Comfort Station

4:00 P.M

Lance Cavendish strode westward on 42nd Street, eyes flashing in his dark-hued face as he surveyed the scene. Rain rained, drenching the already-drenched city, but Lance was well protected within his Bill Blass raincoat and his Italia boots. His Afro hairdo, sculptured in the shape of a flamingo standing on one foot, was tucked away protectively under his Christian Dior hat, and his sensitive hands were protected by buff gloves from Countess Mara.

Like most Americans of African descent, Lance Cavendish was a Renaissance man, whose cool humor and good competence were a legend where’er he would wander. Having finished the architectural plans for the new Black Studies Center at Yeshiva University earlier than anticipated, Lance had taken time out from his busy schedule to present to the New York Public Library the original manuscript sheet music of his “Separate But Equal Cantata,” a defense of community control of neighborhood schools from which the pupils have been bussed, and was now on his way to the West Side Airlines Terminal, whence he would delimousine and deplane for Washington, D.C., to return to his seat in Congress, where he had a vital speech to deliver on offshore fishing rights before hastening off yet once more; he was to open in Las Vegas’ Sahara Hotel in just three days and was still to decide whether to appear as a singer or a comedian.

Now, striding westward on 42nd Street, humming his cantata while mentally composing a sonnet to the memory of Leadbelly, Lance Cavendish observed the rain splashing onto the sidewalk, running waterily in the gutter, spattering on the passing traffic, dribbling down the front of his own raincoat, and an expression of inner unease touched his handsome brown face. Looking about, he spied ahead through the splashing rain the stony contours of the Bryant Park Comfort Station, and his level amused eyes lit up in an expression of anticipatory relief. His stride increased in length, and purposefulness, and his eyes fairly sparkled.

But then, as the Comfort Station came closer, the expression in Lance Cavendish’s clear-seeing eyes grew more doubtful. Can it be? those piercing eyes seemed to say.

Lance Cavendish came to a stop on the sidewalk in front of the building. His keen vision observed the oval window in the street side wall, observed the entrance over on the right, even observed the statue up in Bryant Park behind the Comfort Station: a green-garbed green man in a frock coat, leaning on a book on a pedestal, holding what appears to be a bag of peanuts in his hands.

(Had Lance Cavendish looked carefully at the north face of this statue’s base, he would have seen the following inscription:

And had he, further, looked carefully at the inscription on the south face of the base, Lance Cavendish would have discovered that the person represented hereon was none other than the far-seeing William Earl Dodge, beloved of millions. Lance Cavendish didn’t look, however; he was otherwise engaged.)

After having fully observed the street side of the Bryant Park Comfort Station, Lance Cavendish strode to the park entrance just to the right of the Comfort Station and slowly but stridingly made a complete circuit of the building, going all the way around it and then coming all the way back around again in the opposite direction, until once more he was standing on the sidewalk in front of the cold gray building.

There was no entrance for him.

Lance Cavendish shuffled away.