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and Walt Whitman (Dave), Dunmore and Stagedoor Manor (Rachel and, as it turns out, her “co-star,” and now film star, Natalie Portman), and Starlight (!) (Dan); and our visits to Hobart (Peter), Middlebury (Dan), Emerson (Rachel), Carleton (Dave) and Amherst (Danny, espe- cially when we went up for commencement and found out, at a cocktail party at Professor Kennick’s house, that the next day we would hear Danny speak to the commencement audience, as he had been elected Speaker of the Class—and when we dined peacefully with Phyllis and Tom and watched them down “sea breezes”).
On the smaller-picture side of things, we remember fondly the interaction between Dan and Dave, on the one hand, and Francis, Mous- sika, and Gus, on the other (see “Master of the House,” in this chapter); Peter, Dave, and Dan constructing HO scale-model buildings in the kitchen for a railroad that I told them I would construct (okay, I know that they had to wait twenty years or so, but I did deliver); our house- keepers, Hortense, Grace, and, especially, Su-Sann, our very small Asian cook who would prepare wonderful dinners for us in a wok and who, I fantasized, rode around the kitchen on Gus’s back when no one was home; and, finally, David and Michael McNabb dutifully pulling pizza off the kitchen fan, table, and floor after a “spat” between two of the children who shall remain nameless.
It was the dining room—or, more particularly, the dining room ambience—that epitomizes for me the fun that we had with the kids in Scarsdale. It was my fiftieth birthday celebration (November 3, 1994), and I thought that I’d turn the tables and present them with a gift—well, anyway, something special. (I’m obliged to add that November 3 is also David’s birthday, a fact that I admit only with annoyance and reluctance; he was turning fourteen.) When we had moved into the house about four and one-half years earlier, the nineteenth-century rifle that had been hanging on a wall of the library was gone, but the murals on the dining room walls showing—and here’s some guesswork—downtown Scarsdale during the nineteenth century and scenes of the Hudson Val- ley remained. They were awaiting a time at which we would “decorate.” Decorating was now anticipated, and an opportunity therefore pre-
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