Some Buried Caesar

"They used to have." She opened the mirror of her compact to study nature with an eye to improvement. "I guess they were engaged, or about to be. Of course you don't know about the Osgood-Pratt situation. The Osgoods have been rich for generations, they go back to a revolutionary general I think it was-their relatives in New York think the Social Register is vulgar. To me that's all a bore… my mother was a waitress and my father was an immigrant and made his money building sewers."

"Yet look at you. I heard Pratt say yesterday that he was bom in an old shack on the spot where his new house stands."

"Yes. His father worked as a stablehand for Osgood's father. Clyde told me about it. A farmer had a beautiful daughter named Marcia and young Pratt got himself engaged to her and Frederick Osgood came back from college and saw her and married her. So she became Clyde Osgood's mother, and Nancy's. Pratt went to New York and soon began to make money; He didn't marry, and as soon as he had time to spare he started to find ways to annoy Osgood. When he bought land up here and started to build, it looked as if the annoyance might become really serious."

"And Clyde read up on family feuds and found that the best way to cure it would be for him to marry Pratt's niece. A daughter is better in such cases, but a niece will do."

"No, it wasn't Clyde's idea, it was his sister's. Nancy's." Lily closed her compact. "She was staying in New York for the winter, studying rhythm at the best night clubs, and met Jimmy and Caroline, and thought it might be helpful for the four of them to know each other, and when Clyde came down for a visit she arranged it. It made a sort of a situation, and she and Jimmy got really friendly, and so did Clyde and Caro- line. Then Clyde happened to get interested in me, and I guess that reacted on Nancy and Jimmy.''

"Did you and Clyde -get engaged?"

"No." She looked at me, and the comer of her mouth turned up, and I saw her breasts gently putting the weave of the jersey to more strain as she breathed a deep one. "No, Escamillo." She peeled her potato again, "I don't suppose I'll marry. Because marriage is really nothing but an economic arrangement, and I'm lucky because I don't have to let the economic part enter into it. The man would be lucky too-I mean if a man attracted me and I attracted him."