little to help, for what I really wanted was a glimpse of the face of that little girl, living out half her childhood in a frozen wasteland. All I could conjure of her was that she wore her hair in pigtails and that her eye-lashes were long and beautiful.
I smoked another cigarette and noticed that it was get-ting late. The orange sun had now dipped behind the trees, and the sky at the horizon was a splash of pink, darkening to purple and then to night above. I had sat too long in the cold and was shivering. Adopting a brisk pace, I hoped to Page 20
reach the Fifth
Avenue entrance just north of the unsightly, ramshackle zoo before night fell in earnest. As I hurried along, I entertained the idea that perhaps Mrs. Charbuque, though she sounded sane enough, was truly unhinged. And then as quickly, I asked myself, "Would it really be of any great consequence to my portrait?" I real-ized I was lending a great weight of importance to her personal history, whereas in reality the mere cadence of her words, the gentle tone of her voice, and even the lies she might be telling me were every bit as alive with clues to her face and figure as was the reality of her days. The whole affair was like trying to reassemble the pieces of a convoluted dream shattered by waking.
I should have gone home and at least tried to work out some of the figures of her story on paper, but I was still too caught up in the mystery of my new commission to concentrate at the drawing board.
Besides, I feared that waiting for me would be responses to those letters of disengagement I had sent to my erstwhile patrons, and wanted to forestall facing their thinly veiled unpleas-antries and innuendos hinting at my lack of professional-ism. Samantha, I knew, would be busy propping up the insubstantial performance of the amnesiac ghost, so there was no possibility of spending time with her. I decided to head down to the seamy side of town and harass Shenz for a spell.
Out on the avenue, I caught a hansom cab easily enough and directed the driver to my friend's address.
Shenz lived on Eighth Avenue on the outskirts of that area known as Hell's Kitchen, a nightmarish territory marked by stockyards, warehouses, and tenements, where a gumbo of humanity's destitute
scratched out a grim existence that in its inadequacy staggered the imagina-tion. The closest I wished to get to it was Shenz's place. Of course, being the liberal-minded fellow I was, I had read enough of the recent crop of publications exposing soci-ety's ills to be sympathetic to the plight of these poor people, but in reality my mission was not to effect change. Instead, my efforts went selfishly toward avoiding, geographically and philosophically, the whole unsightly mess.
Shenz was interesting in that respect. As he had told me, he liked to live close enough to these cataracts of chaos to feel the raw energy of life they contained. He said it did something for his painting.
"At times, Piambo," he had said to me, "it is a good thing to leap the garden wall and join the living. That society we move in for our work is too often so delicately moribund."
Back before they had cleaned up the Tenderloin, scat-tering the vermin who squatted there like scorpions under rocks, and turned it into an area of commerce, Shenz had an address perilously close to the illicit action. Once, when I made some disparaging remark about what they did with their women and children, he retorted that I would most likely think it only good fun to attend one of Stanford White's soirees where each distinguished gentleman was given his own naked female as a party favor. That's what
I admired most about Shenz—he could move through any stratum of society and adopt its customs, but he never lost sight of the truth. It was precisely this quality that I now sought out in relation to the conundrum that was Mrs. Charbuque.
Stepping from the streets of the West Side into Shenz's rooms involved a disconcerting transition. At one
I smoked another cigarette and noticed that it was get-ting late. The orange sun had now dipped behind the trees, and the sky at the horizon was a splash of pink, darkening to purple and then to night above. I had sat too long in the cold and was shivering. Adopting a brisk pace, I hoped to Page 20
reach the Fifth
Avenue entrance just north of the unsightly, ramshackle zoo before night fell in earnest. As I hurried along, I entertained the idea that perhaps Mrs. Charbuque, though she sounded sane enough, was truly unhinged. And then as quickly, I asked myself, "Would it really be of any great consequence to my portrait?" I real-ized I was lending a great weight of importance to her personal history, whereas in reality the mere cadence of her words, the gentle tone of her voice, and even the lies she might be telling me were every bit as alive with clues to her face and figure as was the reality of her days. The whole affair was like trying to reassemble the pieces of a convoluted dream shattered by waking.
I should have gone home and at least tried to work out some of the figures of her story on paper, but I was still too caught up in the mystery of my new commission to concentrate at the drawing board.
Besides, I feared that waiting for me would be responses to those letters of disengagement I had sent to my erstwhile patrons, and wanted to forestall facing their thinly veiled unpleas-antries and innuendos hinting at my lack of professional-ism. Samantha, I knew, would be busy propping up the insubstantial performance of the amnesiac ghost, so there was no possibility of spending time with her. I decided to head down to the seamy side of town and harass Shenz for a spell.
Out on the avenue, I caught a hansom cab easily enough and directed the driver to my friend's address.
Shenz lived on Eighth Avenue on the outskirts of that area known as Hell's Kitchen, a nightmarish territory marked by stockyards, warehouses, and tenements, where a gumbo of humanity's destitute
scratched out a grim existence that in its inadequacy staggered the imagina-tion. The closest I wished to get to it was Shenz's place. Of course, being the liberal-minded fellow I was, I had read enough of the recent crop of publications exposing soci-ety's ills to be sympathetic to the plight of these poor people, but in reality my mission was not to effect change. Instead, my efforts went selfishly toward avoiding, geographically and philosophically, the whole unsightly mess.
Shenz was interesting in that respect. As he had told me, he liked to live close enough to these cataracts of chaos to feel the raw energy of life they contained. He said it did something for his painting.
"At times, Piambo," he had said to me, "it is a good thing to leap the garden wall and join the living. That society we move in for our work is too often so delicately moribund."
Back before they had cleaned up the Tenderloin, scat-tering the vermin who squatted there like scorpions under rocks, and turned it into an area of commerce, Shenz had an address perilously close to the illicit action. Once, when I made some disparaging remark about what they did with their women and children, he retorted that I would most likely think it only good fun to attend one of Stanford White's soirees where each distinguished gentleman was given his own naked female as a party favor. That's what
I admired most about Shenz—he could move through any stratum of society and adopt its customs, but he never lost sight of the truth. It was precisely this quality that I now sought out in relation to the conundrum that was Mrs. Charbuque.
Stepping from the streets of the West Side into Shenz's rooms involved a disconcerting transition. At one
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