Copyright 1992(c) ARNOLD By Bill Slattery When Arnold moved up here he told us that before he retired he had been in the advertising business in New York. He told us in such a way that we all knew he had been an important man in New York. A big wheel. While telling us how important he had been, he also got it across that if you had not been in the advertising business in New York you were lacking something. What it was we lacked was never spelled out in so many words. But we all knew that Arnold believed himself to be better than we were. It was irritating. Actually it was infuriating. We tried to please Arnold and accept him into our community. We honestly did. He seemed like such a nice man despite his in- flated notions of his own worth. At first many of us invited Arnold to our homes to meet our neighbors and friends. He always came when we invited him because he didn't know anybody and he was lonely. When he came, he unfailingly brought along what he called house gifts. The gifts were expensive. Once he brought a hundred-dollar salad bowl to my house. I knew it cost a hundred dollars because he told me what he'd paid for it. He had the sales slip in his pocket and he showed it to me. He came by a couple of days later with a VCR. He hadn't been invited. He wasn't expected. He just showed up with the VCR. He said he'd noticed on his last visit that we didn't have a VCR so he just bought one for us. Oh my. We tried to tell him that we couldn't accept such gifts from someone we barely knew, but Arnold wouldn't hear of it. The VCR cost five hundred dollars what with the boxes of blank tapes and the movies and the head cleaner. He left the sales slip Scotch- taped to the box the VCR came in and left. He didn't give us a chance to refuse. He just walked in, said hello, plunked the thing down and left. We told him, and other people did, too, that he was embarrassing us, we could not repay him; few of us had as much money as he did and we did not know how to give gifts to strangers. He said we'd have to get used to him, that's just the way he was; he had always brought people expensive gifts. He'd always been generous like that. When his old firm sent him to Europe he used to make people angry, he told us, because he left such large tips. He made people around here angry, too, and for the same reason. He had breakfast a couple of times a week at the little dining room downtown at the ferry landing by the bay and regularly left a ten- or twenty-dollar tip for a breakfast that might cost three or four dollars. After Arnold had been here for a while, people stopped asking him over to their houses. It had all just gotten to be too much. He once brought someone a dining room table as a house gift. He brought somebody else a complete set of tires. He presented my neighbor down the street with a fur stole. (She was a married woman and it caused talk.) He bought a sailboat for somebody else. When we stopped inviting him to our houses, Arnold began taking us out for dinner. There are two or three very, very expensive restaurants over in Newport, the biggest town close to here, places where it costs more than a hundred dollars a couple for dinner. He invited my wife and me, and other people too, to those places, sometimes two and three times a month. That got embarrassing quickly and people started turning down his invitations. One night he invited a group of us he hadn't seen in a long time to his house for supper. Arnold was not the kind of man who cooked. We knew he was a widower and that he didn't have servants. Those of us who accepted his invitation talked among ourselves and decided that he was probably going to have a cookout, chicken, hot dogs, that sort of thing, something anybody could cook. We were dismayed to discover that Arnold had hired a caterer to prepare and serve our meal. There were eleven of us that night at Arnold's table. The bill, including the wines and the tip, was close to three thousand dollars. That did not include round trip air fare for the chef from Provence nor his travel expenses to and from Orly and to and from Green Airport. This dinner turned out to be the most embarrassing thing Arnold had done to date. We all came dressed informally. It turned out to be awkward because a uniformed waiter stood behind every chair. Instead of chicken and hot dogs cooked outside, we were served a meal that lasted nearly three hours that included a fish, a soup, a choice of three entreess, two salads, five kinds of dinner wines, several kinds of coffees and cheeses, a fully-laden pastry cart, three dessert wines, and two brandies. This dinner made up our minds for all of us. We decided among ourselves that we would avoid Arnold at all costs in the future. He called many times with invitations and we all refused them all. He dropped by bringing extravagant gifts. We returned them. Our houses were closed to him. We did not return his calls. When new people moved into the community, we warned them away from Arnold and his unwanted largess. Despite being ostracized, Arnold persisted in pressing his extravagant attentions upon us. He paid for refinishing the floors at the school gymnasium. He paid for landscaping the community center. He supplied funds for constructing a reading room at the library. We read in the paper one wonderful day that Arnold had moved away. We were all quite relieved even though many of us by now expected something of the kind. Poor Arnold had little choice, actually. He had to move away because we'd burned his house down. This may seem an extreme action but we don't take kindly here to strangers claiming to be better than we are when they are not. I do not believe we would welcome a stranger here who claimed to be better than we are even if he were better than we are which is unlikely. END