Read Online Greenwich by Howard Fast - Free Book Online Page B

son.”
    â€œVery generous of you.”
    â€œYou can leave whenever you’re through. As long as the girls understand the menu.”
    â€œThey’ll hear from me if they don’t.”
    The two women, standing at the other side of the kitchen, giggled. Abel’s son entered with a tray of glasses as Sally stood up on her toes and kissed Abel’s cheek. After Sally left the kitchen, Joseph said to his father, “It’s your age and beauty, so I won’t mention it to Mom.”
    â€œYou miss the point entirely,” Abel replied. “That’s a good woman, a very fine and innocent woman. I don’t care why she married Castle or what she done before she married him, but that’s a good, generous woman. Time you learned the difference between men and women. There are good women but mighty few good men.”
    â€œRight on!” Donna exclaimed. They were both of them, Josie and Donna, in awe of Abel.
    â€œThat’s enough,” Abel said firmly. “They’re sitting down. The first course and then the wine. So get your little asses in there.”
    Sally had spent at least an hour over the seating. She had place cards of china, small pieces that you could write a name on in ink and then simply rub it off, and the lady in the shop on Greenwich Avenue where she purchased them had assured her that they were in the best of taste. She sat at one end of the table, her husband at the other, and put Sister Pat on her right. Richard would be happy to have Muffy on his right. She knew that Castle liked to play a touching game under the table, especially with Muffy Platt, and she felt that as an understanding and grateful wife, she should overlook this. Actually, it did not bother her too much. Muffy was older and not aging well after a face-lift; and for all of his wandering, she felt that Richard would never leave her. Men were a continuing mystery to her, and thus she accepted them however they were.
    Actually, the dinner party was becoming a great success, and Sally glowed. Let Richard play his game with Muffy. The old witch got little enough from her own husband, and the result would be a more amorous Richard Castle that night when they went to bed. The food was not entirely to Sally’s taste—she would take off at times to stuff herself at McDonald’s—but she had gotten used to odd sauces and exotic flavors; and as for the guests, they were in food’s seventh heaven.
    Sally herself was straining her ears, as was Sister Pat Brody, to follow a discussion between Monsignor Donovan and Harold Sellig, with an occasional intervention from Mary Greene and her husband, Herbert.
    â€œAs I understand your point of view,” the monsignor was saying, “you’re making a case for social guilt. In other words, it’s not only the nuns and lay workers and Jesuits and Archbishop Romero who were murdered in El Salvador, presumably by assassination squads that we trained, but you include President Kennedy and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King—” He paused.
    â€œAnd others,” Sellig said. “Luminaries, of course. They provide the substance for the media. But those who die in war, of starvation, of the casual killing—”
    â€œBut that’s too broad a brush,” Herb Greene protested. “Assassination is a word of precise meaning.”
    â€œYes, for you, Professor. You’re a linguist. But in social practice, or in a literary sense, if you will, words expand and take on a broader meaning. Take two of the adjectives commonly used by the kids today; awesome and cool. Each has lost its technical meaning. Take awesome. My son’s eighteen, going into his first year at Columbia next fall. I tell him that I’ve been writing the past four hours, he responds that it’s positively awesome.”
    Sally noticed that Castle had stopped whispering to Muffy Platt and was now listening.
    The monsignor was savoring his