The Golden Goose (2 page)

Consequently, when a situation arose like this one of the will, in which there was no use for her sole asset, Cousin Peet was at a loss. She simply sat there with her secondary sex characteristics going to waste, looking from one to the other of her assembled kin as if groping for a clue to whatever the mystery was.

As for Cousin Twig: Gastronomically speaking, where Cousin Peet made the mouth water, her brother was about as appetizing as a glob of long-spoiled pork. Cousin Twig had no shape; that is, the shape he was in conformed to no esthetic pattern acceptably human. It was fat where it should have been lean, and stringy where it should have had bulk: his thighs were too long and his legs were too short; his torso gave an upside-down effect; and above all—above all loomed his head, most of it beyond his brows in the manner of the original Boris Karloff's Frankenstein monster, except that in Cousin Twig's case no make-up was necessary. In addition to this anatomical slumgullion, nature had thrown into the pot a skin coarsely dark, with the green-broth sheen of an exposed drainage ditch.

Ill-designed containers are often redeemed by their contents. The love of Beauty brought out the handsome prince in the Beast. The Ugly Duckling's habiliments covered the most gorgeous bird in the pond. The gargoyle breast of Quasimodo harbored the tenderness of angels. Not so with Cousin Twig. The interior Twig was even less favored than its housing. He might well have said with Gloucester that love forswore him in his mother's womb. For he was as nasty inside as out—a man of cringe and craft, bitter, lecherous, treacherous, capable of kissing the foot that kicked him and biting the hand that fed him, and both for purposes of his own.

So now Cousin Twig, after a moment of silence, put on his look of ruptured dignity, which unfortunately succeeded only in resembling the
risus sardonicus
of a corpse felled by lockjaw, and said to his Uncle Slater: “Uncle Slater, I will not presume to speak for anyone else present, but for you to suggest that I might have designs on your stocks and bonds and whatever other worldly trifles you have stashed away hits me where I live. For shame, Uncle Slater. I'm humbly happy with the pittance you allow me from your income, and it hurts me deeply that you should think otherwise.”

“Then you're a fool, Nephew Twig,” said Uncle Slater with a grin, “which I have no intention of believing. You're all quite welcome to my capital in good time. At the easy rate I'm going, that should be about twenty years from now.”

Uncle Slater miscalculated. The twenty years he looked forward to turned out to be more nearly twenty days.

For the record: It was three weeks and two days later that Slater O'Shea went to his reward, which was what he had been afraid of for a long time.

2

Prin tried to remember later just when it was that she last saw Uncle Slater alive. She finally decided that it must have been about two o'clock that fateful Friday afternoon.

Ordinarily Prin would have been slaving for her nylons behind one of the counters of Free's Drug Store on Friday afternoon; but on this particular Friday she had screwed up her mutated face—really not a bad face as faces went, she always thought, although of course not an O'Shea face, which at its best ran to Black Irish handsomeness, as in Brother Brady's case—and put a moan into her voice, the way they did on television commercials, and told Orville Free that she hadn't wanted to mention it before, since it involved a condition peculiarly female connected with the moon, but the cramps were getting to be too terrible and she'd simply have to take the rest of the day off. The lunar reference was a lie. The truth was that Prin had enough O'Shea in her to get the feeling occasionally that she simply couldn't stand working another second, and this had been one of those occasions. So that was how she came to be sitting in Uncle Slater's living room at two o'clock on a Friday afternoon, nuzzling a gin and tonic and listening to
Till Eulenspiegel
on his hi-fi, when he came home in an obvious glow and waved to her cheerily on his way upstairs to his room. And she had never again seen Uncle Slater breathing, boozily or otherwise.

After a while
Till
was finished and so was the gin and tonic, so Prin had gone into the kitchen, dropped two ice cubes into her glass, leaned against the sink for a few minutes listening to Mrs. Dolan, the cook, then deserted Mrs. Dolan and returned to the living room and refilled the glass according to Uncle Slater's recipe, which was equal parts of gin and quinine water. After that she had wandered out to the terrace. On the flagstones lay a sky-blue air mattress, and on the sky-blue air mattress lay Cousin Peet's little belly, along with the rest of her.

