By five-thirty, all was in readiness for the reading club, which would begin with drinks at six. Kathleen Boyle looked around with satisfaction. Everything was spotless, the bar stocked and the ice bucket filled. The silver and crystal on the dining-room table gleamed. The dishes were laid out in the kitchen for the supper Mr. Obuchi had left behind. The Missus would have nothing to complain about.
Kathleen said good-bye to Pace Padgett and hurried away, eager to make her exit before the Missus or Mr. Tobias could interrupt her day off any further.
3
Getting Ready: II
“Well, dear, I’m as ready as I’ll ever be,” Cynthia Frost said as she walked into the library, where Reuben was puttering at his desk, working his way through a pile of accumulated paper. He looked up at his wife, pleased as always to take in the slim dancer’s figure she had managed to preserve years after her retirement as a ballerina. She was carrying a paperback edition of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, which she waved at her husband.
“Well, so am I,” he replied. “Having nothing better to do while you were off gallivanting in Chicago, I reread parts thirteen through sixteen last night.”
Cynthia, who was in charge of performing-arts grants at the prestigious Brigham Foundation, had been away for two days in Chicago, trying to assist in the latest effort to establish a viable ballet company in that city. She had attended a dinner of potential backers the night before and had offered up a Brigham grant, conditioned on obtaining a matching amount from local sources.
Cynthia had been annoyed at the inconvenience of attending an out-of-town dinner on a Saturday night, even though, as she and her husband got older, the working world’s distinction between weeknights and the weekend no longer was as pronounced for them as it once had been. But her annoyance had been tempered by the enthusiasm she had encountered, though she realized that it was not the first time that there were bright predictions that ballet was, at last, going to be put on a sound footing in the Windy City.
She had eaten the execrable lunch served on the plane and, after a brief report of her travels to Reuben when she arrived home, had gone immediately to her room to prepare for the evening’s session of Robyn Vandermeer’s reading club. It was not exactly her idea of ending a day that had begun at the Chicago Ritz at seven that morning, though she was reasonably sure she could not persuade Reuben to skip the monthly event. But it was worth a try.
“I’m afraid my gallivanting, as you call it, has taken more out of me than I thought,” she said. “Do we really have to go tonight?”
“We’ll talk about it in a minute,” her husband answered, instinctively employing the lawyer’s trick of meeting confrontation with delay. “What do you think of this? Do we need it?”
Reuben handed his wife a flier from the telephone company extolling the virtues of call-forwarding.
“This thing says you can program your phone so your calls will go to another number,” Frost explained. “Like everything the phone company does, it’s only pennies a day.”
“What on earth would we use it for?” Cynthia asked, as she looked over the advertisement.
“Well …”
“Reuben, sometimes I don’t understand you, even after forty what? forty-four years of marriage. I can remember when you could barely plug in a toaster—and refused to learn anything mechanical. Now, ever since Doug Gilmore persuaded you to buy that computer, you’ve suddenly become Dr. Steinmetz.”
“Now, wait a minute. You wanted me to get my computer,” he said, gesturing toward the sleek machine sitting on the side of his desk.
“Yes, I did. I thought it would—”
“—Occupy me.”
“Yes, occupy you. And maybe tempt you to start writing down some of the interesting things that have happened in your life.”
“Oh, God.”
“But it’s turned out to preoccupy you. It, and now all these other toys you want. Call-forwarding. Or that machine you mentioned the other day, the fax.”
“Everyone has a fax,” Frost protested.
“What would you do with it?” Cynthia asked, then suddenly realizing that this was perhaps not the most politic question for her retired husband. “But that doesn’t matter. If you want one, for heaven’s sake get one. We’ll end up with more electronic equipment than the Russian Mission on Sixty-seventh Street, but that’s all right.”
“I’m going to buy one. All the people at the office say they’re wonderful. Imagine, sending copies of things over the telephone.
“And I’m going to have a modem, too,” he added. “Gil-more tells me that with a modem you can do all kinds of things. Like access back articles from The New York Times. Or get airplane schedules and stock reports. Or even play blackjack.”
“Reuben, you’re impossible.”
“So be it. But you haven’t answered my question about call-forwarding.”
“I really don’t see what use it would be. Unless of course you want all your calls transferred while you’re down with the boys at the Gotham. And, if we may go back to where we started, do we have to go to Robyn’s?”
Reuben’s filibuster was over. “Of course we do, dear, unless you really feel terrible. I know, we both were hoodwinked into the damn thing—Robyn called you ten minutes after writing a big check to NatBallet, and Tobias followed up right after a meeting on high-fee legal business at Chase & Ward. But as I said then, and have been saying ever since, if we do it, we have to take it seriously. That means reading the books and going to every meeting. Look at the Jeromes. They come only half the time and are completely lost when they do.”
