priest-brother from the small collection of volumes beside her bed. Donne, Crashaw, and Francis Thompson were her favorites; a flawless critical taste prevented her from falling into the sentimental errors of “devotional” verse. One evening she stretched her hand across the coverlet and picked up a volume of George Herbert.
“Do you know Herbert’s The Elixir?” she asked Stephen.
“I think I do. But read it to me.”
Ellen read the exquisitely simple poem until she came to these stanzas:
All may of Thee partake:
Nothing can be so mean
Which with this tincture, “for Thy sake,”
Will not grow bright and clean.
A servant with this clause
Makes drudgerie divine;
Who sweeps a room as for Thy laws
Makes that and th’ action fine.
Ellen laid the book down; her eyes, lifted to Stephen’s, were like leaf-brown pools catching the reflection of cloudless skies. “Nothing can be truer than that,” she said.
“Nothing is,” added Stephen.
Leaving Ellen that night, he could not help comparing her with Lalage Menton. Both were teeming with dedicated love, but where La-lage’s physical strength enabled her to pour her love fearlessly over humanity, Ellen’s frailty was like a burning glass that focused the rays of divine energy with an intense inwardness. If Lalage reminded him of a glowing monstrance, Ellen was an alabaster vase lighted by an unex-tinguishable flame.
At the memento of the Mass next morning, Stephen prayed that Ellen’s love might sometime pierce the walls of her room and bring its special illumination to the world of common men.
GEORGE FERMOYLE’S RETURN from war somewhat lightened the gloom at 47 Woodlawn Avenue. He came out a good-looking Captain with a medal for valor at Château-Thierry, a shrapnel wound under his right collarbone, and some seventeen hundred dollars saved from his military pay. George’s viewpoint on the postwar world was moderately cynical; as he remarked to Stephen: “The brotherhood of man, like the fatherhood of God, is a notion too radical for our age.” Without wasting any time worrying about the future of the world, George took up his law courses again. No more drudgery on the Fish Pier; his savings would easily see him through law school. He spent a couple of hundred dollars fixing up the attic bedroom, bought himself a good armchair, and bent over the lawbooks that were meat and drink to his famished legal mind.
Some of the best talks Stephen ever had were in George’s attic study. Other than law, politics were George’s main interest. To Wilson’s international idealism George added social and economic ideas quite in advance of the time. A wave of strikes was spreading across the country, and George interpreted them as the opening action in a long struggle between capital and labor.
“Our national wealth must be more evenly distributed, Stuffy, with the workers getting an ever-increasing share in the form of higher wages. Imagine it! Steelworkers in Pittsburgh are getting only twenty dollars for a seventy-hour week. I don’t want to sound like a Socialist, but doesn’t it seem that America’s potentialities are being selfishly exploited for the benefit of a few rich men?”
“You sound like Leo XIII’s social encyclicals,” said Stephen. “If you want to find chapter and verse for everything you’ve just said, read Leo’s Rerum novarum, written in 1891.”
“Find me a copy in English,” said George. “The trouble with you churchly oysters is that your pearls are always in polished Latin.”
Then George would puff at a bo’sun pipe, and urge his priest-brother to implement with action the social theories of the Church. The argument might go on till midnight, but always across the fascinating themes of law, religion, and social reconstruction fell shadows of the grief hovering over the Fermoyle household. Invariably the sessions ended with talk of Mona.
“Are you satisfied that we’re doing all we can to find her?” asked Stephen one night.
“I don’t quite know, Stuffy.” George tamped a fresh load of Burley into his pipe. “Sometimes I think we ought to take a more positive line of action. The police aren’t really interested in these missing-persons cases. Perhaps we should go after Mona with private detectives. They’re a rum-dum lot, but sometimes they get results.”
“That would run into money, wouldn’t it?”
“A minimum of twenty dollars a day, plus expenses. …”
Stephen shook his head. “No one in this family could afford that kind of thing.”
George fingered the buckram cover of Wharton’s Bills and Notes. “I could, Stuffy. You see, I saved most of my pay for three years. I’ve still got almost fifteen hundred dollars in cash.”
“But that money must see you through law school.”
“I could go back to my old job on the Fish Pier. And I’d do it in a minute, Stuff, if it would put the skip in Celia’s step and the roar in Din’s voice again.”
All for love, thought Stephen. “We couldn’t ask you to spend your money that way, George. It might be as useless as throwing it out the window.”
“I’ve got a hunch it wouldn’t be, Stuffy. I’ll look into it anyway.”
