You know how you can go along in life for years without facing essential matters of this type. Absolute definitions generally make a person feel worse. I’ve known heavy drinkers who have survived for years merely by not admitting they was confirmed drunkards. I expect you thought back a ways when I commenced my association with Amelia that I believed in our blood-relationship on mighty flimsy evidence; that a girl in her position would say anything a customer wanted to hear; that playing the role of my niece was a hell of a lot easier profession that the one from which I had reclaimed her.
These considerations was not unknown to me. But look here: the kind of life I had lived, I had earned a right to say who was or wasn’t my kin. Every real family I had ever possessed had been tore away from me by disaster. I got to figuring the natural relationships was jinxed for me, and when little Amelia offered herself, I accepted forthwith and believed the privilege was all mine.
“I mean,” she says, “I knew you were getting your fun out of it and so was I, but I have this chance now to become respectable, and who knows when it would come again?” She takes my hand, and she says: “I’d like it real fine if you could give me away. My mother ran off with a drummer when I was twelve, and my father drank himself to death a couple years later. That was in Saint Joe, and then I came downriver. A fellow that came into Dolly’s used to tell me about the Mormons; which is how I know about their ways.” She smiled; I reckon you could say she somehow preserved a innocent quality that was genuine.
Well sir, after I got used to the idea, I was right proud. I felt forlorn in that I would soon lose the company of my “niece,” but the satisfaction that I had significantly altered her fate brought me back almost even again. If respectability was always denied me personally, at least in this instance I was able to arrange it, so to speak, for another. That’s about as high as a white man can aspire.
“Amelia,” I says, “you don’t have to have blood-ties to get a family feeling about a person. I am connected in natural brotherhood to a man who is so low as to drop snake heads in the whiskey he sells, and I do not give a damn for him if you will pardon the expression. Most of the people I have really cared about in this world, I have elected to the position. I have a belief that a man’s real relatives are scattered throughout the universe, and seldom if ever belong to his immediate kin.
“So you are my niece in the only fashion that means anything. And because I love you as such, I am not a-going to give you away. You had better go as an orphan to this wedding, which is the truth, anyway.”
She really did protest, which made me feel good for I reckon she wouldn’t have wanted me there had she not had some fondness for me, but I stayed firm. I seen now that my old dream of getting her well married and then dropping around to the house of a Sunday to take dinner with her and her husband would not work. I could never keep up the pose of explorer or fossil-hunter or whatever the tale she’d handed the senator’s son as regards her “uncle.” However, after a time I did realize that it would be humiliating to have nobody stand up for her, considering the wedding was to be a social affair attended by the better class of K.C. So I promised to provide a man.
I appealed to Signorina, and by George it turned out she was living with just the right sort of fellow at this time: a decayed-gentleman type, about fifty year of age with gray sideburns and a spiky goatee. He was also an alcoholic, but swore he could walk down a church aisle without staggering when supported by the money I give him.
I also bought Amelia the finest wedding outfit, along with a complete wardrobe for the time after; and such money as I then had left, I presented to her as dowry. She never said a word of thanks. She had never expressed the sentiment of gratitude at any time during our association, for she knowed it was always a square deal for me. Maybe it is not the worst training for a woman to put in a season as a harlot.
I watched the wedding from the choir loft, and seen for the first time the young fellow she was marrying, and he wasn’t much. He was built tall and flabby and wore eyeglasses at the age of twenty-five. His Pa was a stocky man with a hard jaw and iron-gray hair. It was easy to see that Amelia was taking over from the old man as the supply of force for that boy.
Signorina Carmella’s lover worked out real fine in his role. He walked so straight up the aisle, with Amelia on his arm, that there might have been steel scaffolding beneath his tailcoat. Carmella, on the other hand, never got to the ceremony. That pair lived according to some kind of rule by which at any given time one of them lay stinking drunk at home. Today was her turn.
