There was a knock on my door and I said come in. It opened and Madeline entered and advanced, enveloped in a thin white film of folds that started at her breasts and stopped only at her ankles. It made her face smaller and her eyes bigger.
“How do you like my dress, Archie?” she asked.
“Yep. You may not call that formal, but it certainly—” I stopped. I looked at her. “I thought you said you liked the name Andy. No?”
“I like Archie even better.”
“Then I’d better change over. When did Father confide in you?”
“He didn’t.” She opened her eyes. “You think I think I’m sophisticated and just simply impenetrable, don’t you? Maybe I am, but I wasn’t always. Come along, I want to show you something.” She turned and started off.
I followed her out and walked beside her along the wide hall, across a landing, and down another hall into another wing. The room she took me into, through a door that was standing open, was twice as big as mine, which I had thought was plenty big enough, and in addition to the outdoor summer smell that came in the open windows it had the fragrance of enormous vases of roses that were placed around. I would just as soon have taken a moment to glance around at details, but she took me across to a table, opened a bulky leather-bound portfolio as big as an atlas to a page where there was a marker, and pointed.
“See? When I was young and gay!”
I recognized it instantly because I had one like it at home. It was a clipping from the Gazette of September ninth, 1940. I have not had my picture in the paper as often as Churchill or Rocky Graziano, or even Nero Wolfe, but that time it happened that I had been lucky and shot an automatic out of a man’s hand just before he pressed the trigger.
I nodded. “A born hero if I ever saw one.”