a party

There is a party going down below me, on the grass lawn of a large Georgian mansion. The lawn is about half the size of a football field. It is midnight now, and I am peering into the party below, feeling quite like Sabrina, perched at the level of tree-tops, waiting for Bogart (originally Holden) to waltz out, impeccably attired in a white tuxedo blazer and bowtie, bearing champagne and a bon mot. It is that kind of party, with its patrons attired in backless evening dress, with a jazz quartet playing old Sinatra songs, with laughter spiralling up into my apartment, tinged with alcohol and unaccountably gay. Don't they know there is a war going on? We are, after all, in war time. I imagine these are what parties looked like in the late 20s, when the war was going on somewhere else, when it hadn't yet arrived on these shores. And Cambridge with the bluest of pedigrees harking back to the Revolution, reeking of old-money, and Gatsby-like parties filled with drunken intellectuals, the silliest drunks of them all. The last place where the war would ever come, but come it did, as the monument of the dead in the commons next to us attests. There will be newer monuments, soon enough.