"Did he tell you that?"
"He ain't had to. But I know it. I can feel it."
Mamie stood up and put her arm about Dulcy. Both of them were trembling.
"We got to stop him somehow, child."
Dulcy twisted about to face the mirror again, as though seeking courage from her looks. She opened her pink straw handbag and began repairing her make-up. Her hand trembled as she painted her mouth.
"I don't know how to stop him," she said when she'd finished. "Without my dropping dead."
Mamie took her arm from about Dulcy's waist and wrung her hands involuntarily.
"Lord, I wish Val would hurry up and get here."
Dulcy glanced at her wrist watch.
"It's already four-twenty-five. Johnny ought to be here now himself." After a moment she added, "I don't know what's keeping Val."
3
Someone began hammering loudly on the door.
The sound was scarcely heard above the din inside the room.
" Open the door! " a voice screamed.
It was so loud that even Dulcy and Mamie heard it through the locked bathroom door.
"Wonder who that can be," Mamie said.
"It sure ain't neither Johnny or Val making all that fuss," Dulcy replied.
"Probably some drunk."
One of the drunks already on the inside said in a minstrel man's voice, "Open de do', Richard."
That was the title of a popular song in Harlem that had originated with two blackface comedians on the Apollo theatre stage doing a skit about a colored brother coming home drunk and trying to get Richard to let him into the house.
The other drunks on the inside laughed.
Alamena had just stepped into the kitchen. "See who's at the door," she said to Baby Sis.
Baby Sis looked up from her chore of washing dishes and said sulkily, "All these drunks make me sick."