Read Age for Free Online Page A

then they had Daphne—born, as Sherm would jovially tell you, when they were on homemade mead their first year in the New Hampshire house, and ‘when my good eye was shut.’
    Daphne took all her father’s farm-talk and population disdain seriously, also his freeloading style. As a consequence, she now grows Jerusalem artichokes, elephant garlic, and other rare fodder on the California estate of the patroness with whom she has adopted a baby. Of which baby Sherm, in one of those opportunistic flashes that according to Rupert have for fifty years kept him the only conservative to be printed in the liberal journals, and vice versa, immediately wrote: ‘our Lesbian grandchild.’
    Kit’s sharp eyes are roving our bedroom. It’s an active room, no doubt of it. Twin clumps of books and Kleenex at the bedsides, and a scatter of other intimate objects—nasal inhalator, neck pillow, body lotion—which we use as one. Maybe she can tell that. There’s also a jolly patchouli smell I want no housekeeper ever to get to the bottom of; it means us. The bed is made up but our nightclothes are tumbled on it. We don’t intend to be this graphic but I guess we are.
    ‘You don’t mean to say—’ Kit says, ‘Gemma, do you mean to say you and Rupert still —?’
    I don’t mean to say—and she knows it.
    We hold it there. Then, just as she and I used to do when she and Sherm—that rising young columnist, middle-of-the-road arbiter, and prospective elder statesman—still dropped in on us whenever Rupert rose a step or two—we went into the kitchen to join the boys.

G EMMA PUT ON SUCH a spread that I’d have blushed for our conspicuous consumption if I hadn’t already been red in the face from laughing like the devil inside. She comes of a tradition that pushes hard on the larder for its guests.
    At first they had graciously said: ‘Don’t bother with refreshment,’ then Kit quavered, ‘perhaps a little white wine. If you have it.’ This was before the salmon and Parma ham and other goods were brought out; plainly she had thought we might not. Though normally we drink some mild aperitif, we always keep a bottle of Quincy or Sancerre on hand for Mr Quinn, the old pensioner who lives on the ground floor. Although wine is his delight, he rations his calls on us. I was glad to see the bottle was full; he’s about due. Then I eased out the Scotch from the store of bottles in the cupboard before Sherm could mutter, ‘If you have any—’ His mouth opened when he saw the brand. When Gemma brought out the cognac for me—brought to us from Paris by Christina—he would have switched, if I hadn’t just then said, ‘Oh, by the way, I recall you love marc. ’
    It was the drink of his youth on those Paris barricades which were to sustain him for years later. When he came back home he brought the barricades with him—or thought he did. To be fair to Sherm, he never thought he would turn so American, and he has taken this with very good grace.
    He turns down the marc , though: ‘Good God no, not with my gut!’ and opts for the cognac, caressing the label with a leer. ‘Nothing too good for us ex-Communists.’
    He means himself, of course, not me. To him my career is sadly uncheckered by the kind of outer history every intellect should have—where some muddle is better than none. He used to joke that I must have heard the quote ‘To thine own self be true’ very early, maybe in the West or even Garden City, had said to myself, ‘That’s for me,’—and was stuck with it.
    Doesn’t matter. For a long while—my whole life—I have been. And I have said equally sharp things about him. That he too has only the subject on which he has written over and over—the one book. The main thing is that sitting around this table, we remember—all of it.
    Alas, including what Gemma does. Who now says: ‘Is that why when you were invited to the Nixon White House, you went?’
    ‘Were you invited?’ Kit said.
    ‘Come, come,’