Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut

IT WAS ALMOST THREE O'CLOCK when Mary Jane finally found Eloise's house. She
explained to Eloise, who had come out to the driveway to meet her, that everything had
been absolutely perfect, that she had remembered the way exactly, until she had turned
off the Merrick Parkway. Eloise said, "Merritt Parkway, baby," and reminded Mary Jane
that she had found the house twice before, but Mary Jane just wailed something
ambiguous, something about her box of Kleenex, and rushed back to her convertible.
Eloise turned up the collar of her camel's-hair coat, put her back to the wind, and
waited. Mary Jane was back in a minute using a leaf of Kleenex and still looking upset,
even fouled. Eloise said cheerfully that the whole damn lunch was burned--
sweetbreads, everything--but Mary Jane said she'd eaten anyway, on the road. As the
two walked toward the house, Eloise asked Mary Jane how it happened she had the day
off. Mary Jane said she didn't have the whole day off; it was just that Mr. Weyinburg
had a hernia and was home in Larchmont, and she had to bring him his mail and take
a couple of letters every afternoon. She asked Eloise, "Just exactly what is a hernia,
anyway?" Eloise, dropping her cigarette on the soiled snow underfoot, said she didn't
actually know but that Mary Jane didn't have to worry much about getting one. Mary
Jane said, "Oh," and the two girls entered the house.
Twenty minutes later, they were finishing their first highball in the living room and
were talking in the manner peculiar, probably limited, to former college roommates.
They had an even stronger bond between them; neither of them had graduated. Eloise
had left college in the middle of her sophomore year, in 1942, a week after she had been
caught with a soldier in a closed elevator on the third floor of her residence hall. Mary
Jane had left--same year, same class, almost the same month--to marry an aviation
cadet stationed in Jacksonville, Florida, a lean, air-minded boy from Dill, Mississippi,
who had spent two of the three months Mary Jane had been married to him in jail for
stabbing an M.P.
"No," Eloise was saying. "It was actually red." She was stretched out on the couch, her
thin but very pretty legs crossed at the ankles.
"I heard it was blond," Mary Jane repeated. She was seated in the blue straight chair.
"Wuddayacallit swore up and down it was blond."

"Uh-uh. Definitely." Eloise yawned. "I was almost in the room with her when she dyed
it. What's the matter? Aren't there any cigarettes in there?"
"It's all right. I have a whole pack," Mary Jane said. "Somewhere." She searched
through her handbag.
"That dopey maid," Eloise said without moving from the couch. "I dropped two brandnew
cartons in front of her nose about an hour ago. She'll be in, any minute, to ask me
what to do with them. Where the hell was I?"
"Thieringer," Mary Jane prompted, lighting one of her own cigarettes.
"Oh, yeah. I remember exactly. She dyed it the night before she married that Frank
Henke. You remember him at all?"
"Just sort of. Little ole private? Terribly unattractive?"
"Unattractive. God! He looked like an unwashed Bela Lugosi."
Mary Jane threw back her head and roared. "Marvellous," she said, coming back into
drinking position.
"Gimme your glass," Eloise said, swinging her stockinged feet to the floor and
standing up. "Honestly, that dope. I did everything but get Lew to make love to her to
get her to come out here with us. Now I'm sorry I--Where'd you get that thing?"
"This?" said Mary Jane, touching a cameo brooch at her throat. "I had it at school, for
goodness sake. It was Mother's."
"God," Eloise said, with the empty glasses in her hands. "I don't have one damn thing
holy to wear. If Lew's mother ever dies--ha, ha--she'll probably leave me some old
monogrammed icepick or something."
"How're you getting along with her these days, anyway?"
"Don't be funny," Eloise said on her way to the kitchen.