Portraits and Observations Read Online Free PDF Page B

certainly, Grandfather. And why did you drop the bombs?”
    Mr. Crocker surveyed the assemblage of fellow Cherokees; then, with a saturnine smile, bobbed his head in the direction of Miss Brockton. “Her—” he said, “I wanted to blow her up. She’s a stinking pig; she and Cook have it fixed up between them never to give me any chocolate sauce so she can gobble it all her big fat self.”
    Promptly the ladies gathered around his intended victim, whose heart-flutter seemed suddenly on the verge of flying her to the ceiling; above their outraged clucking, Mrs. Allen T. Bonaparte’s
non sequiturs
carried clearest: “Murder dear Miss Brockton, imagine, did you ever visit the waxworks in London? You know the ones I mean: look alike, don’t they?” And it was understood the radios that night would set every window trembling.
    Now, among the tenants there is one so formidable she gives pause even to Littlelow. Very grand is Mrs. T. T. Huett-Smith, and when she appears in the dining room, twinkling with yellowed musty diamonds, her entrance lacks only musical fanfare: with stuttering steps she advances toward her table (the one with a rose, the only one with a rose: paper, at that), accepting, in passage, the homage of the socially ambitious: she is the last souvenir they have of those faraway days when Brooklyn, too, supported an altitudinous society. But like most things which have lingered beyond their valid bloom, Mrs. T. T. has turned decadent, has become a tragicomic exaggeration: lipstick and rouge, of which she uses an inordinate quantity, look rancid on her narrow, shriveled face, and her pleasures are perverse: she enjoys nothing so much as making some sadistic revelations. When Mrs. Bonaparte first moved into the hotel, Mrs. T. T., seeing her enter the dining room, announced vociferously, “I remember that creature when her mother was a scrubwoman in the
lowest
bath in Coney Island.” The shy and silent Webster sisters are another target: “Damned old maids, my husband always called them.”
    I know a secret about Mrs. T. T. She is a thief. For years she has been slipping the Cherokee’s dime-store silverware into her embroidered handbag, and one day, during what was doubtless a mental blackout, she appeared at the desk asking to have her collection locked safely in the hotel safe. “But my dear Mrs. Huett-Smith,” said Littlelow, rising above his astonishment, “this can hardly belong to you; after all, it isn’t your pattern.” Mrs. T. T. examined the knives and forks with a puzzled frown: “Of course not,” she said, “no, of course not: we always had the best.”
    Weeks have gone by since I was last at the Cherokee. I had a dream. I dreamt one of Mr. Crocker’s bombs blew them all away; to tell the truth, I’m rather afraid to go and see.
    December 28. A blue crystal day, too exquisite for the stuffy precincts of Mrs. Q.’s, and so with a friend I went for a walk on Brooklyn Heights; Boston’s Beacon Hill and Charleston, these alone of places I have known, can project a comparable sense of the past (the
vieux carré
of New Orleans is exempt because its quality is too directly foreign); and of the three, Brooklyn Heights seems the less contrived, and certainly the least exploited. It is condemned, of course; even now a tunnel is coming through, a highway is planned; steel-teethed machines are eating at its palisades, many of the old mansions wait in derelict darkness for the demolition crew; the red newness of
Danger! Men Working
signs glitters in the sober shade of dwarfed Dickensian streets: Cranberry, Pineapple, Willow, Middagh. The dust of dynamited stone hangs its sentence in the air. As it was getting dusk we bought a pecan pie; we sat down on a bench and watched the honeycomb of lights go on in the towers across the river. Wind whipped whitecaps on the cold water, sang through the harplike bridge, swept crying gulls in looping patterns. Eating my portion of the pie, I sat looking at