The Golden Goose

1

Princess O’Shea was not really a princess. Her father’s name happened to be Royal, and “Princess” seemed logical. It was also a good joke. Royal O’Shea had had a taste for jokes. It ran in his family.

Prin’s mother died in attempting to continue the dynasty, and her father lived another eighteen years before surrendering to an unregal cirrhosis of the liver. That was when Prin came to live with her father’s brother Slater in his house at the edge of Cibola City, which was not much of a city by any but the most technical definition, although it was a good deal of a house.

Uncle Slater O’Shea had money. He had it by way of his late wife, who had acquired it from her late first husband. She had been a realistic lady of some shrewdness, suspecting rightly that Slater O’Shea had pressed his suit more out of regard for his own future happiness than for hers; but he was also charming and amusing and sometimes exciting, which was all the good lady asked after fifteen years of being married to a man whose idea of a high old time was to go to his safe deposit box and see if his bonds and stock certificates were still there. She cheerfully willed Uncle Slater what was left of what she had had when he started helping her spend it. Uncle Slater being what he was, it was not nearly so much as it might have been; but it did include the big old house at the edge of Cibola City, and enough income from the remains of the safe deposit box to enable him to live in non-working comfort. A life of non-working comfort had been Uncle Slater’s prospector-like dream since he had first struck it poor, which was practically at birth.

Prin liked Uncle Slater fine. With his libido now damped by the dews of time, he roared more quietly; and since he had not worked for his late wife’s earlier husband’s money, he was quite generous with it. He was certainly more fun than Aunt Lallie, Uncle Slater’s sister, and than Cousin Twig and Cousin Peet, the spawn of another brother (not Prin’s father Royal) who had deserted his two motherless chicks and gone off and died interestingly somewhere. As for Brady O’Shea, Prin’s brother, Uncle Slater was a king by comparison, and Princess O’Shea would have been the first to say so; in fact, she was the first to say so.

Aunt Lallie and Cousins Twig and Peet had been living with Uncle Slater when Prin arrived. Prin was the only one who had come by invitation. The others had dropped in for visits and just stayed on, like The Man Who Came to Dinner; and Brother Brady, learning of his sister’s providential haven, got there virtually on her heels. Aunt Lallie, Cousins Twig and Peet, and Brother Brady had not been asked to stay, as Prin had; but on the other hand they had not been asked to leave, so it all came to the same thing.

The reason they had not been asked to leave was that Uncle Slater had a tender feeling for scoundrels and a sense of responsibility toward all O’Sheas in the blood line. In every instance he could think of — Prin excepted — “scoundrel” and “O’Shea” were synonyms; so that at the same time that he felt tenderly toward them, he refrained from turning his back, since he took it for granted that any of the quartet was quite capable of sinking a knife in it, especially if the exertion promised a profit. The price of eternal vigilance being exhaustion, Uncle Slater restored tranquillity to his aging soul by writing a most engaging will. In this will he prorated his worth among the five O’Sheas who lived with him and seventeen other O’Sheas who lived elsewhere.

“Those of you who did not flunk simple arithmetic will therefore see,” said Uncle Slater to the five O’Sheas in residence as he waved the will heartily, like a flag, “that my decease will, automatically and ipso facto, divide my estate into twenty-two equal parts. The advantages to us all must be evident. So long as I remain in a state of animation there is enough to support the six of us under this roof in freedom from reasonable want. Were I to pass on, however, the butchered bits of my estate would scarcely suffice to support any one of you for more than a year or so. I see that you grasp the unpleasant consequences of my demise. Each of you would be reduced to the alternatives of, one, working; two, stealing; three, starving; or four, finding another sucker. I agree in advance that the first of these alternatives is too far fetched to be seriously considered. The third is almost, although not quite, as bad. The second is a possibility, but I would not recommend it. The fourth, I grant, seems the most attractive; however, there are countless parasites for each available host, and I do not think the odds of finding another one are good. I have myself been lucky in this respect, and my natural inclination is to identify with those less fortunate. I was in my time an accomplished freeloader at others’ expense, so I am agreeable to your being likewise at mine. In short, let’s all relax and enjoy the fruits of my dear Millie’s first husband’s labors and take very, very good care of Uncle Slater. Any questions?”

“I don’t have a question,” Princess O’Shea said firmly, “I have an announcement. Which is that I’m working six days a week in a drugstore for pay, Uncle Slater. I know I get that weak gene from my mother’s side, and I apologize; but by the same token I’m no damn freeloader, so don’t lump me with them — those — that are.”

“True,” said Uncle Slater. “Our Princess is a mutation, and in all fairness I should have said so. I’m happy to be able to point out that this ‘pay’ she mentions with such deplorable pride is just about enough to keep her in nylons; however, she is technically correct. As for having inherited the weakness from your mother’s side, Princess, I’m obliged to register a dissent; I knew your mother’s side. To be candid, my dear, in view of this unhealthy streak in you I’m inclined to believe that you may not be an O’Shea at all. There may well have been an interlude in the Royal household, briefly before your nativity, when your poor mother dallied with a commoner.”

