New York, enervated from sleepless nights on fire-escapes and in
bedrooms opening on areaways, moved through it at half-speed, hugging
the narrow shade of buildings. Infant mortality climbed with the
thermometer. In Fifth Avenue, cool, high bedrooms were boarded and
empty. In First Avenue, babies lay naked on the floor, snuffing out for
want of oxygen.
Across that man-made Grand Canon men leap sometimes, but seldom. Mothers
whose babies lie naked on the floor look out across it, damning.
Out into this flaying heat Miss Becker stepped gingerly, almost
immediately rejoined by Mr. Leon Kessler, crowningly touched with the
correct thing in straw sailors.
"Get a move on," he said, guiding her across the soft asphalt.
In Rinehardt's, one of a thousand such _Rathskeller_ retreats designed
for a city that loves to dine in fifteen languages, the noonday cortege
of summer widowers had not yet arrived. Waiters moved through the dim,
pink-lit gloom, dressing their tables temptingly cool and white,
dipping ice out from silver buckets into thin tumblers.
They seated themselves beneath a ceiling fan, Miss Becker's
taffy-colored scallops stirring in the scurry of air.
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