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“She doesn’t want an ambulance,” Helen said. “She wants to sleep it all away. I’ll bet she doesn’t even feel cold.”

“She’s a cake of ice.”

Sandra moved, turning her head toward the voices but without opening her eyes. “You got no wine?” she asked.

“No wine, honey,” Helen said.

Pee Wee came out with a stone-gray rag that might once have been a blanket and wrapped its rough doubleness around Sandra. He tucked it into the neck of her sweater, and with one end formed a cowl behind her head, giving her the look of a monastic beggar in sackcloth.

“I don’t want to look at her no more,” Francis said, and he walked east on Madison, the deepening chill aggravating his limp. Helen and Pee Wee fell in behind him, and Rudy after that.

“You ever know her, Pee Wee?” Francis asked. “I mean when she was in shape?”

“Sure. Everybody knew her. You took your turn. Then she got to givin’ love parties, is what she called ‘em. but she’d turn mean, first love you up and then bite you bad. Half-ruined enough guys so only strangers’d go with her. Then she stopped that and hung out with one bum name of Freddy and they specialized in one another about a year till he went somewheres and she didn’t.”

“Nobody suffers like a lover left behind,” Helen said.

“Well that’s a crock,” Francis said. “Lots suffer ain’t ever been in love even once.”

“They don’t suffer like those who have,” said Helen.

“Yeah. Where’s this joint, Pee Wee, Green Street?”

“Right. Couple of blocks. Where the old Gayety Theater used to be.”

“I used to go there. Watch them ladies’ ankles and cancanny crotches.”

“Be nice, Francis,” Helen said.

“I’m nice. I’m the nicest thing you’ll see all week.”

Goblins came at them on Green Street, hooded spooks, a Charlie Chaplin in whiteface, with derby, cane, and tash, and a girl wearing an enormous old bonnet with a fullsized bird on top of it.

“They gonna get us!” Francis said. “Look out!” He threw his arms in the air and shook himself in a fearful dance. The children laughed and spooked boo at him.

“Gee it’s a nice night,” Helen said. “Cold but nice and clear, isn’t it, Fran?”

“It’s nice,” Francis said. “It’s all nice.”

o o o

The Gilded Cage door opened into the old Gayety lobby, now the back end of a saloon that mimicked and mocked the Bowery pubs of forty years gone. Francis stood looking toward a pair of monumental, half-wrapped breasts that heaved beneath a hennaed wig and scarlet lips. The owner of these spectacular possessions was delivering outward from an elevated platform a song of anguish in the city: You would not insult me, sir, if Jack were only here, in a voice so devoid of musical quality that it mocked its own mockery.

“She’s terrible,” Helen said. “Awful.”

“She ain’t that good,” Francis said.

They stepped across a floor strewn with sawdust, lit by ancient chandeliers and sconces, all electric now, toward a long walnut bar with a shining brass bar rail and three gleaming spittoons. Behind the half-busy bar a man with high collar, string tie, and arm garters drew schooners of beer from a tap, and at tables of no significant location sat men and women Francis recognized: whores, bums, barflies. Among them, at other tables, sat men in business suits, and women with fox scarves and flyaway hats, whose presence was such that their tables this night were landmarks of social significance merely because they were sitting at them. Thus, The Gilded Cage was a museum of unnatural sociality, and the smile of the barman welcomed Francis, Helen, and Rudy, bums all, and Pee Wee, their clean-shirted friend, to the tableau.

“Table, folks?”

“Not while there’s a bar rail,” Francis said.

“Step up, brother. What’s your quaff?”

“Ginger ale,” said Pee Wee.

“I believe I’ll have the same,” said Helen.

“That beer looks tantalizin’,” Francis said.

“You said you wouldn’t drink,” Helen said.

“I said wine.”

The barman slid a schooner with a high collar across the bar to Francis and looked to Rudy, who ordered the same. The piano player struck up a medley of “She May Have Seen