Once her mother, who had come home from a shopping expedition with the inside pocket of her voluminous cape full of a harvest of the sheerest of baby things to match Marylin’s blond loveliness—­batiste—­a whole bolt of Brussels lace—­had bitten the thumb of a policeman until it hung, because he had surprised her horribly by stepping in through the fire escape as she was unwinding the Brussels lace.

Another time, from her mother’s trembling knee, she had seen her father in a crowded courtroom standing between two uniforms, four fingers peeping over each of his shoulders!

A uniform had shot her father from the underpinnings of the freight car.  Her mother had died with the phantom of one marching across her delirium.  Even opposite the long, narrow, and exceedingly respectable rooming house in which she now dwelt a uniform had stood for several days lately, contemplatively.

There was a menacing flicker of them almost across her eyeballs, so close they lay to her experience, and yet how she could laugh when Getaway made a feint toward the one on her beat, straightening up into exaggerated decorum as the eye of the law, noting his approach, focused.

“Getaway,” said Marylin, hop-skipping to keep up with him now, “why has old Deady got his eye on you nowadays?”

Here Getaway flung his most Yankee-Doodle-Dandy manner, collapsing inward at his extremely thin waistline, arms akimbo, his step designed to be a mincing one, and his voice as soprano as it could be.

“You don’t know the half of it, dearie.  I’ve been slapping granny’s wrist, just like that.  Ts-s-st!”

But somehow the laughter had run out of Marylin’s voice.  “Getaway,” she said, stopping on the sidewalk, so that when he answered his face must be almost level with hers—­“you’re up to something again.”

“I’m up to snuff,” he said, and gyrated so that the bamboo cane looped a circle.

She almost cried as she looked at him, so swift was her change of mood, her lips trembling with the quiver of flesh that has been bruised.

“Oh, Getaway!” she said, “get away.”  And pushed him aside that she might walk on.  He did not know, nor did she, for that matter, the rustling that was all of a sudden through her voice, but it was almost one of those moments when she could make his eyes smart.

But what he said was, “For the luvagod, whose dead?”

“Me, in here,” she said, very quickly, and placed her hand to her flimsy blouse where her heart beat under it.

“Whadda you mean, dead?”

“Just dead, sometimes—­as if something inside of me that can’t get out had—­had just curled up and croaked.”

The walk from the shirt factory where Marylin worked, to the long, lean house in the long, lean street where she roomed, smelled of unfastidious bedclothes airing on window sills; of garbage cans that repulsed even high-legged cats; of petty tradesmen who, mysteriously enough, with aerial clotheslines flapping their perpetually washings, worked and sweated and even slept in the same sour garments.  Facing her there on these sidewalks of slops, and the unprivacy of stoops swarming with enormous young mothers and puny old children, Getaway, with a certain fox pointiness out in his face, squeezed her arm until she could feel the bite of his elaborately manicured finger nails.