The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #4503 Message #1788375
Posted By: Jim Dixon
20-Jul-06 - 01:18 PM
Thread Name: Origins: In Room 202 (Leslie, Kalmar, Harris)
Subject: RE: Lyr Req: In Room Two Hundred and Two / In Room 202
Here's the relevant text copied from "The Mauve Decade"—see the link that Joe posted above:So in that city [Chicago], on the night of July 5th [1893], as it slumbered under the doubled protection of Mrs. [Potter] Palmer and Miss [Frances] Willard, there came the birth of an American folksong. The agent of a New York bank was roused and brought hastily to room 202 in a packed hotel. The room held a priest, some doctors, a handsome, scared lad from a small town in Iowa who blubbered that the lady just told him she was taking some headache medicine, and the bared body of a wonderful woman stretched on a bed in the muscular torments that follow a dose of strong poison. There was also a purse that enclosed a startling bankbook and some cards. The adolescent knew nothing. She had spoken to him on the Midway at the [World's] Fair. They let him go. The priest prayed and the body stirred until dawn. Delicate and just audible, voices filled the room and there came the scents of Jockey Club and heliotrope, the fluttering whisper of laces, the chuckled gossip of "The Black Crook's" dressing-room. . . . Kitty, did y'see Jim Fisk's sleigh with the silver bells yest'day? . . . Say, Kitty, who gave you the house in Twelfth Street? Honest, Kitty, I won't tell! . . . Kitty! Kitty, Ned Stokes shot Jimmy over at the Grand Central an' the p'lice are lookin' for Josie Mansfield! . . . These astral echoes floated over the fair body until it loathsomely stiffened on the bed. And then something slim and exquisite rose in a cloud from the sagging wreck. She stood preening the ruffles and the slanting hat in which Brady photographed her for the delight of bucks along Broadway in 1869. She hitched tighter to the famous ankles her striped Watteau stockings and her feet that once ran bare across bogs in County Glare [sic] now tripped in those ridiculous little shoes from which men drank champagne. Outside a misty door Kitty dawdled, a bit scared, uncertain in the gloom pierced by red shadows rolling up from Purgatory, and then a voice ineffably French murmured behind her: "Ma toute belle!" and Kitty turned to beam professionally on a delicious gentleman, smartly groomed once more, whose grin suggested release from some sharp agony. They looked and liked. The gallant blond fellow tucked under one arm a ghostly advance copy of M. Pierre Louys's Songs of Bilitis, not yet published, after turning down the page at . . . "Mon dernier amant, ce sera toi, je le sais. Voici ma bouche, pour laquelle un peuple a pâli de désir. . ." and pretty Kitty went down the ordained steps with Guy de Maupassant chattering tenderly in her ear, and now the ribald sing:
"In room Two Hundred and Two,
The walls keep talking to you.
Shall I tell you what they said?" . . .
And in New York a balance of more than three hundred thousand dollars acquired by a dancing-girl who didn't dance was split among her Irish kin. She was not yet forty. In Constantine perhaps Pierre Louys was polishing off, "Se peut il que tout soit fini! Je n'ai pas encore vécu cinq fois huit années . . . et déjà voici ce qu'll faut dire: On n'aimera plus . . .
In the text they never use the name "Kitty Kane." They never tell you Kitty's last name.
Frankly, I find this writing style annoying. It's hard to tell what part is supposed to be true and what is fiction.