"It's only a block out of the way. Come on! Don't stand gassing."
"You-thought-that-fellow-on-the-corner-of-Dock-Street-might-be-a-plain -clothes-man!"
"What if I did? Want me to go up and kiss him?"
"Don't believe in hugging the law, though. It's enough when it hugs you."
"Come on. I'll buy some supper. Steak and French frieds and some French pastry with a cherry on top for your little sweet tooth. That's the kind of a regular guy I am."
"All right, all right! I'm taking you there, ain't I?"
"Oh, you'll go straight, if you can't go that way anywhere but home."
They trotted the little detour in silence, the corners of her mouth wilting, he would have declared, had he the words, like a field flower in the hands of a picnicker. Marylin could droop that way, so suddenly and so whitely that almost a second could blight her.
"Now you're mad, ain't you?" he said, ashamed to be so quickly conciliatory and trying to make his voice grate.
"No, Getaway--not mad--only I guess--sad."
She stopped before her rooming house. It was as long and as lean and as brown as a witch, and, to the more fanciful, something even of the riding of a broom in the straddle of the doorway, with an empty flagpole jutting from it. And then there was the cat, too--not a black one with gold eyes, just one of the city's myriad of mackerel ones, with chewed ear and a skillful crouch for the leap from ash to garbage can.
"Gowann! Get into your blue dress and I'll blow you to supper."
He thought he detected the flash of a dimple. He did. Remember, she was very young and, being fanciful enough to find the witch in the face of her rooming house, the waves at Coney Island, peanut cluttered as they were apt to be, told her things. Silly, unrepeatable things. Nonsense things. Little secret goosefleshing things. Prettinesses. And then the shoot the chutes! That ecstatic leap of heart to lips and the feeling of folly down at the very pit of her. Marylin did like the shoot the chutes!
He did not conceal his surge of pleasure, grasping her small hand in both his. "Good girlie!"
"Good night, Getaway," she said, but with the inflection of something left unsaid.
He felt the unfinished intonation, like a rocket that had never dropped its stick, and started up the steps after her.