“Time! You have time to go to the Water Gap or up to Manchester for golf every two or three weeks. As for me wanting to see the old home, you know that’s silly!”
“Well, we won’t argue about it, but I’m certainly not going to waste my vacation in any hick town where they’ve probably got a six-hole course that you have to putt on with a niblick! Why can’t they come here?”
“I don’t suppose they could, but if you want me to, I’ll ask them.”
“Suit yourself. It’s your brother.”
The Bob Masons boarded The Wolverine at the nearby metropolis of Niles and got off some twenty hours later in New York’s Grand Central Station. Compared with the jump from California to Michigan, it seemed like once around on a roller coaster.
Rita met them and identified Bob by the initials on his suitcase. He wouldn’t have known her. She was the same age as Jennie, thirty-five, and he had expected her to look it. Instead, she looked ten years younger and was prettier than a member of the Buchanan Mason family had any right to be. And what clothes! Like those of the movie gals who had infested his Los Angeles.
“Why, sis, are you sure it’s you?”
“Am I changed?” she said, laughing.
“Not as much as you ought to be,” replied Bob. “That’s what makes it so hard to recognize you.”
“Well, you’ve changed,” said Rita. “Let’s see—it’s twenty years, isn’t it? You were fourteen and naturally you didn’t have that mustache. But even if you were clean shaven, you wouldn’t be a bit like the Bob I remember. And this is Jennie,” she added. “Well!”
“Yes,” admitted Bob’s wife.
She smiled and Rita noticed her teeth for the first time. Most of the visible ones were of gold, and the work had evidently been done by a dentist for whom three members of a foursome were waiting. Rita, Bob, and Bob’s wife, escorted by a red cap, walked through the Biltmore and across Forty-third Street to where Gates was parked with Rita’s sedan. Gates observed the newcomers as he relieved the red cap of their meager baggage. “Sears, Roebuck,” he said to himself, for he had lived in Janesville, Wisconsin.
“Oh, we forgot to see about your trunks!” exclaimed Rita when the car had started.
“We didn’t bring no trunks,” said Bob.
“We can only stay two weeks,” said his wife.
“That seems like an awfully short visit,” Rita said.
“I know, but Bob don’t feel like he can stay away from the garden this time of year. We left old Jimmy Preston to take care of it, but nobody can be trusted to tend to another person’s garden like you would yourself.”
“Does the place look just the same?”
“I should say not! It was in terrible condition when he first came East.”
“Came East?”
“I mean, to Michigan. But Bob spent—How much did you spend fixing things up, Bob, about?”
“Over two thousand dollars,” said Bob.
“I thought it was nearer twenty-one or twenty-two hundred,” said his wife.
“Well, somewhere over two thousand.”
“It was more than two thousand,” insisted his wife.
“Look out!” yelled Bob, and the two women jumped.
They were on the Fifty-ninth Street bridge and Gates was worming his way through the myriad trucks and funerals that prevail on that structure at 11 a.m.
“What’s the matter? You scared me to death!” said Rita.
“I thought we was going to hit that Reo,” Bob explained.
“Bob’s a nervous wreck when anybody else is driving,” apologized Jennie. “I often think a person who drives themselves is more liable to be nervous when somebody else is driving.”
“I guess that’s true,” agreed Rita, and reflected that she had heard this theory expounded before.
“And I do believe,” continued Jennie, “that Bob is just about the best driver in the world, and that’s not because he’s my husband, either.”
This remark caused Gates to turn around suddenly and look the speaker in the eye, and the sedan missed another Reo by a flea’s upper lip.
The road leading from New York to the towns on Long Island’s north shore is, for the most part, as scenically attractive as an incinerating plant. Nevertheless, Jennie kept saying “How beautiful!” and asking Rita who were the owners of various places which looked as if they had been disowned these many years. Bob was too nervous to make any effort to talk and Rita sighed with relief when the drive was over.
“I’ll show you your room,” she said, “and then you can rest till lunch. Stu is in the city and won’t be home till dinner. But he only goes in once or twice a week, and he said he would arrange not to go at all while you’re here, so he’d have plenty of time to visit.”
Jennie was impressed with the luxurious guest room and its outlook on the Sound, but Bob had slept badly on the train and dozed off while she was still marveling.
“I don’t suppose you feel like doing much this afternoon,” said Rita when lunch was over. “Maybe we’d better just loaf. I imagine that tomorrow and the rest of the week will be pretty strenuous. Stu has all kinds of plans.”
So they loafed, and Jennie and Rita took naps, and Bob walked around the yard and plotted the changes he would make in it if it were his.
Seven o’clock brought Stu, who was introduced to the in-laws and then ordered to his room to make himself presentable for dinner. Rita followed him upstairs.
“Well?” he said.
“I’m not sure yet,” said Rita, “but I’m kind of afraid—Bob is awfully quiet and I guess she’s embarrassed to death. I hope they’ve brought some other clothes, but then I don’t know—A change might be for the worse, though it doesn’t seem possible.”
“Does she think,” asked Stu, “that just because she’s from the Golden State she has to run around with a mouthful of nuggets?”
“She’s all right when she doesn’t smile. You mustn’t say anything what will make
