Chapter 19 — The Headmaster’s Bad Dream
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rs. Ellen Sawyer, the Headmaster’s wife, felt satisfied with her achievement as she sat with her six guests around the living room fire after dinner. She had had serious doubts about the party beforehand, but now everyone seemed at ease and the dinner had actually exceeded her expectations. Her brother Stanley and his wife Deanna had come to visit for the weekend. Stanley was a lawyer with the distinguished Boston firm of Bartlett, Jones, and A.P. Butterworth. Deanna, a tall, masterful woman, thin to the point of emaciation and stylish almost to arrogance, was a gourmet cook. She had generously undertaken to cook the Saturday night dinner. Ellen Sawyer had been steam-rollered into acceptance, but nourished doubts that anyone else could or should invade her kitchen and cook for her guests. However, Deanna had promised to do her famous baked stuffed lobster, and who could decently refuse that? Getting ready for Deanna had been a good piece harder than cooking a dinner. Many of the necessary ingredients – Deanna had sent a list – were not on her kitchen shelves and some of the spices were not available in the Bath supermarket. The wine for seasoning had to be French Chardonnay. The salad fixings had to be of the highest quality. Those little hard, pink golf balls of supermarket tomatoes were unacceptable. The cucumbers had to be unwaxed, the avocadoes of the precise degree of ripeness, the lettuce oh-so-crisp. Deanna, surveying the result of Ellen’s two-day scavenger hunt, spent a good part of Saturday morning scouring the shops of Bath to repair deficiencies in quality and to procure a few items she had wanted to select herself. Right after lunch at school – pea soup and corn bread – Ellen, Stanley, and Deanna had driven down to Steve Cushing’s wharf at Small Point for eight lively 1 1/2-pound lobsters. Steve had led them out of the close little store on the wharf, stuffy with smells of bait, wet wool, tar, tobacco and oil stove, and had lifted the lid of the lobster car. He reached in with his dip net. “I want that one over there in the corner,” said Deanna, “and that one that just backed into the crowd on this side.” Steve patiently and skillfully maneuvered the designated creatures into his net and dropped them snapping into the basket on the scale. One was pronounced inferior and was returned for a better one. When eight had been selected and passed inspection, they were weighed and dumped into a cardboard beer carton. The visitors picked their ways up the icy gangway, Deanna holding her fur coat tightly around her in the bitter wind, and hurried to the car. Ellen stepped into the house on the wharf with Steve to pay for the lobsters. “I’m sorry to be so fussy,” apologized Ellen,” but she’s my sister-in-law and a gourmet cook who writes books about it. So far as I’m concerned, at this time of year a lobster’s a lobster and they all taste the same.” “Well,” answered Steve, “I don’t mind. If you’re going to deal with the public, you have to be pretty damned accomodatin’, even in the winter.” Despite the difficulties of the oven not being just right, the plates not being quite hot enough and the wine – Stanley had brought the wine from Boston – quite cold enough, the dinner had been a great success. Now, over coffee, Coach Johnson was expatiating on the World Series, what the manager of the Cardinals should have told his batter to do in the ninth with one out and a man on first. Stanley was intensely interested and suggested the proper defensive shift for the Yankee outfield. Mrs. Johnson was dutifully attentive. Fritz Bauer, Head of the History Department, was profoundly bored as was Judy Bauer, neither of whom knew a shortstop from a doorstop. Deanna had shot her bolt. She lay wilted on the couch. 84
