TWO

THE ORIGIN OF THE WORLD

The next morning was cold and overcast and useless for printing, and I went about my morning activities in an agitated state. This was made worse around midmorning when Augie Baxter turned up at the door with his sample case and an air of obsequious bonhomie that suggested bad news. I led him into my office and sat him down, and the boy brought us coffee in china cups.

“Sales are down,” he acknowledged as I eyeballed my earnings. “Even atrocity pictures aren’t moving like they used to do. I bet we didn’t sell ten of your scalped buffalo hunter in the last six months.”

According to my statement only seventy-three dollars and thirty-five cents were owing to me for the six months covered, less than what I still owed him for views of Paris and Rome and the land of the Hottentots I’d ordered on his last visit.

“I don’t suppose I’ll be making an order then, this time.” I handed him the statement back.

“Wait.” I turned back to find him rifling the sample case. “Let me show you something before you say that.”

He handed me a single view, which I placed into the stereopticon. Pressing my eyes to the lenses I was treated to the sight of a naked woman leering at the camera, one hand demurely resting at her shoulder and the other stimulating her unusually hirsute genitalia. The look of wanton depravity on the woman’s face and the artless explicitness of the pose set this view apart from the typical nude views sold in the back rooms of saloons and cigar stores and whorehouses, or, for that matter, from the ones I’d taken years before of Maggie. I was sad at the thought of those images I’d left behind in Cottonwood and apoplectic at the notion that someone might have found them, might at this moment be pulling them from a similar sample case somewhere for under-the-counter sale to slack-jawed, masturbating yokels unworthy of her glance.

“Not interested,” I said.

“I was just showing you, is all.” He took the view back and replaced it in the case’s hidden compartment. “I sell a hell of a lot of these extra-dirty French views out of the cathouses, and if I could get a few of some local gals who don’t look like they’re about to keel over from the last stages of the clap, in some real inviting poses, I could sell even more. I’d really like to start vending them under the counter in some of the finer galleries, like yours right here.”

“Good luck,” I said. “You won’t be the first one who’s tried.”

Augie noticed the boy standing in the doorway before I did. “What do you want?” he asked with some belligerence.

Poor Lemuel cowered and shrank into the corridor, extending his hand to me. In it was an envelope. “Fellow just brought this by,” he said. “Urgent message for you, Mr. Sadlaw.”

He scurried out as I opened the envelope, which bore neither postage nor return address. Inside was a single sheet of stationery bearing the engraved flag of the Denver Bulletin, reduced to fit the page.

         Sadlaw,

         Meet me at the Charpiot Hotel at noon for luncheon.

         R. Banbury

I shoved the envelope and the letter into my desk drawer. It was a quarter past eleven. “Sorry, Augie, I’m being summoned. You’ll have to come back later.”

“Fine, I’ll head on down to Market Street and have a look at some of those whores.” His eyebrows rose and fell dementedly, and he seemed to expect me to be impressed.

“You go and have yourself a good time,” I said.

“I’ll leave you these and come back for your order tomorrow.”

I nodded as he pulled the samples and a catalogue from his case and set them on my desk, though I had no intention of making an order with so many sets of views unsold in the display cases.

AFTER INFORMING MRS. Fenster that I would not require any lunch, I descended to the street and strolled to my engagement at a leisurely pace, not particularly concerned about punctuality. The sky had remained low and dark gray, the day as cold as it had been at dawn, and I regretted not having put on a heavier coat. I arrived at the Charpiot shortly before noon and didn’t see Banbury in the dining room. I told the maître d’hôtel whom I was meeting and was informed with a disdainful sniff that Mr. Banbury took his luncheon in his private suite of rooms on the third floor.

The corridors and the staircases of the Charpiot were finely wrought, with imported carpets and flocked velvet walls, and though I was dressed with more care than usual I still felt like the ashman misdirected through the parlor. I was certain that the staff and guests I passed on the way to the suite saw me the same way, and somehow certain also that Banbury had planned this humiliation as punishment for defiling his inamorata, though I knew this was absurd, since he’d been well aware of my connection to her for some time.

