Runaway Waltz by Frederic Morton

Author:Frederic Morton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2005-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Probably it would. And probably Baroness Pauline has fine-tuned her tanginess to the biographer. Probably I strike her as quite a highbrow sort, with kinks of my own. Hence her sympathy for my no-breakfast, no-lunch, yes- Yowser bizarrerie, her casual weaving in of Mouton’s aesthetic credits such as Philippe’s Christopher Fry translations, the wine museum, the Dalí bottle label (the Braque and Picasso designs already woven into previous conversations), plus the news scoop of “the Elizabethan folly” delivered by way of soliciting my literary acumen and thus stroking my vanity.

But also depressing my spirits. All that haute kinetic cunning makes me feel sluggish in comparison. Sabotages my wrapping. The Christmas paper resists me. My cough revives and unsteadies my hand. Until it subsides I leaf through the Oxford Elizabethans.

Surprise. Edmund Spenser’s famous Faerie Queene has nothing checked off at all. However, there is a red check on the October eclogue of his The Shepheardes Calendar, which I barely remember because I never assigned it in class. But I see now that as a translated excerpt it’s better than any Faerie Queene canto because individually the eclogues are much less entangled in context than the cantos.

Impressive. Unexpectedly perplexing. Is Baroness Pauline’s intricate artifice further complicated by genuine scholarship?

This makes me tired; drained beyond the cold; discouraged by the complexities to be mastered in this project. Familiar blues, actually, whenever I’m on the brink of a new book. But the physical fatigue is new. I’m gift-wrapping again, but my fingers are too weary to stretch the paper wrinkle free over the raised frame of the subway map plaque. How much easier were the napkin rings at Papa’s on Eighth Avenue! What balm to be back there now! … Even to pursue the “normal” career Papa once envisioned for me, concocting a new generation of wafer recipes in the baking lab of the National Biscuit Company? Or better still, running a nice little store—“Ye Olde Vienna Patisserie”—near Papa’s office? Right on Eighth Avenue because that’s also close to Frosch’s Bake Shop of my apprentice days. Frosch’s is now a TV mart, but the customer base must still be there for strudel and torte. Why not invest my savings in a tranquil existence like that? And stop having to wrench out of my brain words, phrases, insights, ideas, day after day after day? Why not get out of this constant, and confounding scribbling stress? …

And into my confoundment barges Marcia.

“There’s my Christmas wrapper!” she trills.

Behind her, butler Babysitter trundles his hedonic wagon, pulls it right up to me, presents it with a bow a shade more wine-scented than before, exits.

She lifts a silver bell from the wagon’s top tier.

“Your poppy seed twists, sir. Hot! Fresh baked!”

Such high spirits grate on my low.

“You tattled on me!” I say.

“Aren’t you glad?”

She lifts a smaller silver bell. Revealed, an astounding sight: on scalloped porcelain shells, butter patties that are not just patties but miniature sculptures carved in butter, tiny replicas of my poppy seed twists, down to a needlepoint of micro craters representing poppy seed.

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