Treasure Box Page 0,29

evolve ways of hurting each other and then ignoring it and going on?

"Oh, please," said Madeleine. "Let's just take it as a given that my family is weird. I'm simply the normal-looking one who can go around in public. But I'll tell you what. Quentin has been dying of curiosity and I think he's sort of hurt that I've never taken him, so this is it. Next week. After New Year's. We'll drive up the Hudson Valley and I'll take him into Chateau Cryer and when he comes back here he can tell you all the weird things he saw. Believe me, you can't stay there for three hours without having a dozen very bizarre tales to tell."

"Tell us some now," said Quentin.

"You see?" said Madeleine. "Now that I've actually agreed to take him, he's afraid and he wants me to prepare him in case he wants to back out. Well, I'm not going to tell him a thing. He'll just have to come with an open mind."

"I'm sure your family is perfectly wonderful," said Mom, "and that's what Quentin will tell us."

"Maybe," said Madeleine with a knowing smile. "And maybe not. But I'll tell you this. Nobody in my family makes a banana cream pie like yours, Mother Fears. And the half-pie in your fridge is moaning my name."

"The pie doesn't know your name," said Quentin. "That was me you were hearing. But we'll settle for the pie for now."

"Quentin," said Mom reprovingly. "You're not such a newlywed anymore that we should have to put up with your innuendos."

"Innuendo?" said Quentin. "Why, whatever do you mean, Mother dear?"

After the pie, as Mom cleaned up in the kitchen and Dad signed on to America Online to send after-Christmas e-mail to his brothers, Quentin gave Madeleine a chance to back out of her invitation.

"But I don't want to back out. I'd already decided it was time for you to meet them. I would have told you privately but then the conversation just went that way and - you don't mind, do you?"

"Not at all. In fact I'm relieved. That you trust me enough to take me home."

"It wasn't a matter of trusting you, Tin, my pet, my poo. I know you can handle it. They just have a way of getting under my skin. With you to hold on to as an island of sanity, I think I can get through a day with my family. Just a day, mind you."

"And then a night at the Holiday Inn?"

"Well, of course we have to stay overnight, but you know what I mean. Twenty-four hours and then we go, no matter how my family pleads with you to stay, do you understand me? Because even if I'm wearing a plastic smile on my face and saying, 'Oh, yes, Quentin, let's do stay,' trust me, I do not want to stay, I want you to get me out of there before we reach the witching hour."

"Which is?"

"If we arrive at noon, then by the next noon we must be gone or I will turn into a puddle of mucus on the floor."

"That's an attractive image. If I kiss it, does it turn back into a princess?"

"No, it just turns into a cold." She kissed him. "Your kiss has already turned me into a princess."

Chapter 6. She Loves You, Yeah

The limo met them at La Guardia in the late afternoon on New Year's Day and they started out on the drive up the Hudson. "Shame we won't be able to see the river," Quentin said. "It'll be dark before we get over the Triborough."

"You can't see the river anyway," said Madeleine. "Not the way you can from the bluffs. The great houses were all built to be seen from the water. That was the highway then, the steamboats up the Hudson."

"The house is that old?"

"A fireplace in every room. The kitchen is an add-on. The bathrooms are carved out of hallways and stuck under stairs. All afterthoughts."

"They built these huge gorgeous mansions and then went outside to the privy?"

"Don't be silly," said Madeleine. "They had fine porcelain chamberpots. Which were emptied by the servants."

"Let me guess about the toilet paper."

"Every room had a water basin and towels. What do you think they were for?"

"Oh, for the good old days," said Quentin.

"I suppose your people all had flush toilets from the fifteenth century."

"No. But they dug their own latrines and built privies and used the Sears catalogue. Nobody handled anybody else's sewage."

"The idea of money