Some Smart Ladies Happen to be of the Evening Variety

In a novel, “Butterfield 8”, written by John O’Hara, a fabulously successful prostitute named Gloria Wandrous nevertheless hated her job and the nature of it, and once in a kind of angry desperation cried out, “Command performances leave me quite cold. I’ve had more fun in the back seat of a ’39 Ford than I could ever have in the vault of the Chase Manhattan Bank.”

We thought of that line one evening earlier this week down at the Fish Fry on Arawak Cay where a group of five ladies sat in a kind of wake, except that they were more in an attitude of merriment than of mournful melancholy.

In fact they were all dressed up to the nines and knocking back Daiquiris as if Bacardi were going not simply out of The Bahamas but out of style. They were actually ladies of the evening apparently taking at least that part of the evening off.