Page:Levenson - Butterfly Man.djvu/150

148 Into Ken's life, glamor, long absent, was returning. The bracing air of a New York winter stung him, quickened him as fresh snow flaked against his face. Doors and windows were hung with holiday holly, the theatre audiences gay, women clad in the pelts of a thousand little furry animals, men so polished in their blacks and whites that they seemed less men than cleverly fabricated animate laughing dolls.

In the theatre, life settled slowly. Rosemary Rose hired Vernon Gale, blond, Virginian and virginal, as her chauffeur. Polly Tucker flew into hysterics when Walter Winchell reported that her caricaturist sweetheart had been seen in the Frivolity Club with another woman. Annie Begley filled her offstage waits by playing practical jokes on unsuspecting chorus men and stage hands. To clamoring chorus girls she presented Willis P. Flint, playboy and spender, who lived up to his spendthrift reputation by throwing parties every night, entertaining half a dozen girls at a time, wining and dining them and sending them home happy, each ten dollars richer.

Ken slipped easily into a smooth groove. He decided to accept Howard's invitation to live at the Barrington, provided he was permitted to pay a share of the rent. He moved into a small comfortable bedroom on the first floor of the duplex apartment, a modernistic room with triangular chairs, a low dreamless bed covered with sky-blue satin, a highly polished chrome steel mirror; on the walls bewildering post-impressionist paintings by Picasso, Matisse and Benton. Ken stipulated that he was not to be considered a guest. But it was difficult not to be a guest of the ever-thoughtful Howard, who had always lived in a faultless world, a patient, silent servant at his elbow; a well