"Am I late? I had to give tea to an old friend of Kevin's from Dublin who came with a message from Yeats."
"Yeats! The poet?" Vida asked Figente, wide-eyed.
"Yes. Kevin Doyle is the eminent literary critic. By the way, he likes to encourage young women writers. Mary, this is Miss Boswell, one of our better young writers. I have just commissioned her to write my memoirs."
Mary Doyle racked her brains to recall the name which seemed familiar, but not succeeding, nodded perfunctorily. One couldn't trust Figente, who had a strange sense of humor about foisting unimportant people on one. Better to rely on one's own judgment of who was who to nab for dinner with Doyle as the lure.
Just as the small talk petered out and everyone, except Mrs. Custerd, became restive, Hal, at a signal from Damon, put on a record. Softly a rhythmic tenor drum beat against indolent plucking of strings and, on a sporadic liquid chant of a song, Ranna slid from behind the gold screen clad in a neatly pleated loincloth figured with miniature gods resembling himself. The stylized patterns of his bent-kneed movements flowed easily one into another, accented with contrapuntal and unexpected angles of his arms as his head jerked right and left on its axis. But it was the languorous rippling under the polished skin that fascinated his audience.
Ranna himself, fascinated by one member of the audience, lowered his gaze to keep from looking into the lapis lazuli eyes of the girl with the moonbeam hair who watched, lips slightly parted.
"There, Raymond, what did I tell you?" said Mrs. Custerd after the applause. "You really must do something about this boy."
Figente threw a lamp-table scarf over the dancer's glistening shoulders. "I have wished for some time to present an unexpurgated Arabian Nights. Don't you think that would be fun?" Ranna nodded shyly, his eyes on Lucy. "Damon will do the sets and costumes, and Lucy will be Scheherazade. Now where will we present it? Let's see, there's that old Thalia Theatre on the Bowery where the Chinese company plays. That might be amusing, but no, it's not large enough. I'd rather take the Manhattan Opera House. That would start a new vogue. Broadway would move downtown again where it belongs instead of in the Bronx where it has gone." This was a dig at the Century Theatre because it had been erected in unfashionable West of Central Park.
"Don't put it on, Figente, you know that isn't the Bronx," Lucy said.
