He went through the station yard as if he’d seen it all before—oxcarts of six and eight yokes with crated monuments and some with loads of faced and unfaced building stone, draft teams with wagons of coke and coal for the furnaces and others of pig iron for the forges and foundries that ran day and night to support the quarries; loads of goods and foodstuffs for the city; overhead strung with the wires and lines of the new century, electric and telegraph and telephone; outside the passenger depot canopied hotel wagons with boy drivers and other boys in sandwich boards strolling the crowd crying out for restaurants, rooming houses; men working in shirtsleeves or threepiece suits and from them came the filter of unknown tongues—and he passed through this with rising excitement, as if he’d found a place where he could begin.

On Merchants’ Row he found a tailor and bought a readymade nine-dollar suit off the rack and paid two dollars to have the alterations done while he waited. Once the pinning and chalking was done he crossed the street and bought a pair of shoes with a hard bright finish and went then to a barbershop and had his hair cut and was shaved, knowing that thus far nothing had been finer than the hot towels laid over his face and the smooth sweet brisk strokes of the razor and the deft shears, the fingers working pomade through to his scalp, the final whisk of the powdered brush against the back of his neck. Then he claimed his suit, bought new socks and carried out his old clothes and shoes tied up with string in a paper bundle. In a paper sack he carried two additional collars and two sets of cuffs. He dropped the bundle inside an alleyway on a pile of rotting debris.

He walked up through the town and came into the row of old riverside tenement houses with small restaurants and even smaller sundry stores, pawnshops, junkshops, and barbershops on the ground levels, the buildings interspersed with scrap yards and rag-pickers sheds. He took a mean yellow room three flights up for three dollars a week, the room with a sprung bed and stained mattress and a straightback chair and a washstand with a chipped pitcher and bowl. He paid for two weeks and went immediately back out. By now it was early afternoon and a quiet of sorts was over the street. Flies worked in swarms over offal in the gutter and a pack of five- and six-year-olds swarmed by him, boys and girls both. A woman leaned from a window and hung laundry on lines strung between buildings. His stomach ached now with hunger and he walked past three cafés, unsure of what to eat, how to order. More than anything he did not want to be the fool.