“Who are you?” asked the driver, hands on hips, looking down from six feet.
Nick was next to him suddenly, and Charlie ran over. Nick put his hand on Willie’s head. “This my boy Willie. He’s going to Broadway!”
“No kidding? This your son?” The driver was smiling now.
Nick laughed. “No. I sure do wish my son could dance like that.”
Willie felt an astounding sensation. He wanted to leap, as high as he could, as high as the building. He couldn’t even look at Nick.
“All right, come on, guys, let’s get it moving.” The driver was bored now. He turned his back and started toward his cab.
“Don’t worry about him,” said Charlie. He jumped up on the back of the truck, his balloon body moving so fast it was surprising.
Nick threw the last can against the building with a satisfactory clamor. “Give ’em hell, Willie!” he yelled as he jumped up beside Charlie. The truck started to move away. Willie stood watching.
“Give my regards to Broadway,” Nick sang above the roar of the truck. Charlie joined: “Remember me to Herald Square . . .” Together: “Tell all the gang at Forty-second Street. . .” They were turning. Now Willie couldn’t see the truck. “. . . That . . . I . . . will . . . soon . . . be . . . there,” came to him ghost-like from around the corner. Silence was there. Willie felt odd. He walked toward his apartment building.
“Hi zer, Villie,” said the doorman, who was of an undetermined Baltic origin. He bore a strong resemblance to Dracula, and his doorman’s cape didn’t help.
Willie barely heard him. Concentrating, he walked in, smiled absently at the doorman, pushed the elevator button, and walked through the opening doors.
“Ess,” said the doorman behind him, breathing through his teeth.
Willie danced wildly, impatiently, by himself in the elevator as it was going up. He felt his feet were making angry sounds.
Old Mrs. Goldstein was waiting for the elevator as he danced out. Tapping in place, he held the door for her. “A regular Fred Astaire,” she muttered as she went past him slowly.
The door closed. Willie practiced dancing up the wall as he’d seen Donald O’Connor do in an old movie. It was hard. He went to his own door, fished around for his key, and let himself in. “I’m home!” he yelled.
“Ter-rif-ic,” he heard Emma say from her room in a deep, sour voice. She slammed her door.
He went into the kitchen, started looking for cookies. “Well, if it isn’t Bill Robinson.” It was Martha, the maid. She was white and wildly freckled, but Willie liked her. Sometimes she had a sharp tongue that could make him feel like a worm, but she was there to come home to every day, and friendly most of the time.
She gave him a toothy grin. Her teeth stuck out. He jammed a cookie in his mouth and started tapping down the hall to his room. “Here, now, get this book satchel out of my kitchen.”
He danced back and got it.
“Can’t you even say hello?”
He stopped. He usually said hello. I am going to do something, he thought. I don’t know what it is that I am going to do, but I am going to do something and I am going to do it soon.
“Hello.” He smiled, then danced out. “Helloooo,” he wailed like a ghost as he ran down the hall.
“Between you tappy-tapping and your sister the district attorney, a person could go starkers around here,” Martha called after him. Martha was always talking to herself. Martha talked all the time, whether there was anybody in the kitchen or not. He closed the door on her voice.
He flung down his briefcase and ate his cookies to a slow soft shoe in front of the mirror. “If Nick were my father” raced through his head and was stopped like a car at a light. A vision of summer stock rose in his mind, as firm and as sweet as the cookies, pictures of him and Dipsey having dinner at four o’clock because they had to go on at eight and it didn’t do to be too full when you danced, pictures of backstage, pictures of footlights blinding and—suddenly he saw his father sitting in the audience, ashamed of him.
Emma trudged home heavily, her books seeming to weigh more than the day before. She was having a running argument with herself about the consumption of a cream horn, an additional, unnecessary cream horn, at lunch that day. The argument went through her head like this:
THE STATE OF NEW YORK AGAINST EMANCIPATION SHERIDAN
DISTRICT ATTORNEY: Your name is Emancipation Sheridan, otherwise known to your friends and family as Emma Sheridan?
EMMA: Yes.
D.A.: Yes, sir.
EMMA: Yes, sir.
D.A.: Now, Emma, tell the jury what you had for lunch today.
EMMA: Hot dogs and sauerkraut.
D.A. (snidely): And what else, Emma?
EMMA: Chocolate milk.
D.A. (insinuating): And?
EMMA (looking down and whispering): A roll.
D.A.: Now, Emma, you’re evading the question. You realize that you’re under oath. Are you going to swear under oath to the honest, upstanding ladies and gentlemen of the jury that that’s all you had for lunch?
EMMA (whispering even lower): A cream horn.
D.A.: What? Speak up. We can’t hear you.
EMMA (a bit louder): A cream horn.
D.A. (greatly irritated): Your honor, will you please direct this witness to answer my questions loudly and clearly so that the court and the jury can understand her?
JUDGE: Miss Sheridan, will you please try to speak up?
EMMA: Yes, sir.
JUDGE: What?
EMMA: Yes, sir.
D.A. (swaggering around): Now, Miss Sheridan, will you please tell the jury what else you ate for lunch.
EMMA: A cream horn.
D.A. (slyly): Do you want to leave it at that?
EMMA (yelling): Oh, all right, two cream horns.
Emma almost walked into a parking meter. She stopped herself just in time and trudged along, back in the real world now. Oh, the shame of it. Two cream horns.
Still, when she finally passed her bar exam and she finally had a case and she was cross-examining the school dietitian, it would go like this:
EMMA (prominent young New York trial lawyer): Did you or did you not put out a tray of forty cream horns—and don’t say there weren’t forty, because there were, because I counted them—did you or did you not put that tray out there to tempt and lead astray and in particular to ravage the diet of one Emma Sheridan?
DIETITIAN (meekly): I did.
EMMA: If it please the court, this witness refuses to speak up and I have failed in all my efforts to get her to speak louder.
JUDGE: We will have no more of that. Dietitian of the Gregory School, you will speak up.
Emma gave a smile of satisfaction. She watched the dietitian cringe and wiggle around for a minute, then own up to her crime. Her mother’s voice broke through her dream: Just because there were forty, that didn’t mean that you