Cousin Peet was wearing the hip sliver of a pink bikini, and nothing else. Even though Cousin Peet was on the small side as girls usually go, in the hip sliver of a pink bikini there seemed to be a great deal of her, all clearly superior. Her self-advertising tended to disconcert strangers, for she was given to lying about almost anywhere in almost nothing; and sometimes, in some places, in nothing absolutely. The only thing that shocked her was the continual rediscovery that practically all members of the male sex construed her innocent displays as invitations to finger the merchandise—that is, after they had got over being disconcerted. They could never seem to understand, as they dragged themselves away clutching their groins, that Cousin Peet's sex drive was only slightly stronger than a flat-worm's.

Cousin Peet's habit of going about casually near-naked never seemed to put any notions into her head that could not have been freely discussed from the rostrum at a D.A.R. meeting. Prin's own notions in certain circumstances were not so unimpeachable. In her view, poor Peet was a waste; and Prin felt no envy in conceding the quality of what was being wasted, for not only did she possess attributes that were just as good, but she also knew what to do with them, which apparently Cousin Peet did not.

“Hello, you Peet,” Prin said, drifting over to the umbrella-table. “Where's anybody?”

Peet raised herself on her elbows and twisted from the dimpled gimbals, ignoring the absence of the upper sliver. Her large, light blue eyes seemed not quite focused. This gave them a kind of lovely vacancy reminiscent of Ophelia or some other tragic heroine who had lost her mind, but of course this was an illusion: as Uncle Slater said, she had no mind to lose.

“Well,” Peet said brightly, “here I am, and here you are.”

“Yes,” Prin said, “there's no doubt about that. And Uncle Slater just went up to his room. But where are Aunt Lallie and Twig and Brady?”

“Aunt Lallie is taking her afternoon siesta. At least she says that's what she does in her room after lunch, and she always goes upstairs, so I guess it's true. I saw Twig drifting around a couple of times. And Brady was here a while ago, and then he went around back to hit some golf balls or something, and I'm glad.”

“Why?” asked Prin, knowing perfectly well why.

“Because he kept acting so
peculiar
, Prin.”

“For instance?” asked Prin unnecessarily, for there was nothing else to do.

“Well, he kept staring and staring at me the way he does. With the most threatening
expression
. And he sat down, and stood up, and up, and down, and up-and-down till I got most as itchy as he was. What do you suppose can be the matter with Brady?”

“It's an itchy day. Take my advice, though, Peetie-girl, and don't let Brady sweet-talk you into a dark corner to explain it.”

“Do you think he might be
dangerous?
” cried Cousin Peet, two of her attributes bobbing with agitation. “You ought to know, Prin. Your own brother and all.”

“Not as much as you'd think,” Prin sighed. “Brady ran away from home when he was fifteen and I was nine. I saw him only once between then and the time he turned up here.”

“Could something be wrong with him, do you suppose?”

“Nothing serious. Just the
Peetis fornicatis
itch.”

“Well, I
hope
so.”

“What?” said Prin. “Never mind, Peetie. I think I'll go on back inside and nibble on another gin and tonic and do some itching of my own.”

Peet nodded as if she understood perfectly. She lowered herself to the blue mattress again with a happy little sigh, and Princess left her. Prin made another drink and went upstairs to her room, having suddenly decided to lie down for a while. Her head was spinning and lying down seemed the sensible preference to falling down, which she kept having the disturbing sensation she was about to do. In her room she kicked off her shoes and sat down on the bed and finished her third gin and tonic. The dizziness unaccountably increased, and she did what she had come up to the bedroom to do: she lay down and closed her eyes. This immediately made her think of Coley Collins, a young man of whom she had recently begun to think itchily.

She was engaged in this pleasant preoccupation when someone knocked on her door and opened it simultaneously. For a horrid moment Prin thought it might be Cousin Twig, against whom privacy could be reasonably assured only by a well-turned key, and she had forgotten to turn it. Her eyes flew open and she jerked her skirt down at the same instant; but then she saw that it was Brother Brady, and Prin murmured, “Thank God,” and shut her eyes again.

