Page:Angna Enters - Among the Daughters.djvu/428

 such a thing when you're so upset? The table had beautiful silver candelabras and was banked with red roses and black hothouse grapes. With all that light on the table the empty picture hooks on the red brocade walls hardly showed.

"The dinner wasn't so bad, more fun than most parties. One of the showgirls was from Mobile and good at Southern dialect stories. Another girl, her stage name is Day Joy, is a bit player, she's a little thing with a black short-cropped bob. Soubrette but cute. She was a cigarette girl at Piselli's. She has a fast line of chatter. Everyone laughed when she said with a little-girl voice, 'Down South, they act like it's a crime to be thirteen and a virgin.'

"Then Lyle said to me diagonally across the table so everyone could hear, 'How long have you known about love, Lucy?' There were three men there who'd made love to me so I said, 'Oh, I don't know anything about love yet.' Well, that gives you an idea of w'hat was talked about. By the time we were finished the girls, the older ones in their late twenties and thirties especially, were beginning to show through their makeup, especially their smeared lipstick because they were so tipsy. Everyone was beginning to show who belonged to whom for the night and Lorna was angry trying not to show how furious she was at Day Joy who had two men on her hook, one being Lorna's. I sat mostly with Nino. Then we danced to the Victrola. I gave a lineup Charleston lesson and the room looked like Christmas with all those jiggling beads. Then Day Joy tied a big bow in her hair and pulled off her dress, she had on white satin underwear like a child's rompers, and took off her slippers and stockings, and stood in the middle of the room and sang risque songs with a finger in her mouth, as if they were nursery rhymes. Two of the couples disappeared and then Lyle, who was very drunk now, came up and said, 'Don't you think you've been mad at me long enough? Why don't we go somewhere and make up like old times? Or are you aiming at a title? I don't think you'll make it, after tonight.'

"I saw Nino looking at me hurt, and then Piselli came, and I got away from Lyle and went into the powder room. Lorna followed me, very upset. Her rouge had a purplish look, and even the three orchids which usually can stand anything were floppy. Her skin was the way faces look in makeup after a show, all lines and pores. She went on and on about Day Joy. 'She knows it excites men to pretend she's a little girl,' Lorna said and went on some more about 416