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.Why didn’t you just say Nudes?”“In Boston,” he smirks.He works for another minute, glancing at her as she smokes.“Do this,” he says, and lifts his chin.She does.The tusk nearly tips her backward; the rider makes his shifting adjustment.To balance it all she sticks the cigarette between her lips as though she is her brother’s corny moll.While she is holding the pose he asks, “Do you want to marry him?”“Oh, well,” she admits, “I think he wants to marry me.” She plucks out the cigarette.“Once the wife’s out of the way.”Her brother is pretending to be neutral on this score, but he can’t look at her.“All right,” Hollis decides.“I’ll come see him.”The honest truth is she doesn’t want to marry anyone.She couldn’t make anyone take care of her—never again.She is going to lose her mind again, she knows, and it just isn’t fair to make anyone come along for the ride.“Attaboy, Holly,” she says.“I just wouldn’t want him to think I’m all on my own in the world.He’s such a sentimental old bum, you know.” She drops her chin, hands the card back.“It would make him too sad.”Meanwhile, Edward is enjoying the stormy summer.He is working long hours, but there is Mary in the outer office to make it all fine.A bolt of lightning kills a Gerenuk antelope in the Franklin Park Zoo, and there is a front-page story about it in the Globe.It is a rare beast from darkest Africa and about as hardy looking as a folding chair, but if Edward had been the deer’s press agent he would have been proud of the work.He chucks the paper on a stool.He catches Mary’s quick voice on the telephone and feels a gust of contentment.The only sour note is that he cannot marry her, because he still has a wife, at least in name; although in fact, as he has come to see, he has never really had a wife at all.But now he is feeling a revival.Old things that died long ago have been coming back to life.Long ago he had been a happy man, an admirer of Teddy Roosevelt, had worn old boots and slapped his pals howdy, had imagined himself running for selectman or something more, feeling he was in possession of a dumb straight-ahead affection for all his friends and for the public at large, a grand and agreeably stupid feeling that seemed to be his natural way.He looked the part, but more than this, he felt it suited.Big fella, big heart.It got him in trouble sometimes, for example in the ring; when any sort of emotion got the best of him he would overswing, making a bid to win the fight with one punch.He would open up on the right side, and anyone who knew the book on him would be waiting for it, and that would be that.If he could have stopped doing it, he would have.But he understood it to be an aspect of his character, and anyway it displayed his natural self—and a good self it was on balance, a man suffering from no hesitation and prone to big declarations of passion, with a bounty of feeling he harbored for individuals and for whole races of humanity.That’s who he was once, most fundamentally, and it’s who he feels himself becoming again with Mary.For now he is aware of what he has been missing all these years: the joy of life.Just life, that’s all it is.Frankie serves them coffee in the mornings when they arrive together off the streetcar and step into Vernon’s for some breakfast before work.Tomato-on-rye at lunch.Mary kids him and feeds him lines, and he detects the admiring glances of every other man in the place.There is a brother somewhere, or so the story goes, but Mary is reluctant to produce him so maybe he’s just a figure she feels she needs, a source of possible threat.She is no shrinking violet, either; together they sit in the fourth row at the Palace or the Foster-Wilde Hall out of range of the flying blood and sweat but close enough to see everything, and Mary tucks herself into his arm but never turns away; she loves watching the big fellows go after it hard, and in the car going home she is definitely hot to trot, while Isabel had always turned up her nose at the whole business.“Come on, Teddy,” she will say, putting a hand on his leg.And they go to the movies and sit in the dark and laugh together; she has a heartbreaking hee of a laugh that he could listen to all day.And on Saturday mornings they lie in the sun in the apartment garden with dark glasses on and read the newspapers with a pitcher of orange juice between them.And airplanes pass overhead, and they watch them go, wondering who the lucky stiff is to fly away like that.And Edward’s heart feels full, it feels packed, as though more blood is suddenly reaching it than before; he feels a richness there now, a beautiful glory.He can’t believe his good fortune.And then a man comes to see him in his offices, with a froggy, loose-lipped mouth, his eyes half-lidded, wearing a silver suit and a red tie, carrying the air of an established gent.He is squat, powerfully constructed, an inch under six feet, a year or two short of thirty.“Mr.Howe?” the man ventures.“I’m Hollis.”It takes Edward a long moment to place the name.He doesn’t know any Hollis, and the man from Guarantee, who is expected in ten minutes to talk about insuring their fighters, is called Mr.Farber.When he gets it, his surprise is too great to mask.“The brother!” he exclaims, delighted.“Sit!”“I beg your pardon; you were expecting someone else.”“I thought you were a figment!”Hollis Hempstead looks down at himself with pretend concern as he settles in.“Sometimes I don’t feel all there,” he admits.“I wonder sometimes if it’s worth getting out of bed at all some days.”Now he notices the man has the mincing air of a fairy, and Edward recoils a little.“Sure,” he says.“Mary tells me all about you; I hope you don’t mind my dropping in to see for myself.She let me in.I like your view.” Hollis nods appreciatively at the potted palms, the brass cigar lighter, the brass lamp.He seems to fix each of these in his memory before he says, “Very comfortable.I’d imagined something more rough-and-tumble.”“We don’t let the hard boys up here,” he says, and hears the double meaning too late.For a second it occurs to Edward that Mary has hired someone and put him up to an impersonation, some flamer she dug up from somewhere as a joke on him.It would be her style.But no, there is a strong resemblance once you look for it
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