PORTRAIT OF A SIREN
Crispness folded down upon New York a month later,
bringing November and the three big football games
and a great fluttering of furs along Fifth Avenue.
It brought, also, a sense of tension to the city, and
suppressed excitement. Every morning now there
were invitations in Anthony’s mail. Three
dozen virtuous females of the first layer were proclaiming
their fitness, if not their specific willingness,
to bear children unto three dozen millionaires.
Five dozen virtuous females of the second layer were
proclaiming not only this fitness, but in addition
a tremendous undaunted ambition toward the first three
dozen young men, who were of course invited to each
of the ninety-six parties—as were the young
lady’s group of family friends, acquaintances,
college boys, and eager young outsiders. To continue,
there was a third layer from the skirts of the city,
from Newark and the Jersey suburbs up to bitter Connecticut
and the ineligible sections of Long Island—and
doubtless contiguous layers down to the city’s
shoes: Jewesses were coming out into a society
of Jewish men and women, from Riverside to the Bronx,
and looking forward to a rising young broker or jeweller
and a kosher wedding; Irish girls were casting their
eyes, with license at last to do so, upon a society
of young Tammany politicians, pious undertakers, and
grown-up choirboys.
And, naturally, the city caught the contagious air
of entre—the working girls, poor ugly souls,
wrapping soap in the factories and showing finery
in the big stores, dreamed that perhaps in the spectacular
excitement of this winter they might obtain for themselves
the coveted male—as in a muddled carnival
crowd an inefficient pickpocket may consider his chances
increased. And the chimneys commenced to smoke
and the subway’s foulness was freshened.
And the actresses came out in new plays and the publishers
came out with new books and the Castles came out with
new dances. And the railroads came out with new
schedules containing new mistakes instead of the old
ones that the commuters had grown used to....
The City was coming out!
Anthony, walking along Forty-second Street one afternoon
under a steel-gray sky, ran unexpectedly into Richard
Caramel emerging from the Manhattan Hotel barber shop.
It was a cold day, the first definitely cold day,
and Caramel had on one of those knee-length, sheep-lined
coats long worn by the working men of the Middle West,
that were just coming into fashionable approval.
His soft hat was of a discreet dark brown, and from
under it his clear eye flamed like a topaz. He
stopped Anthony enthusiastically, slapping him on
the arms more from a desire to keep himself warm than
from playfulness, and, after his inevitable hand shake,
exploded into sound.
“Cold as the devil—Good Lord, I’ve
been working like the deuce all day till my room got
so cold I thought I’d get pneumonia. Darn
landlady economizing on coal came up when I yelled
over the stairs for her for half an hour. Began
explaining why and all. God! First she drove
me crazy, then I began to think she was sort of a
character, and took notes while she talked—so
she couldn’t see me, you know, just as though
I were writing casually—”
