Welcome to the Monkey House - Kurt Vonnegut [60]
And then Grace came home, cheerful but weak, leaning on George’s arm. It was late in the afternoon, and Anne and I were waiting in the living room, literally trembling with excitement. As George helped Grace up the walk, Anne fussed nervously with a bouquet of red roses she had brought and placed in a massive glass vase in the center of the coffee table.
We heard George’s hand on the latch, the door swung open, and the McClellans stood on the threshold of their dream house.
"Oh, George," Grace murmured. She let go of his arm, and, as though miraculously drawing strength from her surroundings, she walked from room to room, looking all about her as we had seen her do a thousand times. But this time of times she was speechless.
She returned at last to the living room, and sank onto the plum-colored chaise longue.
George turned down the volume of the phonograph to a sweet whisper. "Well?"
Grace sighed. "Don’t rush me," she said. "I’m trying to find the words, the exact words."
"You like it?" George asked.
Grace looked at him and laughed incredulously. "Oh, George, George, of course I like it! You darling, it’s wonderful! I’m home, home at last." Her lip trembled, and we all began to cloud up.
"Nothing wrong?" George asked huskily.
"You’ve taken wonderful care of it. Everything’s so clean and beautiful."
"Well, it’d sure be a surprise if things weren’t clean," George said. He clapped his hands together. "Now then, you well enough for a drink?"
"I’m not dead."
"Leave us out, George," I said. "We’re leaving. We just had to see her expression when she walked in, but now we’ll clear out."
"Oh, say now—" George said.
"No. I mean it. We’re going. You two ought to be alone—you three, including the house."
"Stay right where you are," George said. He hurried into the dazzling white kitchen to mix the drinks.
"All right, so we’ll sneak out," Anne said. We started for the front door. "Don’t get up, Grace."
"Well, if you really won’t stay, good-by," Grace said from the chaise longue. "I hardly know how to thank you."
"It was the most fun I’ve had in years," said Anne. She looked proudly around the room, and went over to the coffee table to rearrange the roses slightly. "The only thing that worried me was the color of the slipcover and curtains. Are they all right?"
"Why, Anne, did you notice them too? I wasn’t even going to mention them. It would certainly be silly to let a little thing like that spoil my homecoming." She frowned a little.
Anne was crestfallen. "Oh dear, I hope they didn’t spoil it."
"No, no, of course they didn’t," Grace said. "I don’t quite understand it, but it doesn’t matter a bit."
"Well, I can explain," Anne said.
"Something in the air, I suppose."
"In the air?" Anne said.
"Well, how else can you explain it? That material held its color just perfectly for years, and then, poof, it fades like this in a few weeks."
George walked in with a frosty pewter pitcher. "Now, you’ll stay for a quick one, won’t you?"
Anne and I took glasses hungrily, gratefully, wordlessly.
"There’s a new Home Beautiful that came today, sweet-heart," George said.
Grace shrugged. "Read one and you’ve read them all." She lifted her glass. "Happy days, and thanks, darlings, so much for the roses."
(1951)
THE HYANNIS PORT STORY
THE FARTHEST AWAY from home I ever sold a storm window was in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, practically in the front yard of President Kennedy’s summer home. My field of operation is usually within about twenty-five miles of my home, which is in North Crawford, New Hampshire.
The Hyannis Port thing happened because somebody misunderstood something I said, and thought I was an ardent Goldwater Republican. Actually, I hadn’t made up my mind one way or the other about Goldwater.
What happened was this: The program chairman of the North Crawford Lions Club was a Goldwater man, and he had this college boy named Robert Taft Rumfoord come talk to a meeting one day about the Democratic mess in Washington and Hyannis Port. The boy was national president of some kind of student organization that