Those were her realities.  Home.  The new sandwich cutters.  Heart shape.  Diamond shape.  Spade.  The strip of hall carpet newly discovered to scour like new with brush and soap and warm water.  Epstein’s meat market throws in free suet.  The lamp with the opal-silk shade for Marcia’s piano.  White oilcloth is cleaner than shelf paper.  Dotted Swiss curtains, the ones in Marcia’s room looped back with pink bows.  Old sashes, pressed out and fringed at the edges.

And if you think that Hattie’s six rooms and bath and sunny, full-sized kitchen, on Morningside Heights, were trumped-up ones of the press agent for the Sunday Supplement, look in.

Any afternoon.  Tuesday, say, and Marcia just home from school.  On Tuesday afternoon of every other week Hattie made her cream, in a large copper pot that hung under the sink.  Six dozen half-pint jars waiting to be filled with Brown Cold Cream.  One hundred and forty-four jars a month.  Guaranteed Color-fast.  Mulatto, Medium, Chocolate.  Labeled.  Sealed.  Sold.  And demand exceeding the supply.  An ingratiating, expert cream, known the black-faced world over.  It slid into the skin, not sootily, but illuminating it to winking, African copper.  For instance, Hattie’s make-up cream for Linda in “Love Me Long” was labeled “Chocolate.”  But it worked in even a truer brown, as if it had come out of the pigment instead of gone into the pores.

Four hours of stirring it took, adding with exact minutiae the mysteriously proper proportions of spermacetti, oil of sweet almonds, white wax—­But never mind.  Hattie’s dark secret was her own.

Fourteen years of her black art as Broadway’s maid de luxe had been her laboratory.  It was almost her boast now—­remember the sunken headstones—­that she had handled spotlessly every fair young star of the theaters’ last ten years.

It was as mysterious as pigment, her cream, and as true, and netted her, with occasional extra batches, an average of two hundred dollars a month.  She enjoyed making it.  Singing as she stirred or rather stirring as she sang, the plenitude of her figure enveloped in a blue-and-white bungalow apron with rickrack trimming.

Often Marcia, home from day school, watched.  Propped up in the window frame with her pet cat, a Persian, with eyes like swimming pools with painted green bottoms, seated in a perfect circle in her quiet lap, for all the world in the attitude of a sardel except for the toothpick through.

Sometimes it almost seemed as if Marcia did the purring.  She could sit like that, motionless, her very stare seeming to sleep.  To Hattie that stare was beautiful, and in a way it was.  As if two blue little suns were having their high noon.

Sometimes Marcia offered to help, because toward the end, Hattie’s back could ache at this process, terribly, the pain knotting itself into her face when the rotary movement of her stirring arm began to yank at her nerves.