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she’ll pick somebody else.

    When I woke up a pauper , nauseated and disoriented, my brother had already picked a new profession for me. Unfortunately, that’s the sort of fellow Valentine is.
    “There you are. Bully,” my brother drawled from the chair he’d pulled up to my bedside and then sat in backside front, dangling his thick blond arm and half-chewed cigar over the sanded cedar. “Some of New York is still standing, by the way. Not your ken oryour workplace, though. I checked. Those look like the inside of my fireplace.”
    We were both alive, then, which seemed pretty favorable. But where? The windowsill a few feet from me hosted a series of herb pots and a bowl of cheery upright asparagus, either decoration or future dinner. Then I spied a huge, glorious painting of an American eagle bearing arrows in its talons on the far wall and winced inwardly.
    Val’s place, on Spring Street. I’d not been there in months. It’s the second floor of a fine cozy row house with hysterical political posters and the usual strapping patriotic pictures of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson blanketing the walls. Firemen are New York’s heroes, and the heroes make an actual living by way of politics, as they aren’t paid for running headlong into blazing infernos. So their days break down thus: for recreation, they douse fires, beat the good nature out of rivals from other engine companies in organized gang brawls, and drink and whore their way up and down the Bowery. And for work, they get their friends elected or appointed to city jobs, so that they all manage to elect or appoint each other. People would object louder to this system if they didn’t worship the firemen. Who’s against a flash-man when he’s dressed in red cotton and you’re handing your baby out a window?
    I haven’t the stomach for any of it. Politics or prolonged exposure to Val.
    Valentine is a Democrat, in the identical way some men are doctors or stevedores or brewers, and his goal in professional life is to crush the hated Whigs to powder. The Democrats don’t worry much over the few scattered Anti-Masonics, whose only aim is to convince America that the Freemasons intend to murder us all in our beds. Nor do they lose sleep over the Liberty Party, because as glad as New Yorkers are that slavery here was abolished entirely in 1827, joiningan entire political engine dedicated to the welfare of blacks is extremely unfashionable. What chafes Val’s hide are the machinations of the Whigs: they’re merchants and doctors and lawyers generally, most of the well-to-do and everyone with pretensions in that direction, gentlemen with clean hands who make a tremendous racket about raising tariffs and modernizing banks. The accepted Democratic response to Whig arguments is to praise the natural virtue of the peasant, and then to throw the ballot boxes coming from Whig districts into the Hudson.
    The main difference between them isn’t political, though, to my mind. As I grasp the matter, the Democrats would like every last taxpaying Irishman to vote for them, and the Whigs would like every last taxpaying Irishman to be deported to Canada.
    It all repulses me. I’ll own that my brother lives pretty comfortably, though. And for a man who always neglects the top two buttons of his fireman’s shirt and thinks of morphine the way most people think of tonic water, he’s laughably clean in domestic habits. He sweeps the floor every morning and polishes his andirons with rum every other month.
    “Thirsty? Water, rum, gin, or small beer?” My brother went to rummage in the kitchen and deposited two mugs on the table next to me when he returned. “Here, have your pick of the first pair. Would you believe that thirty-eight Broad Street, apart from the saltpeter, had its basement stuffed with French cream? Barrel after barrel of brandy, Tim. Worst streak of luck I’ve ever seen …”
    As he continued, I squinted, focusing my vision. Val wore a halfhearted