In their big first-class seats, all of them, even tormented Bluey Kannata, looked as self-contained as rich children. They had conquered New York, and it was hard to know what that mean to them. Now they were going—composedly—to Frankfurt. There the full-color programs had already been printed up in a language Whitey Wappitji and the others had no familiarity with. The troupe were calm about that venue, too. Here, at the start of their flight, they were suffering no preperformance trembles for the sake of Frankfurt. They never seemed to hold any narrow postmortems that McCloud could see, or blame each other for mistakes on stage. They didn’t worry about the perversity or mental blinkers of critics. It was clear to McCloud now, at the close of their New York adventure, that they suffered from dreads and obsessions of their own: Whitey and the Christian Phil and the movie actor Bluey. But they lacked the sort of self-absorption artists were supposed to have. Their show business was in some ways more light, more casual, than show business itself.
