brought Duff along with her for reading night. I have electric baseboard heat (expensive!). Duff has a furnace that doesn’t work well; also, he’s a New Englander, and cheap, so he won’t turn up the thermostat. There the two of them were at my door, she with a jar of soup she’d made from tomatoes she’d canned, he just standing there, pretending to be chewing tobacco when he wasn’t, his big boots caked with mud and snow. I did ask him to leave them outside. He hung on to Mrs. Terhune and to me, though I proved more useful in bending down and unlacing the boots and pulling them off, with his hand that wasn’t on Mrs. Terhune’s shoulder clutching my door frame. I don’t even remember how I segued, that evening, from Shackleton to Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia —probably because of the quality of his prose, which I much admire—only to learn, at the end of my little reading, during which we all sipped herbal tea with honey, that Duff’s father had been to Patagonia. He’d also been to the Galápagos, and to the Suez Canal, where he’d gotten dengue fever. “He was no businessman, he was OSS, then CIA,” Duff announced. “You might wonder, well, what’s our business in the Galápagos? And the answer’s mine to give. The tortoises. At one time, believe it or not, our country considered rigging up tortoises to record conversation going on around them. Well, you might ask: how many bad guys were going to step outside to talk important business, like the Galápagos was just one big backyard? The answer was—at least if you got them to the Galápagos—quite a number! There was some ‘Go to the Galápagos’ campaign after World War Two. That’s where they wanted everybody to go, though most people preferred San Michael of Allende. You think about recent times and those boys, Nixon I think it was, trying to give Fidel Castro an exploding cigar. That’s no joke.”
I nodded. It was Kennedy, but it seemed like something Nixon would do.
“That was their best thought!” Duff said, loudly. “So a bunch of turtles . . . I mean, tortoises. My father taught me the distinction: tortoises. What I’m saying is, there was a big conference in the Galápagos, and they were sleeping in the sun or crawling their ten inches a day, or standing up, looking left and right, and plopping down again, wired for sound!”
“My fine neighbor, you are full of surprises,” Mrs. Terhune said.
“That writer fellow, he happened to be an acquaintance of my father. You might ask, where would my father encounter the dashing Bruce Chatwin? Well, it was on faraway soil, where his Sherpa knew the Sherpa who was taking some Brits on a hike, and they thought in their Sherpa way that maybe they could lead the two expeditions together. One of the hikers was an English writer, name of Chatwin. When he and my father met, he was astonished at my father’s age. Said he didn’t look a day over sixty. Had some reluctance about letting the Sherpas get off easy, but they did agree they’d join up. But on the second day one of the men fell ill and had to be airlifted out with a ruptured appendix, so First Sherpa went ahead. Anyway, that first night, my father talked old age and dengue fever and London bars with Bruce Chatwin, who fell ill himself in the 1980s, but by then my father didn’t read the paper, and except for reading In Patagonia , I don’t think he ever read another of his books. I can’t be sure of that. Anyway, my father—as you surely remember, Muriel—was always fired up about something or somebody, and for a while it was nothing but Chatwin, Chatwin, Chatwin. When he died, I wrote a note to Mrs. Chatwin, telling her how much that one meeting meant to my father and saying that if she remembered ever hearing about a Charles Manley Arthur Bromwell, that was my late father, who died at the age of one hundred and three.”
Mrs. Terhune turned to me, the fingers of her free hand rubbing the warm mug. She said, “One time
I nodded. It was Kennedy, but it seemed like something Nixon would do.
“That was their best thought!” Duff said, loudly. “So a bunch of turtles . . . I mean, tortoises. My father taught me the distinction: tortoises. What I’m saying is, there was a big conference in the Galápagos, and they were sleeping in the sun or crawling their ten inches a day, or standing up, looking left and right, and plopping down again, wired for sound!”
“My fine neighbor, you are full of surprises,” Mrs. Terhune said.
“That writer fellow, he happened to be an acquaintance of my father. You might ask, where would my father encounter the dashing Bruce Chatwin? Well, it was on faraway soil, where his Sherpa knew the Sherpa who was taking some Brits on a hike, and they thought in their Sherpa way that maybe they could lead the two expeditions together. One of the hikers was an English writer, name of Chatwin. When he and my father met, he was astonished at my father’s age. Said he didn’t look a day over sixty. Had some reluctance about letting the Sherpas get off easy, but they did agree they’d join up. But on the second day one of the men fell ill and had to be airlifted out with a ruptured appendix, so First Sherpa went ahead. Anyway, that first night, my father talked old age and dengue fever and London bars with Bruce Chatwin, who fell ill himself in the 1980s, but by then my father didn’t read the paper, and except for reading In Patagonia , I don’t think he ever read another of his books. I can’t be sure of that. Anyway, my father—as you surely remember, Muriel—was always fired up about something or somebody, and for a while it was nothing but Chatwin, Chatwin, Chatwin. When he died, I wrote a note to Mrs. Chatwin, telling her how much that one meeting meant to my father and saying that if she remembered ever hearing about a Charles Manley Arthur Bromwell, that was my late father, who died at the age of one hundred and three.”
Mrs. Terhune turned to me, the fingers of her free hand rubbing the warm mug. She said, “One time
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