and cupolas to the frames of its basement-level windows the house was unrelievedly pink. When I first saw the place I was instantly reminded of the façade of some back-lot castle left over from the MGM movie version of The Wizard of Oz. The interior also was pink. The floors, walls, ceilings and even most of the furniture of each hallway and room varied slightly in hue--due to an uneven paint job--from the tender rosé of fresh lox to a more aggressive bubble-gum coral, but everywhere there was pink, pink admitting rivalry from no other color, so that after only a few minutes contemplating my prospective room under the proud eye of Mrs. Zimmerman, I felt at first amused--it was a cupid's bower in which one could only barely restrain raucous laughter--and then really grimly trapped, as if I were in a Barricini candy store or the infants' department at Gimbels. "I know, you're thinking about the pink," Mrs. Zimmerman had said, "everybody does. But then it gets you. It wears on you--nice, really nice that is, I mean. Pretty soon, most people they don't want no other color." Without my questioning, she added that her husband, Sol--her late husband--had lucked into a fantastic bargain in the form of several hundred gallons of Navy surplus paint, used for that-- "you know"--and halted, finger quizzically laid aside her porous spatulate nose. "Camouflage?" I ventured. To which she replied, "Yeah, that's it. I guess they didn't have much use for pink on those boats." She said that Sol had painted the house himself. Yetta was squat and expansive, sixty or thereabouts, with a slightly mongoloid cast to her cheerful features that gave her the look of a beaming Buddha. That day I had been persuaded almost at once. First, it was cheap. Then, pink or not, the room she showed me on the ground floor was agreeably spacious, airy, sun-filled, and clean as a Dutch parlor. Furthermore, it possessed the luxury of a kitchenette and a small private bathroom in which the toilet and tub appeared almost jarringlywhite against the prevailing peppermint. I found the privacy itself seduction enough, but there was also a bidet, which lent a risqué note and, electrically, unconscionably stirred my expectations. I also was greatly taken by Mrs. Zimmerman's overview of her establishment, which she expounded as she led me around the premises. "I call this place Yetta's Liberty Hall," she said, every now and then giving me a nudge. "What I like to see is my tenants enjoy life. They're usually young people, my tenants, and I like to see them enjoy life. Not that I don't gotta have rules." She lifted the pudgy nub of a forefinger and began to tick them off. "Rule number one: no playing the radio after eleven o'clock. Rule number two: you gotta turn off all lights when you leave the room, I got no need to pay extra to Con Edison. Rule three: positively no smoking in bed, you get caught smoking in bed--out. My late husband, Sol, had a cousin burned himself up that way, plus a whole house. Rule number four: full week's payment due every Friday. End of the rules! Everything else is Yetta's Liberty Hall. Like what I mean is, this place is for grownups. Understand, I'm running no brothel, but you wanta have a girl in your room once in a while, have a girl in your room. You be a gentleman and quiet and have her out of there at a reasonable hour, you'll have no quarrel with Yetta about a girl in your room. And the same thing goes for the young ladies in my house, if they want to entertain a boyfriend now and then. What's good for the gander is good for the goose, I say, and if there's one thing I hate, it's hypocrisy." This extraordinary broad-mindedness--deriving from what I could only assume was an Old World appreciation of volupté--put the final seal on my decision to move to Yetta Zimmerman's, despite the all too problematical nature of the free hand I had been given. Where would I get a girl? I wondered. Then I was suddenly furious at myself for my lack of
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