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there!”
    “You, too,” Koo said, cracking up. “Have a good night, honey.” And eventually they used a cleaner version of the idea in the show.
    For a while, Koo appended excuses to his calls home (“Meetingwith the sponsor.” “Script trouble, gotta stay up with the writers.”), but soon he gave up even that much pretense, as his evenings “in town” grew to outnumber his evenings “at home.” He stayed at the Warwick on Sixth Avenue below Central Park, he traveled with a funny, bright, invigorating crowd, and it became more and more difficult to force himself to make appearances in that other life. By 1940 he was solemnly vowing to spend at least one night a week with the family, and most weeks he wasn’t making it.
    The finish came in February of 1941. Koo joined a bon voyage party seeing off some Miami-bound friends at Penn Station, and awakened next morning to find himself still on the train, which was highballing south. “By God, I’m having my ham and eggs in Carolina.” Once in Miami, he had to make several explanatory phone calls to friends and business people back in New York, and every one of those conversations was sprinkled with hilarity, except the call to Syosset. “I won’t be home tonight, honey,” Koo started, intending a gag line on his present whereabouts, but before he could deliver it Lily said, “I know you won’t. You haven’t been here for three weeks.”
    What surprised Koo, even more than the words, was the voice. Maybe the long-distance wire had a distorting effect, or maybe he was actually hearing Lily for the first time in years. In any case, she sure as hell didn’t sound like the girl he’d married. This Lily sounded like a head nurse: flat, tough, dispassionate, uncaring. Sitting there in his warm hotel room in hot Miami, listening to that cold voice, Koo shivered. He tried to go on with his gag—“A funny thing happened, uh, on the way...”—but at that point he simply ran down. You can’t swap swifties with a zombie.
    “I can’t talk long,” Lily said. “Frank just woke up from his nap.” At that time, Barry was three and Frank one. Koo had offered to pay for nurses, nannies, but Lily had refused, insisting she wouldbring up her own children herself. What Koo didn’t understand at the time—what he still doesn’t entirely understand, though it doesn’t make any difference now—is that Lily was afraid of his life in New York. She was afraid of fame, afraid of glamour, afraid of the same bigtime that Koo reveled in.
    But Koo couldn’t see that. All he saw was that Lily had turned herself into a drudge, and that she was unhappy, and that her unhappiness was dragging him down. Now, he couldn’t even mention Miami, not in the presence of that frigid misery. “I’ll call you later,” he said, all the fun gone from his voice. He sounded as bad as she did.
    And that was the moment, when he heard his own voice pick up her flat deadness. His other phone calls had involved problems—a meeting rescheduled, a rehearsal cancelled, a newspaper interviewer given an apology—but they’d been solved, hadn’t they? And solved without spoiling the fun . Koo Davis was a free and happy man, so free and happy that he could suddenly be in Miami by mistake and the main result was only laughter. Koo loved laughter, not only audience laughter when he was performing but also his own laughter when something tickled him, laughter around him when he was with his pals. What did he need with this specter from the Grim Beyond?
    The specter was saying, “Will you be home this weekend?” But she didn’t ask as though she cared about the answer. It was more as though he was another of the problems in her life, like Frank waking from his nap, or Barry’s bed-wetting.
    “I don’t think so,” Koo said. Huddled on the edge of the bed in the Miami hotel room, phone pressed to the side of his face, free hand over his eyes, he looked like a clockwork toy waiting to be