The parlor was long and narrow, furnished like a railway passenger coach with cane-covered chairs and lamps hanging from the ceiling, a common kind of decoration for a whorehouse – a celebration of these most romantic of customers, these railroadmen, astronauts of their day, more exalted than war heroes: men from the future who dared where none of the rest of us dared and who lived every day with secrets the rest of us could only guess at. A scarred player piano stood at one end of the room; a spray of cut daisies drooped in a large vase on top of it. Jonathan and College sat down, separated by a spittoon. Olympia sat opposite them. Her hair was bright orange. Pendants dangled from her ears down to her shoulders – a proper Hollywood whore of olden times.
‘Would you gentlemen like a drink?’ she asked. Without waiting for a reply, she called out, ‘Fritzi! Two whiskeys!’
A girl of fifteen or sixteen appeared with a tray. She was plump and pink-cheeked, fair. She wore a white dress with a ruffled bodice such as farm girls wore to Sunday school. No Hollywood here, but even a hero fancies what he fancied as a boy and couldn’t get. Jonathan watched Fritzi with fascination and Olympia watched him. ‘You’ve never been to a place like this before, have you?’
Jonathan shook his head. College had disappeared from time to time during their years of roaming around together; he’d never told Jonathan where he was going, though Jonathan had known he was going whoring and figured, older brother like, that Jonathan was too young for such entertainments. Jonathan had given in to the protectiveness because the idea of being physically close to somebody, a living person, touching the living flesh, a whore’s flesh or any woman’s flesh – or any man’s – terrified him. It brought to mind George’s girlish breasts, and not only that (in which there was an undeniable element of sex) but also the terrible weakness he had found in himself when George had touched him, which wasn’t sex at all but just human contact – that most elementary of contacts, that avenue into the heart nobody understands and everybody fears, even while hungering after it.
‘It’s his twenty-first birthday,’ College said. ‘On my twenty-first birthday I got drunk. What were you doing on your twenty-first birthday, Miss LeCleve?’ Olympia raised her eyebrows. ‘Oh, you must have been lovely at twenty-one,’ College rushed on. ‘A red peony: paeonia lactiflora “Bower of Roses”: my mother grew them.’ He tilted his head to one side. ‘No, not a peony. Do you know the blooms on a Golden Chain tree? You must have glowed like a whole grove of them in June.’ Dimples showed in his pock-marked cheeks and chin. ‘Golden Chains are marvelous in July, too – Look, Johnny, see how she handles her shoulders. Were you a dancer?’
Olympia laughed. ‘I was a whore,’ she said. College laughed with her, but Jonathan’s eyes lingered on the door through which Fritzi had disappeared. ‘You like my Fritzi, don’t you?’ Olympia asked, turning to him. ‘Tell you what, I’ll give you a dollar off with her since it’s your birthday.’ She laughed again. ‘Fritzi, come back.’ Fritzi appeared and sat on the arm of Jonathan’s chair. All of this is documented in his diaries. I make up nothing. I doubt Atlas knew anything about it, though; like Jonathan’s dream, his love of whores was a secret he kept from his children. Fritzi smiled at him. There was a gap between her front teeth. He tried to smile back, taking too long to do so, and her smile deepened.