Page:Levenson - Butterfly Man.djvu/222

220 The show was about to close. Chicago had not responded to Howard Vee's trenchant wit; his sophisticated melodies were, it appeared, already passé. Business had been poor. Mike Vee himself came to Chicago. He ordered the posting of a closing notice. He had no intention, he said, of paying losses out of profits already banked.

The news affected Ken not at all. Chicago days were dizzily whirling by. His pace was too great for Frankie. The pink-cheeked chorus boy, a boy no longer, refused to bask in the glow of Ken's greater success. Frankie had grown into a paler and wiser young man. He had stopped drinking. During his stay in Chicago, a rich old man of the West Side was befriending him. Ken saw little of him. Ken's own days and nights were full. His entourage contained new faces. His mind, jangling with new and more curious ideas, was weary of chorus boys and chatter about show business. It was a relief to spend the evening with a college boy or a young dairy farmer from Wisconsin or an electrical engineer who lived in an expensive lake shore apartment hotel.

Chicago, rousing slumbering memories, offered varied possibilities for entertainment, its ever-shifting group of parasites who clung to him, hands open, borrowing, eating free meals, drinking his liquor, soon whetted his appetite for parties and for what he succinctly termed, "laughs."

Within him a new and rich vein was being bared. While he was drinking, his mind seemed to escape the limitations of his body. He was never Kenneth Gracey. He was the lady superintendent of a girl's seminary putting her charges to bed, or a redheaded woman acrobat cursing the stage hands in a small town vaudeville theatre for not fastening the braces of her tightrope. Or Aunt Emily Winterbottom