PAGE 3
Gigolo
by
Her husband protested rather weakly. “I don’t care. I like the old shack. I know the heating apparatus is bum and that we get the smoke from the paper mills, but–I don’t know–last year, when we had that punk pink palace at Cannes I kept thinking—-“
Mrs. Gideon Gory raised the Leyden eyebrow. “Don’t get sentimental, Gid, for God’s sake! It’s a shanty, and you know it. And you know that it needs everything from plumbing to linen. I don’t see any sense in sinking thousands in making it livable when we don’t want to live in it.”
“But I do want to live in it–once in a while. I’m used to it. I was brought up in it. So was the kid. He likes it, too. Don’t you, Giddy?” The boy was present, as usual, at this particular scene.
The boy worshipped his mother. But, also, he was honest. So, “Yeh, I like the ol’ barn all right,” he confessed.
Encouraged, his father went on: “Yesterday the kid was standing out there on the bluff-edge breathing like a whale, weren’t you, Giddy? And when I asked him what he was puffing about he said he liked the smell of the sulphur and chemicals and stuff from the paper mills, didn’t you, kid?”
Shame-facedly, “Yeh,” said Giddy.
Betrayed thus by husband and adored son, the Leyden did battle. “You can both stay here, then,” she retorted with more spleen than elegance, “and sniff sulphur until you’re black in the face. I’m going to London in May.”
They, too, went to London in May, of course, as she had known they would. She had not known, though, that in leading her husband to England in May she was leading him to his death as well.
“All Winnebago will be shocked and grieved to learn,” said the Winnebago Courier to the extent of two columns and a cut, “of the sudden and violent death in England of her foremost citizen, Gideon Gory. Death was due to his being thrown from his horse while hunting.”
… To being thrown from his horse while hunting. Shocked and grieved though it might or might not be, Winnebago still had the fortitude to savour this with relish. Winnebago had died deaths natural and unnatural. It had been run over by automobiles, and had its skull fractured at football, and been drowned in Lake Winnebago, and struck by lightning, and poisoned by mushrooms, and shot by burglars. But never had Winnebago citizen had the distinction of meeting death by being thrown from his horse while hunting. While hunting. Scarlet coats. Hounds in full cry. Baronial halls. Hunt breakfasts. Vogue. Vanity Fair.
Well! Winnebago was almost grateful for this final and most picturesque gesture of Gideon Gory the second.
The widowed Leyden did not even take the trouble personally to superintend the selling of the Gory place on the river bluff. It was sold by an agent while she and Giddy were in Italy, and if she was ever aware that the papers in the transaction stated that the house had been bought by Orson J. Hubbell she soon forgot the fact and the name. Giddy, leaning over her shoulder while she handled the papers, and signing on the line indicated by a legal forefinger, may have remarked:
“Hubbell. That’s old Hubbell, the dray man. Must be money in the draying line.”
Which was pretty stupid of him, because he should have known that the draying business was now developed into the motor truck business with great vans roaring their way between Winnebago and Kaukauna, Winnebago and Neenah, and even Winnebago and Oshkosh. He learned that later.
Just now Giddy wasn’t learning much of anything, and, to do him credit, the fact distressed him not a little. His mother insisted that she needed him, and developed a bad heart whenever he rebelled and threatened to sever the apron-strings. They lived abroad entirely now. Mrs. Gory showed a talent for spending the Gory gold that must have set old Gideon to whirling in his Winnebago grave. Her spending of it was foolish enough, but her handling of it was criminal. She loved Europe. America bored her. She wanted to identify herself with foreigners, with foreign life. Against advice she sold her large and lucrative interest in the Winnebago paper mills and invested great sums in French stocks, in Russian enterprises, in German shares.