The Great Man Read Online Free PDF Page A

white wrought-iron table and matching chairs. Two docile little pear trees rose near the house, thoughtfully blossoming in the spring and bearing fruit in the fall. An equally thoughtful pine tree provided shade in one corner of the yard, under which Lila had had built a playhouse for visiting grandchildren.
    Teddy had not been born to end up in a neighborhood like Greenpoint: She had chosen to live here. In 1952, during her sophomore year at Vassar, her English expatriate financier father, Herbert Groverton St. Cloud, the untitled younger son of a nobleman, had lost everything all at once on a bad investment, a South African diamond mine swindle he should have been too shrewd to fall for. He’d sold his Fifth Avenue town house and all his various possessions to pay his debts, and his only child had had to leave college abruptly. Almost penniless, Teddy had camped out with her father at an old family friend’s house and enrolled in a secretarial course, then found work as a secretary for an entertainment law firm and got herself an apartment. Her father, her only family, had died shortly afterward of a heart attack, leaving her almost nothing. She’d zealously reinvented herself as a working girl, settling in Greenpoint in the late 1950s. Originally a nineteenth-century rough-and-tumble riverfront shipbuilding town at the northernmost tip of Brooklyn, just across the river from midtown Manhattan, it had been populated largely by immigrants, Italians and Irish first, then Poles.
    Lila also lived here by choice. In 1985, shortly after Sam Scofield, her first husband, had died of colon cancer, she had sold the apartment in Gramercy Park they’d owned since 1968 and bought an old Queen Anne brownstone on stately, tree-lined Noble Street, just a five-minute walk from Teddy’s smallish old brick house with its tiny back garden on the more heavily trafficked, down-at-the-heels Calyer Street. Back then, this neighborhood had been seedy, run-down, so the house was a bargain, and after Lila had had it refurbished and reappointed, it was as elegant as any house, anywhere.
    Teddy had always liked coming to Lila’s house, which was the sort of place she’d been born to inhabit, the life she’d lost. Coming here always reminded her how much happier she was as a “single working mother,” lackadaisical housekeeper, and server-forth of imaginative cookery on mismatched chipped dishes than she would have been as the inhabitant of such a house, with its daily maid, grand piano, heirloom dishes, groomed back garden, and state-of-the-art appliances. She loved Lila’s house both because it was comfortable and luxurious and because it reassured her that she didn’t regret her fate.
    Teddy had put the Calyer Street house on the market immediately after Oscar’s death; she’d found the house on India Street that same afternoon at the Realtor’s office. The unmarried old owner, Homer Meehan, the last surviving descendant of the family who’d bought it when it was built in the 1870s, had become too crippled to live alone and so was headed for an old-age home and was selling his family house. He left behind odd touches, like the Chinese-cardboard cartoon faces in the lav, ballpoint pen–scrawled maunderings upstairs on the wall of the smaller of the two bedrooms (her favorite: “It’s useless to give up and useless to persevere, so take the path of least resistance with your eyes and mouth shut”), and photos of wild animals mating or about to mate, cut from
National Geographic
s and pasted in a free-form collage on the wall of the tiny boot room leading out to the backyard. Teddy had left all this handiwork untouched, partly out of her heartbroken reluctance to start over in a new place, partly out of an appreciation for weirdo eccentrics.
    “He seemed too earnest at first,” Teddy said to Lila, slathering her second bun with jam.
    “Earnest isn’t bad,” said Lila. She rightly suspected that Teddy sometimes secretly chafed at