The Railway Police and the Last Trolley Ride by Hortense Calisher Page B

potion, but on her setting it in front of him it only disclosed more of those damned yellow fluffs—he couldn’t get one more down him now if he was blessed for it, or even if he was to be offered one of the women with it, she as nude as the fritter, both of them spitted on the devil’s toasting-fork. Outside the window, he saw that the tables were empty, the women and children scattered, most of the men of the picnic being gathered along the shoreline, strolling or in groups of jokers, and he longed for that pair who knew him to come and rescue him, with whatever guffaws. In the foreground, between him and them, on the table nearest to the window, one of their stoneware pitchers reared large, in another and a realer world. There was no barrier like a window. Mentally, he jumped through the glass—or the small Robin Goodfellow soul of him did, and landed neatly on the cold mouth-edge of the pitcher, just before it dove into what wasn’t lemonade, from what he could see of those waterside stragglers, but beer. Well—as he said to his mate later—luckily he was able to recall that there were still doors to that house, so he stood up politely enough, though he may have licked at his dry mouth a bit—and made ready to bolt.
    It was Lottie who leaned across him—to pick up one of the dainties in the pot. That double valentine she carried in front leaned with her, in fact splitting wide enough to show him, since it wasn’t a whore’s and her sister was standing right by her, that some kind of mental innocent owned it. It wasn’t this that got him.
    “Try one,” she said, and though he choked a bit, of course he knew that she was addressing the tiny eatable she held pinched between two cushiony fingertips—and wasn’t even really offering it either. In fact she was murmuring to it like to a baby.
    “Day old, you’re different,” she said. “Way I like you best.” Then her lips parted softly, so that he saw the gleam on their jello-pink insides; then she nipped the poor thing—that’s the way he thought of it—between her milk-fine teeth, and it was gone, to what pinker recesses he could only imagine—and certainly did. But just before it went down her, the tip of her tongue came out partway to meet it, nothing gross, delicate as anything, indeed not like a bodily flicker, more intelligent. But it was this that got him.
    You are all bound to think of us as a generation that didn’t scarcely smell the dark angles of closeness, fleshly closeness, much less speak of them; isn’t true of course—how do you think you all got here? Never trust what one century thinks of another, much less one generation. It was only that we didn’t speak out so much in a crowd as you do. And you seem to us like a solid row of tongues hanging out day and night for excitement, and only getting dry for it, in all that wind. We see you falsely of course—as falsely forward as you see us backward. Don’t you think I know that and so calculate my vision of us both? And when you are able to correct yours that way, what’ll you be? Old?
    Anyway, it wasn’t too much of a mistake that saw Lottie’s tongue as the liveliest part of her, and jumped to her quick show of it as to a sexual flicker more common to other parts, which was where it took him. Not that he knew yet whether or not he’d made a choice.
    For leave it to Emily, as was learned later, to take up a moment of surprise, hers or anybody else’s, and kick it further up the ladder. What she did, or he thought he saw her do, was to leap past him, through the window. Anyway, she leaned across him, just as Lottie had done, but without stopping—and without the neckline of course—and continued past him, her apron skirts in serene sail, with perhaps a bit of ankle added—a sight of some interest, though not as piercing. A next moment’s revision told him that she had merely stepped gracefully through the bay, which opened French-style—but by this time she was already back