than cats— but they did each nab an anchovy-stuffed olive when T.S. finally decided to tackle the refrigerator.
There wasn't much to do. Like every single one of the rooms in his six-room apartment, the refrigerator was spotless and gleaming clean. He wiped out the butter compartment, just in case the cleaning lady had missed it, then restacked his frozen dinners according to the main entree.
That done, he took a blow dryer to his bedroom slippers to restore the nap then checked all of his paintings and prints with a carpenter's level to ensure they were hanging properly. After all, it had been at least a month since he'd performed these all-important tasks.
Remembering some new purchases from the day before, T.S. then added a few entries to the computerized cross-indexed catalog he maintained on his private music collection, which was heavy on opera and show tunes. There was no point in checking the shelves of hardback books. He'd spent the morning before dusting and organizing those. Paperbacks were not allowed in the apartment, at least not after T.S. had eagerly read them. They were spirited down the hall and given to a neighbor so that Auntie Lil would not discover that he read best-selling thrillers and cheap detective novels by the handful each week.
He was finally reduced to killing another hour by rearranging his impeccably organized personal files chronologically instead of alphabetically. Then, realizing the absurdity of such a system, he moved them back as they were. In doing so, a small envelope fluttered to the floor from his Personal Correspondence, 1942-1955 file. He stared at it. The combination of Auntie Lil's earlier lecture and the letter's familiar handwriting triggered a flood of memories, as well as curiosity about how his past would seem to a stranger. People would find it odd, he supposed, that he had kept a correspondence file beginning with age seven. But then, not many people had been sent to boarding school at such a young age. And even fewer had had their letters to home returned regularly, with grammar and spelling carefully corrected by a well meaning but rigid schoolteacher mother.
Had T.S. been more sentimental, and less like his mother, it might have hurt his feelings. He had, instead, made a game out of trying to send her letters perfect in every way—thus embarking on a career of perfectionism that, among other compulsions, drove him to save every personal letter he received with the reply date noted on the front of each envelope.
He held the childish letter in his hand. It began with "Dear Mummy and Daddy." How strange. Children never called their mothers "Mummy" anymore, did they? It was hard for him to know for sure. Children were as foreign to T.S. as Zulu warriors, and a great deal more alarming. He noted with satisfaction that his mother had uncovered a mere three mistakes in the letter, and picayune ones at that, at a time when he was only eight years old. Not bad. Of course, by age ten he'd been able to beat her at her own game and had earned brief laudatory replies at the bottom of his own letters in return. It was better than nothing at all and, nearly fifty years later, he still treasured the perfunctory paragraphs of praise from his emotionally distant mother.
Replacing the letter into its proper folder, T.S. ran his fingers over the neat pile of perfectly ordered correspondence. Each letter— with certain rather spectacular exceptions—was very thin and very carefully folded. The exceptions were missives from Auntie Lil, posted from all corners of the world as she trekked here and there, following the fashion designers she served as they searched for new styles and new fabrics. He had awaited each of her letters with an eagerness he felt ashamed to admit to anyone else. No one else at boarding school, he remembered, in all those years away from home, could have claimed more exotic correspondence. Her letters had arrived at his always well sterilized room with wonderful irregularity, always fat and crammed with clippings, scraps of fabric, photographs of herself with strangers and stacks of postcards she'd meant to send earlier. They literally overflowed with evidence of a world so chaotic it both frightened and excited his prematurely adult mind.
T.S. knew even then how much his mother despised Auntie Lil and her unorthodox, sometime scandalous, ways. But, while struggling to maintain loyalty toward his rigidly conventional mother, T.S. had always been drawn closer to Auntie Lil's