The Dud Avocado - Elaine Dundy [113]
I left the restaurant without finishing my coffee and went straight to the Embassy.
As I started to go through the gates I was stopped by a sentry. “Hey! Hey, Sally Jay, when’d you get back?”
I looked dumbly at the soldier who’d spoken to me. I peered under his helmet. “My God! Hugo McCarthy. Mac! I didn’t even recognize you without the mustache. What in the world are you doing in that get-up? What’s the gag?”
“No gag at all,” he told me proudly. “I’m in training. I’m landing a big P.R.O. job at SHAPE in a couple of months. Assigned to guard-duty till then.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I should hope not. Never more serious in my life. Say, Sally Jay, I’m glad I ran into you. Missy and I—hah—Missy and I are getting married soon. You’ll have to come to the party. We found a peach of an apartment right near here. Just around the corner. The rue Boissy d’Anglas—d’you know it? It’s not very big—just a room and a kitchen, but it’s wonderfully furnished-cocktail bar and all that. Very snappy. Some big-shot Italian diplomat had it before, so you can imagine. Anyway, it’ll suit us fine for a start.”
“You and Missy!”
“Yeah. You know your pal Keevil gave her a pretty rough time, that bastard, but she’s O.K. now. How is the old snake, by the way?”
“Oh fine, fine. I mean I guess. I haven’t seen—but listen, hoiv did this all happen? I mean.…”
“Oh—oh,” he said, suddenly stiffening to attention. “Brass hats. Run along, little girl. See your later.”
So I ran along. And force of habit found me outside American Express. So I went in.
There was a letter from Uncle Roger. I held it in my hand awhile, breaking into one of the cold sweats that had formed such an integral part of my temperature in recent days, and then I tore it open and read it:
Dear Sally Jay,
That one generation cannot ever (ever) understand any other in spite of common ancestry and language and what have you is axiomatic. Your problems aren’t ours in any sense and you will have to deal with them in different ways. I strongly support conventional maxims about youth standing on its own feet, sowing its own oats, and reaping its own whirlwind (if there is one thing my generation knew nothing about it was moral agriculture), and I believe you should be allowed to work things out with as little meddling from the outside as possible. But every so often an unlikely chain of events or a special curiosity about a rare specimen does draw me, does really draw me, toward trying to understand someone about whom I am by definition ignorant.
In short, and in short words—how did you do it? How did such a cognizant young woman as yourself manage to get involved in what I cannot help (much as I hate so-called “value-judgments”) calling a deeply unsavory scandal, the details of which will no doubt erupt Etna-high and rock the Press back on what are aptly known as its heels? I dislike hortation, but I advise you to wonder, as calmly as possible, why it happened; for I am sure it need not have. Attribute this curiosity on my part, perhaps, to the Hydrogen bomb, which has revived my moribund affection for the fellow creatures with whom I share what remains of the pure air of this remarkable planet.
And speaking of this, I must inform you of a great change that has taken place in my own special spheres of interest. For the approach of atomic destruction, coinciding with the approach of my own end, has quixotically returned me to earth after all my years of star-gazing. In brief, I have swapped the telescope for the microscope. And how fascinating is life down under there! I am embarking on a really splendid collection of insects. I have already a very fine ant community, a first-class beehive, and a most romantic corner of rare cobwebs which I call my Spidery. You must come and see it some day—by which time I hope to have expanded it considerably.
But I mustn’t wander too far afield—especially as it has just occurred