KNEW MARGOT AND MARTHA well, but I hardly knew their parents, Andrew and Rosetta, at all.  At the time, I wouldn’t have said that, though.  I supposed that I knew everything there was to know about them, because everyone in Babbington had an anecdote or two to tell about them, and I had heard quite a few of them.  The Glynns were artists, Babbington’s only artists, as far as I knew.
    Artists.  What can I say?  What should I say?  I could write a book about the ideas about art and artists that were current when I was a boy, ideas that had their inevitable effect on me, on my ideas, on my art—but this isn’t that book, and I have another story to tell, and for the purposes of this story it will be enough to say that Andy was a painter and Rosetta was a poet.  As artists, they were regarded as eccentrics, colorful characters.  The anecdotes told about them had a common theme: their blissful detachment from the minutiae of everyday life, the very things that loomed so large in the lives of normal Babbingtonians, like my parents.  There were also titillating rumors about Bohemian goings-on, rumors recounted in whispers too low, alas, for me to hear.  Among the stories I did hear were the one about Andy Glynn’s forgetting to wear shoes in public (or a belt, or a shirt, or pants, depending on the storyteller), the one about Rosetta’s becoming so entranced with the appearance of a bin full of cauliflower at the market that she bought all of it, every head, and fed her family nothing but cauliflower for a week and a half, and the one—well—I’ll tell it to you as my mother told it to me one night, after we had been visiting some friends of ours, the Fishers. 
    Visiting was rare for us.  My parents didn’t have much of a social life outside the family, but now and then someone would give a little party, and sometimes there would be a gathering that included children, as this had.  My parents left the Fishers’ in high spirits, a little tipsy on beer (or maybe it was highballs or old-fashioneds), but higher, I think, on the idea that they belonged to a fun-loving set.  I was a little intoxicated by that idea, too.
    “So long, so long,” my mother called to Mrs. Fisher.  “We had a wonderful time.”  She was right.  We had had a wonderful time. 
    “I hope we remember the car!” called my father. 
    The group on the front steps, waving us off, roared.  I supposed that they were laughing at the very idea of my father’s forgetting to drive our car home.  It was such a preposterous idea that I laughed, too, without realizing that I was laughing only at the comic surface of a story with a slightly malicious center.  My father performed a little business of starting to walk off, hands in his pockets, like a man who thinks he came on foot and doesn’t realize that he’s leaving his car behind.  My mother joined in the fun by snagging his coat and dragging him back to the car, where he registered slapstick surprise at its being there.  I didn’t know what my parents were up to, but I loved seeing them indulge in comical behavior, whatever its point might be.  I wanted to be part of it, so I started walking off, in the way my father had, hands in my pockets, whistling.  I got a laugh, too, almost as good as the laughs my parents had gotten, but I didn’t know what I was doing, because I didn’t know the story behind it.  I didn’t realize that my father, in his performance, had been alluding to one of the legends of the Glynns, invoking it to get a laugh, and he had gotten the laughter he’d hoped for. 
    “Oh!” my mother cried, settling onto the front seat, closing the door.  “That was hilarious.  You were very funny, Bert.”
    “Thank you, my dear,” said my father.  The voice he used wasn’t his own, and I understood that he was still playing his adopted comic character, whoever that might be.
    “And you, too, Peter.”
    “Thank you, my mother,” I said.  I was good at picking things up.  “But I don’t really get the joke,” I admitted.
    “Oh!” cried my mother.  “That makes it even funnier!”  She and my father broke out in laughter again.
    “It’s about the Glynns,” said my mother after she’d gotten herself under control.  “Mr. and Mrs. Glynn.”
    “Uh-huh.”
    “Well, they were invited to the mayor’s for dinner.  It was Clam Fest time, and the mayor was having one of those big dinners he gives for important people.  Everyone wears a tuxedo, you know.  The men, that is.  It’s all very fancy, and they eat French food.  Little canapés on rounds of colored bread—green, yellow, red.”
    “Where did you hear that?” asked my father.
    “Oh, it’s in all the magazines,” said my mother.
