Free Old Acquaintance by David Stacton Page A

they were the poorest members of it, so poor that until his death they had never been asked to Uncle Felix’s house. Uncle Felix was their Dutch uncle, and lived beside one of the statelier canals in Amsterdam. The body was laid out in the front parlor on the left. Never before had Charlie been in a house that smelled so good, of silk upholstery, polished maple, and a fine waft of cooking odors from the kitchen in the basement as they went in through the ground floor. The corpse had looked so contented and sleek and well fed, lying there with pious hands, under the dream of all warm winter comforters, the sort of comforter Charlie had always wanted on his own cold bed. The room had flickered in the companionable glow of gasoliers. Candles burned quietly in important candelabra. Nobody had looked in the least worried, or cross, or put out,and before the coffin was closed, the children had been sent down to the kitchen, where the cook had stuffed them with sauerbraten (it had been waiting in the crock for Uncle Felix, and was a little overripe, but they weren’t told that), with potato pancakes, the best sauerbraten and the best potato pancakes Charlie had ever eaten.
    The respectable old Dutch families use the front door only for funerals. Otherwise they go in on the ground floor, through an arch under the front steps. Charlie had always been annoyed by that piece of protocol. Of course Uncle Felix wasn’t Dutch or even respectable, but he could afford a respectable Dutch house, so when the coffin was closed, the pallbearers took it out through the first-floor front door, and then down the steps. It meant a lot to Charlie. If you were dead you got to use the front door. Not otherwise.
    So when they got back to Berlin, he crawled up on the sofa, in the badly furnished front room, laid himself out, and got his sister to light the kitchen candles, while he lay there with piously folded hands and his eyes shut. Of course there weren’t any sauerbraten and potato pancakes afterwards, but if he lay there long enough, there would be.
    He made an arrangement with her. He’d play house with her if she’d play dead with him. The game went on for several years, and then went underground, the way most children’s games do, without any warning, like an elevated train into a tunnel.
    It emerged, fresh as paint, some time during the course of his second marriage, after a quarrel, he supposed. He was alone in the apartment, crawled up on the sofa, suddenly remembered the game, and had been playing it ever since, whenever life got too much for him and he needed rest. When he closed his eyes he could even smell the smells of that fine house, years ago. If he kept his eyes closed long enough, and his hands folded, he would most assuredly get sauerbraten  and potato pancakes. He would just float away, feet first, into heaven. He would be able to use the front door. With his eyes closed, he could see yes, that nobody would look put out, or worried, or cross with him again.
    Whatever else you said for it, it at least gave him a rest period. His sister had been fond of him, he supposed. But there had never been anybody to tuck him in.
    When his thoughts strayed in that direction, Charlie invariably sat up.
    It must be five. The lighting was bad. And Paul hadn’t come in yet. “Sometimes,” says the foolish American matron in the New Yorker cartoon, facing a sunset of optimum vulgarity, “I think the cocktail hour is the most beautiful hour of the day.” Charlie didn’t happen to agree. He did have a drink, and sat there listening to the silence, which bothered him. Inhabited silence soothed him. For empty silence he had no use.
    It is only a game, of course. Everything is a game. But even chess players must have their moments to relax, though he doubted it. It was his theory that all chess players were of monster birth, like blue babies, except that they did not die.
    Across from the sofa on which he had been lying, propped up on a