Cheyney Fox Read Online Free PDF

men watched her walk barefoot over to one of the several stacks of paintings leaning against the walls waiting to be hung. She began looking through them. So much work yet to be done, two more rooms without a painting on the walls. Max and Morris looked at each other and then decided to do something about Cheyney Fox.
    “How would you like to catch pneumonia instead of opening an art gallery? ’Cause that’s what you’re gonna do, standing barefoot in a damp blouse and your underwear,” announced Max.
    She looked down in surprise at her silk-and-lace slip. “Oh, I got so carried away I forgot it was my lingerie you’d just illuminated.”
    “Look, don’t blush for us,” said Morris. “You’re decent enough. You wouldn’t believe the things we’ve seen, the chances we’ve had with some of our customers.”
    “The chances we’ve taken,” bubbled Max. A twinkle in his eye, a faint smile of remembrance on his lips.
    Morris poked him in the ribs and gave him a disapproving look. Cheyney sneezed, but she had wanted to laugh. The brothers did a takeover. Each an arm to march her up the stairs, picking up her discarded clothing and handbag en route.
    “It always begins with a sneeze,” said Max.
    “Or a cough,” Morris confirmed.
    “You can’t afford it. Pneumonia,” said Max.
    “No, not pneumonia,
and
the Abrams brothers.” That was Morris.
    “So, since you got the Abrams brothers’ bill to pick up, you’d better take a hot bath, a schnapps, and go to bed.”
    “Hey, fellas, it’s only four o’clock,” she managed to get in.
    Morris ignored four o’clock, “A schnapps and hot tea is better.”
    Max didn’t. “So is there some law says you can’t go to bed at four o’clock in the afternoon? I never heard of such a law. You, Morris?”
    “Not me.”
    “Guys, guys, I only sneezed once. You’ll be prescribing chicken soup next.”
    “And why not? It’s the best medicine. The other day I heard somebody say, ‘If I just had some Jewish penicillin, I could shake this cold in a day.’ ‘Jewish penicillin?’ I asked. ‘Chicken soup,’ I got told.”
    The brothers beamed. Max and Morris Abrams, Master Electricians, came over as a pair of vaudeville comics who took turns at playing the straight man in their act. Burlesque rejects, borscht-belt comedians, working their way through the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York, their dream to play the Concorde Hotel. Cheyney gave in because she knew they never would. She allowed them to take over.
    The upper hall was stacked with paintings. The trio walked through it to the first-floor room overlooking the garden. Max found two rheostats on the wall and turned them to maximum power. The spot and flood lights played dramatically on the stark white walls. The room was architectural perfection. A double cube, with all the impact of that classical proportion: cold, empty, and vast. The thick, sunflower-yellow carpet was like the masterly stroke of an artist’s brush.
    Cheyney was impressed. Against all advice, she had insisted it would work, and it did. She had taken a quantum leap in choosing that color. But then, that was Cheyney: always aiming outward in time and space. In fact, Cheyney acted always from instinct and near-certainty. She was a young woman who did not lightly take a chance.
    The room was an artistic powerhouse even without its paintings.It was supercharged with an ethereal energy that pricked the senses, and the memory.
    Hans Hofmann, his house, his paintings, Provincetown, Massachusetts, several years before. Trashy, ramshackle Provincetown. A seaside village, quasi town, of gray, two-story, fishing-shack-like houses teetering over the water, with only slivers of space between them, along the crescent-shaped bay-side of its long, narrow one-way main street, and its weatherworn wooden houses stretching back into the narrow lanes of the town. Only Provincetown, of all of the artists’ summer colonies, had that cheap, honky-tonk,