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“I’m sure she would accept that as a compliment,” Brewster Payne said.
“Or that Matt isn’t really my brother,” Foster went on. “I presume you did try to talk him out of this becoming-a-policeman nonsense?”
“First things first,” Brewster Payne said. “Matt is your brother, de facto and de jure, and I’m sure you won’t say anything about something like that to him.”
“Of course not,” Foster said.
“I already told him,” B.C. said, “that I thought he was nuts.”
Out of the mouth of the babe, Brewster C. Payne thought. He said: “To answer your second question, no, I didn’t really try to talk Matt out of becoming a policeman. For one thing, I learned of it after the fact, and for another, he’s your mother’s son, and as you have learned there are times when neither of them can be dissuaded from what they want to do. And, finally, son, I don’t agree that it’s nonsense. I told him, and I believe, that it can be a very valuable learning experience for him.”
“Amy says that he was psychologically castrated when he failed the marine corps physical, and is becoming a policeman to prove his manhood,” B.C. said.
“She talks to you like that? When I was a boy—”
“All the girls you knew were virgins who didn’t even know what ‘castrated’ meant,” Foster said, laughing. “But Amy has a point, and she’s really concerned.”
“I don’t think I quite understand,” Brewster Payne said.
“What if Matt can’t make it as a policeman? He really doesn’t know what he’s letting himself in for. What if he fails? Double castration, so to speak.”
“I have confidence that Matt can do anything he sets his mind to do,” Brewster Payne said. “And I’m beginning to wonder if sending your sister to medical school was such a good idea. I’m afraid that we can expect henceforth that she will ascribe a Freudian motive to everything any one of us does, from entering a tennis tournament to getting married.”
****
Patricia and Amelia Payne came down the wide staircase from the second floor. They were dressed almost identically, in simple black dresses, strings of pearls, black hats, and gloves.
Brewster Payne had what he thought a moment later was an unkind thought. He wondered how many men were lucky enough to have wives who were better looking than their daughters.
“Where’s Matt?” Patricia Payne asked.
The two men shrugged.
Amelia Payne turned and shouted up the stairs.
“Matty, for God’s sake, will you come?”
“Keep your goddamned pants on, Amy,” Matt’s voice replied.
“It is such a joy for a father to see what refined and well-mannered children he has raised,” Brewster C. Payne II said.
Matt came down the stairs two at a time, a moment later, shrugging into a jacket; his tie, untied, hanging loosely around his neck. He looked, Brewster Payne thought, about eighteen years old. And he wondered if Matt really understood what he was getting into with the police, if he could indeed cope with it.
“Since there’s so many of us,” Patricia said, “I guess we had better go in the station wagon.”
“I asked Newt to get the black car out,” Brewster Payne said, meeting his wi
fe’s eyes. “And to drive us.”
“Oh, Brew!” she said.
“I considered the station wagon,” Brewster Payne said. “And finally decided the black car was the best solution to the problem.”
“What problem?” Matt asked.
“How to avoid anything that could possibly upset your grandmother,” Patricia Payne said. “All right, Brew. If you think so, then let’s go.”
They collected Foster and B.C. from the patio, and then filed outside. Newt, the handyman, who was rarely seen in anything but ancient paint-splattered clothing, was standing, freshly shaved and dressed in a suit, and holding a gray chauffeur’s cap in his hand by the open rear door of a black Cadillac Fleetwood.