This being sheer speculation, Princess O’Shea disdained to defend her legitimacy, morganatic or otherwise; such considerations had never seemed to her of any consequence.

As for the others, they attended Uncle Slater’s genial briefing in their usually divergent styles:

Aunt Lallie sat smiling at someone not visible to anyone else. This effect, which she achieved by staring intently at an uninhabited part of the room, was not one of her more endearing accomplishments; it tended to raise goose pimples on the uninitiated. Nor were the hands in her lap more reassuring. They were large, hard-looking and hairy, whereas the rest of her was small, soft and baby-girlish. To see her as she now occupied a straight chair, hands folded before her, created the astonishing illusion of a big tough man skulking behind her with his arms about her waist. This hyperbole was one of Uncle Slater’s conceits; the power of Lallie’s mind over Lallie’s matter, he liked to say (to Prin privately). But, alas for Aunt Lallie, it was no very satisfactory substitute for the real thing.

Brother Brady O’Shea reacted to the testamentary news as he reacted to almost everything: he strode powerfully over to his uncle’s bar, seized a bottle of his uncle’s choice bourbon, and poured himself an oversized man’s oversized drink — which he manfully proceeded to imbibe. Sister Prin had often supposed (also in conceit, since she considered the incestuous implications of the supposition as unlikely as the supposition itself) that Brother Brady might well have been the big tough man in the Aunt Lallie illusion. He was big enough, and he certainly gave the appearance of toughness; and he was unquestionably a man, at least in the biological sense (there could be no doubt about the gender of his thoughts, considering the way he looked at Cousin Peet). But the conceit ended there. Physique and libido notwithstanding, Brother Brady was the weakest of sisters. As Uncle Slater liked to say, one wondered what held Brady O’Shea’s body beautiful up, since his Creator had left the backbone out. His capacity for mischief could only be guessed at.

And Cousin Peet. Cousin Peet was five-feet-three blonde inches of pure female higher mathematics, all parabolas and lunes and little arcs of young soft moist flesh put together with amazing congruity. The difficulty was that, if you figured her, the answer invariably came out wrong. In Uncle Slater’s earthier, if mixed metaphor: “Our little sultry sexpot is a little frozen fish.”

For Cousin Peet employed her extraordinary nubile equipment as reflexively as she employed her knee when the frequent occasion required it. It was her only stock-in-trade in a rather remarkable business, since she refused to part with any parcel of it. Even so, Cousin Peet might have utilized her window dressing to her profit — as a sales leader, say, to push less desirable merchandise — but for the fact that she had no other goods in inventory. Uncle Slater, always there with a relevant mot, put it this way: “Peet is like a highly successful popover: bite into her and you’d get a great big mouthful of nothing.” This unoccupied interiority, he pointed out fondly, was particularly true of her head.

Consequently, when a situation arose like this one of the will, in which there was no use for her sole asset, Cousin Peet was at a loss. She simply sat there with her secondary sex characteristics going to waste, looking from one to the other of her assembled kin as if groping for a clue to whatever the mystery was.

As for Cousin Twig: Gastronomically speaking, where Cousin Peet made the mouth water, her brother was about as appetizing as a glob of long-spoiled pork. Cousin Twig had no shape; that is, the shape he was in conformed to no esthetic pattern acceptably human. It was fat where it should have been lean, and stringy where it should have had bulk: his thighs were too long and his legs were too short; his torso gave an upside-down effect; and above all — above all loomed his head, most of it beyond his brows in the manner of the original Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein monster, except that in Cousin Twig’s case no make-up was necessary. In addition to this anatomical slumgullion, nature had thrown into the pot a skin coarsely dark, with the green-broth sheen of an exposed drainage ditch.

Ill-designed containers are often redeemed by their contents. The love of Beauty brought out the handsome prince in the Beast. The Ugly Duckling’s habiliments covered the most gorgeous bird in the pond. The gargoyle breast of Quasimodo harbored the tenderness of angels. Not so with Cousin Twig. The interior Twig was even less favored than its housing. He might well have said with Gloucester that love forswore him in his mother’s womb. For he was as nasty inside as out — a man of cringe and craft, bitter, lecherous, treacherous, capable of kissing the foot that kicked him and biting the hand that fed him, and both for purposes of his own.

So now Cousin Twig, after a moment of silence, put on his look of ruptured dignity, which unfortunately succeeded only in resembling the risus sardonicus of a corpse felled by lockjaw, and said to his Uncle Slater: “Uncle Slater, I will not presume to speak for anyone else present, but for you to suggest that I might have designs on your stocks and bonds and whatever other worldly trifles you have stashed away hits me where I live. For shame, Uncle Slater. I’m humbly happy with the pittance you allow me from your income, and it hurts me deeply that you should think otherwise.”

“Then you’re a fool, Nephew Twig,” said Uncle Slater with a grin, “which I have no intention of believing. You’re all quite welcome to my capital in good time. At the easy rate I’m going, that should be about twenty years from now.”

Uncle Slater miscalculated. The twenty years he looked forward to turned out to be more nearly twenty days.

For the record: It was three weeks and two days later that Slater O’Shea went to his reward, which was what he had been afraid of for a long time.