Alexander Woollcott settled back on the old wood-slatted folding chair, wrapped his arms around his tremendous stomach, and groaned so loudly that folks sitting at the end of our long table suddenly jumped, swiveled to stare at him. Oblivious, Aleck ran a plump finger across his gravy-smeared lips, licked the moist fingertip, and grinned at me, his small, round eyes magnified and alive with pleasure behind his Coke-bottle eyeglasses. He struck me as a night owl suddenly blinded by the headlights of a passing car.

"Edna, dear, I've come to an important decision about my life."

This ungainly man twisted on the rickety chair — it creaked and moaned as though trying to escape the heavy load it bore — and waited for me to say something. When I didn't, he flicked a finger against my forearm, impatient.

In turn, I twisted away from him. "Aleck, your decisions usually result in our feuding for months on end."

He smirked as he suppressed a minor belch. "Ah, dear Edna, you really do believe I loom gigantically in the affairs of your humdrum but lavish life."

"A sentence I am tempted to parse, but dare not."

He spoke over my words, one fleshy hip sliding into the woman on his left. I watched her growl and leave the table. He blinked his eyes wildly. "There is so little that you understand about the workings of a complex man."

"When I finally meet one, I'll wire you my thoughts."

He chuckled and pointed at his half-finished plate of food. "Listen, my dear. I may have to convert to — tell me, what is the religion of these wonderful folks here?"

"Methodist, according to the sign on the church above us."

"Well, well. Followers of that delirious John Wesley. Doubtless a well-fed man. But Methodists are puritans at heart, no? They believe in fasting. Or do they?" A deliberate pause as he glanced around the shadowy basement with the long institutional tables covered in much-washed but severely ironed white tablecloths, its faded gingham lace curtains shrouding the tiny windows up by the ceiling blocked the weak noontime winter sunlight streaming in. A drab room, the hint of moldy basement about the place. Freshly painted white wainscoting along the walls, checkerboard tiles dotting the floor. "And I may have to move here." He stressed the word, shuddered as though he were Napoleon facing imminent exile.

"To Flemington?"

"A hick town, sure. Quaint, to use the redundant word popping up in all the news accounts. But" — he surveyed the food before him — "such exile is worth it, to dine daily in this pedestrian church basement. Succulent pot roast and rosemary- slathered potatoes, and feathery onions so transparent that ..." He sighed, closed his eyes, a thin smile gracing his lips.

"But Aleck, you were born in New Jersey, no? Red Bank?

Some notorious commune of free-spirit folks."

He grumbled, his voice even whinier than usual. "A house of eighty-five rooms and dozens of folks in everyone else's business. The Phalanx. A father with incurable wanderlust and a love of poverty. My youthful eyes looked to Hamilton College, then to Manhattan, that blessed city. Like any celebrated raconteur, I refuse to cross the Hudson into Jersey swamp land."

"Yet here you are, settling in, salivating over a luncheon produced by church ladies in hairnets and sensible shoes."

Aleck glanced up from his dish, his fork still suspended in air. He rolled gloriously in his seat, his triple chins shimmying. His v