“You won’t be going anyplace for a while.” One Christmas at midnight on the button, at the old place, the ward door blows open with a crash, in comes a fat man with a beard, eyes ringed red by the cold and his nose just the color of a cherry. The black boys get him cornered in the hall with flashlights. I see he’s all tangled in the tinsel Public Relation has been stringing all over the place, and he’s stumbling around in it in the dark. He’s shading his red eyes from the flashlights and sucking on his mustache. “Ho ho ho,” he says. “I’d like to stay but I must be hurrying along. Very tight
...more
