Mrs. Levy stood staring at her husband, her colored lashes motionless.

“If you’re going to the store, you can just get me that Easter ham,” Miss Trixie rasped. “I want to see that ham right here in my home! I don’t want any double talk this time. If you people want a confession from me, you’d better start paying off.”

She snarled once at Mrs. Levy, flashing her teeth as if they were a symbol of something, a gesture of defiance.

“There,” Mr. Levy said to his wife. “You have three reasons for going to the grocery now.” He handed her a ten-dollar bill. “I’ll wait for you here.”

Mrs. Levy took the money and said to her husband, “I guess you’re happy now. Now I’ll be your maid. You’ll hold this over my head like a sword. One little misjudgment and I suffer all this.”

“One little misjudgment? A libel suit for half a million? What are you suffering? You’re just going to the corner grocery.”

Mrs. Levy turned and found her way along the aisle. The door slammed and, as if a weighty problem had been lifted from her, Miss Trixie fell into a juvenile slumber. Mr. Levy listened to her snoring and watched the Monrovian freighter moving out into the harbor and turning downstream toward the Gulf.

His mind grew calm for the first time in several days, and some of the events surrounding the letter began passing in review through his consciousness. He thought of the letter to Abelman, and then his mind was recalling another place where he had heard similar language. It was in the Reilly kook’s yard just an hour ago. “She must be lashed.” “Mongoloid Mancuso.” So he had written it after all. Mr. Levy looked tenderly down at the little accused party snoring over her box of Dutch cookies. For everyone’s sake, he thought, you will have to be declared incompetent and confess, Miss Trixie. You are being framed. Mr. Levy laughed out loud. Why had Miss Trixie confessed so sincerely?

“Silence!” Miss Trixie snarled, snapping awake.

That Reilly kook had really been worth saving after all. He had saved himself, Miss Trixie, and Mr. Levy, too, in his own kook way. Whoever Burma Jones was, he deserved a generous award…or reward. Offering him a job at the new Levy Shorts would be even better for public relations. An award and a job. With some good newspaper publicity to tie in with the opening of Levy Shorts. Was that a gimmick or wasn’t it?

Mr. Levy watched the freighter cross the mouth of the Industrial Canal. Mrs. Levy would be on a ship soon, destination San Juan. She could visit her mother on the beach, laughing and singing and dancing. Mrs. Levy wouldn’t really fit into the Levy Shorts plan.

Fourteen

Ignatius spent the day in his room napping fitfully and attacking his rubber glove during his frequent, anxious moments of consciousness. Throughout the afternoon the telephone in the hall had been ringing, each new ring making him more nervous and anxious. He lunged at the glove, deflowering it, stabbing it, conquering it. Like any celebrity, Ignatius had attracted his fans: his mother’s jinxed relatives, neighbors, people Mrs. Reilly had not seen for years. They had all telephoned. At every ring Ignatius imagined that it was Mr. Levy calling back, but he always heard his mother say to the caller the lines that were becoming tearfully standard, “Ain’t this awful? What I’m gonna do? Now our name is really ruint.” When Ignatius could stand it no longer, he would billow out of his room in search of a Dr. Nut. If he chanced to meet his mother in the hall, she would not look at him but rather study the fleecy spheres of lint that drifted along the floor in her son’s wake. There seemed to be nothing that he could say to her.

What would Mr. Levy do? Abelman, unfortunately, was apparently a rather petty person, a man too small to accept a little criticism, a hypersensitive molecule of a human. He had written to the wrong person; the militant and courageous broadside had been delivered before the wrong audience. At this point his nervous system could not manage a court trial. He would break down completely before the judge. He wondered how long it would be before Mr. Levy descended upon him again. What senile conundrums was Miss Trixie babbling to Mr. Levy? An infuriated and confused Mr. Levy would return, this time determined to have him incarcerated at once. Now waiting for this return was like waiting for an execution. The dull headache persisted. The Dr. Nuts tasted like gall. Abelman certainly wanted a great deal of money; that sensitive plant of an Abelman must have been greatly offended. When the true author of the letter was discovered, what would Abelman demand in lieu of $500 thousand? A life?

The Dr. Nuts seemed only as an acid gurgling down into his intestine. He filled with gas, the sealed valve trapping it just as one pinches the mouth of a balloon. Great eructations rose from his throat and bounced upward toward the refuse-laden bowl of the milk glass chandelier. Once a person was asked to step into this brutal century, anything could happen. Everywhere there lurked pitfalls like Abelman, the insipid Crusaders for Moorish Dignity, the Mancuso cretin, Dorian Greene, newspaper reporters, stripteasers, birds, photography, juvenile delinquents, Nazi pornographers. And especially Myrna Minkoff. The musky minx must be dealt with. Somehow. Someday. She must pay. Whatever happened, he must attend to her even if the revenge took years and he had to stalk her through decades from one coffee shop to another, from one folk singing orgy to another, from subway train to pad to cotton field to demonstration. Ignatius invoked an elaborate Elizabethan curse upon Myrna and, rolling over, frantically abused the glove once more.

How dare his mother contemplate a marriage. Only someone as simpleminded as she could be so disloyal. The aged fascist would conduct witchhunt after witchhunt until the formerly intact Ignatius J. Reilly was reduced to a fragmented and mumbling vegetable. The aged fascist would testify for Mr. Levy so that his future stepson would be locked away and he would be free to satisfy his warped and archaic desires upon the unsuspecting Irene Reilly, to perform his conservative practices upon Irene Reilly with free enterprise. Prostitutes were not protected by the Social Security and unemployment compensation systems. No doubt the Robichaux roué was thus attracted to them. Only Fortuna knew what he had learned at their hands.

Mrs. Reilly listened to the squeaking and belching emanating from her son’s room and wondered whether, on top of everything else, he were having a fit. But she didn’t want to look at Ignatius. Whenever she heard his door opening, she tried to run to her room to avoid him. Five hundred thousand dollars was a sum she could not even imagine. She could hardly imagine the punishment given someone who had done something bad enough to be worth five hundred thousand. If there were any cause for suspicion on Mr. Levy’s part, there was none on hers. Ignatius had written whatever it was. Wouldn’t this be fine? Ignatius in jail. There was only one way to save him. She carried the telephone as far down the hall as she could, and for the fourth time that day, she dialed Santa Battaglia’s number.

“Lord, honey, you really worried,” Santa said. “What happened now?”

“I’m afraid Ignatius is in worst trouble than just a picture in the paper,” Mrs. Reilly whispered. “I can’t talk over the phone. Santa, you was right all along. Ignatius gotta go to the Charity.”

“Well, at last. I been talking myself hoarse telling you that. Claude just rang up a little while ago. He says Ignatius made a big scene at the hospital when they met. Claude says he’s ascared of Ignatius, he’s so big.”

“Ain’t that awful. It was terrible in the hospital. I already told you how Ignatius started screaming. All them nurses and sick people. I coulda died. Claude ain’t too angry, huh?”