The door of the suite was ornately carved like that of a church, and before I had the chance to knock it opened and a liveried servant led me to a dining room as sumptuous as the one downstairs. It was so gloomy outside that even with the curtains wide open the candles were burning, and I despaired of getting anything useful out of my afternoon sittings; Banbury waited at a small table, one eye covered with a bandage stained orange-red with blood. He had already begun to eat his soup and was mopping it up with a crust of bread as I took my seat. “Glad you could come, Bill,” he said.

“Thanks for the invitation,” I said, and started in on my soup.

“There’s no hard feelings about Priscilla, just so you know.” As if to mock the room’s baroque elegance he was in his shirtsleeves and what was left of his hair fanned out in all directions as though toweled dry and then neglected by the comb. “Not toward you, anyway.”

“I heard you two going at it when I left.” A glass of red wine stood next to one of water, which I drained. An elderly man with a waxed moustache appeared at my side and filled it again from a crystal pitcher.

He snorted and tossed the last of his morsel of bread in the remnants of the soup. “Christ, all I said to her was I hoped she wasn’t having trouble with bedsores, and the next thing I knew she was shrieking at me, said I was spying on her. I said, ‘Priscilla, dear heart, I’m not spying, this is Thursday, same day as I always come by.’ Then she’s knocked that goddamned curio cabinet of hers on the floor and everything in it’s smashed to bits, and then she’s got the goddamned fireplace poker in her hand.”

“Funny how that bedsores remark didn’t restore her equanimity.”

“Well, hell, you can’t expect me to stand there and say, ‘That’s all right, sweetheart, you go ahead and lay down for any of my chums your heart desires.’ After all I’m paying the goddamned rent on the place.” He picked the sodden bread back up and lolled it around in his mouth. “I’d be satisfied if she’d just make a pretense of hiding it from me.” He pointed to the bandaged eye. “Now how do you think I explained this to Muriel when I got home?”

“I don’t know.”

“With considerable goddamned difficulty, is how. Shit, she knows I’ve got a sweetheart somewhere, but it’s a lot easier to pretend when I don’t walk in the door with my eye gouged halfway out. I’m lucky not to have lost the goddamned thing.”

“I guess you are.” Muriel was, in fact, the owner of record of my building, having inherited the entire block from her father, a failed forty-niner who had stumbled upon a vein of silver on his way back east to rejoin his wife and daughter and take a job in his cousin’s slaughterhouse in Virginia. I had never met her, as she preferred to keep the more vulgarian of Ralph’s companions at arm’s length. “How is old Muriel?” I asked, just to be polite.

“She’s out of my hair, mostly, getting ready for a big shindig downstairs that’s going to cost me a bundle. It’s for Gertrude’s engagement, did I tell you about that?”

“You didn’t. Congratulations.”

“Well, he’s a young man from Germany, and he’s after her mother’s money, but at least she’ll be out of the house. I love her dearly but Jesus, Mary, and Joseph if she ain’t every bit as homely as my own poor Muriel.”

The soup was tasty and I was hungry, but I was preoccupied with the thought that Banbury was leading up to a proposal to alter the status quo, which for the moment mostly suited me. The waiter took our soup dishes and put down plates of what looked like bœuf bourguignon, its blackish gravy still bubbling.

“Hell, I’ve just had a bellyful. That sweet thing she sits on just ain’t worth the trouble. What I’ve been wondering is,” he said with his mouth full of the first bite of beef, huffing little breaths in and out to counteract the heat, “how’d you like to take her on full-time?”

I nearly choked on my wine at the thought. “Not much,” I said.

“Half the problem’s that goddamned laudanum, if you want to know what I think. Fact is,” he said, lowering his voice and leaning forward as if afraid Priscilla would hear, “I already got another gal set up here in town and she’s not half the trouble Cilla is.” Banbury took another bite, blowing on it first.

