ABSTRACT
No place better realizes Brad Allen's juvenile dream of grown-up space than the piano bar: where he produces so many signs of adultness that one would almost think he is suffering from a delusion that (despite his frequent patronage or his manifest majority) there may even arise some difficulty about his right to be there. The activity of singing—reinforced by the anonymity of membership in a chorus—retracts him deep into a womb where what may be called his social physiognomy disappears along with every trace of his usual busy campaign to promote this or that of its aspects, and whence he seems as ageless in the self-portraits. During the course of singing, for no reason he would ever be capable of giving, sudden tears drop from his abstracted eyes, or he catches his breath in the middle of a line just as though he were heaving a sob, or practically gasping for life.
