(2 of 2)
Cross-connecting links are provided by a few natural ditches, seepage, floods, more often by artificial ditches of Author Rice's own digging. Thus Christopher's chauffeur is also part owner of a swanky brothel, which gives part-time employment to a Coleman board member's under-financed debutante daughter, who confides casually in Corinne's daughter, who marries Christopher's rising young secretary. In Professor Coleman's case the tributaries and social cross-connections become really complicated. Example: Gay's ex-fiancée becomes the lover of his brother-in-law who, after being ruined by Christopher, is lost on a round-the-world flight with an ugly female novelist, who socks Cinema Idol Perry Kane, who is murdered by Greg when he discovers Kane to be the lover of his gold-digging wife, whom Gay first sees in a sexy performance at a night club where he is slumming with his student sweetheart Judy and his wisecracking friend from Hollywood, whose frustrated sister is a Long Island City slum schoolteacher, her worst pupil being involved in a holdup shooting of the father of Professor Gay's secretary Shirley Livingston (born Lefkowitz), whose family lives with humorous, warm Jewishness on Washington Heights.
In the bay where these streams discharge their mushy load of dead cats, soggy newsprint, an occasional corpse and other social sewage is no place, warns Author Rice, for healthy bathing. But common readers will likely take his melodrama and let his moral go—like street Arabs who will not give up swimming in contaminated waters because thus far they have caught nothing more serious than an occasional case of itch.