“Yes, sort of.”

“It’s a business arrangement.”

“Yes?”

To make Tod believe it, he poured out a long, disjointed argument, the one he must have used on himself. He even went further than the business part and claimed that they were doing it for poor Harry’s sake. Faye had nothing left in the world except her career and she must succeed for her daddy’s sake. The-reason she wasn’t a star was because she didn’t have the right clothes. He had money and believed in her talent, so it was only natural for them to enter into a business arrangement. Did Tod know a good lawyer?

It was a rhetorical question, but would become a real one, painfully insistent, if Tod smiled. He frowned. That was wrong, too. “We must see a lawyer this week and have papers drawn up.” His eagerness was pathetic. Tod wanted to help him, but didn’t know what to say. He was still fumbling for answer when they heard a woman shouting from the behind the garage.

“Adore! Adore!”

She had a high soprano voice, very clear and pure. “What a funny name,” Tod said, glad to change the subject “Maybe it’s a foreigner,” Homer said.

The woman came into the yard from around the corner of the garage.

She was eager and plump and very American.

“Have you seen my little boy?” she asked, making a gesture of helplessness. “Adore’s such a wanderer.”

Homer surprised Tod by standing up and smiling at the woman. Faye had certainly helped his timidity.

“Is your son lost?” Homer said.

“Oh, no-just hiding to tease me.”

She held out her hand.

“We’re neighbors. I’m Maybelle Loomis.”

“Glad to know you, ma’am. I’m Homer Simpson and this is Mr. Hackett.”

Tod also shook hands with her.

“Have you been living here long?” she asked. “No. I’ve just come from the East,” Homer said.

“Oh, have you? I’ve been here ever since Mr. Loomis passed on six years ago. I’m an old settler.”

“You like it then?” Tod asked.

“Like California?” she laughed at the idea that anyone might not like it.

“Why, it’s a paradise on earth!”

“Yes,” Homer agreed gravely.

“And anyway,” she went on, “I have to live here on account of Adore.”

“Is he sick?”

“Oh, no. On account of his career. His agent calls him the biggest little attraction in Hollywood.”

She spoke so vehemently that Homer flinched.

“He’s in the movies?” Tod asked.

“I’ll say,” she snapped.

Homer tried to placate her,

“That’s very nice.”

“If it weren’t for favoritism,” she said bitterly, “he’d be a star. It ain’t talent. It’s pull. What’s Shirley Temple got that he ain’t got?” “Why, I don’t know,” Homer mumbled.

She ignored this and let out a fearful bellow.

“Adore! Adore!”

Tod had seen her kind around the studio. She was one of that army of women who drag their children from casting office to casting office and sit for hours, weeks, months, waiting for a chance to show what Junior can do. Some of them are very poor, but no matter how poor, they always manage to scrape together enough money, often by making great sacrifices, to send their children to one of the innumerable talent schools. “Adore!” she yelled once more, then laughed and became a friendly housewife again, a chubby little person with dimples in her fat cheeks and fat elbows.

“Have you any children, Mr. Simpson?” she asked.

“No,” he replied, blushing.

“You’re lucky-they’re a nuisance.”

She laughed to show that she didn’t really mean it and called her child again.

“Adore… Oh, Adore…”

Her next question surprised them both.

“Who do you follow?”

“What?” said Tod.

“I mean-in the Search for Health, along the Road of Life?”

They both gaped at her.

“I’m a raw-foodist, myself,” she said. “Dr. Pierce is our leader. You must have seen his ads-‘Know-All Pierce-All.’”

“Oh, yes,” Tod said, “you’re vegetarians.” She laughed at his ignorance. “Far from it. We’re much stricter. Vegetarians eat cooked vegetables. We eat only raw ones. Death comes from eating dead things.” Neither Tod nor Homer found anything to say. “Adore,” she began again.

“Adore…”

This time there was an answer from around the corner of the garage.

“Here I am, mama.”

A minute later, a little boy appeared dragging behind him a small sailboat on wheels. He was about eight years old, with a pale, peaked face and a large, troubled forehead. He had great staring eyes. His eyebrows had been plucked and shaped carefully. Except for his Buster Brown collar, he was dressed like a man, in long trousers, vest and jacket.

He tried to kiss his mother, but she fended him off and pulled at his clothes, straightening and arranging them with savage little tugs. “Adore,” she said sternly, “I want you to meet Mr. Simpson, our neighbor.”

Turning like a soldier at the command of a drill sergeant, he walked up to Homer and grasped his hand.

“A pleasure, sir,” he said, bowing stiffly with his heels together. “That’s the way they do it in Europe,” Mrs. Loomis beamed. “Isn’t he cuter” “What a pretty sailboat!” Homer said, trying to be friendly. Both mother and son ignored his comment. She pointed to Tod, and the child repeated his bow and heel-click. “Well, we’ve got to go,” she said. Tod watched the child, who was standing a little to one side of his mother and making faces at Homer. He rolled his eyes back in his head so that only the whites showed and twisted his lips in a snarl. Mrs. Loomis noticed Tod’s glance and turned sharply. When she saw what Adore was doing, she yanked him by the arm, jerking him clear off the ground.

“Adore!” she yelled.

To Tod she said apologetically, “He thinks he’s the Frankenstein monster.”

She picked the boy up, hugging and kissing him ardently. Then she set him down again and fixed his rumpled clothing.

“Won’t Adore sing something for us?” Tod asked. “No,” the little boy said sharply.

“Adore,” his mother scolded, “sing at once.”

“That’s all right, if he doesn’t feel like it,” Homer said. But Mrs. Loomis was determined to have him sing. She could never permit him to refuse an audience.

“Sing, Adore,” she repeated with quiet menace. “Sing ‘Mama Doan Wan’ No Peas.’”

His shoulders twitched as though they already felt the strap. He tilted his straw sailor over one eye, buttoned up his jacket and did a little strut, then began:

“Mama doan wan’ no peas,

An’ rice, an’ cocoanut oil,

Just a bottle of brandy handy all the day.

Mama doan wan’ no peas,

Mama doan wan’ no cocoanut oil.”

His singing voice was deep and rough and he used the broken groan of the blues singer quite expertly. He moved his body only a little, against rather than in time with the music. The gestures he made with his hands were extremely suggestive.

“Mama doan wan’t no gin,

Because gin do make her sin,

Mama doan wan’ no glass of gin,

Because it boun’ to make her sin,

An’ keep her hot and bothered all the day.”

He seemed to know what the words meant, or at least his body and his voice seemed to know. When he came to the final chorus, his buttocks writhed and his voice carried a top-heavy load of sexual pain. Tod and Homer applauded. Adore grabbed the string of his sailboat and circled the yard. He was imitating a tugboat. He tooted several times, then ran off.

“He’s just a baby,” Mrs. Loomis said proudly, “but he’s got loads of talent.”

Tod and Homer agreed.

She saw that he was gone again and left hurriedly. They could hear her calling in the brush back of the garage. “Adore! Adore…” “That’s a funny woman,” Tod said.

Homer sighed.

“I guess it’s hard to get a start in pictures. But Faye is awfully pretty.”

Tod agreed. She appeared a moment later in a new flower print dress and picture hat and it was his turn to sigh. She was much more than pretty. She posed, quivering and balanced, on the doorstep and looked down at the two men in the patio. She was smiling, a subtle half-smile uncontaminated by thought. She looked just born, everything moist and fresh, volatile and perfumed. Tod suddenly became very conscious of his dull, insensitive feet bound in dead skin and of his hands, sticky and thick, holding a heavy, rough felt hat.