The Celebrity Read Online Free PDF Page A

mania for nomenclature. Parents who name their sons after Presidents and Generals, parents who zealously thumb through the Bible when a new baby is due to join their little group of Zillahs, Absaloms, and Bathshebas—these parents surely reveal, if “mania” be too harsh a term, a strong attachment to nomenclature as well as to American history or the Book of God. And what of a certain large family with so passionate a love of horticulture that its girls were christened Ivy, Laurel, Rose, and Hyacinth, and its boys Oakley, Ferndon, Elmwood (since Elmer was too lower-class), and Larch?
    The Johns family would never have gone as far as that.
    But when, in the early days of the century, Gerald Johns met a pretty girl whom he politely called “Miss Thornton” for an entire evening in the shy tempo of that time—when Gerald then discovered that of all possible feminine names, hers was Geraldine, he immediately felt, in the neatness and sweetness of this phonetic pairing, an importance, a charm, and a destiny. And Geraldine felt them too.
    Once they were married, they decided to bestow upon all their children names beginning with G. A year later, they found it grievous to wreck the auditory perfection of Gerald Johns, Junior, by inserting a middle name for the sake of the Thornton grandparents, never suspecting that their first-born would disown the Gerald anyway, once he reached the age of consent—in his case, five. Before this unhappy defeat, having had four years to discuss hard G’s versus soft G’s, they were ready with Gregory, and when the recessive characteristics finally won out over the dominant, and girls began to appear, they were equally prepared with Gracia, Gloria, Georgia, and Gwendolyn.
    Hard G or soft, all the Johns offspring, save one, were present in Thornton’s apartment on the mild January evening of the seventeenth, together with husbands and wives and those of their own children who had qualified for admission by having entered their teens. The missing one was Gwendolyn, who lived in Wyoming, wife of a rancher and mother of five little would-be ranchers.
    Even without Gwendolyn and some dozen or so ineligible grandchildren who were there only in snapshot and anecdote, Mr. and Mrs. Gerald Johns could look about them, talk to, and lovingly touch quite a group of their progeny. This they did, at frequent intervals, through the preliminaries of arrivals and greetings and gift-giving and kissing, through the next stage of rum cocktails for the adults and ginger ale with a maraschino cherry for the youngsters, and then on through the precarious eating of an expensive, excellently prepared, and tepid buffet supper off the knees.
    To the fond old eyes of Gerald and Geraldine, each son and daughter, each grandchild, whether in the flesh or on Kodachrome, was Beauty and Goodness personified. To their delighted ears, each voice spoke only the admirable accents of wit and intelligence and modesty. To their happy hearts there was no human frailty, no selfishness, no baseness, and certainly no knavery, hiding in the bosom of one single creature before them.
    Their proud happiness sent forth emanations of joy so irresistible that the entire room responded to it. Laughter was constant, appetites were expansive, well-being was universal. The hulking maid, Hulda, was nearly successful at concealing her resentment as she collected abandoned plates and glasses and cutlery from laps and end-tables and carpets, and Cindy only smiled indulgently when one of her smaller nephews slopped a dishful of gravy all over her favorite sofa.
    When at last everybody had been supplied with ice cream and chocolate sauce and cookies, Thornton went off to the kitchen and brought back an icy magnum of champagne, domestic. The cork popped splendidly and Thorn grinned. His spirits had lifted, as they invariably did, once he gave up rebellion and surrendered to these family evenings. He filled the glasses, not forgetting a token splash in