I placed a forkful of beef into my own mouth, taking the same precaution and scalding my palate regardless. I wondered if he expected me to keep his plans from Priscilla; I wasn’t willing to take up the responsibility of paying her rent, but I thought she should have some warning before she found her means of support removed.

“What’s funny is, I used to worry about that husband she left back in Iowa. I wondered if maybe he’d track her down and burst into that bedroom sometime and perforate me.” He brought his hand up to his bandaged eye. “And then I figured it out. Hell, he’s probably been running the other direction the whole time, worried she’s coming after him.”

“What do you suppose she’ll do without your support?” I said.

“Used to be a seamstress. She could do that again. Wouldn’t be able to keep up the way she’s living now, but she wouldn’t starve. Hell, she could make a living singing.”

“Is that a joke?”

He looked puzzled. “You haven’t heard her sing and play?”

“Never. Piano’s always been shut when I’ve been there.”

He shrugged. “Well, her voice is mighty pretty.”

The food was remarkable, and once our conversation turned away from Priscilla I much enjoyed it. Dessert was a sort of bread pudding laced with rum, followed by a very special old pale. Upon finishing Banbury rose, patting his distended abdomen with fond pride. “They serve a hell of a table here,” he said.

He walked me downstairs and out to a sidewalk teeming with ill-tempered pedestrians huddled against the cold.

“This gal I got now, she’s from the South, a real old-fashioned belle. She orders me around and makes faces and if she doesn’t get her way, I don’t get mine, if you know what I mean.”

“That’s the way they are, I understand.”

“The damnedest thing is, I like it. She hardly even makes an affectation of liking me, and yet I come back.” He coughed into his fist, trying hard to get something out of his throat. “Well, I sure wish you’d think this over. I’d hate like hell to see Priscilla thrown out onto the street.”

“You’ll keep paying the rent for a few months, won’t you? Until she can find something?”

He looked at me as if I were insane. “Christ, supporting three women in three different houses is about to put me in the goddamn alms house.” He walked away, shaking his head, and gave a little wave without looking back.

HAVING A LITTLE time to spare I walked blocks out of my way with my hands in my coat pockets, prodding with my tongue a little flap of skin that dangled, heat-shredded, from the roof of my mouth. At Nineteenth Street I turned right and headed to Market Street, thinking I might find Augie there. Since one or more of my afternoon sittings seemed likely to cancel on me I thought I might as well conduct my business with him and be done with it, but walking up the street I was importuned a dozen times without seeing any trace of him.

One of these unfortunates approached me with a smile of recognition on her face. “Well, it’s old Sean Cooney from Boston, ain’t it? It’s me, Mary Dolan, from up the street.” Her face was worn by drink and laudanum and hard luck, but there was nonetheless a sweet softness to her aspect that suggested a kindly soul; in easier circumstances and with better dentition she would have been pretty. “I always liked you better than your brother; he’s got a mean streak like your old man did.”

“I’m not him,” I said.

“The hell you ain’t. What say you and me go back there to Boston for that centennial celebration? This Denver business ain’t working so good for me as I’d imagined it would.”

“I’m not him, and the centennial was last year besides.”

“Like hell it was.”

“1776 plus one hundred equals 1876. Two years ago.”

“The hell you say.”

“It’s a fact. Don’t you remember the Fourth of July? All the fireworks and the parade?”

“Go on with you, they have those every year on the Fourth of July!”

“So they do,” I said, and resumed walking.

She followed me. “Say, Seanny. Remember that milliner’s I worked for? Mrs. So-and-So? You think she’d take me back on?”

She wasn’t going to accept the fact that I wasn’t Sean Cooney, and I hesitated to give life-altering counsel to a stranger, but clearly Denver wasn’t doing her any favors. “I’d say if you want to go back to Boston, though, you ought to give it a try.” Satisfied, she nodded and turned away from me, and I made my escape.

