Quentin or whatever, and when you saw him next he’d be wearing a cast-off Brooks suit and a hat with a Princeton club I forget which band that someone had given him and which he was pleasantly and unshakably convinced was a part of Abe Lincoln’s military sash. Someone spread the story years ago, when he first appeared around college from wherever he came from, that he was a graduate of the divinity school. And when he came to understand what it meant he was so taken with it that he began to retail the story himself, until at last he must come to believe he really had. Anyway he related long pointless anecdotes of his undergraduate days, speaking familiarly of dead and departed professors by their first names, usually incorrect ones. But he had been guide mentor and friend to unnumbered crops of innocent and lonely freshmen, and I suppose that with all his petty chicanery and hypocrisy he stank no higher in heaven’s nostrils than any other.
“Haven’t seen you in three-four days,” he said, staring at me from his still military aura. “You been sick?”
“No. I’ve been all right. Working, I reckon. I’ve seen you, though.”
“Yes?”
“In the parade the other day.”
“Oh, that. Yes, I was there. I dont care nothing about that sort of thing, you understand, but the boys likes to have me with them, the vet’runs does. Ladies wants all the old vet’runs to turn out, you know. So I has to oblige them.”
“And on that Wop holiday too,” I said. “You were obliging the W.C.T.U. then, I reckon.”
“That? I was doing that for my son-in-law. He aims to get a job on the city forces. Street cleaner. I tells him all he wants is a broom to sleep on. You saw me, did you?”