“Now Prin,” said Aunt Lallie. “It’s in the worst possible taste to make a remark like that. Shame on you!”
“Yes,” snarled Cousin Twig, “there are some things that are just not funny. You know perfectly well I’m depending on Uncle Slater to live forever. So stop making with the dirty jokes.”
“I repeat,” said Prin O’Shea wearily. “Uncle Slater is lying up there dead on the floor of his bedroom, and one of us had better call his doctor to make it official.”
There was another, this time stricken, silence.
“Well,” said Cousin Peet, slithering off the sofa. “Anyone for dinner?”
3
It was Prin, in the end, who called the doctor. It was almost always Prin, in the end, who did the things that needed doing. Uncle Slater’s late wife’s first husband’s family physician was an elderly curmudgeon named Dr. Horace Appleton, and Prin looked up his telephone number in the directory in the hall. Dr. Appleton answered the phone with a kind of yelp, like an incensed terrier, and she told him hurriedly that he must come over at once to see Uncle Slater. It was Dr. Appleton’s opinion, shrilly told, that Uncle Slater could probably wait without serious consequences until tomorrow, at which time he could come to the office. Prin replied that Uncle Slater could wait, all right, but that he couldn’t possibly come to the office, tonight or tomorrow or ever.
“Why can’t he?”
“Because he’s dead.”
“How do you know he’s dead?”
“Because he’s lying on the floor in his room,” Prin said, “and he isn’t breathing.”
“In that case,” Dr. Appleton said, “I’ll come right over.” And he did.
It took him about twenty minutes to get there. In the meantime, Prin went back to the living room and sat quietly with Aunt Lallie and Cousin Twig, who had mixed himself a large dark highball in lieu of solid nourishment and was mumbling obscenities to the memory of his uncle. Then, unexpectedly, Cousin Peet and Brother Brady came back from the dining room, having decided that eating was not something they wanted to do after all, especially since they had to serve themselves in the face of Mrs. Dolan’s defection. Brother Brady headed for the bar.
“Prin,” he scowled, mixing drinks for himself and Peet, “are you absolutely sure Uncle Slater is dead?”
“I suppose an autopsy would establish it beyond question,” said Prin, “but, as a layman, I’m satisfied that he is, yes.”
“I wonder,” said Aunt Lallie to the empty air. “I mean, if the rest of us ought to rely on your judgment, child, in a matter of such importance.”
“Then don’t,” said Prin. “Anyone’s free to go upstairs and form his own judgment.”
“Twig?” said Aunt Lallie. “Brady?”
“Not me, thank you,” said Twig. “I’ve been avoiding dead people all my life. I don’t like dead people.” It was rather like hearing the Giant confide in Jack that he didn’t care for bread made from the bones of Englishmen, Prin thought. “You do it, Brady.”
“Well,” said Brady. Then he brightened. “Sure. I’ll go. If Peet will go with me. What do you say, Peet?”
“No.”
“Oh, come on. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”
“Oh, no?” said Peet. “Well, I’m not going.” And she took the drink from Brady’s hand and curled up on the sofa again, the velvet of her Capri pants threatening to split. Brady studied them hopefully.
It was apparent to everyone that Uncle Slater, dead or alive, had nothing to do with Peet’s declining Brady’s invitation. Brady, looking sullenly dangerous again, went upstairs alone. He was back in remarkably short order, a little blue around the edges.
“Prin was right,” he said, heading for the bar. “Uncle Slater is completely dead.” He laced his highball powerfully and threw his head back and drank like Thor trying to drain the sea.
“Completely dead?” said Peet. “You mean it’s possible to be incompletely dead?” In Peet’s primitive state of intelligence, she sometimes exercised a disconcerting logic. “I don’t believe you can be incompletely dead.”
“Atta girl, Peet,” her brother Twig sneered. “Any more than you can be slightly pregnant.”
“Please,” Peet said haughtily. “I don’t like people who use risqué language.”
“Yes, Twig,” sniffled Aunt Lallie. Now that Uncle Slater’s veritable decease had been established to her satisfaction, she had her dainty handkerchief in her outsize hand and was punching at her eyes with it. “And your uncle lying up there dead.”
“What am I supposed to do, sob?” snarled her nephew. “It was damn inconsiderate of him to kick off, Aunt Lallie — as if you didn’t know it!”
“Well, it’s true a man Slater’s age ought to have taken better care of himself,” wept Aunt Lallie. “After all, he did have a responsibility to his family.”
“Look,” said Brady. “Dying was his own business. But that will he left — that’s our business.” He added in gloomy afterthought, “Some business!”
“How much am I going to get?” asked Peet with a trace of anxiety.
“Enough to keep you in clothes,” growled Brady, “which, considering how little you need for that purpose, doesn’t comfort me a damn bit.”
“Peet,” said Twig, “do you think you can add five — the five of us — to the seventeen outside O’Sheas? Don’t bother, it’s twenty-two. You heard Uncle Slater. How much of a slice can you expect from a pie cut into twenty-two pieces?”
“That was mean of him,” Peet said angrily.
Aunt Lallie broke off in mid-sniffle. “I just thought. Let’s break the will! It isn’t as if Slater were in his right mind. If he had been, he’d have left his entire estate to me. After all, I’m his sister.”
“I have news for you, Aunt Lallie,” said her nephew Twig with a certain malevolent enjoyment. “I’d rather have one twenty-second of a sane uncle’s estate than nothing of a crazy one’s. So I’m prepared to fight. Right, Brady? You with me?”
“I guess so,” said Brady glumly, “though it would have been a lot simpler if he’d left everything to Prin. Then we could all have stayed on here on the old basis, just as if Uncle Slater hadn’t died at all.”
Prin wondered if that were true, or if she would have thrown them out to shift for themselves. But she supposed that in the end she’d have permitted them to stay, for it was Uncle Slater’s money, and Uncle Slater had observed the family tradition that no O’Shea was expected to work seriously at anything, or to starve as a consequence of not doing so. It would have been a moral obligation. Prin sighed and stirred, ashamed of herself. What was she thinking? She was as bad as the others, speculating over the material considerations while Uncle Slater grew progressively colder and stiffer upstairs, like the dinner he hadn’t been able to come down to eat.
At that moment the doorbell began to ring petulantly. It was automatic for Prin to get up to answer it, since no one else paid the least attention and Mrs. Dolan was in her room deaf to everything but the biff-bang cowboy show she was raptly watching.
The annoyed finger on the bell belonged to Dr. Appleton, who came in carrying a black bag, although what for — under the circumstances — Prin couldn’t imagine. Dr. Appleton looked very much put out, as if Uncle Slater had played the worst trick of all on him. He was at least seventy, but he moved like a young man — or a gnome, Prin thought, for he was short and stocky and quick and sly and his face was full of bristly gray hair.