Slow Sculpture Read Online Free PDF

too, just in case. He brought them back, hesitated, and then poured the second cup. He put a spoon in the saucer, and with sudden shyness pushed it and the milk toward the other man. “Hey!”
    “What?” Halvorsen said in the same dead, flat tone, and “Oh. Oh! Thanks, O’Banion, thanks very I’m sorry.” Suddenly he laughed forcefully and without mirth. He covered his eyes and said plaintively, “What’s the
matter
with me?”
    It was a question neither could answer, and they sat sipping coffee uncomfortably, a man who didn’t know how to unburden himself and a man who had never taken up another’s burden. Into this tableau walked Mary Haunt. She had on a startling yellow hostess gown and had a magazine tucked under her arm. She threw one swift gaze around the room and curled her lip.
    “Grand Central Station,” she growled and walked out.
    O’Banion’s anger came as a great relief to him at just that moment; he was almost grateful to the girl. “One of these days someone’s going to grab that kid by the scruff of the neck and housebreak her,” he snorted.
    Halvorsen found a voice, too, and probably was as grateful for the change in focus. “It won’t last,” he said.
    “What do you mean?”
    “I mean she can’t go on that way much longer,” said Halvorsen thoughtfully. He paused and closed his eyes; O’Banion could see him pulling himself hand over hand out of his personal swamp, moving to dry ground, high ground, where he could look with familiarity at a real world again. When he opened his eyes he gave O’Banion a strange little smile and said, as if in parenthesis, “Thanks for the coffee, O’Banion,” and went on: “She’s waiting for the Big Break. She thinks she deserves it and that it will come to her if she only waits. She really believes that. You’ve heard of high-school kids who perch on drugstore stools hoping for a movie scout to come along and discover them. That’s harmless as long as they do it an hour or two a day. But Mary Haunt does it every minute she’s out of this house. None of us here could help her, so she treats us the way anyone treats useless things. But you ought to see her down at the station.”
    “What station?”
    “She types continuities at the radio station,” said Halvorsen. “From what I hear, she’s not very good, but on the other hand they don’t pay her much money, so nobody kicks. But to her a radio station is the edge of the world she wants to crash—it starts there and goes to TV and to the movies. I’ll bet you anything you like she has a scene all rehearsed in her mind, where a big producer or director stops here and drops in at the radio station to see someone, and
bang!
our Mary’s a starlet being groomed for the top.”
    “She’d better learn some manners,” grumbled O’Banion.
    “Oh, she’s got manners when she thinks they’ll do her some good.”
    “Why doesn’t she use them on you, for example?”
    “Me?”
    “Yes. Don’t you get people better jobs, that sort of thing?”
    “I see a lot of people, a lot of different kinds of people,” said Halvorsen, “but they have one thing in common: they aren’t sure what they want to do, to be.” He pointed his spoon at the doorway. “She is. She may be wrong, but she’s certain.”
    “Well, what about Sue Martin?” said O’Banion. He pursued the subject quickly, almost thoughtlessly, because of a vague feeling that if he didn’t, Halvorsen would slip back into that uncomfortable introspective silence. “Surely there’s a lot about show business Mary Haunt could learn from her.”
    Halvorsen gave the nearest thing yet to a grin and reached for the coffeepot. “Mrs. Martin’s a nightclub entertainer,” he said “and as far as Mary Haunt’s concerned, night clubs are slums.”
    O’Banion blushed violently and cursed himself for it. “Why that little—no background, no—no—how could
she
look down on … I mean, she’s a little
nobody!
” Conscious that he