I leave the accounting to you in good faith, Mr. Langley said he had never heard of the Police Beneficiaries League and asked what its work was. Then his whiskeyed voice softened: But seeing as you are respectable folks, he said, I am inclined to overlook the matter for a kindly donation of, say, fifteen percent of the weekly monies to the Police Beneficiaries League. He announced in rather formal tones that it was against the law to operate a commercial enterprise out of a residence on Fifth Avenue. Standing at the open door he brought a cold breeze in with him. He had his own amiable view of the problem. And of course there was the visitation one day of a policeman, though he seemed not to be acting on the complaints of our neighbors.
Naturally there followed complaints from the residences south of us: a letter of articulate disapproval, hand-delivered by someone's butler, and an angry phone call from someone who would not give her name, although there may have been more than one phone call from more than one person. Those we had to turn away sat down on the stoop and milled about on the sidewalk. Langley said, These newspaper people are illiterate-how can one rub shoulders with an upper crust?Īt the very next dance we had to close the doors with people still clamoring to get in. The item about us in the "what to do, where to go" section of one of the evening papers was the first sign of trouble: something to the effect of a high-class taxi dance on Fifth Avenue where you could rub shoulders with the upper crust. Excerpted from the forthcoming novel HOMER & LANGLEY, due out from Random House this September.
0 kommentar(er)
