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The mystery is how Gus, once having gone through what we assumed to be this unpleasantness, did not manage to avoid its happening again. Then again, Gus was Gus. The second time, to our dismay, he managed to get skunked right before we moved to the City. I guess that he wanted to let everyone in the lobby and, even better, the elevator know that we had arrived.
He did get along very well with Francis; they never fought, even though Gus made a habit of eating Francis’s cat food when no one was watching. He loved the boys, who ran him ragged, and even forgave them for his unfortunate $800 collision with a fungo bat. He was, in fact, not quite clear that he was not one of our children. If Kathy and David were sitting on a couch and Gus would become aware of it, the next thing that you would see was Gus squeezing in between the two them, clearly wanting himself rather than David to be Kathy’s puppy.
As I mentioned earlier, Kathy and I did not sell the house for five years after the last of the children, David, abandoned us and had the nerve to go to college. One reason might have been that Gus was indeed one of our children, the only one that we had had together.
If I May Be Completely Serious for a While
Kathy’s folks were born about five years after my mother was born and ten years after my father was. They remained relatively young to us dur- ing our entire stay in Scarsdale; my parents, unfortunately, did not. Jessie and Warren had their house on Martha’s Vineyard, which we loved to visit, and were active both there and at their home in Washing- ton. My parents may have been active in Somers (playing bridge and golf) when we arrived at 16 Church Lane South, but my father was gone eight years later, at the age of eighty-six, and by the time that we moved to the City, my mother was in the last stages of Alzheimer’s disease, and we had moved her to a nursing home near our apartment. At that time, she was eighty-seven.
When we first moved in, my folks still seemed young to us. They • 545 •