I NEXT MADE a detour in the direction of picturesque Hop Alley, thinking I might pick up the day’s laundry and save Mrs. Fenster a trip. I had no idea which of the dozen or more launderers was hers, however, and I walked past without stopping to check any of them. The signage on the street was in both English and Chinese, and I noted three more or less respectable-looking white ladies knock, giggling, at the door of one particular business with no outward identification but a painted number 531 and a vertical quartet of Chinese characters. The man who answered maintained his poker face but let them in, glancing momentarily at me as though daring me to object. I had nothing against what they were up to, though; to my way of thinking it was on par with Priscilla’s laudanum-taking, and I reminded myself to stop at the pharmacist’s to pick up a replacement bottle for my next visit to Golden.

AUGIE DIDN’T SHOW up that afternoon, and neither did two of three scheduled sitters, and I sent the third home for lack of illumination. I used the freed-up time to go over my books and, later, to examine Augie’s samples and catalogues. I was already overstocked on most subjects: the War, Geography, the Sciences, Great Personalities, and Comic Scenes, and browsing through the catalogue I saw at first nothing listed that inspired me to add to the inventory. Then my eye stopped at a new listing:

OGDEN & GLEASON, PHOTOGRAPHERS, COTTONWOOD, KANS.

This came as a shock, seeing my own former moniker and hometown in print. I was pleased nonetheless to note that young Gleason had kept the business going. The set of pictures advertised was titled “Scenes of the Former Osage Territory,” described merely as “a series of artistically conceived views of the recently tamed wilderness, incl. a two-headed goat and a white buffalo calf, and the murder cabin belonging to the notorious Benders.”

The day after Maggie and I escaped from Cottonwood I felt the first vague pangs of regret for the vanished opportunity to make a stereographic record of the Bender house and property for publication; I was thus gratified to see that young Gleason had seized it, doubly so that he’d left my name on the business, since taking it off the shingle would doubtless have pleased many in town. I marked down an order for a set.

The sun never showed itself that afternoon, and I sat in the studio and read until six. Mrs. Fenster had sent the boy out for a slab of bacon, and when he returned with it she began cooking a portion of it up with some beans. I withdrew to the studio to resume my reading, and a few minutes later I returned to the kitchen to find Lemuel still there, to the great annoyance of his aunt.

“Says he’s hungry,” she said, as if the claim were the height of absurdity.

“Didn’t you feed him at noon?”

She drew herself up to her full five feet. “You said there was to be no luncheon.”

“Better give him some bacon and beans, then.” The boy had already taken his place at table, and after serving me my portion and filling a plate for herself Mrs. Fenster dipped her ladle into the cook pot with exaggerated reluctance and loaded a plate for him.

I wasn’t overly hungry owing to the rich meal I’d taken at midday, and Mrs. Fenster ate in her usual dainty manner, but the boy fed as though he hadn’t eaten a morsel in days. When I commented benignly on the urgency of his eating he stopped, wide-eyed, for a moment.

“Didn’t mean nothing. Sorry.” He put his fork down.

“Why’d you stop? Go on, eat. Your aunt’ll fix up some more if your belly’s as empty as that.”

After a cautious moment he decided I wasn’t japing and set about eating again. I had the old woman fry a bit more bacon, and she added it with some more brown, crusty beans to his plate. He tore into that with the same breathtaking gusto as he had his first portion, and the gluttonous spectacle had begun to tickle me.

“Care for a third helping?”

He nodded warily, and she fried him still more bacon. There was another plate’s worth of beans in the pot, too, and he finished that off as well before letting loose with a belch that would have shocked a muleskinner. After shooting a worried glance at Mrs. Fenster he grinned sheepishly at my laughter, and nearly an hour after his usual departure time he went out the door for home. I sat up for a while, reading and ruminating on the world of separation between a resourceful farm boy like Horace Gleason, capable of replacing me completely at a technically demanding craft after but a few months training, and a dull city boy like poor Lemuel, incapable even of mustering the nerve to trouble his own aunt for a meal that he was due as a condition of his employment.