At noon the next day, George Fermoyle was engaging the confidential ear of Lloyd C. Brumbaugh, proprietor of the Acme Detective Agency. The shell of Mr. Brumbaugh’s ear was as bloodless and hard as any clam dug in the flats of his native Cape Cod, but he was an experienced operator and knew exactly what questions to ask. Weight, height, color of hair, eyes, complexion, and the etceteras of Mona’s anatomy; her men friends, favorite forms of recreation, out-of-town acquaintances—the whole story was jotted down on Mr. Brumbaugh’s pad.
“Acme investigators will begin looking for your sister at once, Mr. Fermoyle. Naturally, I can guarantee nothing—but we have our methods. The fee will be six hundred a month, payable in advance.”
From his wallet George drew six one-hundred-dollar bills, handed them to Mr. Brumbaugh. A month passed. No trace of Mona. George paid out another six hundred. He was back at his old job on the Fish Pier now, working all day, attending law classes at night. Toward the end of the second month he got a letter from the Acme Detective Agency, and rang Stephen at once.
“News, Stuffy! Brumbaugh thinks he’s located her.”
“Where?”
“In Wilkes-Barre. Meet me in front of the B. U. Law School at ten tonight. I’ll give you the details.”
Shortly after ten P.M. the brothers Fermoyle were sitting in a one-arm lunchroom on Boylston Street. Stephen read the typewritten report of the Acme Agency:
Our operative has located a young woman who fits the description of Mona Fermoyle in all but one detail. Age twenty-one or thereabouts; height 5 ft. 6 in., weight approx. 118 pounds, dark blue eyes, fair complexion. The single point of difference is color of hair. This woman has blond hair, which could easily be caused by bleaching.
Stephen remembered Mona’s desire for golden hair, wistfully expressed on the day of his return from Rome; Brumbaugh was probably right. Stephen raced on:
The person located by us is traveling under name of Margo LaVarre, and is accompanied by a Spanish-type male, early thirties, known as Ramón Gongaro. Sometimes claims to be a medical doctor, but earns living as a professional dancer. Billed as Gongaro and LaVarre, this man and your sister gave exhibitions of ballroom dancing in small towns on the dime-a-dance circuit. Have worked recently in Newport News, Wilmington, Wheeling, Scranton, and Altoona. Appeared two nights last week in Wilkes-Barre. Present whereabouts uncertain, but will probably show up in New Jersey or New York.
Please advise us as to course of action, and kindly remit check for $600 for development of further information.
Sincerely yours,
P. K. BRUMBAUGH
P.S. If desired, charges might be brought against Gongaro for violation of Mann Act.
The sheer ugliness of the business! Stephen looked across the table at George sipping his coffee. There was only one thing to be said, and George said it.
“Just when we locate her, the money runs out.” He slid his bankbook across the table. “There’s only two hundred dollars left, Steve. Do you suppose Florrie would pitch in with four hundred more?”
Stephen stirred his coffee despondently. “I’d hate to ask her, George. There was always a bickering between Florrie and Mona. And after that Ponzi episode I don’t think Florrie’s in the mood to hand out any cash.”
“She couldn’t do any worse than refuse.”
“I wouldn’t want to put Florrie or anyone else in that position.”
George understood the charity of Stephen’s attitude. “Corny Deegan might help us,” he suggested.
“No doubt he would. He’d tear off a dozen blank checks and say, ‘Come back for more if you need it.’ But this is a family affair, George. We can’t ask Corny to shoulder the private troubles of the Fermoyles.”
“What’ll we do? We can’t risk losing track of her now.”
Calculations long as a column of ledger figures were going on in Stephen’s mind. “If we only dared wait.”
“Wait for what?”
Stephen’s finger was at the list of towns in the typewritten report. “Look, George, it’s as clear as a plotted graph. Mona’s heading north. Virginia, Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey. Brumbaugh says she’ll probably turn up next in New York.” Stephen’s excitement mounted. “It’s the homing instinct. I bet she’ll be back in Boston within a month.”
“We can’t hang around dance halls every night waiting for her to show up.”
“We can’t,” said Stephen, “but Bernie can. From now on, Bernie’s going to be Operator Fifty-nine, attached to the dance-hall district. And with the help of a few well-directed prayers I’ll be surprised if we don’t catch up with Gongaro and LaVarre within the next few weeks.”
STEPHEN’S PREDICTION came out with adding-machine precision. He was returning one night to the Cathedral rectory when the curate on duty said, “Your brother’s waiting for you in the reception hall.” There was Bernie, packed sausage-tight in a pinchback green suit, wearing an Ascot tie, narrow high-cuffed trousers, and suède-top shoes. The rig was a vaudevillian’s dream, but Bernie’s double chin was sunk to his Ascot.