Brother Brady, not grasping the nuance of his sister's piety, was pleased. “Hi, Princess,” he said heartily. “What are you doing home?”

“Lying down, as you see,” said Prin, stretched out like a newly arranged corpse. “And what I'd like to do next, Brady, is drift away with my thoughts into slumberland. So goodbye?”

“Aren't you supposed to be working?” Brother Brady asked, with the virtuous concern of one to whom the phenomenon was of theoretical interest only.

“I got a convenient case of little-girl trouble and Mr. Free said I could go home.”

“Atta sis,” said Brady approvingly. “I don't see why you waste your time on that crummy job, anyway. It's so—so—” he groped for
le mot juste
“—unnecessary.”

“Oh, go away,” murmured Prin.

“You're an idiot. I wish I had your in with Uncle Slater. Man, would I take him! Here you are, able to get anything you want from him if you'd only try—”

“What I want I already get without trying.”

“You're a square, do you know that?” said Brother Brady; this time he stalked over and sat down hard on the bed. Prin opened one eye and quickly closed it again. His brief moment of good humor was gone; he had that ugly look again. Most people didn't see the ugliness, especially women, but Prin could see it even when Brady was being agreeable and charming, and it always gave her a chill. Brother Brady, she was sure, was capable of anything, even murder, and he may have been guilty of that for all she knew—knowing him, after all, so little. Right now, sitting on Prin's bed, he looked sullen and dangerous, and it meant that he had had some kind of unsettling experience.

“What's the matter with you?” Prin said. “Has something happened?”

“What makes you think something's happened?” he growled. “Not a damned thing's happened.”

“Well, according to what Peet just said—”

Brother Brady's body beautiful quivered. “What did Peet just say?”

“She said you kept staring at her and acting itchy.”

“How does she expect me to act,” snarled Brady, “when she's always lying around without any clothes on? That damn Peet is crazy, that's what she is! She's the most deceptive female I've ever seen in my life.”

“I don't think she means to be.”

“In my opinion she's frigid. I'd bet on it,” said Brady excitedly.

“Not with me, brother. You're surely right, and I don't have the least doubt you've made every effort to prove it. Your own cousin, too. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

“What I can't understand is why she leads a fellow on,” muttered Brady. “It's damn confusing.”

“Peet doesn't lead anyone on. She just likes to go naked.”

“She ought to put some clothes on!”

“Women are showing themselves practically naked in public wherever you look.”

“But does she have to do it in
private?”
cried Brady. He inhaled his rage and said with formidable quietude, “She better quit is all I've got to say. She don't, she'll be in for one hell of a surprise one of these days.”

“My advice, Brady,” sighed his sister, “is to start taking cold showers. You might be the surprised one. I can't give you an authoritative opinion for obvious reasons, but it's my hunch Peet would turn out to be as exciting a conquest as a cold mashed potato sandwich.”

Kindly and sound as this advice was, Prin could see that Brady was not impressed by it. He lit a cigarette and puffed at it moodily for a while, seeming to be thinking about where to go. To Prin's relief he finally rose from the bed and left the room. Her head was still spinning, and she thought a nap might help it run down. So she turned over and went to sleep. The nap did in fact stop the spinning, although she felt rather gummy when she awoke—which was, to her surprise, at six o'clock.

It was halfway to seven before she went downstairs. Everyone was in the living room except Mrs. Dolan, who was muttering in the dining room as she set the table, and Uncle Slater, who had not yet made his appearance for a reason still generally unknown. Aunt Lallie, smoking a cigarette in a long onyx holder, was looking prettily regal (if you could ignore her hands) in a severe black gown. Cousin Twig was torturing a tune on the piano with one steel-nailed green-brown finger. Cousin Peet, draped over the sofa, had slipped into skintight red velvet pants and a sheer white silk blouse that suggested with curious effectiveness what she had fully displayed earlier. Brother Brady, slouched tigerishly in a chair, was watching Cousin Peet with an expression at once carnivorous and incredulous.