The Short History of a Prince Read Online Free PDF Page A

indelible pen and placed it on the ledge on the porch. The shelf ran around the wall just above the screens and was cluttered with bottles, some that went back as far as 1900. The children, jammed together at the table, all skinny arms and elbows, were noisy and crude, farting, putting peas up their noses and, once, slinging mashed potatoes, like snowballs, at one another. It took three throws for an adult to notice the commotion across the room. Uncle Wally, who died shortly after, scooped up a mashed-potato ball from theserving dish and lobbed it over to his son. It missed his target and hit Sue Rawson squarely on the back as she made her way into the kitchen. Even the youngest child knew not to laugh. Aunt Jeannie leaped up, averting a stunned silence, and in a frenzy began both scolding the perpetrators and with her napkin blotting the buttery smear on Sue Rawson’s red shirt. Walter wondered years later if that single ball of potato did it, if, as Jeannie shrilled into her ear, Sue Rawson said to herself, This, none of this, is funny.

    “Will you look at that?” Robert McCloud said to Walter, when Aunt Jeannie finally made her entrance at her own party at two-thirty. The unsuspecting guests were standing on the porch holding their shiny silver party plates. The sun, blurred by a haze, seemed not to have moved in the yellowy clouds since noon. It was too hot to be a glorious day and the sky was the wrong color. But the women from Aunt Jeannie’s tennis club, wearing girdles and stockings and slips under their flowered dresses, insisted that it was a perfect afternoon for an anniversary party. Never mind that it was impossible to make fans from the little limp napkins that said “Jean and Theodore” in silver cursive, that they weren’t much good for mopping a brow either. No matter that there were horseflies down at the lake, not so much as a puff of air from any direction—and who had noticed that the hostess was two hours late? It was a glorious day. A splendid day!
    Robert McCloud was the only one who saw Aunt Jeannie appear at the French doors. She was standing with silver tears in her dark lashes, wearing the wedding dress she had worn exactly twenty-five years before. “The celestial body,” he murmured to Walter. “The comet streaking across the sky.”
    The guests turned to look, to see what had glimmered in the corner of their eyes.
    “Dad!” Walter gripped his father’s arm.
    The gown had been stored at the furrier since the honeymoon. None of the beads were missing from the fitted bodice, the leg-o-mutton sleeves were crisp, and the mud had been cleaned off the train that buttoned up the back into a bustle. After six children and twenty-fiveyears of marriage to the manager of the Jewel Food Store in Oak Ridge, it was clear that Aunt Jeannie still had her figure.
    She opened her arms. “Welcome!” she cried. “Welcome!” Someone, a plant in the audience, Walter guessed, clapped, prompting everyone else to set their plates aside, to put down the runny Jell-O and the deviled eggs that had been leached of their color in the heat. They all applauded. Aunt Jeannie clasped her hands at her throat and nodded her head, left, right and center. “It is every last one of you,” she declared, “who has made me the luckiest, the happiest, and the most satisfied woman in the village of Oak Ridge.”
    She stepped down, bobbing and smiling, and stood for a moment before the Peg-Board where the family pictures hung. Uncle Ted had been told to get some help and carefully bring it out from the living room that morning. Walter turned to Susan, to explain. “She wants the visitors to appreciate the wonder of a family that has shared such an expensive place for so long and are still speaking to each other. She’s posing in front of the photographs, taking her place in the history that might just as well end with her, now, on this very porch.”
    Walter was unable to pour the champagne, take in the spectacle of