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crazy effect he produced? It was a voice like a late summer sky, full of the threat of rain and streaked with sheet lightning—but the rain never broke, and the sweeping winds only roiled the dry air. It was a voice for a Jewish Lear, hurled into the sluggish, hoax-heavy, pollution-dark clouds that sat on the roofs of skyscrapers and tenements, blowing raspberries. The old man had got up and was standing under Norman—Norman was short but his father was shorter—shaking his fist and glowering. “You’re excused,” he said.
    â€œExcused?”
    â€œYes, dammit, excused! Don’t you know when to leave the table?”
    â€œAfter the corned beef,” he said. “Not before.”
    â€œDon’t be smart. Smart I’ve got enough of to last me a lifetime. I don’t need more from you. If you marry this person, you are herewith disinherited. I will make it official. I would make it religious, but that would ruin your mother. She would die of tears. I don’t want your mother should drown. I got enough troubles, like I got enough of smart. You think I’m being funny, don’t. I may express myself in your eyes peculiarly, but what it amounts to is about half a million smackeroos you won’t see. Have I made myself clear?”
    â€œWhy do you care so much? It’s not as if you’ve spent your life in a synagogue chanting prayers, for chrissake.”
    â€œI have a constituency. Also, I have values.”
    â€œSome values.”
    â€œYou can think what you think, Norman, but a father’s will is his labor of love. I earned every cent and how I leave it is my way of saying what I was working for. Remember this. After all, I could die today. This afternoon.”
    â€œOh, Sidney,” a woman’s voice wailed. “Not this afternoon! Just when I came all the way to Brooklyn to surprise you!” It originated from behind Norman. He wheeled around, the fateful cigarette in his raised hand. The hand struck a breast of mind-boggling proportions, and then Norman heard a faint sizzling sound, and there was a pause for collective astonishment, as they all gazed, united in fascination, at the fox fur catching flame on Birdie’s bust.
    8
    O N TIMES SQUARE , Birdie Mickle was billed as Miss Chicken Delight. The neon said: SHE’S FINGERLICKIN’ GOOD . It had taken her a long time to work her way up to neon, and every year on the way up was one year subtracted from how long she could hope to stay there, stripping with class being something you could do only so long as the body held up. Not that hers was in any immediate danger of collapse. She was, as the boys used to say, round and firm and fully packed, and that’s not all: her chest was like a scaffold; a man could practically stand on it to get a better view of the scenery.
    If Birdie’s body was still good, she was convinced that this was at least partly because she kept her mind in shape. Birdie was no dope. She was a well-read woman, and why not? Should she let her life lead her, instead of her leading it? She read between numbers, and it wasn’t to educate herself either, as she quickly informed any man who took a patronizing interest in the books in her apartment on Madison Avenue. She read because she liked to.
    But Birdie’s deep-down special interest, the ambition that lived in her heart like a secret lover, was interpretative dancing. At work, she was renowned for her rendition of “Baby, Pull My Wishbone, Please”—and what nobody even knew was that she had written it herself, words and all. She had talent, she didn’t doubt that for an instant. The sad thing was, the business was tight. Sex in the sixties was free, so who needed the illusion of sex? You could walk down the street and see young girls half Birdie’s age nearly as naked as she was by the end of her act, and in broad daylight no less. And as if that weren’t enough, now the men were