The Prince of West End Avenue Read Online Free PDF Page A

dear lady, there is next to nothing to tell." "I already know something," she said coyly. I must have looked startled. "You're very shy with the ladies. I like that." After the war, Milton Perlmutter prospered, first in practice alone, later in a successful partnership. "Years ago he represented the Emma Lazarus in a million-dollar suit. It made all the papers. One of the doctors was accused of indelicacy with a female resident, and her family held the home responsible. Totally false, of course. The wretched woman broke down and confessed the truth under Milton's cross-examination. Her family had put her up to it. That was when I first heard about the Emma Lazarus. Who'd have thought then that I'd end up here? Well, of course, ours is not any ordinary home, more of a luxury residential hotel. We're not exactly paupers here." I winced at this, but she merely patted me on the hand, as if to help me past a painful bubble of gas. "You think we have class now? You should have seen the Emma Lazarus in those days. Class isn't the word. No need for bulletproof glass then. The riffraff wouldn't have dared poke a nose through the door. Why, the doorman dressed like a five-star general."

    "Your grandfather might not have been comfortable here," I murmured.
    She seemed not to understand. "He died in England, my granny too, may they rest in peace. Frosch versus the Emma Lazarus was Milton's first big case. He sent me to NYU, bless him, with the proceeds. I majored in English and minored in German literature."
    At that time, we were walking on Broadway. She had invited herself along. I had some errands in the neighborhood. She put her hand on my arm, stopping me in my tracks. "I know something else about you."
    "I'm really a very uninteresting person."
    "You're a poet. I remembered just the other day. I knew the. name was familiar. Then it came to me: the stacks at NYU, your book of poems on the shelf."
    "That was another Otto Korner. With an umlaut. An understandable mistake."
    I could see she didn't believe me.
    "I suppose you could call it a comfortable marriage, no strains, none but the usual." Perlmutter had doted on her. "But it wasn't a perfect union." It had taken her eight years of widowhood to pinpoint the fault: "He lacked a spiritual dimension." For all the refinement of his education, he was too worldly, too much the lawyer, impatient of those immaterial truths with which literature deals. "There was no poetry in his soul, only torts and class reunions." But of course there was their daughter, Lucille, to link them in love—Lucille herself a mature woman now and, since her "sticky" divorce, "something of a spearhead in the women's movement," writing, lecturing, traveling all over the country.
    One day I returned to my room for the siesta hour and, to my horror, found her sitting demurely and plumply on my straight-back chair. Her feet, crossed at the ankles, did not quite reach the floor. She was wearing the navy-blue tunic of the

    English schoolgirl over a severe white blouse. Her hair was tied in a velvet ribbon. She was not in the least flustered.
    "Forgive me," she said, "but the door was unlocked. In my view, you don't really know a person until you know the things he surrounds himself with. Don't you agree?" She touched her chin with her finger and smiled, dimpling. "You look so silly with your mouth open. Do sit down."
    This was an insufferable impertinence! "Madam," I said, "I am still in mourning for my wife. Do me the kindness to leave at once."
    Her round face crumpled, like that of a baby with colic. "Oh, oh, oh," she moaned, "how could you, you beast!" And she ran from my room.

    Riverside Drive, Miss Dattner setting a pace irritatingly faster than I found natural or comfortable.
    "Will you look at that!" she said angrily. The lower wall was adorned with graffiti, variously colored, largely illegible. New since my recent illness was an ill-formed swastika in bright yellow. Piles of garbage in bursting black