—Oh, blah, blah, blah, said Woolly.
Sarah opened her mouth to make another point, but Woolly picked up the panda and waggled it back and forth in front of his sister.
—Oh blah, blah, blah, he said in a panda’s voice.
—All right, said Sarah with a laugh. For old times’ sake, let’s have tea at the Plaza.
Duchess
On Friday at half past one, I was standing in front of the hutch in Woolly’s sister’s dining room admiring the orderly arrangement of her china. Like the Watsons, she had place settings that were worthy of being handed down, and perhaps already had been. But here were no teetering towers of coffee cups, no thin layer of dust. Sister Sarah’s china was arranged in perfectly aligned vertical stacks, and each plate had a little circle of felt to protect its surface from the plate above it. On a shelf under the china was a long black case that contained an equally orderly arrangement of the family silver.
Locking the hutch’s lower cabinet, I put the key back where I’d found it: in the tureen that was on display in the middle of the middle shelf. The lady of the house clearly had a nice sense of symmetry, which was no less laudable for being easy to decipher.
Wandering down the hall from the dining room, I satisfied myself that I had visited every room on the ground floor, then headed up the back stairs.
* * *
Over breakfast, Sarah had explained that she and Dennis would be spending the weekend at their apartment in the city because they had dinner engagements on both nights. When she added that she needed to head in before noon in order to run a few errands, and Woolly suggested that he come along to keep her company, Sarah looked at me.
—Would that be all right? she asked. If Woolly joined me in the city for a few hours?
—I don’t see why not.
So it was settled. Woolly would drive in with Sarah, and I would come later in the Caddy to pick him up on our way to the Circus. When I asked Woolly where we should meet, naturally he suggested the statue of Abraham Lincoln in Union Square. Shortly after eleven, they pulled out of the driveway and headed for the city, leaving me with the run of the house.
For starters, I went into the living room. Pouring myself a finger of scotch, I put Sinatra on the hi-fi and kicked up my feet. The record was one I’d never heard before, but Ol’ Blue Eyes was in fine form, singing an assortment of lightly swinging love songs with full orchestration including “I Get a Kick Out of You” and “They Can’t Take That Away from Me.”
On the cover of the album, two pairs of sweethearts were out for a stroll, while Sinatra leaned against a lamppost by himself. Dressed in a dark gray suit with a tilted fedora on his head, Sinatra was holding a cigarette so loosely between two fingers it looked like he might drop it. Just seeing the picture made you want to smoke, and wear a hat, and lean on lampposts all by your lonesome.
For a moment, I wondered whether Woolly’s brother-in-law had bought the record. But only for a moment. Because, of course, it must have been Sarah.
Cuing up the record for a second time, I poured myself a second whiskey and meandered down the hall. According to Woolly, his brother-in-law was something of a Wall Street wunderkind, though you wouldn’t have known it from his office. There was no ticker tape, or whatever they used nowadays to tell them what to buy and sell. There were no ledgers or calculators or slide rules. In their place was ample evidence of the sporting life.
On a shelf right across from the desk—where Dennis could easily see it—was a stuffed fish mounted on a post, forever turning its mouth toward the hook. On the shelf above the fish was a recent photo of four men having just finished a round of golf. Luckily it was in color, so you could take note of all the clothes you would never want to wear. Scanning the faces of the golfers, I picked out the one who seemed particularly smug and figured that was Dennis. To the left of the shelves was another photograph hanging above two empty J hooks that jutted from the wall. This photo was of a college baseball team with a two-foot trophy on the grass.
What there wasn’t was a picture of Woolly’s sister. Not on the wall, not on a shelf, not on the wunderkind’s desk.
After rinsing out my whiskey glass in the kitchen, I found what I guess you’d call a pantry. But it wasn’t like the one at St. Nick’s, stacked from floor to ceiling with bags of flour and cans of tomatoes. This one had a little copper sink with a copper counter, and vases in every imaginable color and size, so that Sarah could perfectly display every bouquet of flowers that Dennis would never bring her. On the brighter side, Dennis had made sure that the pantry had a specially designed cabinet in which to store a few hundred bottles of wine.