Little Casino

An attractive woman

HE ENTERS THE RESTAURANT WITH HIS mother, into the wonderful smell of the bar, just opened on Sunday early afternoon, the serious, adult smell of whiskey and bitters, lemon peel, gin and vermouth and rum; the sweet and sharp cigarette smoke from the first patrons, sitting quietly with their griefs and their hangovers and their Sunday papers, waiting patiently for the liquor to make the slow afternoon sadly bearable. He orders a Gibson, his mother a Clover Club, or is it a Jack Rose? He waits for her comments on his news, given her, abruptly, two days earlier, regarding his plans to marry, suddenly, a girl whom his mother dislikes a good deal. Not only is she a Protestant, but she is much too young, not even out of high school, so his mother insists despite the facts. The cocktails arrive, his mother takes out a pack of Herbert Tareytons and lights one with her beautiful little jewel of a Dunhill lighter, inhales and blows smoke at an angle past the little brim of her small black velvet hat. She is an attractive woman, whose terror and loathing of men has been elegantly metamorphosed, over the years, into an aloof but sharp contempt. She puts the lighter squarely on top of the cigarette pack. So, she says. Have you given any thought to this, you lummox? He looks at her and shrugs, a gesture of love, intimacy, and respect. The trouble with this girl, she says, that is, one of the troubles that I can see, is. She stops, and takes a sip of her gorgeously blushing cocktail. Is, she says, simply that she is obviously a little tramp. Do you, dear God, want another little tramp to set next to the first one? At least she was Jewish.

The restaurant was on Montague Street in Brooklyn Heights. It may well have been Armando’s. It looks like Armando’s.

The young man once accidentally saw his mother, through a half-open door, as she was dressing, and spied on her, shamed and disturbed. He has trained himself, if “trained” is the word, to think of her, on that particular day, as a woman wholly different from the woman he sits across from in the restaurant. In this way, even a hint, a breath of the incestuous may be successfully proscribed. More or less.

The Gibson was made with Beefeater gin, one of the small glories of this humdrum life.

CLOVER CLUB

Juice ½ Lemon.

2 Tsps. Grenadine.

White of 1 Egg.

1½ oz. Dry Gin.

Shake well with cracked ice and

strain into a 4 oz. cocktail glass.

JACK ROSE

1½ oz. Applejack.

Juice ½ Lime.

1 tsp. Grenadine.

Shake well with cracked ice and

strain into a 3 oz. cocktail glass.