Ladies In The Parlor by Jim Tully

night with her lover, his wife caught a heavy cold. Influenza followed. She was dead within a week.
    He became a drunkard again. His business collapsed as well as himself. His children were sent to an orphan asylum.
    Marie had been adopted by wealthy people, from whom she ran away. She remained with them long enough to absorb a taste for good living and a desire for exquisite things.
    Her hearing was not quite normal. For fear she would not hear a man correctly, and say the wrong thing, her method was to look at the speaker with wide open eyes after he had finished a speech and say with admiring conviction,
    “Aren’t you wonderful?”
    In this way she made many friends among men.

Chapter 15
    Many of Mother Rosenbloom’s girls did not want their friends and relatives to know that they were in a house of prostitution, so it was their custom to have letters mailed to the “professor’s” house.
    The professor was the piano player. It was his duty every night to play the piano and otherwise make the house merry from nine until three.
    An ancient German, he had white hair, stooped shoulders, and a sagging lower lip. He wore a frock coat that had turned yellow, and his Byronic collar revealed a long, leathery, wrinkled neck.
    The lower lids fell away from rheumy eyes that seldom moved. He lived alone in a small house at the edge of the city. The girls often visited him on their “day off.”
    A man with no bad habits, he was tolerant with his associates. With his own passions long subsided, he would listen patiently to the woes of the troubled women around him.
    With an excellent knowledge of music, he had played the piano and the violin in Mother Rosenbloom’s house for sixteen years. Hn that time he had seen many young women come and go—some had married more or less happily, others had died, some had “opened their own places.” All had remembered “the professor.”
    Once, ill for a month, he was deluged with kindness.
    He received so many offers of help that Mother Rosenbloom took charge and allowed each girl to contribute twenty-five dollars, while she contributed two hundred. The old man was sent to the country until he had entirely recuperated.
    Each evening when he came to work, the girls would gather around him for their mail. Some would scold when they received no letters. His face would take on a hurt look, as though he had been to blame. He always smiled joyfully when he came burdened with mail.
    Leora became one of his favorites. He would rub his fingers over her as one would a piece of rare pottery. She was more silent than the other girls. The old man seldom talked. A bond of silence sprang up between them.
    Patiently he would teach her the first principles of playing the piano and watch her delicate hands go awkwardly over the keys. She absorbed considerable knowledge of music through him.
    The old man admired Beethoven. While Selma and Leora thrummed the piano with him, he talked of his favorite.
    “He was like a lion,” explained the professor, pushing his hands out to indicate Beethoven’s huge head and long hair. “He could make the thunder come, and the lightning—he was the son of a servant—a giant—a giant.”
    “Well that’s all right, I’m not snobbish—what a hell of a bedful he’d make,” said Selma.
    The professor, aghast, played the piano slowly.
    One evening he brought a letter for “Crying Marie.” It had been forwarded to several different cities before reaching his house. He watched her read the letter with intense interest.
    She answered it immediately and gave it to the professor to mail.
    Within a week, while the old man practiced a new tune on his violin, the doorbell rang.
    A stylishly dressed young woman stood before him. “Does Miss Mary V— live here?” she asked.
    “No, I live alone here—”
    “But I had a letter from this address a short time ago.”
    “Are you sure?” asked the old musician, and then, “Won’t you come in?”
    She stepped inside,