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loved everybody, didn’t he?” he went on, strikingtheir table with his palm. “Regardless of race, color, or creed. He had no discrimination—is that the word?” and overcome by his joke he bowed back over his own table, in silent tussle with his laughter.
    Vivian left the table to sing again, and when she returned, the actress had moved to the chair Vivian had vacated, and she sat down in the actress’s chair, nearer now to the intrusive man, and saw that he was observing her, his face that of an outsider, desirous, recriminative. “I guess he thought he was going to live forever,” he said to her. “You could tell he thought so by the way he smoked that cigarette in the longest holder I ever saw outside of the movie queens back in the flapper days.”
    â€œYou saw his picture when he was at Yalta?” she asked him, repeating an observation she had heard earlier. “He looked sick then, his face looked as if it got the message he was going to die. He had a blanket or an overcoat around his shoulders.”
    He patted her wrist. “You’re sweet,” he said.
    â€œHow do you know?”
    â€œBecause you got nursey eyes. ‘He looked sick at Yalta.’ Did you hear that?” he asked his companions, who were no longer listening to him. “You got nursey eyes.” He took her hand between both of his, caressing it between his palms, attributing to her, with that pressure of his hands, a sympathetic knowledge of all men. “Go on.”
    â€œGo on what?” she asked.
    â€œTell me some more.”
    â€œMore of what?”
    â€œOh, they got so much on their minds they don’t take care of themselves. More of that. You know when a man gets a lot on his mind what happens to his body? Look at Gandhi—that’s what’s the matter with me. I’m as skinny as Gandhi only more because I’m twice as tall as he is. I think big thoughts. My head is big, see, but all my hair has turned white and my body is skinny.”
    â€œWhat big thoughts?” she asked him.
    â€œWe all got a stake in it,” he said. “Those who stayed at home as much as those who laid down their lives. Got two factories going day and night, one down in El Segundo, out near the beach where the aircraft factories are. We make a small part that you girls would call an itsy-bitsy part, but without it the plane couldn’t fly. It couldn’t fly. Got another factory up here, feeds the shipyards with another itsy-bitsy part. When the general goes marching through the surf up to his neck, we’re right along with him, you and me. You and me, we’re right there when he delivers the coop de grace. The coop de grace belongs to you and me.”
    He brought their clasped hands into her lap and, opening her hand, he began to smooth it flat, palm up, insistently smoothing out her fingers that curled again after his hand passed over them.

8
    O n the night when the lights of the city came on again, she walked several miles before she hailed a taxi, elated by the glitter and glow of the signs, by the suffusion of colors, by the colors pulsing through the tubes, crackling and humming; by the animation of the signs whose borders ran in a demented pursuit of themselves, or each letter of the letter before it; and by the lights reflected on dark windows and gliding along the windows of passing cars. She saw the change of colors upon her white coat and upon her legs as she walked and knew that her face was tinted with the colors that she walked through as were the faces of other strollers, and this coming on again of every light was like an absolving of everyone in the city and like a mindless promise of further experiences that might call for further absolving.
    The Manufacturer—she called him that, amusing herself with the anonymity of it—appeared again in the lounge. He brought no friends with him and he spoke to no other patrons. Their first