'You want to buy old Arbuthnot's place!' the shocked realtor asked.
We were delighted to learn that there was an 'old Arbuthnot.'
'I only hear from his lawyers,' the realtor said. 'They've been trying to unload the place, for years. Old Arbuthnot lives in California,' the realtor told us, 'but he's got lawyers all over the country. The one I deal with most of the time is in New York.'
We thought, then, that it would simply be a matter of letting the New York lawyer know that we wanted it, but -- back in New York -- Arbuthnot's lawyer told us that Arbuthnot wanted to see us.
'We'll have to go to California,' Frank said. 'Old Arbuthnot sounds as senile as one of the Hapsburgs, but he won't sell the place unless he gets to meet us.'
'Jesus God,' Franny said. 'That's an expensive trip to make just to meet someone!'
Frank informed her that Arbuthnot was paying our way.
'He probably wants to laugh in your faces,' Franny told us.
'He probably wants to meet someone who's crazier than he is,' Lilly said.
'I can't believe I'm so lucky!' Father cried. 'To imagine that it's still available!' Frank and I saw no reason to describe the ruins -- and the seedy new tourism surrounding his cherished Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea.
'He won't see any of it, anyway,' Frank whispered.
And I am glad that Father never got the chance to see old Arbuthnot, a terminal resident of the Beverly Hills Hotel. When Frank and I arrived at the Los Angeles airport, we rented our second car of that week and drove ourselves to meet the aged Arbuthnot.
In a suite with its own palm garden, we found the old man with an attending nurse, an attending lawyer (this one was a California lawyer), and what would prove to be a fatal case of emphysema. He sat propped up in a fancy hospital bed -- he sat breathing very carefully alongside a row of air-conditioners.
'I like L.A.,' Arbuthnot gasped. 'Not so many Jews here as there are in New York. Or else I've finally gotten immune to Jews,' he added. Then he was flung off at a sharp angle on his hospital bed by a cough that seemed to attack him by surprise (and from the side); he sounded as if he were choking on a whole turkey leg -- it seemed impossible he would recover, it seemed his persistent anti-Semitism would finally be the death of him (I'm sure that would have made Freud happy), but just as suddenly as the attack had seized him, the attack left him and he was calm. His nurse plumped up his pillows for him; his lawyer placed some important-looking documents upon the old man's chest and produced a pen for old Arbuthnot to hold in his trembling hand.
'I'm dying,' Arbuthnot said to Frank and me, as if this hadn't been obvious from our first glimpse of him. He wore white silk pajamas; he looked about one hundred years old; he couldn't have weighed more than fifty pounds.
'They say they're not Jews,' the lawyer told Arbuthnot, indicating Frank and me.
'Is that why you wanted to meet us?' Frank asked the old man. 'You could have found that out over the phone.'
'I may be dying,' he said, 'but I'm not selling out to the Jews.'
'My father,' I told Arbuthnot, 'was a dear friend of Freud.'
'Not the Freud,' Frank said to Arbuthnot, but the old man had begun coughing again and he didn't hear what Frank had to say.
'Freud?' Arbuthnot said, hacking and spewing. 'I knew a Freud, too! He was a Jewish animal trainer. The Jews aren't good with animals, though,' Arbuthnot confided to us. 'Animals can tell, you know,' he said. 'They can always sense anything funny about you,' he said. 'This Freud I knew was a dumb Jewish animal trainer. He tried to train a bear, but the bear ate him!' Arbuthnot howled with delight -- which brought on more coughing.
'A sort of anti-Semitic bear?' Frank asked, and Arbuthnot laughed so hard I thought his subsequent coughing would kill him.
'I was trying to kill him,' Frank said later.
'You must be crazy to want that place,' Arbuthnot told us. 'I mean, don't you know where Maine is? It's nowhere! There's no decent train service, and there's no decent flying service. It's a terrible place to drive to -- it's too far from both New York and Boston -- and when you do get there, the water's too cold and the bugs can bleed you to death in an hour. None of the really class sailors sail there anymore -- I mean the sailors with money,' he said. 'If you have a little money,' Arbuthnot said, 'there's absolutely nothing to spend it on in Maine! They don't even have whores there.'
'We like it anyway,' Frank told him.
'They're not Jews, are they?' Arbuthnot asked his lawyer.
'No,' the lawyer said.
'It's hard to tell, looking at them,' Arbuthnot said. 'I used to be able to spot a Jew at first glance,' he explained to us. 'But I'm dying now,' he added.
'Too bad,' Frank said.
'Freud wasn't eaten by a bear,' I told Arbuthnot.