THE NEXT MORNING was sunny, and I busied myself on the rooftop printing what I should have done the day before. At eleven o’clock I had to go downstairs and wait for Augie Baxter myself, since Lemuel hadn’t come in that morning. Though he’d never before failed to arrive on time I was more angry than concerned, having had to perform most of the lad’s chores in addition to my own. When Augie arrived I was in an unusually foul temper; as I’d anticipated he complained bitterly at my puny order and then proceeded to criticize the one new addition to it.

“We just added them back in January. Pretty pictures, to be sure, the fellow’s got a sharp eye. There’s not much remarkable about that set, though.”

“I see there’s a view of the Bender cabin,” I said with as much casual indifference as I could manage.

“Well, a few years ago we were selling a full set of those, but they were a disappointment. Just one skeleton was all you could see, and a few pictures of buildings and a bunch of yahoos standing in front of some holes in the ground and some trees on fire. What it really needed is a view of them Benders hung from a tree, then you’d have something you could sell.”

I thought of something just then: the nude views I’d taken of Maggie, the ones I’d had to leave behind in Cottonwood. “This fellow Gleason, he doesn’t handle any views of naked ladies, does he?”

“Naw, not that I seen, anyway. I think he’s got religion. And speaking of naked ladies, you missed yourself a free roll in the hay yesternoon.” He leaned back in his armchair, looking quite pleased with himself.

After Augie left I sat alone in the gallery and imagined discreetly contacting Horace Gleason and seeing if he had those views of Maggie. If I couldn’t trust young Gleason, who’d been upstanding enough to keep my name on his business after my disgrace, whom could I trust?

My answer came quickly and harshly; I was prosperous, well-respected, and suspected of nothing, after years of fear and penury. Wagering my liberty, my neck, and my hard-won money on Gleason’s good nature was out of the question, no matter how badly I wanted those pictures back. I would continue to call them forth, imperfect, from memory, and be glad I could do that.

It was nearly noon, and I hadn’t yet read the morning newspapers, and I thought I’d seek out the News to read with my midday meal. I put on my hat and started to leave, and as I started down the steps the front door opened to reveal my young assistant standing in the center of its frame, appearing even smaller than usual. My first inclination, having spent most of the morning angry with him, was to yell, but his face was so pallid and drawn I stopped myself before a sound came out. He held the door open with his left leg instead of his hand, which dangled strangely at his side, and over his right shoulder he carried a bindle tied to the end of a stick. Without undue harshness I asked what had kept him.

“Sorry, Mister,” he said, and his voice broke on the first syllable. “I think I’ll be having to quit on account of my arm.” It broke again on “arm.”

“What’s the matter with your arm?” I asked, and I took hold of the door and motioned him inside.

“It’s pretty sore,” he said when we got to the top of the stairs. It certainly looked that way from where I stood.

“How’d that happen?”

He looked down at the parquet. “It was the smell’s what it was.”

“What smell?” I asked, exasperated at his lack of eloquence.

“The farting. My old man got tired of it after a while and he cracked me a couple good ones.”

“Jesus. Your pa did that over a little gas?”

“It was a lot of gas,” he said.

I called for Mrs. Fenster and she waddled in carrying a rag. She scowled at the sight of the boy, as though his unreliability reflected poorly on her.

“The lad’s hurt his arm,” I said.

She sniffed and threw her rag over her shoulder and roughly tugged his sleeve upward. “You’re long past due for your bathing, young man,” she said, and if she was about to add some other insulting comment, she stopped at the sight of his arm, which displayed a nascent rainbow of skin tones from red to black, with orange predominating, the yellows and purples yet to add themselves to the ghastly palette.

“Lay that bindle down there and we’ll go see Ernie Stickhammer down the street.” I beckoned him to follow me down the stairs.

“Sawbones costs money,” Mrs. Fenster yelled from the top of the stairs, as though fearing that any moment I might come to my senses and leave her or the boy responsible for Stickhammer’s fee.

“Don’t trouble yourself, Mrs. Fenster,” I called up to her. “Stickhammer’s the cheapest doctor in Colorado.”

ERNIE STICKHAMMER WAS an unmarried native of Montreal, Canada, and lived in a small room in the back of his office, which occupied three rooms six doors down the street from the gallery, up a comically narrow flight of stairs.

