“If anything you’re too old. To be a vent. Most boys pick it up ten or so. Where are your parents?”

“Ithaca.”

“Greece?”

“Ithaca, New York,” he clarified.

“Yes, I thought you were American.”

He decided not to argue with that, though he disagreed. True, he’d been born in the United States, and raised there, but his parents were English, his older sisters were English, every single person he was related to was English. A dog is a dog though born on a sheep farm, he told himself.

She said, “Was anybody with you on the boat?”

“No.”

She extracted a cigarette from a tin box and lit it with a large chrome lighter that gave off the scent of fuel. In her act, she struck matches on Willie Shavers’s cheek, then smoked while he talked. “You didn’t stow away,” she said, leaking smoke.

He shook his head.

“But you want to stow away here.”

“I can’t go back,” he said.

“To Ithaca, New York,” she said, with an amused expression. “No? Why?”

He had his reasons, but they were ineffable. The fact was he’d planned from the first day to walk off the boat in Southampton, track down one of his sisters—all three of them lived in England: Katie in Sussex, Fiona in Bath, and Eloise in a village in Norfolk called Little Snoring—and ask for sanctuary. But his sisters would no doubt fling him back to his parents. He felt the nap of the velvet sofa, toed the herringbone parquet floor. One of the planks was loose under his sneakered foot, and he knew he could kick it up and out. He wanted to take it with him. All around were pictures of Lottie Stanley with famous people he didn’t recognize. He could only tell they were famous, and English: the sideburns, the teeth, the ears. Americans weren’t better-looking, they were only more ashamed. He stood to go.

She said, “Sit down, my darling,” and appraised him through her winding smoke. On the ship he’d stared at her face for an hour a night, every night for seven. He wasn’t used to being looked at, or being called my darling. “I’ve got a home I can’t go back to myself. Can you pay weekly rent?”

“A little,” he said. He hadn’t been paid for his work on the boat—that would have happened on the return—but in his knapsack he had a stack of traveler’s checks, his entire savings, withdrawn the day he left.

“Remind me your name?”

“Lenny.”

“Oh no,” she said. She reached over to an ashtray on a side table to stab out her cigarette, the same gesture she used to punctuate all conversations, including the ones she had onstage with her several varieties of self. Her hair was a strange tweedy combination of dark and light. “We’ve already got a Lenny. What’s your last name?”