“I’ve just seen Mona,” he announced.
“The homing bird! Where?”
“At the Metro Dance Pavilion, a dime-a-dance place on Tremont Street.”
“How does she look? Did she speak to you?”
Tears slid down Bernie’s chubby cheeks. “She looked all right. But she wouldn’t speak to me.”
“Was she alone?”
“No, a guy was with her.”
“What kind of a guy?”
“One of them patent-leather Spanish dancers. He shoved me away.”
Mona was back in Boston, Gongaro was with her. “You say they’re at the Metro Dance Pavilion?” asked Stephen. “Let’s get right down there.”
Twenty minutes later, Stephen was following his brother into the butt-strewn lobby of the Metro Dance Pavilion, a second-floor layout on lower Tremont Street. Knots of young men, many with padded shoulders and pomaded hair, were taking a quick drag at cigarettes between dances. Stephen had borrowed a flashy handkerchief from Bernie and tied it Ascot-fashion around his Roman collar. They climbed the stairs. Suppose Mona weren’t there! Or suppose she were! Halfway up the stairs Bernie stopped at a little booth. “Ten tickets please,” he said and handed the box-office man a dollar.
The dance floor was fenced off by a waist-high railing, broken by a turnstile. Hostesses lolled on settees waiting for customers, while some two hundred couples were fox-trotting to the strains of Margie, brassily rendered by Dinger Doane and his Jazz-bo Babies. A dim orange light made it difficult to see a face clearly.
Stephen searched the floor for a glimpse of Mona. “Do you see her?” he whispered to Bernie.
“Here she comes now, with that guy in the tan suit.”
Stephen saw the couple. The man had an arrogant talent for dancing. He was wearing a cocoa-colored jacket and purple shirt; high-heeled shoes added to his height. In agony Stephen watched Mona dance past, her head thrown back, her delicate body floating petallike in her partner’s arms. She was undeniably lovely; her blondined hair, which at first shocked Stephen, added a theatrical touch to her beauty. She was wearing a pink ball gown glittering with sequins and silver lace; her costume and dyed hair expressed with painful emphasis Mona’s notion of herself as a queen among taxi dancers.
A deadly emotion gripped Stephen. “Let’s walk out there and take her away from him,” he said to Bernie.
“We can’t do that, Steve. Bouncers are all over the place. They’d throw us downstairs.”
The music stopped, the lights went up, and the dancers streamed through exit gates. The floor was empty now save for a man who held up a hand for attention. Unable to get silence, he signaled the drummer, who tore off a mama-papa flam ending in a boom-boom. The master of ceremonies began talking with the false elegance of a prize-fight announcer.
“La-deez an’ gennelmen! Tonight with your kind permission we offer for your ennertainment a re-fined exhibition of sussiety dancing in the final innerstate a-liminations for a silver loving cup. Your applause will decide the winnah … thank you one and all.” His finger shot a directive at the band leader. “Perfessor Doane will take it from here.”
The band blared into Dardanella, and two couples glided toward the center of the floor. Stephen had no consciousness of the other dance team; he saw only Mona and Gongaro. He knew little about dancing, but recognized the professional touch that Mona and her partner gave to the showy steps. As the exhibition progressed, partisan applause grew louder. The rivalry between the couples was high; each tried to surpass the other with fancy variations. Mona and Gongaro did a hesitation dip to handclapping and shouts of “Attaboy, Ramón.” The other couple countered with a reverse pinwheel, and took their meed of applause. Then Gongaro let Mona spin free for a solo whirl and caught her in mid-flight with heel-clicking precision. What hurt Stephen most was the Spaniard’s evident command over Mona’s person. Gongaro’s preening self-esteem said: “Alone, this girl is nothing. But with me—watch now.”
The music stopped, and the two couples stood in the center of the floor while the master of ceremonies approached them, loving cup in his hands. A barrage of applause rattled across the hall as he held the cup over Mona and Gongaro. An equal barrage was let loose when the trophy rested over the heads of the other couple. Again and again, the test was made, till at last, with the cup over Mona’s head, the roof went sailing away.
Gongaro accepted the prize and strutted ahead of Mona toward a side door.
“Come on, Bernie,” said Stephen.
They circled the edge of the dance floor and pushed open the door through which Mona and Gongaro had disappeared. In a bare greenroom the dancers were being paid off by the master of ceremonies. He was handing Gongaro twenty-five dollars when he saw Stephen and Bernie.
“What you guys want?” he challenged.
“We want to speak to our sister,” said Stephen.
