"The more charitable among our friends took it upon themselves to scotch these old wives' tales. 'He's merely had a nervous breakdown,' they said loyally. 'You can tell by the way he drums his fingers when she's talking.' Our children, they added, were not real albinos, nor was it true I had been made contact man for a white slave ring in Saigon. I was much too yellow."
-- from the conclusion of Chapter 1, "Rancors Aweigh"
by Ken
Last night we heard our hero waxing rhapsodic about his beloved Orient -- based on hisround-the-world trip, chronicled in Westward, Ha! (of which we sampled the early chapters).
I wish I were back there this minute! Those gentle, courteous people, those age-old temples, those placid winding canals overhung with acacia ----" Overhung with nostalgia and a little cordial I had taken to ward off a chll, I gave way to racking sobs.And then, when he was "at my most vulnerable," his wife "struck off the veneer of civilization and struck like a puff adder," announcing, "Let's go!"
Once the paterfamilias grasped that his wife was actually proposing transplanting the household to Siam, he underwent an instant change of outlook toward the pestilential East, explaining "as patiently as I could that Siam was a vast malarial marsh, oppressively hot and crowded with underprivileged folk scratching out a submarginal existence."
But there was no helping it -- the Perelmans were Siam-bound. Tonight, concluding "Rancors Aweigh," the first chapter of The Swiss Family Perelman, we learn how the young Perelmans took the news of their impending adventure.
FOR PART 2 OF "RANCORS AWEIGH," CLICK HERE
THURBER TONIGHT (including BENCHLEY, WILL CUPPY, WOLCOTT GIBBS, RING LARDNER, BOB AND RAY, E. B. WHITE, JEAN SHEPHERD, and PERELMAN TONIGHT): Check out the series to date
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