The Ennet House living room: Day and Gately
Past Minty, down at the dining-room table’s end, Burt F.S.’s still coughing, still hunched over, his face a dusky purple, and Nell G. is behind him pounding him on the back so that it keeps sending him forward over his ashtray, and he’s waving one stump vaguely over his shoulder to try and signal her to quit.
Context
The smoking's sequel four pages on: a stump doing the work of a hand — the gesture legible, the help unstoppable — the body's limits and the House's clumsy solicitude in one tableau.