Cook the peaches with care, then drain off the syrup and boil it until it is almost as thick as rice pudding. Now find a pint of your best brandy, pour it in, and stir well. Put the peaches in hot jars, pour in the brandy sauce, and seal tight.
Gramp was always in good humor over his morning peaches. It was the moment for any attack, any plan that was to be brought to him. We all valued such moments. Mama knew they could not be wasted on silly things.
Mama and I waited in the hall. It was like a scene from a bad play.
Uncle Willie said, “Have we a good lawyer?”
“There are no good lawyers… ours is a fine crook. He'll hide any body you have done in,” said Gramp.
“The girl in the car, she said something about being ruined for life.”
Gramp grinned. “Time you settled down.”
“It's her back… we ran into a milk truck on the Boston Post Road, and smashed the bottle… I mean… it was very dark and she's only a small girl and… oh hell… you've got to help me. She is going to sue me for fifty- thousand dollars.”
Gramp pushed away his plate and attacked a ham steak with gusty relish.
Aunt Fiona, who was getting older, so that she looked like a woman of forty who was always mistaken for thirty-four, sniffed and said, “Why don't you put him into The Firm? Start from the bottom and make something of himself, work his way up.”
Gramp, who had five sons who ran The Firm under his barked telephone orders to Wall Street, shook his head. “Can't do it… the country is going to hell in a hack fast enough as it is.”
Uncle Willie held his head again and said, “I've been invited to Jud's place in the Carolinas for a few weeks. Or Palm Beach… there is a girl, and…”
“There always is,” said Gramp. “Hell, you take too much after me, and that's no good at your age. Not a cent, not a beer check in credit, and no repairing of that gasoline monster. Take your raccoon skins and go!”
Uncle Willie had a sense of humor. “It should be snowing a blizzard outdoors when you say that. All right. Then I'll sell bonds.”
In those days a Harvard man could do two things and still be respected at Hasty Pudding. Decide to write a novel or sell bonds. It is amazing to remember a time that no one bought a bond if he respected his social standing, unless there was a Harvard man on the other end of it.
Uncle Willie became a bond salesman. He did very well. Everybody knew everyone was going to get rich, those days, and Uncle Willie had manners, a taste in wines, good looks, and a way on the dance floor.
Uncle Willie went through the Twenties in his English Burberrys of dark blue cloth (he had given me the raccoon as something towards my future college education), his blue-tinted shirts, his black pearl studs, his Packard job in bold blue with gold fittings (a pig farmer bought the Bear Cat to cart swill to his sty). And Uncle Willie's shoes were the darkest, with the most narrow toes, and were made for him by a famous old English bootmaker named Rabbinowitz, who had moved from Warsaw to Canal Street.
Uncle Willie had a flat of his own. I used to go there to deliver the mail that forgotten ladies used to send to his old address, It was on Murray Hill, in an old, white, marble-fronted house built by Stanford White just before he made the front page by stopping something sent at him by Harry Thaw.
I used to walk up, up a red flight of stairs smelling of Chanel's Five and the bindings of George Moore's novels that Uncle Willie collected. The white door, set in a Chinese red frame, held a small card with heavy raised lettering on it (I used to run my fingers over it, just for the hell of it) WILLIAM A. LONGSTREET.
Inside the woodwork a tired bell would loss out a tone, and all the restless mice would wake up, or stop their love- making in the walls, and run through the old paneling.
The door would be opened by a stiff Russian who had once been in livery in London, and who was called River. He was very stiff, with a bald pate and red-grey hair growing around his cars. He was the model of the first Peter Arno drawing I ever saw. River (“Not Rivers… thank you,” he would always say) was a silent man who took care of Uncle Willie, cooked his meals, stole a modest sum on the wine bill, as was expected, and was very popular with Uncle Willie's friends, who always tried to kidnap him by offering him double what he was getting from Uncle Willie… but as River said, “It's no dice” (he had become very fond of gangster motion pictures).
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