The Genie of Sutton Place Read Online Free Page A

Sam. Sam, come !” Then after Sam had plopped in, she looked at me with a smile that if it had been glass could easily have been broken and said in the same kind of voice, “I love having you here to live with me, Timmy—but there’s one thing we have to have clear. Sam’s not to follow me around! And he’s not to come into my bedroom. All right?”
    â€œAll right, Aunt Lucy,” I said.
    Rose said softly, “Come on, Sam—over here.” And Sam went to her hand. But he kept looking back at Aunt Lucy. Rose flicked me a glance that advised me not to start worrying—yet. Like me, she always knew right away when everything was not all right.
    *   *   *
    The trouble was, Sam just downright fell in love with Aunt Lucy. It was love at first sight and love at first whiff of her beautiful perfume. A lot of it was my fault. I left them alone together.
    You see, I had this scheme. As long as I was going to have to live in my bedroom, I wanted to make it as friendly as I could. I asked Aunt Lucy if she’d care if I made a few changes in it. She said, Why, dear, of course not!—not knowing at all what I had in mind. So little by little I began to take things out of my bedroom and down to the antique shop. It gave me an excuse to see Madame Sosostris every day, too. Even better than the books.
    By the end of a couple of weeks I’d gotten rid of the college banners, the cutesy cushions, and the worst of the pictures. They were a series of framed illustrations from a really rotten children’s book—about this courageous little boy who overcame some dopey phony handicap—and they must have cost Aunt Lucy a fortune. Of course Madame Sosostris wouldn’t sell junk like that in her shop, but she palmed them off on some of her less intelligent colleagues.
    Instead of that junk, I’d smuggled up to Sutton Place my big Bavarian pipe with the bowl in the shape of a skull, my fake mummy’s hand—you can love a fake, it just has to be real—and, best of all, my bone. One day Lorenzo and I had discovered this strange bone inside an Aztec urn. Well, it could have been anything. It could have been from a dinosaur or it could have been—I won’t even hope what. But I wanted it for my own. And since there was no retail value in it, Madame Sosostris gave it to me. My favorite was still the Good-Luck Devil from Borneo, but he looked much more at home with my other things all there, too.
    Oh, I also bought a couple of little bookcases from the shop next to ours. That day I had to take a taxi, to get them back. If I’d known what was going to happen, I’d have taken a taxi—and Sam—every day. But Lorenzo had trained me to save money—we never had much—so I’d walk over to Third Avenue and take the E train down to the Village. You can’t take dogs on the subway, unless they’re in a box or something. Or unless you’re blind. Sam was much too big for me to carry in a box.
    But that meant that all the time I was schlepping everything around, Sam was left up in Sutton Place. And he was bugging Aunt Lucy. I didn’t really know how much till the day she blew up. Then Rose told me …
    I guess that you can love somebody and still be a terrible nuisance to them …
    Rose told me that that hassle in the kitchen on my first day was just the beginning. Of course, Rose has a great sense of humor, so she could see the funniness of it in spite of Aunt Lucy’s explosion. The time she got the biggest kick, she said, was when Aunt Lucy was getting ready to go out to lunch with Mr. Watkins. She’d just gotten out of the shower, and was dressing and primping, with Rose helping her, telling her how pretty she looked.
    â€œThen all of a sudden we heard this pitiful woof from the doorway,” said Rose, through her laughing. “And there was Sam, looking even more moony than usual.” You know