“A trunk. She’s expecting a trunk. It’s been shipped already, she said, and ought to be here by then.”
“What an idiot.”
“Sir?”
“Idiot. Idiot.”
“Mrs. Street, sir?”
“Mrs. Street, Mr. Street, you, Ondine. Everybody. This is the first time in thirty years I’ve been able to enjoy this house. Really live in it. Not for a month or a weekend but for a while, and everybody is conspiring to ruin it for me. Coming and going, going and coming. It’s beginning to feel like Thirtieth Street Station. Why can’t everybody settle down, relax, have a nice simple Christmas. Not a throng, just a nice simple Christmas dinner.”
“She gets a little bored, I guess. Got more time than she can use.”
“Insane. Jade’s here. They get on like schoolgirls, it seems to me. Am I wrong?”
“No, you’re right. They get along fine, like each other’s company, both of them.”
“They don’t like it enough to let it go at that. Apparently we are expecting
“Can I get you some toast?”
“And you. You have finally surprised me. What else have you been keeping from me?”
“Eat your pineapple.”
“I am eating it.”
“I can’t stand here all morning. You got corns—I got bunions.”
“If you won’t take my advice, bunions are the consequence.”
“I know my work. I’m a first-rate butler and I can’t be first-rate in slippers.”
“You know your work, but I know your feet. Thom McAn will be the death of you.”
“I never wore Thom McAns in my life. Never. In nineteen twenty-nine I didn’t wear them.”
“I distinctly recall at least four pairs of decent shoes I’ve given you.”
“I prefer my bunions to your corns.”
“Ballys don’t cause corns. If anything they prevent them. It’s the perspiration that causes them. When—”
“See? Gotcha. That’s exactly what I been tellin you. Philadelphia shoes don’t work in the tropics. Make your feet sweat. You need some nice huaraches. Make your feet feel good. Free em up, so they can breathe.”
“The day I spend in huaraches is the day I spend in a straitjacket.”
“You keep on hacking away at your toes with a razor and you’ll beg for a straitjacket.”
“Well, you won’t know about it because your Thom McAn bunions are going to put you in a rocker for the rest of your life.”
“Suit me fine.”
“And me. Maybe then I could hire somebody who wouldn’t keep things from me. Sneak Postum into a good pot of coffee, saccharin in the lime pie. And don’t think I don’t know about the phony salt.”
“Health is the most important thing at our age, Mr. Street.”
“Not at all. It’s the least important. I have no intention of staying alive just so I can wake up and skip down the stairs to a cup of Postum in the morning. Look in the cabinet and get me a drop of medicine for this stuff.”
“Cognac’s not medicine.” Sydney moved toward the sideboard and bent to open one of its doors.
“At seventy everything’s medicine. Tell Ondine to quit it. It’s not doing a thing for me.”
“Sure don’t help your disposition none.”
“Exactly. Now. Very quietly and very quickly, tell me who this company is.”
“No company, Mr. Street.”
“Don’t antagonize an old man reduced to Postum.”
“It’s your son. Michael’s not company.”
Valerian put his cup carefully onto the saucer. “She told you that? That Michael was coming?”
“No. Not exactly. But so Yardman would know what to look for she told me where the trunk was coming from and what color it was.”
“Then it’s coming from California.”
“It’s coming from California.”
“And it’s red.”
“And it’s red. Fire red.”
“With ‘Dick Gregory for President’ stickers pasted on the sides.”
