Hop Alley by Scott Phillips Read Free Book Online Page B

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