"I was thinking you're a nut and that I've got to go in. Don't make noise or you'll wake my aunt."
She patted him on the cheek, a dismissing gesture which left the boy confused. She was in the house before he reached the sidewalk. He tiptoed unsteadily and then ran with long steps toward his auto parked a block away.
Lucy held the knob of the bedroom door tight to prevent its sudden release tattling to Aunt Mabel that she just had come in. Mae, clutching a shabby rose flannelette dressing gown, stood holding her breath, waiting for the final click of the knob. The room was dark save for a circle of lavender light cast on a cluttered bureau by a dangling bulb over which she had improvised a shade with a lace-edged Georgette handkerchief.
In her high heels Lucy was as tall as her slippered mother. Facing each other they glanced at the ceiling and, when there was no sound from the room above, laughed silently, conspirators against the law, order, and decorum of Twelfth Street.
"Was it a good picture, darling?" Mae whispered.
Lucy picked up her dress by the hem and, with one great yawning stretch, slipped it over her head. "G-r-a-n-d." Her eyes sparkled. "Why don't you and I go again tomorrow night?" She examined her mother analytically. "You know, I think your hair would be cute the style Marguerite Clark wears hers. You look like her."
Mae laughed, pleased. "Especially the way I look now." All thought of self faded as she stood, hairbrush in hand, waiting to serve.
A white combination silked to the floor and became sea foam wreathing Lucy's feet. She stood in shell pink loveliness, unmarred save for a faint pattern on her rosy bottom made by the seat of the cane chair on which she had been sitting while carefully rolling off the silk stockings. To Lucy there was no mystery about her body, or that of her mother's. The lunar visit to herself was accepted as naturally as its visit to her mother.
Mae, regarding Lucy, felt herself more a jeweler with a valuable pink pearl to be kept alive than a mother. She still was bewildered that Lucy could be the fruit of an excruciatingly painful night which had left her body only with ache on her right side, a pain at first attributed to the weight of Charles's body.
But Lucy wasted no reflections on her "looks," as she referred to them, accepting them as she did the elements and ice cream, long
