Different Seasons(173)
I went to the bed and sat beside her and picked up The Long Goodbye. It was a bright, new-minted paperback. I could remember buying the original hardback edition as a birthday present for Ellen. In 1953. “Are we old?” I asked her.
“I suspect we are,” she said, and smiled brilliantly at me.
I put the book down and touched her breast. “Too old for this?”
She turned the covers back with ladylike decorum... and then, giggling, kicked them onto the floor with her feet. “Beat me, daddy,” Ellen said, “eight to the bar.”
“Oink, oink,” I said, and then we were both laughing.
The Thursday before Christmas came. That evening was much the same as the others, with two notable exceptions. There were more people there, perhaps as many as eighteen. And there was a sharp, indefinable sense of excitement in the air. Johanssen took only a cursory glance at his Journal and then joined McCarron, Hugh Beagleman, and myself. We sat near the windows, talking of this and that, and finally fell into a passionate—and often hilarious—discussion of pre-war automobiles.
There was, now that I think of it, a third difference as well—Stevens had concocted a delicious eggnog punch. It was smooth, but it was also hot with rum and spices. It was served from an incredible Waterford bowl that looked like an ice-sculpture, and the animated hum of the conversation grew ever higher as the level of the punch grew lower.
I looked over in the comer by the tiny door leading to the billiard room and was astounded to see Waterhouse and Norman Stett flipping baseball cards into what looked like a genuine beaver tophat. They were laughing uproariously.
Groups formed and re-formed. The hour grew late... and then, at the time when people usually began slipping out through the front door, I saw Peter Andrews seated in front of the fire with an unmarked packet, about the size of a seed envelope, in one hand. He tossed it into the flames without opening it, and a moment later the fire began to dance with every color of the spectrum—and some, I would have sworn, from outside it—before turning yellow again. Chairs were dragged around. Over Andrews’s shoulder I could see the keystone with its etched homily: IT IS THE TALE, NOT HE WHO TELLS IT.
Stevens passed unobtrusively among us, taking punch glasses and replacing them with snifters of brandy. There were murmurs of “Merry Christmas” and “Top of the season, Stevens,” and for the first time I saw money change hands—a ten-dollar bill was unobtrusively tendered here, a bill that looked like a fifty there, one which I clearly saw was a hundred from another chair.
“Thank you, Mr. McCarron... Mr. Johanssen ... Mr. Beagleman ...” A quiet, well-bred murmur.
I have lived in New York long enough to know that the Christmas season is a carnival of tips; something for the butcher, the baker, the candlestick-maker—not to mention the doorman, the super, and the cleaning lady who comes in Tuesdays and Fridays. I’ve never met anyone of my own class who regarded this as anything but a necessary nuisance ... but I felt none of that grudging spirit on that night. The money was given willingly, even eagerly... and suddenly, for no reason (it was the way thoughts often seemed to come when one was at 249B), I thought of the boy calling up to Scrooge on the still, cold air of a London Christmas morning:
“Wot? The goose that’s as big as me?” And Scrooge, nearly crazed with joy, giggling: “A good boy! An excellent boy!”
I found my own wallet. In the back of this, behind the pictures of Ellen I keep, there has always been a fifty-dollar bill which I keep for emergencies. When Stevens gave me my brandy, I slipped it into his hand with never a qualm... although I was not a rich man.
“Happy Christmas, Stevens,” I said.
“Thank you, sir. And the same to you.”
He finished passing out the brandies and collecting his honorariums and retired. I glanced around once, at the midpoint of Peter Andrews’s story, and saw him standing by the double doors, a dim manlike shadow, stiff and silent.
“I’m a lawyer now, as most of you know,” Andrews said after sipping at his glass, clearing his throat, and then sipping again. “I’ve had offices on Park Avenue for the last twenty-two years. But before that, I was a legal assistant in a firm of lawyers which did business in Washington, D.C. One night in July I was required to stay late in order to finish indexing case citations in a brief which hasn’t anything at all to do with this story. But then a man came in—a man who was at that time one of the most widely known Senators on the Hill, a man who later almost became President. His shirt was matted with blood and his eyes were bulging from their sockets.
“ ‘I’ve got to talk to Joe,’ he said. Joe, you understand, was Joseph Woods, the head of my firm, one of the most influential private-sector lawyers in Washington, and this Senator’s close personal friend.
“ ‘He went home hours ago,’ I said. I was terribly frightened, I can tell you—he looked like a man who had just walked away from a dreadful car accident, or perhaps from a knife-fight. And somehow seeing his face—which I had seen in newspaper photos and on Meet the Press—seeing it streaked with gore, one cheek twitching spasmodically below one wild eye... all of that made my fright worse. ‘I can call him if you—’ I was already fumbling with the phone, mad with eagerness to turn this unexpected responsibility over to someone else. Looking behind him, I could see the caked and bloody footprints he had left on the carpet.