“I don’t think their being lost has anything to do with their attendance.”
“Okay, Ted Jerome is dense, and his wife almost as dense. But I still say we have to go regularly to make the thing work.”
“You’re right, of course,” Cynthia said with a sigh.
“It will improve your mind—Robyn’s lofty goal for the group.”
“Hah!” Cynthia snorted. “That’s what she told W when they did that piece on reading clubs. But you know as well as I do the motive was that earlier interview with her in Vogue.”
“Oh, yes.” Reuben chuckled, recalling the story, which was sufficiently delicious that his wife now repeated it.
“I’m surprised she ever admitted it to me. But I can just see it—there she was, holding forth about READ and all its good works, helping the little illiterates and the big illiterates learn to read. Then the bitch reporter asked Robyn what she had read recently.”
“He-hee.”
“And recorded poor Robyn’s hesitation in print. Well, the reading club was born instantly after that article appeared. First Light in August and now Vanity Fair. And here we are, stuck on another Sunday. Thank God the episodes we’re reading this month should make for a lively discussion. Or as lively as it ever gets.”
“I agree. I can’t wait to hear what the group’s got to say about Becky Sharp this time.”
“Besides, I would hate to deprive you of a chance to be taken by the hand through Thackeray by Helena New-comb.”
“That’s a low blow. Just because Helena doesn’t look like your typical frumpy professor of English. She may be a trifle, ah, overblown, like a fading movie star, but she’s very smart.”
“Oh, I grant you that. She’s no affirmative action case, and I’m sure got tenure at Princeton on her merits. But that long blond hair and buxom figure can’t have done her any harm.”
“I’m not so sure. She may have gotten ahead in spite of her looks. Academics are capable of envying anything—from mammillae to monographs, from derrieres to—”
“Reuben, please. I’m sorry I brought it up. Helena leads the discussions very well. I wonder how Robyn found her.”
“Wrote her a letter, is what she told me. It’s not too surprising. Helena reviews in the Times a lot and her book on Thackeray is pretty well known, I think.”
“I should go get ready,” Cynthia said. “I must pretty up s
o I don’t look like Barbara Givens.”
“Oh, God,” Reuben groaned, as he thought about the wife of Dr. Wayne Givens, both the Chairman and the President of the Bloemendael Foundation and another member of the reading group. “How can anybody be so plain?”
“She must work at it,” Cynthia said. “Those prim Laura Ashley dresses, no makeup and that straight hair that looks like it was cut in a barbershop. And she sounds as if she’s going to strangle when she finally gets to say anything.”
“Well, her popinjay husband talks for both of them.”
“‘Dr. Wayne,’ as he now calls himself on television.”
“America’s leading expert on drug addiction, or so everybody says—including himself,” Reuben observed. “I guess he’s good, but he certainly can be insufferable.”
“I still remember his psychoanalysis of Joseph Sedley as a repressed homosexual last month.”
“One of the reading club’s high points, no doubt about it.”
“Enough. Maybe it will be fun, after all. Becky’s money troubles are pretty interesting. But we still have the unanswered question, as we always do at these things.”
“Do you mean what I think?”
“The unanswered question—how drunk will Tobias get?
“He’ll have to go some to beat the last time.”
“Yes, but he’ll be on his home turf. It won’t take two people to carry him home,” Cynthia said, recalling with distaste the untidy conclusion of the February gathering at their house. “We’ve talked it over a hundred times, but after all those years spent getting plastered so quietly, why is he now drinking so violently?”
“I haven’t a clue. Something must be bothering him terribly, but I have no idea what.”
“His finances are all right, aren’t they?”
“As far as I know. Maybe Dr. Givens—Dr. Wayne—should psychoanalyze Tobias.”
“I’ll be ready in ten minutes. Let’s hope it’s an uneventful literary evening.”
Cynthia left to go upstairs, and Reuben, his joints creaking slightly, stood up.
“I hope so. I hope so,” he said quietly to himself, as he followed his wife.
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About the Author
Haughton Murphy is the pseudonym of former lawyer James H. Duffy, author of the Reuben Frost Mysteries. A graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Law School, Duffy got his start writing as a part-time and summer reporter for the Daily Times of Watertown, New York, before moving to New York City to practice law. After a number of years as an attorney, Duffy began writing thrillers, eventually retiring to focus on his novels full-time.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1989 by Haughton Murphy
Cover design by Greg Mortimer
ISBN: 978-1-5040-2817-2
This edition published in 2016 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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