Family Happiness Read Free Page B

Papa going to say about the food?” Dee-Dee asked.
    â€œYes, darling,” said Polly.
    â€œIs he going to say how the eggs are very, very old?”
    â€œYes, darling,” Polly said.
    â€œIs Uncle Paul going to be there?” asked Pete.
    â€œNo.”
    â€œWhat about Uncle Henry and Andreya?”
    â€œThey’re coming and they’re taking you kite-flying after lunch.”
    â€œGoody-goody,” said Pete. “Is Kirby coming?”
    â€œCertainly Kirby is coming,” said Polly.
    â€œMa,” Dee-Dee said, “will you and Daddy get us a dog?”
    â€œNo, for the ten thousandth time,” said Polly. “If you get a dog, I will end up having to walk it. You can have a dog when you’re sixteen. Now, please go wash your hands and put on your clean corduroy pants.”
    By eleven-thirty the children were dressed, Henry was shaving, the beds were made, and the Demarests were ready to go. Polly, who was always ready first, sat in the living room, which was speckled with silvery November light.
    Her living room resembled her parents’, or her Demarest in-laws’. The old Turkish rug was from a Demarest grandmother. The walnut side table had been Wendy’s mother’s. The two big black vases flanking the fireplace had been made by Henry’s sister, Eva, who, in addition to illustrating children’s books, was a potter. The sofa was big enough for all four Demarests to plop onto of a winter’s night to watch the fire. At each of the three windows was a table that held a flowering orange tree in a big terra-cotta pot. Polly and her mother disagreed about house plants. Wendy hated them and felt only fresh flowers belonged in the house, but Polly loved flowering plants. The children had a hanging pot of jasmine in each of their rooms. In Polly and Henry’s bedroom were two pots of sweet bouvardia. In Henry’s study was a long copper tray of African violets.
    It would have been lovely to stay home, but Polly had never stayed home on a Sunday except when the children had been infants and Sunday breakfast had been briefly transferred to the Demarests’.
    Both Polly and Henry had been brought up on tradition. The Solo-Miller family met not only for Sunday breakfast. They observed two Jewish holidays: Passover and Yom Kippur, the latter being the only occasion on which the family made an appearance at synagogue. The ancientness and austereness of this day had a great appeal for Henry, Sr., although Polly could never imagine her father atoning for anything. At Passover they had their own idiosyncratic Seder at which Henry, Sr., delivered himself of a lecture on the meaning of the holiday and its relevance to the American spirit. They celebrated Christmas and Easter as secular holidays, with Christmas trees and Easter baskets. In addition to these and Thanksgiving, they gathered on April Fool’s, which was observed by a meal that had almonds in every course for reasons lost in the mists of Solo-Miller history; and on March the twenty-fourth, Henry and Wendy’s wedding anniversary, for a simple dinner—soup and Cornish pasties, cake with sugar flowers, champagne, cheek-to-cheek dancing on the living-room rug to the songs of Henry and Wendy’s youth. Halloween was always celebrated at the Demarests’: Henry, when he was not away, produced a meal of stew served out of a large pumpkin. Nowadays the whole family trooped off to Pete and Dee-Dee’s school for their Halloween pageant, and then back to the Demarests’ for dinner.
    Everyone took part in these occasions. In the summer, Henry and Wendy spent two months at the family house in Maine, on Priory Lagoon—now that Henry, Sr., was a partner emeritus in his firm, he took the entire summer off. Pete and Dee-Dee spent the summers with their grandparents until Henry and Polly, who rented the same house down the road each year for August, arrived. Henry and Andreya liked to