Mona looked up in terror, saw Stephen, and tried to run from the room. In three quick steps he had her by the wrist. “Monny darling … please. …”
Gongaro stepped forward. “What’s the big idea?”
“The big idea,” said Stephen, “is that we haven’t seen our sister for quite a while, and we want to talk with her.”
The dancing man shrugged a padded shoulder: “From where I stand, she don’t look like she wants to talk to you.”
It was true. Mona’s eyelashes, beaded with mascara, were lowered. Her visor of defiance was down. “Take me out of here, Ramón. These men are bothering me.”
Gongaro had no intention of getting his neck broken. “I’ll get The Bite.” He darted out and returned with a stocky musclebound character—an ex-wrestler, to judge by his necklessness and gorilla-length arms.
“Who’s causin’ the trouble here?” he demanded.
“Him.” Gongaro pointed to Stephen. “He won’t let go of my partner.”
“Oh, yes he will,” said The Bite. “Leggo of the lady’s arm, mister.” He shot out a heavy paw, grabbed Stephen by what seemed to be an Ascot tie (a favorite hold with bouncers), and jerked. The silk handkerchief came off, revealing the Roman collar underneath.
“Geeze, he’s a priest.” Having broken the taboo against striking a clergyman, The Bite’s poor brain collapsed in apology. “I didden’ mean nothin’, Father. Honest, I didden’.”
“Don’t worry about it,” said Stephen. “Everything’s going to be fine if you’ll leave me alone with my sister here for a little talk.”
“Sure, sure, Father. Breeze, everybody.” The Bite pointed at Bernie. “Who’s he?”
“My brother.” Stephen spoke to Bernie. “Get George over here on the double.” Glad to avoid the scene about to take place, Bernie vanished.
Alone with Mona in the bare room, Stephen loosened his grip. “Forgive me, Monny; I had to hang onto you. Tell me, darling, where’ve you been?”
Silence, stubborn and willful, was Mona’s answer.
“Please, darling.” Stephen tried to put his arms around his sister, but she flung his hands down, the flares of her nostrils dilating.
“Don’t try being a big brother any more. It worked last time. But it won’t ever work again. Ever, ever, do you hear?”
“I hear you, Mona.”
“Oh, you hear, all right. But you don’t understand. How could you?” Contempt and anger quivered in her throat. “You don’t know what love is.”
The hopelessness of convincing Mona that he knew the power of love overcame Stephen.
“You mustn’t say that, Mona,” he pleaded.
“I’ll say anything I damn please. I’m through with you, and all the mealymouthed things you stand for. Let me go to hell in my own way, will you?”
“But this isn’t your way, Mona. I watched you dance tonight. I saw how happy you were, and what a gift you have. That gift shouldn’t be wasted on cheap exhibitions. Dancing is one of the arts, and you could make a career of it.”
“I don’t want a career.”
“What do you want, Mona?”
“I just want Benny Rampell,” she said obstinately.
“Come home with me tonight,” bargained Steve. “I’ll help you get him.”
“No one can help me get him now. It’s too late.” Grief at irrecoverable loss shook her. “He married someone else.”
Thundering against the walls of the bare greenroom, mourning above the cheap rhythms of Dinger Doane’s music, Stephen heard the echo of Job’s mightiest line. “No man can deliver his brother unto God” The folly of interfering with other people’s lives, the awful presumption of touching with one’s finger the value of another human heart, brought Stephen to his knees beside his sister. What could he say to undo the wrong he had done her? Small comfort now to offer Mona the solace of religion or to explain that he had acted in accordance with the dictates of his Church. He spoke humbly, his forehead against her shoulder:
“No one can unmake the past, Monny, or strike out human errors of judgment. It was a mistake on my part, a terrible mistake that will leave marks of grief on both of us for the rest of our lives.” His lips touched her cheek. “Next to your suffering—and Benny’s perhaps—mine will be greatest.” He was pleading now. “Celia’s courage is failing; Din mourns for you. Can you keep on hurting them, Monny?”
Ferments of filial love and self-destruction worked in Mona’s heart. Stephen let them rise in silence, then made the absolute minimum request.
“Come home tonight just for a visit, Monny. You won’t have to stay. We’ll say you’ve got a grand job in New York.”
The conflicting ferments in Mona’s soul almost neutralized each other. Then the urge to self-destruction triumphed. “You might as well get off your knees,” she said. “I’m not going home with you. I was a fool to come back to Boston. This time I’m going away and won’t ever be back.”
She walked to the door of the greenroom and opened it. Outside, Ramón Gongaro was waiting.
“Come, pigeon,” he said masterfully. “We will dance.”