Blackguard by Maxwell Bodenheim — Read

After that evening he managed to protect his loneliness with clever words. He told the Edlemans that he was looking for material for short stories and that he intended to roam about the city; and, elated at his purpose, they did not object. Since most of his relatives were still displaying their dignity, jewelry, and card-playing abilities at northern summer resorts, he found it easy to be alone.

In the midst of his restless, empty wanderings he often sat for a while in a little park that rustled and nodded upon the top of a bluff overlooking a broad river. There he would stare out at the wide, yellowish-brown flat of water, and the dull green convolutions of the distant shore, and the water would become an ethereal canvas where he painted fugitive salutes to the woman who had fled from life's semblances. Under the spell of a melting daze he would sit for hours, almost unconscious of the fact that he held a body of slowly breathing flesh. At one end of the park the line of benches turned sharply in toward the city, and this shaded place, guarded by bushes and trees, was known as "Rounder's Corner. " It was frequented by thieves, drug peddlers, sly, lacquered women and an occasional vagrant, and they gathered there from twilight on and drained the fierce insincerities of conversation and whiskey, with sometimes the lucid edge of cocaine. Since Carl came to this spot only during the afternoons, he did not see these people until, one evening, he managed to absent himself from the Edleman home on the pretense of desiring a trip on a river steamboat, and strolled into the park.