Page "fiction" Paragraph 777

I would not want to be one of those writers who begin each morning by exclaiming, `` O Gogol, O Chekhov, O Thackeray and Dickens, what would you have made of a bomb shelter ornamented with four plaster-of-Paris ducks, a birdbath, and three composition gnomes with long beards and red mobcaps ''??

As I say, I wouldn't want to begin a day like this, but I often wonder what the dead would have done.

But the shelter is as much a part of my landscape as the beech and horse-chestnut trees that grow on the ridge.

I can see it from this window where I write.

It was built by the Pasterns, and stands on the acre of ground that adjoins our property.

It bulks under a veil of thin, new grass, like some embarrassing fact of physicalness, and I think Mrs. Pastern set out the statuary to soften its meaning.

It would have been like her.

She was a pale woman.

Sitting on her terrace, sitting in her parlor, sitting anywhere, she ground an axe of self-esteem.

Offer her a cup of tea and she would say, `` Why, these cups look just like a set I gave to the Salvation Army last year ''.

Show her the new swimming pool and she would say, slapping her ankle, `` I suppose this must be where you breed your gigantic mosquitoes ''.

Hand her a chair and she would say, `` Why, it's a nice imitation of those Queen Anne chairs I inherited from Grandmother Delancy ''.

These trumps were more touching than they were anything else, and seemed to imply that the nights were long, her children ungrateful, and her marriage bewilderingly threadbare.

Twenty years ago, she would have been known as a golf widow, and the sum of her manner was perhaps one of bereavement.

She usually wore weeds, and a stranger watching her board a train might have guessed that Mr. Pastern was dead, but Mr. Pastern was far from dead.

He was marching up and down the locker room of the Grassy Brae Golf Club shouting, `` Bomb Cuba!!

Bomb Berlin!!

Let's throw a little nuclear hardware at them and show them who's boss ''.

He was brigadier of the club's locker-room light infantry, and at one time or another declared war on Russia, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and China.