Babe held up a hand. “I’ve got plenty of cash right now, Mr. Frazee.”

Babe tried to step back, but he was too slow. Harry Frazee stuffed the money into the inside pocket of Babe’s coat as the elevator man watched and the doorman and the pretty woman on six saw it, too.

“You’re worth every penny,” Harry Frazee said, “and I’d hate to see you miss a meal.”

Babe’s face burned and he reached into his coat to give the money back.

Frazee walked away. The doorman trotted to catch up. He held the door for him, and Frazee tipped his hat and walked out into the night.

Ruth caught the woman’s eye. She lowered her head and got in the elevator.

“A joke,” Ruth said as he joined her and the elevator man shut the cage door and worked the crank. “Just a joke.”

She smiled and nodded, but he could see she pitied him.

When he got up to his apartment, Ruth put in a call to Kat Lawson. He convinced her to meet him for a drink at the Hotel Buckminster, and after they’d had their fourth round he took her to a room upstairs and fucked her silly. Half an hour later, he fucked her again, doggie-style, and whispered the foulest language he could imagine into her ear. After, she lay on her stomach, asleep, her lips speaking softly to someone in her dreams. He got up and dressed. Out the window lay the Charles River and the lights of Cambridge beyond, winking and watching. Kat snored softly as he put on his coat. He reached into it and placed Harry Frazee’s money down on the dresser and left the room.

West Camden Street. Baltimore.

Ruth stood on the sidewalk outside what had been his father’s saloon. Closed now, distressed, a tin Pabst sign hanging askew behind a dusty window. Above the saloon was the apartment he’d shared with his parents and his sister Mamie, who’d been barely toddling when Ruth was shipped off to Saint Mary’s.

Home, you could say.

Babe’s memories of it as such, however, were dim. He remembered the exterior wall as the place he’d learned to throw dice. He recalled how the smell of beer never left the saloon or the apartment above it; it rose through the toilet and the bathtub drain, lived in the floor cracks and in the wall.

Home, in truth, was St. Mary’s. West Camden Street was an idea. An on-deck circle.

I came here, Babe thought, to tell you I’ve made it. I’m Big Noise. I’ll earn ten thousand dollars this year, and Johnny says he can get me another ten in endorsements. My face will be on the kind of tin plate you’d have hung in the window. But you wouldn’t have hung it, would you? You would have been too proud. Too proud to admit you had a son who makes more money in a year than you could make in ten. The son you sent away and tried to forget. George Junior. Remember him?