peace and the peace of beauty ever found moment, Marylin
nestled in that brief breathing space somewhere deep down within the
noisy cabaret of Getaway's being. His eyes, which had never done
anything of the sort except under stimulus of the horseradish which he
ate in quantities off quick-lunch counters, could smart to tears at the
thought of her. And over the emotions which she stirred in him, and
which he could not translate, he became facetious--idiotically so.

Slim and supine as the bamboo cane he invariably affected, he would wait
for her, sometimes all of the six work-a-evenings of the week, until
she came down out of the grim iron door of the shirt factory where she
worked, his one hip flung out, bamboo cane bent almost double, and, in
his further zeal to attitudinize, one finger screwing up furiously at
a vacant upper lip. That was a favorite comedy mannerism, screwing at
where a mustache might have been.

"Getaway!" she would invariably admonish, with her reproach all in the
inflection and with the bluest blue in her eyes he had ever seen outside
of a bisque doll's.

The peculiar joy, then, of linking her sweetly resisting arm into his;
of folding over each little finger, so! until there were ten tendrils
at the crotch of his elbow and his heart. Of tilting his straw "katy"
forward, with his importance of this possession, so that the back of his
head came out in a bulge and his hip, and then of walking off with her,
so! Ah yes, so!

MARYLIN _(who had the mysterious little jerk in her laugh of a very
young child_): "Getaway, you're the biggest case!"

GETAWAY _(wild to amuse her further_): "Hocus pocus, Salamagundi! I
smell the blood of an ice-cream sundae!"

MARYLIN _(hands to her hips and her laughter full of the jerks_):
"Getaway, stop your monkeyshines. The cop has his eye on you!"

GETAWAY _(sobered):_ "C'm on!"

Therein lay some of the wonder of her freshet laughter. Because to
Marylin a police officer was not merely a uniformed mentor of the law,
designed chiefly to hold up traffic for her passing, and with his night
stick strike security into her heart as she hurried home of short,
wintry evenings. A little procession of him and his equally dread
brother, the plain-clothes man, had significantly patrolled the days of
her childhood.

Once her mother, who had come home from a shopping expedition with the
inside pocket of her voluminous cape full of a harvest of the sheerest
of baby things to ma