Bitter Bronx Read Online Free Page B

piece.”
    Her face softened. She didn’t have the same hard curl at the edge of her mouth. Her eyes bled the viscous color of tears.
    â€œBut you never wrote me once. You had my address. You didn’t even send me a postcard from Arkansas. I had to have my revenge.”
    â€œWait a minute,” Mr. Hugo said. “This is taking a bad turn.”
    And now she wheeled her aluminum throne toward her father with a cold fury.
    â€œStay out of it, Papa.”
    They had pears in white wine, with a piece of fruitcake. Mr. Hugo didn’t look up from his plate.
    â€œCarl, I’ve only been with one man in my life, and that’s you.”
    The slice of fruitcake crumbled in Howell’s hand.
    â€œI’m going crazy,” the old man said, banging his temples with his fists.
    â€œCarl,” she sang, “should I tell you a secret? He pays his own daughter to hug him at night. He can’t bear to be alone. I wouldn’t let him touch me with those claws of his. I wouldn’t let him have a single kiss.”
    She prepared the cups of demitasse. Meanwhile, her father began to shiver and cry. The little duchess tossed a tiny silver spoon at him and he stopped whimpering, but Howell bit right into the lip of his demitasse cup. He’d learned to chisel from these two. They were his teachers. He’d gone on the road with their sounds and smells inside him. His elocution had come from the little duchess, and his dancing swagger from this Smilin’ Jack of the West Bronx. He couldn’t stay at the Lorelei, or he would be sucked into this team of chiselers. They would swallow him alive.
    He folded his napkin and set it on the table, as a child might do. And then he danced out of that apartment-castle on the balls of his feet. They were so occupied in the business of themselves that they didn’t even know he was gone.
    Howell left his fire-sale furniture for the super. He’d never even signed a lease. Perhaps nobody signed leases at the Lorelei. He had his passport and his bankbooks in the back pocket of his pants. Howell had never been abroad, and had crossed only once from El Paso to Juárez, just to see what it was like. All he found were wild dogs with dust on them and twelve-year-old whores. But a passport lent him some distinction, made him appear like a world traveler to the widows of Kansas and South Dakota.
    He crept into his Town Car with a tiny suitcase and the shirt on his back. He was shivering in July. And he lit out from the Grand Concourse with his toe to the floor. Howell was running for his life.

ADONIS
    I was fifteen when Rosenzweig discovered me at the Frick Collection. We were both standing in front of Rembrandt’s Polish Rider , and he came up to me like Count Dracula bathed in perfume and said, “Young man, have you ever modeled before?”
    Some nabob with a boutonniere was always trying to flirt with me at the Frick. But Rosenzweig was all business.
    â€œI’m a freshman at the High School of Music and Art,” I said.
    He handed me his card, said his chauffeur would pick me up after class.
    â€œI wouldn’t want a young gentleman such as yourself to miss a day of school, even if it might make him rich.”
    And then he was gone with that bloodless look of his, like a man made of whitewash. There was a limo waiting for me after class on Monday. We rode down off St. Nicholas Terrace, away from the gargoyles of Music and Art, and into the heart of Manhattan. Rosenzweig & Co. was the Cadillac of clothing cataloguers at the time, occupying a manufacturer’s loft near the tiny synagogue for tailors at the corner of Thirty-sixth. It was like having an assault team on a single floor—with showrooms, a printing press, photography studios, and a rat’s maze of little offices where Rosenzweig’s proofreaders and editors worked from dawn to dusk to spit out catalogues according to his own brutal clock.
    The racket was