Lion House,The by Marjorie Lee Read Free Book Online Page A

who had himself never grown beyond the emotional slats of his own play-pen?
    We got home at about four-thirty to find the kitchen in the same chaotic state we'd left it; but Brad, if bleary, was still awake, so I forgave him.
    "Just in time for the cocktail hour," he said, swinging a Shaker of martinis above his head. "Look, I even put the glasses in the icebox so they'd be cold."
    It was chilly out so I lighted the first fire of the season and we clustered around it. Brad pulled a cushion off a chair and lay back on it, martini in one hand, the other up behind his head. "Tell me," he murmured drowsily, "how did you like the Garden of Allah?"
    "Wingo? It's marvelous," Helene answered.
    "You mean miraculous," Brad said. "Miraculous in the Divine sense, that is. Did you know? It's Jo's religion."
    "Oh, cut it out," I sighed. "So I've got myself an Interest. What's so terrible about a person's having an Interest?"
    "Interest, my foot," he droned. "You've got a ten-ton case of Mother Surrogateship. Or isn't that the accepted terminology? Call Frannie; she'll know."
    I realized with a peculiar little pang: it was the first time her name had come up since the Finches had arrived.
    "Who's Frannie?" Helene wanted to know.
    Brad was silent. Then he laughed a soft, low laugh.
    I looked at him. His face by firelight seemed richly bronze. The tightly drawn skin of his chin and cheekbones caught the reflected glow and shone. The two white temple-wings in his still-black hair slanted over his ears as sharply and perfectly as if they had been painted there. In his eyes there was a veiled thing, a half-closedness, something belonging to memory or even dream; a film lowered against a hidden place within him; a place that was no one's but his. For a minute I loved him. For just a minute it seemed that I had never loved anyone as much as him. But it was the childlike love that grows of inaccessibility.
    "Who's Frannie?" he asked slowly. '"Who is Frannie, what is she...?' You tell them, Jo. You tell them who Frannie is..."
    I lit a cigarette. "The Brownes," I said. "New friends of ours. We met them in the Fall, through Wingo. Wonderful people, both of them."
    Brad laughed again; the same soft laugh that seemed to hold a secret in it. "Wonderful people," he said. "Boy, that Frannie sure is one wonderful people..."
    "Don't sell Marc short," I put in. "Marc is ─"
    "Marc is okay," he said. "Marc's okay all right, only —Marc doesn't like me. Tell me: why doesn't Marc like me?"
    "He does," I said. "Why do you think —"
    "Oh, he does not. Stop making with the Big Happy Family. Marc does not like me. Men never like me, come to think of it —you know that? You see all these guys sitting around talking; at parties, you know? Getting along. Well, not with me; I'm out of it. Even when I'm right there, I'm out of it. And Marc does not like me, and I wanna know why. Why doesn't he?"
    I didn't answer. If it was true, I didn't want to hear it.
    "But what the hell," he went on, beginning to smile. "Frannie likes me. Franni-o, than which there is no whicher..."
    "Come on, Brad," Helene urged. "You've got us all hanging by the thumbs. What's she like?"
    "She's ─" I knew he was going to say it. I knew the words by heart now, and I sat there feeling that if he said it I would scream. "She's—nothing but a little kid with big glasses and bitten nails..."
    "Well, then, why all the fuss about her?" Dick asked.
    Brad lifted himself heavily to his elbow and tried to focus his eyes squarely into Dick's. "Dickie," he said. "Dickie, m'boy..." His speech was suddenly furry as a squirrel. "She'z a girl —who knowz howda: wake up!"
    None of us got him. "Wake up?" I asked with a laugh. "Never struck me as the early-bird type. Sleeps till noon most of the time!"
    "'S not whadda mean," he said, swaying a little. "Whadda mean is: sh' knowz howda wake up me!" With effort he turned again to look at Dick. "Dick," he said; and his words came clearer now, strengthened by an