    “The mayor’s parties are in the magazines?”
    “No,” she said.  “Of course not.  They’re not that famous—but the sandwiches are.”  She laughed, and she looked at my father quickly, moving her eyes but not her head.  “I’ve seen them there.  The canapés.  On little rounds of colored bread.” 
    Her tone was odd, plaintive.  She seemed to be making a plea.  (If I could hear this tone, I must have been growing up very quickly in those days.)  It seemed to say, “Please don’t contradict me, Bert.  Maybe I’m making some of this up.  Maybe I don’t know anything about the canapés at the mayor’s parties, but please accept my little invention.  It makes sense.  It fits the story.  Please just let me have this little thing of my own.”
    “Little rounds of bread,” she said again.  She made a circle of her thumb and forefinger.  “Green, yellow, red.”
    My father looked at her for a moment, then turned his eyes back to the road.  “Oh,” he said.  “Sure.  I see.  We ought to do that.”
    “What?” she asked.
    “Make some of those sandwiches and give a party.”  I think my mother and I were equally astonished to hear him say this, but for different reasons.  To me, it suggested that my father might like to have a good time, but when I hear my father speaking now, in memory, and see the wonderful little smile on my mother’s face, the surprise in her eyes, “Make some of those sandwiches and give a party” sounds like one of the most romantic things my father ever said.
    “Maybe we should,” said my mother.  She squeezed his arm.  “So, anyway, there they were, Mr. and Mrs. Glynn, at the mayor’s party.  And of course they were having a wonderful time.  They were talking with everyone, and laughing, and drinking champagne, and eating the canapés.  Then there was dinner, a long dinner, served in courses, everything from soup to nuts, and more champagne of course.  And then, oh, I don’t know, maybe someone played the piano—of course, someone must have played the piano—and there was dancing, and more champagne.”
    “Ella,” said my father.
    “Well!” she said.  “Probably.”
    My father said nothing.
    “By the time midnight rolled around,” my mother went on, “the Glynns were a little high.  I’m sure their heads must have been spinning—what with all that champagne, and meeting all those important people, and the dancing and everything.  So, when they were leaving, they said their good-byes to the mayor and his wife and they went down the steps and started off in the direction of home.  Their home.  Calling out, ‘Good night!’
    “And the mayor called out, ‘Good night!’
    “And Mr. Glynn called back, ‘A fine night!  A fine night.’
    “And off they went.
    “Well, the party began breaking up.  People began leaving in little groups, making their good-byes.  And just as the last people were leaving, while they were standing on the porch saying good night to the mayor and his wife, along came Mr. and Mrs. Glynn.  Walking along, arm in arm.
    “Everyone stopped talking.  The mayor must have wondered what they were doing  there.  He probably thought they’d decided to come back for more champagne.
    “So he called out to them, ‘Did you forget something?’
    “And Mr. Glynn said, ‘Yes.’”  Here my mother began to giggle.  “‘We forgot our car.’”
    We all laughed.  As the laughter subsided, a pleasant fatigue came over us.  I slumped into a corner and yawned.  My mother leaned against my father and rested her head on his shoulder.  He drove at a slower pace.  None of us spoke, but if we had, we might have thanked the Glynns for the nightcap they’d given us.

If At Home with the Glynns happens to be your first taste of the world according to Leroy, know that . . . you’re not just reading an immensely enjoyable little book, you may be acquiring an addiction from which there is no recovery.

At Home with the Glynns is published in paperback by Picador, a division of St. Martin's Press, at $11.00.

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At Home with the Glynns is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, dialogues, settings, and businesses portrayed in it are products of the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

First published by Crown Publishers, Inc., 201 East 50th Street, New York, New York 10022. Member of the Crown Publishing Group. 

The illustration at the top of the page is an adaptation of an illustration by Stewart Rouse that first appeared on the cover of the August 1931 issue of Modern Mechanics and Inventions. The boy at the controls of the aerocycle doesn’t particularly resemble Peter Leroy—except, perhaps, for the smile.