Different Seasons(167)

I agreed that it was indeed a dirty night and looked back into that big, high-ceilinged room again. A dirty night, a roaring fire... and a ghost story. Did I say that at seventy-three hot blood is a thing of the past? Perhaps so. But I felt something warm in my chest at the thought... something that hadn’t been caused by the fire or Stevens’s reliable, dignified welcome.

I think it was because it was McCarron’s turn to tell the tale.

I had been coming to the brownstone which stands at 249B East Thirty-fifth Street for ten years—coming at intervals that were almost—but not quite—regular. In my own mind I think of it as a “gentlemen’s club,” that amusing pre-Gloria Steinem antiquity. But even now I am not sure that’s what it really is, or how it came to be in the first place.

On the night Emlyn McCarron told his story—the story of the Breathing Method—there were perhaps thirteen club-members in all, although only six of us had come out on that howling, bitter night. I can remember years when there might have been as few as eight full-time members, and others when there were at least twenty, and perhaps more.

I suppose Stevens might know how it all came to be—one thing I am sure of is that Stevens has been there from the first, no matter how long that may be ... and I believe Stevens to be older than he looks. Much, much older. He has a faint Brooklyn accent, but in spite of that he is as brutally correct and as cuttingly punctilious as a third-generation English butler. His reserve is part of his often maddening charm, and Stevens’s small smile is a locked and latched door. I have never seen any club records—if he keeps them. I have never gotten a receipt of dues—there are no dues. I have never been called by the club secretary—there is no secretary, and at 249B East Thirty-fifth, there are no phones. There is no box of white marbles and black balls. And the club—if it is a club—has never had a name.

I first came to the club (as I must continue to call it) as the guest of George Waterhouse. Waterhouse headed the law firm for which I had worked since 1951. My progress upward in the firm—one of New York’s three biggest—had been steady but extremely slow; I was a slogger, a mule for work, something of a centerpuncher ... but I had no real flair or genius. I had seen men who had begun at the same time I had promoted in giant steps while I only continued to pace—and I saw it with no real surprise.

Waterhouse and I had exchanged pleasantries, attended the obligatory dinner put on by the firm each October, and had little more congress until the fall of 196-, when he dropped by my office one day in early November.

This in itself was unusual enough, and it had me thinking black thoughts (dismissal) that were counterbalanced by giddy ones (an unexpected promotion). It was a puzzling visit. Waterhouse leaned in the doorway, his Phi Beta Kappa key gleaming mellowly on his vest, and talked in amiable generalities—none of what he said seemed to have any real substance or importance. I kept expecting him to finish the pleasantries and get down to cases: “Now about this Casey brief or ”We’ve been asked to research the Mayor’s appointment of Salkowitz to—” But it seemed there were no cases. He glanced at his watch, said he had enjoyed our talk and that he had to be going.

I was still blinking, bewildered, when he turned back and said casually: “There’s a place where I go most Thursday nights—a sort of club. Old duffers, mostly, but some of them are good company. They keep a really excellent cellar, if you’ve a palate. Every now and then someone tells a good story as well. Why not come down some night, David? As my guest.”

I stammered some reply—even now I’m not sure what it was. I was bewildered by the offer. It had a spur-of-the-moment sound, but there was nothing spur-of-the-moment about his eyes, blue Anglo-Saxon ice under the bushy white whorls of his eyebrows. And if I don’t remember exactly how I replied, it was because I felt suddenly sure that his offer—vague and puzzling as it was—had been exactly the specific I had kept expecting him to get down to.

Ellen’s reaction that evening was one of amused exasperation. I had been with Waterhouse, Carden, Lawton, Frasier, and Effingham for something like fifteen years, and it was clear enough that I could not expect to rise much above the mid-level position I now held; it was her idea that this was the firm’s cost-efficient substitute for a gold watch.

“Old men telling war stories and playing poker,” she said. “A night of that and you’re supposed to be happy in the Reading Library until they pension you off, I suppose... oh, I put two Beck’s on ice for you.” And she kissed me warmly. I suppose she had seen something on my face—God knows she’s good at reading me after all the years we’ve spent together.

Nothing happened over a course of weeks. When my mind turned to Waterhouse’s odd offer—certainly odd coming from a man with whom I met less than a dozen times a year, and whom I only saw socially at perhaps three parties a year, including the company party in October—I supposed that I had been mistaken about the expression in his eyes, that he really had made the offer casually, and had forgotten it. Or regretted it—ouch! And then he approached me one late afternoon, a man of nearly seventy who was still broad-shouldered and athletic looking. I was shrugging on my topcoat with my briefcase between my feet. He said: “If you’d still like to have a drink at the club, why not come tonight?”

“Well... I ...”

“Good.” He slapped a slip of paper into my hand. “Here’s the address.”