Free Lion House,The by Marjorie Lee

evening. "They're smart and interesting and warm and aware..."
    "Reverse Racist!" she countered, separating them from me and from herself in one fell swoop. "The perfect love object for you would be a Crippled Communist Jewish Negro!"
    "Why do you come to their parties?" I asked. "If they're so impossible why don't you forget it and stay home?" She flushed.
    Bill Brecker, an ex-obstetrician turned researcher, overheard us and ambled over. "Frannie comes to take notes," he said with a smile. "One of these days she's going to write a book called Appointment in Meade's Manor and immortalize all of us!... Have you seen the rest of the house?"
    While we were upstairs exploring Frannie came up to freshen her lipstick. "Ever run into this period?" she asked through stretched lips. "Authentic Early Mother-in-Law..."
    "Love that girl," Bill sighed when she had left. "Someday she'll fork over the twenty-five-an-hour and then there'll be no stopping her."
    "Not Frannie," I told him. "Frannie's just an oriented spectator. She'll never join."
    "You wait. It's just a matter of time."
    "What makes you so sure?"
    "Oh, I know Frannie," he answered. "She's an old flame of mine."
    "Really?"
    "Really. She was seven and I was nine. We used to live across the street from each other in Chicago and both of us had the misfortune to have nurses. They used to sit together in a little park near the Edgewater Beach Hotel and every now and then they'd go back to Frannie's house for coffee. I don't know why I say Frannie's house because it wasn't Frannie's house at all. It, plus everything else, was Frannie's mother's."
    "How do you mean?"
    "Oh, I don't know. It was just a feeling you got. She was quite a dame. Pretty as hell and very busy knocking around; she'd just gotten her divorce. So we'd go up there and she'd be dressing to go out on a date and we'd watch her. We'd watch her watching herself. Lucy Weatherby, at her mirror. You know Lucy? John Brown’s Body? Well, anyway —when she was all done she'd turn around and stand in front of us and say, 'How do I look? Tell me how I look, chickens.' And Frannie'd get this funny little expression on her face and say, 'You look beautiful.' And if I didn't say anything, she'd push it; you know: 'Come on, Billy, don't you think I'm beautiful? Don't you think Frannie's mother is the Cat's Meow?' Well, the truth is: I thought Frannie was a hell of a lot more beautiful than her mother was. I was real sunk when we moved to New York and I couldn't see her anymore; because, to me, Frannie was the most beautiful thing that ever lived. But a kid of nine didn't say things like that out loud in those days. Manners... Mothers had to be respected. Or maybe that's cover-up stuff. Maybe I kind of sensed how sore she'd be if anyone ever told her her daughter was one up on her. This was a dame who had to win, you see..."
    Later when we'd gone downstairs again, I bumped into Frannie at the bar, swapping daggers with Marian Deitz "... and if Jeff could afford a swimming pool," she was saying, "you'd simply use it to drown yourself!"
    "Hey, Fran," I said, breaking in to forestall bloodshed, "that Brecker guy is made for you!"
    "Who, Bill?" she asked. "Love that man. We were kids together in Chicago. Someday he'll get his head shrunk and then there'll be no stopping him!"
    We went soon after that. It didn't take long to find Brad. He was in the kitchen with Mrs. Harris, saving George Sondheim and four bartenders the trouble of replenishing the ice cubes.
     

CHAPTER EIGHT
    It was in the early Spring that the Brownes gave a party of their own: the party, as I was later to think of it. I was in on most of the preparations; and since Frannie felt compelled to leave everything for the last day, a storm of organization the likes of which I had never before seen shook the rafters.
    We finished working with only an hour left for me and Brad to go home and change; and when we got there I made the mistake of taking a bath: that left Brad