When he left with his agent, Johnny Igoe, Johnny suggested they pop over to the St. Vincent Orphan Asylum just a few blocks away. Couldn’t hurt, Johnny said, add to the positive press and maybe give Babe an edge in his latest round of bargaining with Harry Frazee. Babe felt weary, though—weary of bargaining, weary of cameras snapping in his face, weary of orphans. He loved kids and orphans in particular, but boy oh boy those kiddos this morning, all hobbled and broken and burned, really took something out of him. The ones with the missing fingers wouldn’t grow them back and the ones with sores on their faces wouldn’t look in a mirror someday and find the scars vanished and the ones in wheelchairs wouldn’t wake up one morning and walk. And yet, at some point, they’d be sent out into the world to make their way, and it had overwhelmed Babe this morning, just sucked the juice out of him.

So he ditched Johnny by telling him he needed to go buy a gift for Helen because the little woman was angry with him again. This was partly true—Helen was in a snit, but he wasn’t shopping for a gift, not in any store leastways. He walked toward the Castle Square Hotel instead. The raw November breeze spit drops of sharp, random rain, but he was warm in his long ermine coat, and he kept his head tilted down to keep the drops from his eyes and enjoyed the quiet and anonymity that greeted him on deserted streets. At the hotel, he passed through the lobby and found the bar almost as empty as the streets, and he took the first seat inside the door and shrugged off his coat and laid it over the stool beside him. The bartender stood down at the far end of the bar, talking to the other two men in the place, so Ruth lit a cigar and looked around at the dark walnut beams and inhaled the smell of leather and wondered how in the hell this country was going to get along with any dignity now that Prohibition looked a dead certainty. The No-Funs and the Shouldn’t-Dos were winning the war, and even if they called themselves Progressives, Ruth couldn’t see much progress in denying a man a drink or shuttering a place of warm wood and leather. Hell, you worked an eighty-hour week for shit pay it seemed the least to ask that the world give you a mug of suds and a shot of rye. Not that Ruth had worked an eighty-hour week in his life, but the principle still applied.

The bartender, a wide man with a thick mustache curled up so violently at the edges you could hang hats on it, came walking down the bar. “What can I get you?”

Still feeling a glow of kinship with the workingman, Ruth ordered two beers and a shot, make it a double, and the bartender placed the drafts before him and then poured a healthy glass of whiskey.