Dog Bites Man Read Free Page A

before making his decision. A mistake. Her husband, coming from the university, was not bothered by Amber's small silver nose ring or the astrological tattoo on her left arm; Edna was. She was also suspicious: surely the girl's motive was to gather material for a book or perhaps to make a pass at her husband. And even though the new kitchen helper had averted the crisis with the rabbis, Edna had a complaint about her almost every day, which had the effect of turning Eldon into her defender. Having cut back on her medical practice, as planned, Dr. Hoagland was often in close quarters with Amber at the mansion, and the result was not salutary.
    This particular June morning Edna had groused at breakfast that Amber, enjoying the summer rays of sunshine the day before, had stretched out topless on the mansion lawn, "where everybody going by on the East River Drive could see her."
    "So what?" Eldon had replied, telling his wife that she really ought not to waste his time with such petty matters. He left the breakfast table in a foul mood, soon exacerbated by what he felt to be unusually inane and irrelevant questions at his weekly press conference.
    "What is your policy on serving hormone-treated beef in school cafeterias?" a petite journalism intern from one of the honor high schools asked.
    "That's a fine question, young lady"—be gentle with the young—"but I'll leave that one to the health commissioner and the schools chancellor to work out."
    "Do you agree that the
Art of the Phallus
show at the Guggenheim is pornographic?" This from a wire service hack often observed in the City Hall pressroom, feet up, perusing
Hustler
and its sister publications.
    "Haven't seen it."
    "Are you going to?"
    "Probably not."
    Gullighy, although standing behind the mayor in the Blue Room, nonetheless could tell that his boss's tolerance level was rapidly approaching, and declared the session finished.
    "I said when I took over that I'd have a weekly press conference," Hoagland grumbled to his aide as they parted at his office door. "In the interest of promoting openness. Not as a work opportunity for the feebleminded."
    .    .    .
    Once alone, Eldon called his old Princeton roommate Milford Swansea on his private line, to confirm their plan for dinner together that night.
    Swansea was known to one and all as Leaky, the result of an unfortunate bladder accident in the excitement of a spelling bee at St. Paul's School when he was nine years old. He had hoped desperately to shed the moniker when he entered Princeton, but it followed him then and had ever since, not least because "Milford" was a given name one could not do much with in the nickname department. (His mishap had occurred when he was asked to spell"farinaceous" and only he and one other student remained in contention.)
    Leaky and Eldon had been freshman roommates: Leaky the worldly Easterner in the lower berth of a bunk bed, which he had claimed after arriving early, and Eldon in the upper. They were an unlikely pair, the only obvious common bond being their tall, gangly physiques. The preppy Leaky came from old New York money, a trading and shipping fortune going back several generations; Eldon was a hick from Minnesota, son of the assistant foreman at the local Fosston grain elevator, and a scholarship student.
    To the great surprise of both, they hit it off and began a lifelong friendship, in contrast to many if not most of their classmates, who spent their upperclass years avoiding and disassociating themselves from the freshman roommates they had been arbitrarily assigned by the campus housing office.
    Both boys were intelligent and curious, and intellectually brave (or perhaps arrogant) enough to argue about and discuss the prime academic interests of the other—politics and history in Eldon's case, classics in Leaky's. They were also strangely compatible politically, Eldon the Midwestern populist and Leaky a liberal with a patrician WASP's social