to speak.
“Well, boy,” said Gramps at last, “looks like you’ve got a little tidying up to do.”
And that was all he said. He turned around, elbowed his way through the crowd and locked himself in his bedroom.
The Fords contemplated Lou in incredulous silence a moment longer, and then hurried back to the living room, as though some of his horrible guilt would taint them, too, if they looked too long. Morty stayed behind long enough to give Lou a quizzical, annoyed glance. Then he also went into the living room, leaving only Emerald standing in the doorway.
Tears streamed over her cheeks. “Oh, you poor lamb—please don’t look so awful! It was my fault. I put you up to this with my nagging about Gramps.”
“No,” said Lou, finding his voice, “really you didn’t. Honest, Em, I was just—”
“You don’t have to explain anything to me, hon. I’m on your side, no matter what.” She kissed him on one cheek and whispered in his ear, “It wouldn’t have been murder, hon. It wouldn’t have killed him. It wasn’t such a terrible thing to do. It just would have fixed him up so he’d be able to go any time God decided He wanted him.”
“What’s going to happen next, Em?” said Lou hollowly. “What’s he going to do?”
Lou and Emerald stayed fearfully awake almost all night, waiting to see what Gramps was going to do. But not a sound came from the sacred bedroom. Two hours before dawn, they finally dropped off to sleep.
At six o’clock, they arose again, for it was time for their generation to eat breakfast in the kitchenette. No one spoke to them. They had twenty minutes in which to eat, but their reflexes were so dulled by the bad night that they had hardly swallowed two mouthfuls of egg-type processed seaweed before it was time to surrender their places to their son’s generation.
Then, as was the custom for whoever had been most recently disinherited, they began preparing Gramps’ breakfast, which would presently be served to him in bed, on a tray. They tried to be cheerful about it. The toughest part of the job was having to handle the honest-to-God eggs and bacon and oleomargarine, on which Gramps spent so much of the income from his fortune.
“Well,” said Emerald, “I’m not going to get all panicky until I’m sure there’s something to be panicky about.”
“Maybe he doesn’t know what it was I busted,” Lou said hopefully.
“Probably thinks it was your watch crystal,” offered Eddie, their son, who was toying apathetically with his buckwheat-type processed sawdust cakes.
“Don’t get sarcastic with your father,” said Em, “and don’t talk with your mouth full, either.”
“I’d like to see anybody take a mouthful of this stuff and not say something,” complained Eddie, who was 73. He glanced at the clock. “It’s time to take Gramps his breakfast, you know.”
“Yeah, it is, isn’t it?” said Lou weakly. He shrugged. “Let’s have the tray, Em.”
“We’ll both go.”
Walking slowly, smiling bravely, they found a large semi-circle of long-faced Fords standing around the bedroom door.
Em knocked. “Gramps,” she called brightly, “break-fast is rea-dy.”
There was no reply and she knocked again, harder.
The door swung open before her fist. In the middle of the room, the soft, deep, wide, canopied bed, the symbol of the sweet by-and-by to every Ford, was empty.
A sense of death, as unfamiliar to the Fords as Zoroastrianism or the causes of the Sepoy Mutiny, stilled every voice, slowed every heart. Awed, the heirs began to search gingerly, under the furniture and behind the drapes, for all that was mortal of Gramps, father of the clan.
* * * *
But Gramps had left not his Earthly husk but a note, which Lou finally found on the dresser, under a paperweight which was a treasured souvenir from the World’s Fair of 2000. Unsteadily, Lou read it aloud:
“’Somebody who I have sheltered and protected and taught the best I know how all these years last night turned on me like a mad dog and diluted my anti-gerasone, or tried to. I am no longer a young man. I can no longer bear the crushing burden of life as I once could. So, after last night’s bitter experience, I say good-by. The cares of this world will soon drop away like a cloak of thorns and I shall know peace. By the time you find this, I will be gone.’”
“Gosh,” said Willy brokenly, “he didn’t even get to see how the 5000-mile Speedway Race was going to come out.”
“Or the Solar Series,” Eddie said, with large mournful eyes.
“Or whether Mrs. McGarvey got her eyesight back,” added Morty.
“There’s more,” said Lou, and he began reading aloud again: “’I, Harold D. Ford, etc., do hereby make, publish and declare this to be my last Will and Testament, revoking any and all former wills and codicils by me at any time heretofore made.’”
“No!” cried Willy. “Not another one!”
“’I do stipulate,’” read Lou, “’that all of my property, of whatsoever kind and nature, not be divided, but do devise and bequeath it to be held in common by my issue, without regard for generation, equally, share and share alike.’”
“Issue?” said Emerald.
Lou included the multitude in a sweep of his hand. “It means we all own the whole damn shootin’ match.”
Each eye turned instantly to the bed.
“Share and share alike?” asked Morty.
“Actually,” said Willy, who was the oldest one present, “it’s just like the old system, where the oldest people head up things with their headquarters in here and—”
“I like that!” exclaimed Em. “Lou owns as much of it as you do, and I say it ought to be for the oldest one who’s still working. You can snooze around here all day, waiting for your pension check, while poor Lou stumbles in here after work, all tuckered out, and—”
“How about letting somebody who’s never had any privacy get a little crack at it?” Eddie demanded hotly. “Hell, you old people had plenty of privacy back when you were kids. I was born and raised in the middle of that goddamn barracks in the hall! How about—”
“Yeah?” challenged Morty. “Sure, you’ve all had it pretty tough, and my heart bleeds for you. But try honeymooning in the hall for a real kick.”
“Silence!” shouted Willy imperiously. “The next person who opens his mouth spends the next sixth months by the bathroom. Now clear out of my room. I want to think.”
A vase shattered against the wall, inches above his head.
* * * *
In the next moment, a free-for-all was under way, with each couple battling to eject every other couple from the room. Fighting coalitions formed and dissolved
