This being sheer speculation, Princess O’Shea disdained to defend her legitimacy, morganatic or otherwise; such considerations had never seemed to her of any consequence.
As for the others, they attended Uncle Slater’s genial briefing in their usually divergent styles:
Aunt Lallie sat smiling at someone not visible to anyone else. This effect, which she achieved by staring intently at an uninhabited part of the room, was not one of her more endearing accomplishments; it tended to raise goose pimples on the uninitiated. Nor were the hands in her lap more reassuring. They were large, hard-looking and hairy, whereas the rest of her was small, soft and baby-girlish. To see her as she now occupied a straight chair, hands folded before her, created the astonishing illusion of a big tough man skulking behind her with his arms about her waist. This hyperbole was one of Uncle Slater’s conceits; the power of Lallie’s mind over Lallie’s matter, he liked to say (to Prin privately). But, alas for Aunt Lallie, it was no very satisfactory substitute for the real thing.
Brother Brady O’Shea reacted to the testamentary news as he reacted to almost everything: he strode powerfully over to his uncle’s bar, seized a bottle of his uncle’s choice bourbon, and poured himself an oversized man’s oversized drink — which he manfully proceeded to imbibe. Sister Prin had often supposed (also in conceit, since she considered the incestuous implications of the supposition as unlikely as the supposition itself) that Brother Brady might well have been the big tough man in the Aunt Lallie illusion. He was big enough, and he certainly gave the appearance of toughness; and he was unquestionably a man, at least in the biological sense (there could be no doubt about the gender of his thoughts, considering the way he looked at Cousin Peet). But the conceit ended there. Physique and libido notwithstanding, Brother Brady was the weakest of sisters. As Uncle Slater liked to say, one wondered what held Brady O’Shea’s body beautiful up, since his Creator had left the backbone out. His capacity for mischief could only be guessed at.
And Cousin Peet. Cousin Peet was five-feet-three blonde inches of pure female higher mathematics, all parabolas and lunes and little arcs of young soft moist flesh put together with amazing congruity. The difficulty was that, if you figured her, the answer invariably came out wrong. In Uncle Slater’s earthier, if mixed metaphor: “Our little sultry sexpot is a little frozen fish.”
For Cousin Peet employed her extraordinary nubile equipment as reflexively as she employed her knee when the frequent occasion required it. It was her only stock-in-trade in a rather remarkable business, since she refused to part with any parcel of it. Even so, Cousin Peet might have utilized her window dressing to her profit — as a sales leader, say, to push less desirable merchandise — but for the fact that she had no other goods in inventory. Uncle Slater, always there with a relevant mot, put it this way: “Peet is like a highly successful popover: bite into her and you’d get a great big mouthful of nothing.” This unoccupied interiority, he pointed out fondly, was particularly true of her head.
Consequently, when a situation arose like this one of the will, in which there was no use for her sole asset, Cousin Peet was at a loss. She simply sat there with her secondary sex characteristics going to waste, looking from one to the other of her assembled kin as if groping for a clue to whatever the mystery was.
As for Cousin Twig: Gastronomically speaking, where Cousin Peet made the mouth water, her brother was about as appetizing as a glob of long-spoiled pork. Cousin Twig had no shape; that is, the shape he was in conformed to no esthetic pattern acceptably human. It was fat where it should have been lean, and stringy where it should have had bulk: his thighs were too long and his legs were too short; his torso gave an upside-down effect; and above all — above all loomed his head, most of it beyond his brows in the manner of the original Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein monster, except that in Cousin Twig’s case no make-up was necessary. In addition to this anatomical slumgullion, nature had thrown into the pot a skin coarsely dark, with the green-broth sheen of an exposed drainage ditch.
Ill-designed containers are often redeemed by their contents. The love of Beauty brought out the handsome prince in the Beast. The Ugly Duckling’s habiliments covered the most gorgeous bird in the pond. The gargoyle breast of Quasimodo harbored the tenderness of angels. Not so with Cousin Twig. The interior Twig was even less favored than its housing. He might well have said with Gloucester that love forswore him in his mother’s womb. For he was as nasty inside as out — a man of cringe and craft, bitter, lecherous, treacherous, capable of kissing the foot that kicked him and biting the hand that fed him, and both for purposes of his own.
So now Cousin Twig, after a moment of silence, put on his look of ruptured dignity, which unfortunately succeeded only in resembling the risus sardonicus of a corpse felled by lockjaw, and said to his Uncle Slater: “Uncle Slater, I will not presume to speak for anyone else present, but for you to suggest that I might have designs on your stocks and bonds and whatever other worldly trifles you have stashed away hits me where I live. For shame, Uncle Slater. I’m humbly happy with the pittance you allow me from your income, and it hurts me deeply that you should think otherwise.”
“Then you’re a fool, Nephew Twig,” said Uncle Slater with a grin, “which I have no intention of believing. You’re all quite welcome to my capital in good time. At the easy rate I’m going, that should be about twenty years from now.”
Uncle Slater miscalculated. The twenty years he looked forward to turned out to be more nearly twenty days.
For the record: It was three weeks and two days later that Slater O’Shea went to his reward, which was what he had been afraid of for a long time.
2
Prin tried to remember later just when it was that she last saw Uncle Slater alive. She finally decided that it must have been about two o’clock that fateful Friday afternoon.
Ordinarily Prin would have been slaving for her nylons behind one of the counters of Free’s Drug Store on Friday afternoon; but on this particular Friday she had screwed up her mutated face — really not a bad face as faces went, she always thought, although of course not an O’Shea face, which at its best ran to Black Irish handsomeness, as in Brother Brady’s case — and put a moan into her voice, the way they did on television commercials, and told Orville Free that she hadn’t wanted to mention it before, since it involved a condition peculiarly female connected with the moon, but the cramps were getting to be too terrible and she’d simply have to take the rest of the day off. The lunar reference was a lie. The truth was that Prin had enough O’Shea in her to get the feeling occasionally that she simply couldn’t stand working another second, and this had been one of those occasions. So that was how she came to be sitting in Uncle Slater’s living room at two o’clock on a Friday afternoon, nuzzling a gin and tonic and listening to Till Eulenspiegel on his hi-fi, when he came home in an obvious glow and waved to her cheerily on his way upstairs to his room. And she had never again seen Uncle Slater breathing, boozily or otherwise.
After a while Till was finished and so was the gin and tonic, so Prin had gone into the kitchen, dropped two ice cubes into her glass, leaned against the sink for a few minutes listening to Mrs. Dolan, the cook, then deserted Mrs. Dolan and returned to the living room and refilled the glass according to Uncle Slater’s recipe, which was equal parts of gin and quinine water. After that she had wandered out to the terrace. On the flagstones lay a sky-blue air mattress, and on the sky-blue air mattress lay Cousin Peet’s little belly, along with the rest of her.