“See, horseman?” David said. “How you were then?”
“All right, papa,” Andrew said. “Tell him about when he would read nothing but the funny papers and read funny papers on the trip through the Everglades and wouldn’t look at anything after he went to that school the fall we were in New York and got to be a heel.”
“I remember it,” David said. “Papa doesn’t have to tell it.”
“You came out of it all right,” Thomas Hudson said.
“I had to, I guess. It certainly would have been something pretty bad to have stayed in.”
“Tell them about when I was little,” young Tom said, rolling over and taking hold of David’s ankle. “I’ll never get to be as good in real life as the stories about me when I was little.”
“I knew you when you were little,” Thomas Hudson said. “You were quite a strange character then.”
“He was just strange because he lived in strange places,” the smallest boy said. “I could have been strange in Paris and Spain and Austria.”
“He’s strange now, horseman,” David said. “He doesn’t need any exotic backgrounds.”
“What’s exotic backgrounds?”
“What you haven’t got.”
“I’ll bet I’ll have them, then.”
“Shut up and let papa tell,” young Tom said. “Tell them about when you and I used to go around together in Paris.”
“You weren’t so strange then,” Thomas Hudson said. “As a baby you were an awfully sound character. Mother and I used to leave you in the crib that was made out of a clothes basket in that flat where we lived over the sawmill and F. Puss the big cat would curl up in the foot of the basket and wouldn’t let anybody come near you. You said your name was G’Ning G’Ning and we used to call you G’Ning G’Ning the Terrible.”
“Where did I get a name like that?”
“Off a street car or an autobus I think. The sound the conductor made.”
“Couldn’t I speak French?”
“Not too well then.”
“Tell me about a little later by the time I could speak French.”
“Later on I used to wheel you in the carriage, it was a cheap, very light, folding carriage, down the street to the Closerie des Lilas where we’d have breakfast and I’d read the paper and you’d watch everything that went past on the boulevard. Then we’d finish breakfast—”
“What would we have?”
“Brioche and café au lait.”
“Me too?”
“You’d just have a taste of coffee in the milk.”
“I can remember. Where would we go then?”
“I’d wheel you across the street from the Closerie des Lilas and past the fountain with the bronze horses and the fish and the mermaids and down between the long allées of chestnut trees with the French children playing and their nurses on the benches beside the gravel paths—”
“And the École Alsacienne on the left,” young Tom said.
“And apartment buildings on the right—”
“And apartment buildings and apartments with glass roofs for studios all along the street that goes down to the left and quite triste from the darkness of the stone because that was the shady side,” young Tom said.
“Is it fall or spring or winter?” Thomas Hudson asked.
“Late fall.”
“Then you were cold in the face, and your cheeks and your nose were red and we would go into the Luxembourg through the iron gate at the upper end and down toward the lake and around the lake once and then turn to the right toward the Medici Fountain and the statues and out of the gate in front of the Odéon and down a couple of side streets to the Boulevard Saint-Michel—”
“The Boul’ Mich’—”
“And down the Boul’ Mich’ past the Cluny—”
“On our right—”
“That was very dark and gloomy looking and across the Boulevard Saint-Germain—”
“That was the most exciting street with the most traffic. It’s strange how exciting and dangerous seeming it was there. And down by the Rue de Rennes it always seemed perfectly safe—between the Deux Magots and Lipp’s crossing I mean. Why was that, Papa?”
“I don’t know, Schatz.”
“I wish something would happen beside the names of streets,” Andrew said. “I get tired of the names of streets in a place I’ve never been.”