Ideal Read Free Page B

but of those who could.
    Over a little movie theater with a yellow brick front, a blank marquee, and a circle bearing a huge 15 CENTS in tarnished tinsel, stood the cardboard figure of a woman. She stood erect, her shoulders thrown back, and her short blond hair was like a bonfire snapped at the height of a furious storm—a ferocious tangle of hair over a slim body. She had pale, transparent eyes and a large mouth that looked like the mouth of an idol of an animal that had been sacred. There was no name under the figure, but the name was not necessary, for every passerby on every street of the world knew the name and the wild blond hair and the fragile body. It was Kay Gonda.
    The figure was half naked under its scant garment, but no one noticed that. No one looked at it conventionally and no one snickered. She stood, her head thrown back, her arms limp at her sides, palms up, helpless and frail, surrendering herself and imploring something far away, high over the blank marquee and over the roofs, as a flame held straight for an insight in an unknown wind, as a last plea rising from every roof, and every shop window, and every weary heart far under her feet. And passing the theater, no one did, but everyone wanted dimly to take off his hat.
    Morrison Pickens had seen one of her pictures last evening. He had sat for an hour and a half without moving, and if breathing had required attention, he would have forgotten to breathe. From the screen, a huge white face had looked at him, a face with a mouth one wished one could wish to kiss, and eyes that made one wonder—a wonder which was pain—just what it was they were seeing. He felt as if there was something—deep in his brain, behind everything he thought andeverything he was—which he did not know, but she knew, and he wished he did, and wondered whether he could ever know it, and should he, if he could, and why he wished it. He thought that she was just a woman and an actress, but he thought this only before he entered the theater and after he left it; while he looked at her on the screen, he thought differently; he thought that she was not a human being at all, not the kind of human being he’d seen around him all his life, but the kind no one ever knew—and should. When he looked at her, it made him feel guilty, but it also made him feel young—and clean—and very proud. When he looked at her, he understood why ancient peoples had made statues of gods in the image of man.
    No one knew for certain who Kay Gonda was. There were people who said they remembered her when she was sixteen and working in a corset shop in Vienna. She wore a dress too short for her long, thin legs, with sleeves too short for her pale, thin arms. She moved behind the counter with a nervous swiftness that made people think that she belonged in a zoo, rather than in a little shop with starched white curtains and a smell of stale lard. No one called her beautiful. Men never approached her and landladies were eager to throw her out when she was behind in her rent. She spent long days fitting girdles to customers, her thin white fingers lacing strings tightly over heavy folds of flesh. The customers complained that her eyes made them uncomfortable.
    There were also those who remembered her two years later when she worked as a maid in a disreputable hotel on a dark side street of Vienna. They remembered her walking down the stairs, holes glaring in the heels of her black cotton stockings, an old blouse gaping open at her throat. Men tried to speak to her, but she did not listen. Then, one night, she listened. He was a tall man with a hard mouth and eyes too observant ever to allow her to be happy; he was a famous film director who had not come to the hotel to see the maid. The woman who ownedthe place shrugged with indignation when she heard the maid laughing loudly, brutally, at the words the man whispered to her. But the great director denied vehemently the story of where