Page:Angna Enters - Among the Daughters.djvu/224

 the idea of getting into makeup. This show has run too long, I'd like to start something new. Of course you always feel better at curtain time when you hear the Overture. Come on, Vida."

Damon St. John looked at his watch. "I've got to run. I promised Jane Cowl I'd see the show. You know, Ethel's going to do Juliet too. Both of them in one season! Tell me seriously, Figente, do you really want me to look into the Manhattan thing?"

"Certainly."

Though Damon and the girls left, Mary Doyle lingered.

Figente's thick lashless lids rolled down in what he hoped was a signal to her that the show was over. Through little solicitudes imposed upon him in weak moments of illness or loneliness she insidiously had become part of his intimate circle. Yet no matter how pleasantly disposed toward her he was in her absence or when she first arrived, by the time she left he could not abide her presence. The pasty relief map of her face, pitted with pores, laced with rivulets and forest-marked by a stiff mustache above that Cheshire grin, infuriated him, especially as her presence reminded him of their identical age. He had met her, before the war, as mistress of Couzio, a Corsican working up an American market for the new French painting and from whom he had bought for a few dollars a Cezanne water color. Mary, then Bornaum, from Vassar out of Harrisburg, was in full bloom as an avant-garde disciple of free love. At that time she resembled a lush corsetless Watteau, rumpled as a love bed. The Couzio interlude, followed by others, left her appearance and income dissipated when, stroke of luck, she had snared Kevin Doyle into marriage. From then on, Figente recalled sourly, she had seized on the accident of their same birth date as proof of a spiritual affinity. If not for Kevin Doyle, whom he respected, Figente long since would have denied her admittance, especially as she used his home as a means of procuring gullible notables for her dinner table. Again he marveled that Mary could have seduced the fastidious Kevin, and decided that the critic was more intellectually than physically discriminating. Or was it Mary's income and that in a sort of maternal role she left him free for the lonely beds of pretty young writers? Kevin had made a mistake in not coming this afternoon and meeting the young friend of Lucy's with the handsome broad classical face. It would be amusing to have in his circle, Figente thought, the modest little rustic who had had the grace to be embarrassed by Lucy's introduction. Would Mary never go? Mary, the hanger-on, waiting to tarnish the luster of the Arabian Nights idea, reminding 212