Free Lord of Misrule by Jaimy Gordon

good of himself and was a gentleman to his wife and a benefactor to the unfortunate.
    He almost passed for a man of the world, Alvin. When it all came out about Lillian—that Preakness Saturday in 1937, when she was riding the streetcar out to Pimlico with her boy, looking pretty in her new hat, the white straw Suzy hat with the green spotted veil, and the roving photographer from the Sunpapers took her picture and she blurted that lie, that she was Mrs. Lillian Samuels, wife of Rudy Samuels of 211 Patterson Park Avenue, although she was still Miss Lillian Murphy and they had been living for four years on Queensberry Avenue in Pimlico, two blocks down from the fence where the first turn rounds into the backstretch; and his mother saw the picture in the Sunday paper and the truth came out—he had a feeling that Alvin would have been philosophical about the Catholic girlfriend and maybe even gone along with a wedding. After all, Lillian was a track clocker’s daughter and the real god of the Samuels boys was the racetrack god. His mother threatened to kill herself and wept into her
lokshen
, but never missed a single meal.
    He should have married Lillian. He knew that now. It wasn’t Alvin, it wasn’t Mama, he couldn’t even blame Lillian for forcing his hand with the big hopeful lie—for some reason the doll really loved him—but at the time he was a puffed up young
macher
with a fat roll and had that sportsman’s attitude you shouldn’t let a girl get the upper hand. And besides he never could stomach that woodenhead kossack her son. So Lillian went to Chicago where she died, and he moved back home. The truth was he had never really moved out of the rowhouse on Patterson Park, since that’s where the all-night card game was, with Alvin presiding, and he had slept there two, three nights a week, if you call that sleeping.
    Some would argue, surely, that the influence of Alvin Samuels was not so healthy on his boys—look at Mickey—the bookstore after all was a family concern, and Two-Tie had barely missed going to jail himself. But for better or worse, when it come time to situate his finance business, the racetrack was what he knew, or thought he knew. And years later, once he really knew a little about that type of men and animals, getting ruled off only helped him to see the big picture.
    The way he looked at it now, there was something unseemly about a grown man running around from track to track to hustle a buck. In your maturity, if you’d made yourself sufficiently useful to people, if you’d earned a place in their society, let them hoof it to you. Everybody needed money sometimes. Everybody, down to the lowliest hotwalker or toothless groom living in a tack room on a two-dollar dose of King Kong liquor per day, saw his little piece of the picture. Deals didn’t have to be stuck together with spit and chewing gum if a man had credit. That’s what goddamn telephones were for.
    Besides, he had to think of Elizabeth. The year he got ruled off she turned eleven. He had just noticed the old joy had went out of it for her when they drove to new places and walked around. She got a worried look in her eye, and he saw that the round lens of her eyes was a little milky where it used to be clear as jelly. She hunched her shoulders and stuck close to his knee and never even tried to sniff around the barn poles and mouseholes and manure piles at a new track.
    So it all came together. He could have fought it. Repeated appeals, screaming lawyers, incessant string pulling and greasing of doors had paid off in similar cases for far more repulsive characters than himself. But he decided not to. Unseemly. He liked that word. Enough was enough. He settled down in Carbonport, righthere, on the Ohio side, where he could walk up on the little rise behind the elementary school on Second Street and look down the bluff and across the water at the specks creeping around the brown oval inside the green oval, at least he thought he