“You sure about seeing the doc?” the boy asked, as though I had suggested an audience with the president or the pope of Rome and not a dipsomaniac provincial sawbones. We waited in a small antechamber for him to be done with another patient, and after a few minutes Stickhammer came out in his shirtsleeves in the company of a man with a nose the size of a gherkin, the texture of a cauliflower, and the queasy purplish gray hue of an eggplant. The man left without any words exchanged between him and the doctor, who shook his head sadly after him.

“And what have we here?”

The doctor sported blond whiskers down to his chin, and his face was such a bright pink Lemuel couldn’t help staring at it as he led the boy into the consultation room and helped him up onto a table. Stickhammer’s notice had already been drawn to the boy’s mangled limb, and he knelt to examine it, gingerly pulling the worn sleeve away without causing the boy undue pain.

“My helper’s busted his arm.” I myself wouldn’t have brought any medical problem as challenging as the previous patient’s enlarged nose to Stickhammer, but he’d do for setting a broken arm.

The light of day shining through the window of the room showed to better advantage the discolored, traumatized flesh that extended from shoulder to elbow. The arm was scarred with old wounds as well, more or less healed, including what looked like a bad burn at the shoulder, and I hated to think what the rest of him looked like uncovered. “Sweet Christ almighty.” Stickhammer looked up at me. “You didn’t do this to him, did you?”

“Hell, no. His old man did it.”

“He did, eh? How old are you, lad?”

“Eighteen,” Lemuel said after a moment’s thought, surprising the doctor and me both. I’d have taken him for thirteen or so.

“And why’d the old boy find it necessary to crack your arm this way?”

“Got the farts pretty awful and couldn’t quit.”

Stickhammer nodded, as though that were a common cause of such injuries. “All right, let’s get this old shirt off of you, boy.”

At that I turned to leave. “How much to set it, Ernie?”

“Two-fifty,” he said, and, smarting a bit myself, I left two silver dollars and a half on his desk and told the boy to come back over when he was all done. As I descended the front staircase I winced at the sound of the boy crying out in pain at the shirt’s removal.

A ROAST CHICKEN was ready when I returned to the studio, and by the time Mrs. Fenster and I had done eating the boy had returned with his newly splinted arm in a canvas sling, the empty sleeve of his ragged shirt hanging, slit in half, at his side.

“Pay you back,” he said as he started eating, though we all knew he couldn’t reasonably do so any time soon.

“You can work it off,” I said. “It’s a good thing he busted the left and not the right.”

He gaped at me, slack-jawed, then down at his arm as though trying to remember what had happened to it, then back up at me. “Can’t work. Arm’s broke.”

“That’s why nature gave you two of them. There’s plenty of one-armed men my age who’ve been working for a living since the war.”

He nodded, not understanding my point but eager to please.

“All right, then, why don’t you start preparing the plates for the one o’clock sitting,” I said.

“Yes, sir,” he said, and he started for the darkroom, very slowly.

“Did Stickhammer give you something for that pain?” I asked, suddenly afraid I would have to do all the afternoon’s work myself after all.

“How do you mean?”

“Did he give you a drink to make the hurting stop?”

“Yes, sir,” he said in a somnambulist’s molasses-thick murmur. I should have thought to tell Stickhammer not to dope him up, but I hadn’t, and for my neglect I found myself saddled with a one-armed, opiated imbecile for a helper.

I had to assist him with all his tasks that afternoon, right down to mixing up the collodion, and by day’s end I despaired of his ever relearning the work one-handed. At the end of the day Mrs. Fenster called me aside.

“Where’s the boy to stay tonight?” she asked.

“At home,” I said, seeing no reason he shouldn’t, as long as he wasn’t farting.

“At home with that man what did that to him?” she said. “No thank you, Mr. Sadlaw. Here’s the place for him. I’ll fix him up a bed in the studio and unmake it first thing in the morning. You won’t even know he’s here.”

