4
THE PETERS FAMILY seemed, to me, quite rich, rich in all the ways that I would have considered a family rich at that time. They owned a whole island, after all. They had a maid, about whom I will have more to say later. They owned three boats: a working boat, a barge really, that they used for carrying freight from the mainland, and, in The Missing Garage, used to transport an entire Esso gas station; a sailboat, a lean blue sloop that Larry was permitted to sail by himself and on which Larry’s sister enjoyed sunning herself; and a speedboat, a mahogany Chris Craft speedboat with a twelve-cylinder engine. On the mainland, they owned a small piece of waterfront property in the town of Murky Bay, where they had a dock, a boathouse for the speedboat, and a garage in which they kept a Jaguar Saloon and a war-surplus Jeep.
Everything that the Peterses did was of an order different from anything my family or the families of any of my friends did. My father might spend most of a Saturday changing the oil and filter in our aging Commander, trying to devise a scheme to make my mother’s washing machine stop walking across the cellar floor, or painting the garage, but Mr. Peters was likely to spend a Saturday tied up in the hold of a sinking ship, rappelling down a rock face in pursuit of some bric-a-brac smugglers, or conducting delicate negotiations for the purchase of some fine amber in Lübeck.
And the meals! Every time the Peters family sat down to a meal, it seemed to be the kind of meal that I associated with festivals and celebrations and funerals. If they were having breakfast, they drifted into the dining room one by one, and each filled a plate from a sideboard laden with oatmeal, pancakes, bacon, sausages (sometimes two kinds), coffee, cocoa, milk, juices, sticky buns, crumb cake, crullers, bran muffins, bagels, kaiser rolls, English muffins, toasted rye bread, toasted raisin bread, jelly doughnuts, white mountain rolls, corn muffins, salt sticks, bialys, and fruit. Marie, the maid, would fix eggs any way anyone wanted them. At home, my father usually started the day with white toast, coffee, and a couple of cigarettes. My mother rarely had more than coffee. I usually had a bowl of graham crackers soaked in milk, sometimes a cup of cocoa and toast.
Dinner at the Peterses’ was always a big deal: baked ham, turkey, a roast beef, bowls of potatoes and vegetables, everyone talking away and eating like mad. Of course, they had to eat a lot when they could, because most of the meals at the Peters house were never finished. No sooner would they get their plates heaped with food and eat a few healthy bites than someone would begin shooting at the house from a low-flying plane, an explosion on the mainland would rattle the windows, or Marie would announce the arrival of a mysterious stranger. Dinners were sometimes interrupted in my family, too, but the interruptions seemed to me, at the time, less likely to lead to anything interesting: the heating pipes would begin making metallic knocking sounds, but upon investigation we would find no dark-eyed waif tied up in the cellar, banging on the pipes to rouse some help, only air in the radiators; we’d be startled by a knock at the back door, but it was never a mysterious stranger, only the Mr. Doughboy delivery man, running late on his route; a flash of light would fill the room, and a moment later an explosive crash would rattle the windows, but it would only be a summer thunderstorm, and in those days I didn’t find a summer storm as exciting as an exploding gimcrack factory.
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🎧 186: The Peters family seemed ...