Different Seasons(172)

Stevens brought me a scotch, unasked.

I took it into the stacks and found that puzzling, enticing set of green volumes again. I began reading the works of Edward Gray Seville that night. I started at the beginning, with These Were Our Brothers. Since then I have read them all, and believe them to be eleven of the finest novels of our century..

Near the end of the evening there was a story—just one—and Stevens brought brandy around. When the tale was told, people began to rise, preparing to leave. Stevens spoke from the double doorway which communicated with the hallway. His voice was low and pleasant, but carrying:

“Who will bring us a tale for Christmas, then?”

People stopped what they were doing and glanced around. There was some low, good-natured talk and a burst of laughter.

Stevens, smiling but serious, clapped his hands together twice, like a grammar-school teacher calling an unruly class to order. “Come, gentlemen—who’ll bring the tale?”

Peter Andrews, he of the sloped shoulders and gingery beard, cleared his throat. “I have something I’ve been thinking about. I don’t know if it’s quite right; that is, if it’s—”

“That will be fine,” Stevens interrupted, and there was more laughter. Andrews had his back slapped good-naturedly. Cold drafts swirled up the hallway as men slipped out.

Then Stevens was there, as if by benign magic, holding my coat for me. “Good evening, Mr. Adley. Always a pleasure.”

“Do you really meet on Christmas night?” I asked, buttoning my coat. I was a little disappointed that I was going to miss Andrews’s story, but we had made firm plans to drive to Schenectady and keep the holiday with Ellen’s sister.

Stevens managed to look both shocked and amused at the same time. “In no case,” he said. “Christmas is a night a man should spend with his family. That night, if no other. Don’t you agree, sir?”

“I certainly do.”

“We always meet on the Thursday before Christmas. In fact, that is the one night of the year when we almost always have a large turnout.”

He hadn’t used the word members, I noticed—just happenstance? or neat avoidance?

“Many tales have been spun out in the main room, Mr. Adley, tales of every sort, from the comic to the tragic to the ironic to the sentimental. But on the Thursday before Christmas, it’s always a tale of the uncanny. It’s always been that way, at least as far back as I can remember.”

That at least explained the comment I had heard on my first visit, the one to the effect that Norman Stett should have saved his story for Christmas. Other questions hovered on my lips, but I saw a reflected caution in Stevens’s eyes. It was not a warning that he would not answer my questions; it was, rather, a warning that I should not even ask them.

“Was there something else, Mr. Adley?”

We were alone in the hall now. All the others had left. And suddenly the hallway seemed darker, Stevens’s long face paler, his lips redder. A knot exploded in the fireplace and a red glow washed momentarily across the polished parquet floor. I thought I heard, from somewhere in those as-yet-unexplored rooms beyond, a kind of slithery bump. I did not like the sound. Not at all.

“No,” I said in a voice that was not quite steady. “I think not.”

“Goodnight, then,” Stevens said, and I crossed the threshold. I heard the heavy door close behind me. I heard the lock turn. And then I was walking toward the lights of Third Avenue, not looking back over my shoulder, somehow afraid to look back, as if I might see some frightful fiend matching me stride for stride, or glimpse some secret better kept than known. I reached the comer, saw an empty cab, and flagged it.

“More war stories?” Ellen asked me that night. She was in bed with Philip Marlowe, the only lover she has ever taken.

“There was a war story or two,” I said, hanging up my overcoat. “Mostly I sat and read a book.”

“When you weren’t oinking.”

“Yes, that’s right. When I wasn’t oinking.”

“Listen to this: ‘The first time I laid eyes on Terry Lennox he was drunk in a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith outside the terrace of The Dancers,’” Ellen read. “ ‘He had a young-looking face but his hair was bone white. You could tell by his eyes that he was plastered to the hairline, but otherwise he looked like any other nice young guy in a dinner jacket who had been spending too much money in a joint that exists for that purpose and for no other.’ Nice, huh? It’s—”

“The Long Goodbye,” I said, taking off my shoes. “You read me that same passage once every three years. It’s part of your life-cycle.”

She wrinkled her nose at me. “Oink-oink.”

“Thank you,” I said.

She went back to her book. I went out into the kitchen to get a bottle of Beck’s. When I came back, she had laid The Long Goodbye open on the counterpane and was looking at me closely. “David, are you going to join this club?”

“I suppose I might... if I’m asked.” I felt uncomfortable. I had perhaps told her another lie. If there was such a thing as membership at 249B East Thirty-fifth, I already was a member.

“I’m glad,” she said. “You’ve needed something for a long time now. I don’t think you even know it, but you have. I’ve got the Relief Committee and the Commission on Women’s Rights and the Theater Society. But you’ve needed something. Some people to grow old with, I think.”