ECALLING, NOW, the stories told about the Glynns then, I think I hear, with my adult’s ear, a tone that I’m certain I never noticed as a boy.  The tales of the Glynns and their wacky way of life were told with the tone one might use for a story about a particularly dense pet dog.  It was, to be technical, ridiculous.  What inspired that tone might have been affection rather than contempt, but if it was affection, then it had something in it of the affection one feels for a pet dog, and so I guess I’d have to conclude that there was an underlying contempt whether the tone was affectionate or not. 
    I came home from school one afternoon not long after my mother had told me that anecdote about the Glynns’ forgetting their car to find her retailing it to several neighboring housewives whom she’d assembled in a coffee-klatsch (quite probably, it occurs to me now, so that she could tell the story about the Glynns).  She was just finishing up when I came through the door.  The women smiled and nodded their heads as my mother spoke. 
    I put my books on the kitchen counter and looked in the bread box for a snack.  There was nothing but a loaf of bread.  However, on a platter on the dining room table, I saw something unfamiliar that I recognized at once: tiny sandwiches on circular pieces of bread.  I slipped into the dining room and took two.  I sat on the floor in the corner and ate them while I watched my mother perform for her friends.
    “So,” she was saying, “finally the party began breaking up.  People began leaving in little groups, making their good-byes—”
    “I can never get Dick to leave a party,” Mrs. Morton said.
    My mother said, “Mm, so just as the last people were leaving—”
    “That’s Dick,” said Mrs. Morton.  “Always the last to leave.”  She rolled her eyes and tapped the arm of her neighbor, Mrs. Freed.
    “So,” said my mother, “while they were standing on the porch saying good night to the mayor and his wife—”
    “Wait a minute.  I’m a little confused.  Who was on the porch?” asked Mrs. Vernon.  The Vernons were relative newcomers to our block and regarded as glamorous.
    “The last people to leave,” said my mother.
    “Oh, that would be Dick!” said Mrs. Morton.  She laughed and tapped Mrs. Freed again.
    “Well, let’s see,” said my mother, knitting her brows.  “Oh!”  She brightened and went on.  “While they were saying good night to the mayor and his wife, along came Mr. and Mrs. Glynn.  Walking along—”
    “Walking along, arm in arm,” said Mrs. Jerrold, from across the street.  She was a tall, slim, pretty woman with smooth black hair.  I enjoyed looking at her, but because their house was several houses farther up the street from ours, I couldn’t see into their windows with my binoculars.
    My mother smiled and nodded, very briefly, in Mrs. Jerrold’s direction.  Mrs. Jerrold nodded back, and my mother went on.
    “Everyone stopped talking,” said my mother, spreading her hands out as she said it, in a gesture that even I understood meant that we—her audience—ought to stop talking, too.  “The mayor must have wondered what they were doing  there—”
    “Who?” whispered Mrs. Vernon, in the general direction of Mrs. Jerrold.
    “The Glynns,” whispered Mrs. Jerrold.
    “He probably thought they’d decided to come back for more champagne!” said my mother.  She brought her hands together in a single clap and swept the room with her eyes and smile.
    “You remember that they left earlier?” Mrs. Jerrold whispered to Mrs. Vernon.
    “No,” whispered Mrs. Vernon, “but never mind.  It’s hard to keep people straight when you don’t really know them.”
    “So,” said my mother in a louder voice, “Mayor Whitley called out to them, ‘Did you forget something?’”
    Very suddenly Mrs. Jerrold said, “And Mr. Glynn said, ‘Yes!’”  It might be more accurate to say that she squealed.  I felt a sudden panic.  Was Mrs. Jerrold going to finish the story?  My mother’s eyes were wide, but nonetheless she began to giggle, just as she had at this point in the story when she had told it to me.  Everyone else fell silent.  My mother was looking at Mrs. Jerrold.  For a moment, nothing happened.  Then, quite slowly, Mrs. Jerrold turned toward the table, scanned the platter of circular sandwiches, chose one, and took a tiny bite from it.
    “‘We forgot our car!’” said my mother, nearly shouting.
    We all laughed.  In a while the laughter subsided, more quickly than it had when my mother had told the story to my father and me.
    Mrs. Jerrold said, “Well, what can you expect?  He’s an abstractionist, you know.”
    “Abstractionist?” said my mother.  “I don’t think that’s quite right.”
    “Oh?” said Mrs. Jerrold.  She nibbled at her sandwich again.  The way she pinched her lips to take the tiny bites she was taking made her considerably less attractive.
    “I thought he was a—what’s it—a symbolist,” said Mrs. Morton.
    “No, no, no,” said Mrs. Jerrold, using the same pinched mouth she’d used to take those tiny bites.  “She is the symbolist.”
    My mother said, “I think my friend Dudley Beaker says that Mr. Glynn is an exhibitionist.”
    “What is a symbolist, exactly?” asked Mrs. Vernon.
    Everyone except my mother, who seemed to be searching her memory for whatever it was Dudley Beaker had told her about Andy Glynn, turned toward Mrs. Jerrold.
    “Welllll—” said Mrs. Jerrold, with a knowing smile.
    “No, not an exhibitionist,” said my mother.  “That’s something else.  An expressionist.”
    “I know what you mean,” said Mrs. Vernon, reaching out toward my mother.  “I can never remember the difference between Manet and Monet.”
    “Or maybe it’s im-pressionist,” said my mother.
    “And I can never remember the difference between constructivism and suprematism,” said Mrs. Freed, shaking her head and smacking herself between the eyes.
    Everyone turned toward Mrs. Jerrold again.
    “Welllll—” she said again, and she turned toward the platter again, apparently because she would need another little circular sandwich before she could explain all the ists and isms that had been thrown her way.
    I don’t recall just how Mrs. Jerrold defined abstract expressionist or symbolist that afternoon, but I do recall the impressions that she left with me.  I got the vague idea that abstract expressionist meant something like “comedian” or “clown,” and that maybe being an abstract expressionist or expressing things abstractly had something to do with vaudeville, which was another thing that adults referred to with the same mixture of amusement and embarrassment that Mrs. Jerrold used for abstract expressionism.  I knew that vaudeville involved performing, too, and Mrs. Jerrold made the point—quite vividly and memorably, waving her arms around quite a lot—that abstract expressionism was a pretty active way of painting, involving a lot of throwing, flinging, and flicking blobs of paint around.  She was so good at miming these techniques that we actually cringed when she flung paint in our direction, and my mother’s face took on the same worried look that came over it at the dinner table whenever I tried to talk and twirl spaghetti at the same time.  I got the impression that a symbolist might be someone suffering from a disease, like a diabetic or a hemophiliac, because whenever Mrs. Jerrold said “symbolist,” she followed it with a turning-down of the corners of her mouth, and the rest of the group acknowledged this expression with a sympathetic knitting of the brows, and some clucking.
    I was left with one other impression from that afternoon: that the Glynns were wonderful, that they were what I wanted to be when I grew up.  The idea that they could give themselves up so completely to whatever was on their minds raised the possibility of my becoming everything I seemed to be when I was dreaming.

High Fun

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.

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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.