The Egyptologist - Arthur Phillips [18]
In this respite from my labours, I caress with undiluted joy the recollection of my recent send-off from Boston, though it seems ages ago, a party whose guests included the expedition’s financial backers and their ladies, celebrating both our approaching good fortune in Egypt and my engagement to the daughter of the house. The images coalesce into clear memory: crisp evening attire and the new light gowns, glowing paper lanterns, and a Negro jazz orchestra stationed in the garden courtyard, its music drifting in and out of the open doors and windows of Chester Crawford Finneran’s Commonwealth Avenue mansion in the unseasonable heat of early September:
Canis and man is
A grand combination.
Gee, my dog is swell!
The already dense Egyptian décor in the Finneran home proliferated for the party: CCF had installed at the head of the ballroom two golden thrones on a faux-brick dais. As the climax of the evening’s events, he walked Margaret and me up the three steps to our seats before topping us with outrageous (and structurally inaccurate) Pharaonic crowns, then scowled at the bandleader, told him to “give the jungle noise a rest,” and lifted his goblet, bringing an alcoholic tear to an eye or two with the words “Now, desert sands aside, there’s no treasure in this whole wide world means a thing to me next to that little girl up there on the throne where she belongs.” A flurry of “aww” and “ohhh” and “CC’s so sweet” fluttered in the air before the grinning old bear batted his paws at the noise and it retreated. “But that don’t mean you’re comin’ back empty-handed, Pushy!” Vast amusement. “No, folks, folks, serious now, what dad wouldn’t just leap at the chance to pick up a son-in-law like this one, hey? English gentleman, well-educated, explorer. Honestly, Margaret and me are of one brain on this: we both feel like the luckiest gal in the world! Now then, you go get our gold, Pushy, my boy, and if you come back with piles of it, ingots and jewels and crowns, well”—wily squint through winding coils of cigar smoke—“that’ll just about pay Margaret’s dowry!” His splendid oratory extorted its just homage from the gathered party, while my fiancée and I waved from under our tipping toppers, and I squeezed Margaret’s hand to keep her awake, as the excitement had not surprisingly exhausted her in her fragile health. She smiled through heavy lids and murmured, “This is really swell, isn’t it, love? All this fiesta. I could do with a siesta.” Even in her fatigue, she was celestial, grateful to her father and me. The crowd cheered our nuptials and the success of my mission, perhaps not precisely in that order, as CCF had muscled several of the party into becoming partners in Hand-of-Atum Explorations, of which he is President and I am a shareholding Technical Consultant. The band started up again with a peculiar fox-trot, presumably appropriate to Egyptian exploration and an age-old piece of zoological trivia:
If you prefer not to hump on just one bump
Then you’d best be wary of the dromedary.
But if you’d like to jump and scrump and pump
Between two big lumps—
“Not so fast, boys,” interrupts CCF, and the music stumbles to silence one instrument at a time, a sizzling cymbal the last to get the message, “because we’ve got a little surprise,” and CCF calls up Kendall and Hilly Mitchell, Beacon Hill jollies I had met at an investors’ meeting and then again when, at CCF’s request, I had gone for some very discreet cocktails with Kendall at his exceedingly discreet club, where he interviewed me about my background and Egypt with alarming tenacity and secrecy, an interrogation I simply could not understand until this very moment, when Hilly laughingly tossed her scarcely sheathed hips and bumped the Negro from the piano bench, and Kendall loosened his tie and struck a boulevardier