“Because he won’t be.” I got quite enough of Lemuel in the daytime, and the truth was that Mrs. Fenster was one too many members of my household already.

“He’ll stay for the time being. Till I can get something else arranged.”

Her impertinence was as unusual as the concern she showed the boy, who most days annoyed her more than he did me, and I was so surprised I acquiesced. She set about preparing a makeshift bed for him in the studio on the canapé. He stared at the bed, transfixed, nodding slightly as she explained to him the overnight rules of the house, rules she was making up as she did so, as none of them applied to me or her. He was still contemplating the bed with a long strand of drool hanging from his lower lip and a dullness to his eye when I left them.

THE STRAINS OF the afternoon’s unassisted labors called for release. My back and shoulders were as stiff and sore as if I had spent the day hammering railroad spikes, and my anger and frustration, with no legitimate target but a half-crippled idiot, were ready to overflow. I stepped out onto the street with no precise idea of where I would end the evening, but when I chose a direction it was toward the stables on the street behind. I knew what it would take to restore my peace of mind, at least for the night.

AS I HAD on several previous occasions stepping up to Priscilla’s front door, I spied one of her neighbors scowling through her front parlor window at me. She was young and rather pretty, and on several occasions I had seen her with children of varying ages. Her expression was so vituperative I laughed out loud, and if not for the pane of glass between us she might have spat at me. She looked like she did it often enough to be good at it, and might have hit me even at that distance.

When the door opened Priscilla eyed me with only slightly more friendliness than her neighbor. It was well past the hour at which she stopped accepting unannounced callers, but I hoped she might break her rule this once. “Look what the wind blew over,” she said.

“I wondered if you might be free to dine with me,” I said.

“I’ve already eaten, like any normal person has by this hour. Why don’t you come in, anyhow.”

As we lay there a while later, she said, “Someone told me you and Ralph dined together. So you needn’t worry about concealing it.”

For a moment I wondered if her informant was the waiter, but he had overheard the entire exchange, and if he were betraying confidences he surely wouldn’t have stopped there. “That’s true,” I said, feeling a little glum and disloyal for not revealing to her the nature of my conversation with Banbury. The opportunities open to a woman her age weren’t many or attractive, and the odds of finding another patron as generous as Banbury were slim, regardless of her beauty or the advanced level of her intimate skills; youth was generally the chief attribute a rich old buzzard wanted hanging from his arm, even when its possessor was only halfway to pretty. Priscilla had been a dressmaker back in Iowa, though, and I supposed she might still make a living at that somewhere.

“I hope you weren’t negotiating for my favors without my participation,” she said, rolling slightly toward me to afford a better view of her lovely sex, its labia dark and glistening, a microscopically thin strand of semen suspended delicately across the hairy canopy just above it. The faint odor of recent copulation intoxicated me at that moment like morphine; there wasn’t much I would have refused her then, and I hoped she wouldn’t press for too many details. “We talked about you only in context of your grace and beauty.”

She laughed and was quiet for a moment as she rolled back against the mattress and rolled toward me, noting my gaze fixed on l’origine du monde. “And how are you faring, Mr. Sadlaw, generally?”

“I’m too busy lately, having as I do only half an assistant.” I described to her the circumstances of Lemuel’s injury, to her anger and indignation. I reminded her that she didn’t even know the boy, which placated her not at all.

She rose up and leaned on her arm so that her breasts hung down slantways, their nipples still rosy and swollen. “Charges should be brought.”

“I don’t know that they could, under the circumstances. I guess a father’s got the right to punish his own son. Anyway, I don’t know that the boy’d testify against his pa like that.”

“Then you should do it. He’s your employee, after all, and your trade will suffer for it. Surely the police would understand that. Ralph has plenty of contacts among the police.”

I just nodded. Her righteous vehemence aroused me, and her too, judging by the ardor with which she responded to the pressure of my lips against hers. Soon I was astride her again, and this one was so long in extinguishing itself that I asked to stay the night, which I’d never done there before; she turned me down flat, for the sake of the neighbors, who might think the less of her for it.