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“Well, that would tend to make a man turn to drink,” the waiter said. “But this is the Pennsylvania Railroad and you have to be old enough to vote to buy a drink in a PRR club car. Which you ain’t. Sorry.”
“I understand,” Phil said.
The waiter left only to return several minutes later with a teapot and cup.
“Drink this, boy. It’ll make you feel better.”
“Thank you kindly, sir, but I don’t drink tea.”
“This is special tea. They make it in Dungaress, Scotland. I understand Her Majesty the Queen herself really likes to sip it. Try a little sip, why don’t you? See for yourself if you think it’s worth the ten dollars a cup market forces require me to charge for it.”
—
By the time the train reached Manhattan’s Pennsylvania Station, Phil wasn’t feeling much of the pain he had been feeling since learning of Alexandra’s nuptials. Or much pain at all.
When he entered his father’s apartment, his sire was there.
“I would say ‘welcome home,’” his father greeted him, “except it’s Wednesday, and my own military experience has taught me that privates are rarely, if ever, given time off in the middle of the week. Which makes me suspect that you have experienced more of the rigors of military life than you like, and have, as we old soldiers say, ‘gone over the hill.’”
P. Wallingford Williams, Jr., having taken ROTC at Harvard College, had entered military service as a second lieutenant of artillery and gone to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, where in the sixth week of the Basic Artillery Officer’s Course he had dropped the trail of a 105mm howitzer on his left foot while attempting to set the cannon up for firing. Army surgeons saved the foot, except for the big toe, the loss of which caused Lieutenant Williams to be medically retired from the service with a five-percent disability pension. He later became quite active in several disabled veterans organizations.
“Actually, Pop, I’m on my way to Berlin.”
“I have to tell you, son, that it won’t do you any good to go to New Hampshire. The military police will run you to earth no matter where you try to hide. My advice is that you go to Penn Station, or Grand Central, whichever you prefer, and surrender yourself to the military police who patrol there. Perhaps, considering your youth, the courts-martial will temper your sentence with compassion.”
“I’m not AWOL, Pop. I’m en route to the Berlin in Germany.”
“And why are you wearing corporal’s chevrons? In my day in uniform, impersonation of a noncommissioned officer was nearly as serious an offense as impersonating a commissioned officer. You’re never going to get out of Leavenworth.”
“I’m wearing corporal’s chevrons, Pop, because I am a corporal. Here, have a look at my orders.”
On doing so, Second Lieutenant P. Wallingford Williams, Jr., Artillery, Medically Retired, announced, “I can’t make heads or tails of that gibberish. Why don’t we start over?”
“Sir?”
“Hello, Philip. What brings you home, wearing corporal’s chevrons, in the middle of the week?”
Phil told him.
“Obviously, I owe you my profound apologies,” his father said when he had finished. “I can only offer in extenuation that on the last seven occasions on which you appeared unexpectedly at my door in the middle of the week, it was because you had been booted from the finest boarding schools on the East Coast. And each time that happened, it cost me an arm and a leg—I shudder to remember what it cost me to get you into Saint Malachi’s—to get you into another one.”
“I understand, Pop. No apology is necessary.”
“But I must tell you, Philip, that even when I so unthinkingly thought, ‘My God! Now he’s Gone Over The Hill,’ I also thought, ‘Well, at least he didn’t do to me what Hobo Crawley’s boy did to ol’ Hobo.’”
“Pop, are you talking about Hobart J. Crawley the Fourth?”
“Indeed I am. The son of Hobart J. Crawley the Third.”
“And what was that, sir?”
“I ran into ol’ Hobo at the bar at the New York Athletic Club. Actually, I picked him up off the floor of the bar at the Athletic Club, where he was curled in a fetal position and weeping piteously. When I got him into an armchair in the lounge and got about a quart of black coffee into him, he confided in me his shame.”
“And what was that, Pop?”
“That idiot son of his, the one they call ‘Little Hobo,’ couldn’t keep his You Know What in his pocket and instead used it to get another mental deficient in the family way. You may have seen her around. They live in this building. Tall blonde with a vapid face and no bosom worth mentioning. Anyway, these two are now going to contribute to the further degeneration of the gene pool, and poor ol’ Hobo’s stuck for the tab for the whole operation for the foreseeable future. Little Hobo is now on his third try to get out of the freshman class at Yale. I thank you from the bottom of my heart, son, for not doing anything like that to me.”
“You’re welcome, Pop.”
