“Ignatius! So you got yourself fired.”
“Please, Mother, I am near the breaking point.” Ignatius stuck the bottle of Dr. Nut under his moustache and drank noisily, making great sounds of s**ing and gurgling. “If you are planning now to be a harpy, I shall certainly be pushed over the brink.”
“A little job in a office and you can't hold it down. With all your education.”
“I was hated and resented,” Ignatius said, casting a hurt expression at the brown walls of the kitchen. He pulled his tongue from the mouth of the bottle with a thump and belched some Dr. Nut. “Ultimately it was all Myrna Minkoffs fault. You know how she makes trouble.”
“Myrna Minkoff? Don't gimme that foolishness, Ignatius. That girl's in New York. I know you, boy. You musta really pulled some boo-boos at that Levy Pants.”
“My excellence confused them.”
“Gimme that paper, Ignatius. We gonna take a look at them want ads.”
“Is that true?” Ignatius thundered. “Am I going to be thrown out again into the abyss? Apparently you have bowled all the charity out of your soul. I must have at least a week in bed, with service, before I shall again be whole.”
“Speaking of bed, what happened to your sheet, boy?”
“I certainly wouldn't know. Perhaps it was stolen. I have warned you about intruders.”
“You mean somebody broke into this house just to take one of your dirty sheets?”
“If you were a bit more conscientious about doing the laundry, the description of that sheet would be somewhat different.”
“Okay, hand over the paper, Ignatius.”
“Are you really going to attempt to read aloud? I doubt whether my system could bear that trauma at the moment. Anyway, I am looking at a very interesting article in the science column about mollusks.”
Mrs. Reilly snatched the paper from her son, leaving two little scraps of it in his hands.
“Mother! Is this offensive display of ill manners one of the results of your a**ociation with those bowling Sicilians?”
“Shut up, Ignatius,” his mother said, leafing compulsively toward the cla**ified section of the newspaper. “Tomorrow morning you getting on that St. Charles trolley with the birds.”
“Huh?” Ignatius asked absently. He was wondering what he could write to Myrna now. The film seemed to have been ruined, too. Explaining the disaster of the Crusade in a letter would be impossible. “What was that you said, mother of mine?”
“I said you gettin on that trolley with the birds,” Mrs. Reilly screamed.
“That sounds appropriate.”
“When you come home again, you gonna have you a job.”
“Apparently Fortuna has decided upon another downward spin.”
“What?”
“Nothing.”