"You also have a lovely high voice when you want to," he said.

"I think I had better go home now," I said. "I can walk. It isn't far from here." It was only about forty blocks. I had no shoes; but who needed shoes? I would get home somehow without them.

"When it's time to go home," he said, "you shall have my limousine."

"It's time to go home now," 1 said. "I don't care how I get there. It has been a very tiring day for me. I don't feel very clever. I just want to sleep. If you know anybody who needs a bartender, even part-time, I can be found at the Arapahoe."

"What an actor you are!" he said.

I hung my head. I didn't even want to look at him or at anybody anymore. "Not at all," I said. "Never was."

"I will tell you something very strange," he said.

"I won't understand it," I said.

"Everyone here tonight remembers having seen you, but they've never seen each other before," he said. "How would you explain that?"

"I have no job," I said. "I just got out of prison. I've been walking around town with nothing to do."

"Such a complicated story," he said. "You were in prison, you say?"

"It happens," I said.

"I won't ask what you were in prison for," he said. What he meant, of course, was that I, as Mrs. Graham disguised as a man, did not have to go on telling taller and taller lies, unless it entertained me to do so.

"Watergate," I said.

"Watergate!" he exclaimed. "I thought I knew the names of almost all the Watergate people." As I would find out later, he not only knew their names: He knew many of them well enough to have bribed them with illegal campaign contributions, and to have chipped in for their defenses afterward. "Why is it that I have never heard the name Starbuck associated with Watergate before?"

"I don't know," I said, my head still down. "It was like being in a wonderful musical comedy where the critics mentioned everybody but me. If you can find an old program, I'll show you my name."

"The prison was in Georgia, I take it," he said.

"Yes," I said. I supposed that he knew that because Roy M. Cohn had looked up my record when he had to get me out of jail.

"That explains Georgia," he said.

I couldn't imagine why anybody would want Georgia explained.

"So that's how you know Clyde Carter and Cleveland Lawes and Dr. Robert Fender," he said.

"Yes," I said. Now I started to be afraid. Why would this man, one of the most powerful corporate executives on the planet, bother to find out so much about a pathetic little jailbird like me? Was there a suspicion somewhere that I knew some spectacular secret that could still be revealed about Watergate? Might he be playing cat-and-mouse with me before having me killed some way?

"And Doris Kramm," he said, "I'm sure you know her, too." I was so relieved not to know her! I was innocent after all! His whole case against me would collapse now. He had the wrong man, and I could prove it! I did not know Doris Kramm! "No, no, no," I said. "I don't know Doris Kramm."

"The lady you asked me not to retire from The American Harp Company," he said.

"I never asked you anything," I said.

"A slip of the tongue," he said.

And then horror grew in me as I realized that I really did know Doris Kramm. She was the old secretary who had been sobbing and cleaning out her desk at the harp showroom. I wasn't about to tell him that I knew her, though.

But he knew I knew her, anyway! He knew everything! "You will be happy to learn that I telephoned her personally and assured her that she did not have to retire, after all. She can stay on as long as she likes. Isn't that lovely?"

"No," I said. It was as good an answer as any. But now I was remembering the harp showroom. I felt as though I had been there a thousand years ago, perhaps, in some other life, before I was born. Mary Kathleen O'Looney had been there. Arpad Leen, in his omniscience, would surely mention her next.

And then the nightmare of the past hour suddenly revealed itself as having been logical all along. I knew something that Leen himself did not know, that probably nobody in the world but me knew. It was impossible, but it had to be true: Mary Kathleen O'Looney and Mrs. Jack Graham were the same.

It was then that Arpad Leen raised my hand to his lips and kissed it. "Forgive me for penetrating your disguise, madam," he said, "but I assume you made it so easy to penetrate on purpose. Your secret is safe with me. I am honored at last to meet you face to face."

He kissed my hand again, the same hand Mary Kathleen's dirty little claw had grasped that morning. "High time, madam," he said. "We have worked together so well so long. High time."

My revulsion at being kissed by a man was so fully automatic that I became a veritable Queen Victoria! My rage was imperial, although my language came straight from the playgrounds of my Cleveland adolescence. "What the hell do you think you're doing?" I demanded to know. "I'm no God damn woman!" I said.

I have spoken of losing my self-respect over the years. Arpad Leen had now lost his in a matter of seconds, with this preposterous misapprehension of his.

He was speechless and white.

When he tried to recover, he did not recover much. He was beyond apologizing, too shattered to exhibit charm or cleverness of any kind. He could only grope for where the truth might lie.

"But you know her," he said at last. There was resignation in his voice, for he was acknowledging what was becoming clear to me, too: that I was more powerful than he was, if I wanted to be.

I confirmed this for him. "I know her well," I said. "She will do whatever I tell her, I'm sure." This last was gratuitous. It was vengeful.

He was still a very sick man. I had come between his God and him. It was his turn to hang his head. "Well," he said, and there was a long pause, "speak well of me, if you can."

More than anything now, I wanted to rescue Mary Kathleen O'Looney from the ghastly life the dragons in her mind had forced her to lead. I knew where I could find her.

"I wonder if you could tell me," I said to the broken Leen, "where I could find a pair of shoes to fit me at this time of night."

His voice came to me as though from the place where I was going next, the great cavern under Grand Central Station. "No problem," he said.

23

The next thing I knew, I, all alone, having made certain that no one was following me, was descending the iron staircase into the cavern. Every few steps I called ahead, crooningly, comfortingly, "It's Walter, Mary Kathleen. It's Walter here."

How was I shod? I was wearing black patent leather evening slippers with little bows at the insteps. They had been given to me by the ten-year-old son of Arpad Leen, little Dexter. They were just my size. Dexter had been required to buy them for dancing school. He did not need them anymore. He had delivered his first successful ultimatum to his parents: He had told them that he would commit suicide if they insisted that he keep on going to dancing school. He hated dancing school that much.

What a dear boy he was — in his pajamas and bathrobe after a swim in the living room. He was so sympathetic and concerned for me, for a little old man who had no shoes for his little feet. I might have been a kindly elf in a fairy tale, and he might have been a princeling, making a gift to the elf of a pair of magic dancing shoes.

What a beautiful boy he was. He had big brown eyes. His hair was a crown of black ringlets. I would have given a lot for a son like that. Then again, my own son, I imagine, would have given a lot for a father like Arpad Leen.

Fair is fair.

"It's Walter, Mary Kathleen," I called again. "It's Walter here." At the bottom of the steps, I came across the first clue that all might not be well. It was a shopping bag from Bloomingdale's — lying on its side, vomiting rags and a doll's head and a copy of Vogue, a RAMJAC publication.