Little, Big Read Free Page A

flip it out, like a girl. He had a hat like Svengali's, and eyes like him too—dark-shadowed, compelling, and humorous. It wasn't a week later that he was fired, to the relief of every pair of bifocals in the white room, but by then he and Smoky had become, as only Smoky in the whole world it seemed could any longer say with all seriousness, fast friends.

A City Mouse
    With George as his friend, Smoky began a course of mild debauchery, a little drink, a little drugs; George changed his clothes, and his patterns of speech, to a City tattersall, and introduced him to Girls. In not too long a while, Smoky's anonymity became clothed, like the Invisible Man in his bandages; people stopped bumping into him on the street or sitting on his lap in buses without apology—which he had attributed to his being very vaguely present to most people.
    To the Mouse family—who lived in the last tenanted building of a block of buildings the first City Mouse had built and which they still mostly owned—he was at least present; and more than for his new hat and his new lingo he thanked George for that family of highly distinguishable and loudly loving folk. In the midst of their arguments, jokes, parties, walkings-out-in-bedroom-slippers, attempts at suicide and noisy reconciliations, he sat unnoticed for hours; hut then Uncle Ray or Franz or Mom would look up startled and say, "Smoky's here!" and he would smile.
    "Do you have country cousins?" Smoky asked George once as they waited out a snowstorm over café-royale in George's favorite old hotel bar. And indeed he did.

At First Sight
    "They're very religious," George told him with a wink as he led him away from the giggly girls to introduce him to their parents, Dr. and Mrs. Drinkwater.
    "Not a practicing doctor," said the Doctor, a wrinkled man with woolly hair and the unsmiling cheerfulness of a small animal. He was not as tall as his wife, whose generously-fringed and silken shawl trembled as she shook Smoky's hand and asked him to call her Sophie; she in turn wasn't as tall as her daughters. "All the Dales were tall," she said, looking up and inward as though she could see them all somewhere above her. She had given her surname therefore to her two great daughters, Alice Dale and Sophie Dale Drinkwater; but Mother was the only one who ever used the names, except that as a child Alice Dale had been called by some other child Daily Alice and the name had stuck, so now it was Daily Alice and plain Sophie, and there was nothing for it, except that anyone looking at them could certainly see that they were Dale; and they all turned to look at them.
    Whatever religion it was that they practiced didn't prevent them from sharing a pipe with Franz Mouse, who sat at their feet since they two took up all of a small divan; or from taking the rum-punch Mom offered them; or from laughing behind their hands, more at what they whispered to each other than at anything silly Franz said; or showing, when they crossed their legs, long thighs beneath their spangled dresses.
    Smoky went on looking. Even though George Mouse had taught him to be a City man and not afraid of women, a lifetime's habit wasn't so easily overcome, and he went on looking; and only after a decent interval of being paralyzed with uncertainty did he force himself to walk the rug to where they sat. Eager not to be a wet blanket—"Don't be a wet blanket, for God's sake," George was always telling him—he sat down on the floor by them, a fixed smile on his face and a bearing that made him look (and he was, he was stunned to feel as Daily Alice turned to look at him, visible to her) oddly breakable. He had a habit of twiddling his glass between thumb and forefinger so that the ice trembled rapidly and chilled the drink. He did it now, and the ice rattled in the glass like a bell rung ftr attention. A silence fell.
    "Do you come here often?" he said.
    "No," she said evenly. "Not to the City. Only once in a while, when Daddy has business,