Different Seasons (68 page)

But it’s funny how I saw Ace Merrill again. My friends are dead but Ace is alive. I saw him pulling out of the mill parking lot just after the three o’clock whistle the last time I took my kids down home to see my dad.

The ‘52 Ford had become a ’77 Ford station wagon. A faded bumper-sticker said REAGAN/BUSH 1980. His hair was mowed into a crewcut and he’d gotten fat. The sharp, handsome features I remembered were buried in an avalanche of flesh. I had left the kids with Dad long enough to go downtown and get the paper. I was standing on the corner of Main and Carbine and he glanced at me as I waited to cross. There was no sign of recognition on the face of this thirty-two-year-old man who had broken my nose in another dimension of time.

I watched him wheel the Ford wagon into the dirt parking lot beside The Mellow Tiger, get out, hitch at his pants, and walk inside. I could imagine the brief wedge of country-western as he opened the door, the brief sour whiff of Knick and Gansett on draft, the welcoming shouts of the other regulars as he closed the door and placed his large ass on the same stool which had probably held him up for at least three hours every day of his life—except Sundays—since he was twenty-one.

I thought:
So that’s what Ace is now.

I looked to the left, and beyond the mill I could see the Castle River not so wide now but a little cleaner, still flowing under the bridge between Castle Rock and Harlow. The trestle upstream is gone, but the river is still around. So am I.

I dressed a bit more speedily than normal on that snowy, windy, bitter night—I admit. It was December 23rd, 197-, and I suspect that there were other members of the club who did the same. Taxis are notoriously hard to come by in New York on stormy nights, so I called for a radio-cab. I did this at five-thirty for an eight o’clock pickup—my wife raised an eyebrow but said nothing. I was under the canopy of the apartment building on East Fifty-eighth Street, where Ellen and I had lived since 1946, by quarter to eight, and when the taxi was five minutes late, I found myself pacing up and down impatiently.

The taxi arrived at eight-ten and I got in, too glad to be out of the wind to be as angry with the driver as he probably deserved. That wind, part of a cold front that had swept down from Canada the day before, meant business. It whistled and whined around the cab’s windows, occasionally drowning out the salsa on the driver’s radio and rocking the big Checker on its springs. Many of the stores were open but the sidewalks were nearly bare of last-minute shoppers. Those that were abroad looked uncomfortable or actually pained.

It had been flurrying off and on all day, and now the snow began again, coming first in thin membranes, then twisting into cyclone shapes ahead of us in the street. Coming home that night, I would think of the combination of snow, a taxi, and New York City with considerably greater unease... but I did not of course know that then.

At the comer of Second and Fortieth, a large tinsel Christmas bell went floating through the intersection like a spirit.

“Bad night,” the cabbie said. “They’ll have an extra two dozen in the morgue tomorrow. Wino Popsicles. Plus a few bag-lady Popsicles.”

“I suppose.”

The cabbie ruminated. “Well, good riddance,” he said finally. “Less welfare, right?”

“Your Christmas spirit,” I said, “is stunning in its width and depth.”

The cabbie ruminated. “You one of those bleeding-heart liberals?” he asked finally.

“I refuse to answer on the grounds that my answer might tend to incriminate me,” I said. The cabbie gave a why-do-I-always-get-the-wisenheimers snort... but he shut up.

He let me out at Second and Thirty-fifth, and I walked halfway down the block to the club, bent over against the whistling wind, holding my hat on my head with one gloved hand. In almost no time at all the life-force seemed to have been driven deep into my body, a flickering blue flame about the size of the pilot-light in a gas oven. At seventy-three a man feels the cold quicker and deeper. That man should be home in front of a fireplace... or at least in front of an electric heater. At seventy-three hot blood isn’t even really a memory; it’s more of an academic report.

The latest flurry was letting up, but snow as dry as sand still beat into my face. I was glad to see that the steps leading up to the door of 249B had been sanded—that was Stevens’s work, of course—Stevens knew the base alchemy of old age well enough: not lead into gold but bones into glass. When I think about such things, I believe that God probably thinks a great deal like Groucho Marx.

Then Stevens was there, holding the door open, and a moment later I was inside. Down the mahogany-paneled hallway, through double doors standing three-quarters of the way open on their recessed tracks, into the library
cum
reading-room
cum
bar. It was a dark room in which occasional pools of light gleamed-reading-lamps. A richer, more textured light glowed across the oak parquet floor, and I could hear the steady snap of birch logs in the huge fireplace. The heat radiated all the way across the room—surely there is no welcome for a man or a woman that can equal a fire on the hearth. A paper rustled—dry, slightly impatient. That would be Johanssen, with his
Wall Street Journal.
After ten years, it was possible to recognize his presence simply by the way he read his stocks. Amusing... and in a quiet way, amazing.

Stevens helped me off with my overcoat, murmuring that it was a dirty night; WCBS was now forecasting heavy snow before morning.

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.”

He was waiting for me at the foot of the steps that evening, and Stevens held the door for us. The wine was as excellent as Waterhouse had promised. He made no attempt whatsoever to “introduce me around”—I took that for snobbery but later recanted the idea—but two or three of them introduced themselves to me. One of those who did so was Emlyn McCarron, even then in his late sixties. He held out his hand and I clasped it briefly. His skin was dry, leathery, tough; almost turtlelike. He asked me if I played bridge. I said I did not.

“Goddamned good thing,” he said. “That goddamned game has done more in this century to kill intelligent after-dinner conversation than anything else I can think of.” And with that pronouncement he walked away into the murk of the library, where shelves of books went up apparently to infinity.

I looked around for Waterhouse, but he had disappeared. Feeling a little uncomfortable and a lot out of place, I wandered over to the fireplace. It was, as I believe I have already mentioned, a huge thing—it seemed particularly huge in New York, where apartment-dwellers such as myself have trouble imagining such a benevolence big enough to do anything more than pop corn or toast bread. The fireplace at 249B East Thirty-fifth was big enough to broil an ox whole. There was no mantel; instead a brawny stone arch curved over it. This arch was broken in the center by a keystone which jutted out slightly. It was just on the level of my eyes, and although the light was dim, I could read the legend engraved on that stone with no trouble: IT IS THE TALE, NOT HE WHO TELLS IT.

“Here you go, David,” Waterhouse said from my elbow, and I jumped. He hadn’t deserted me after all; had only trudged off into some uncharted locale to bring back drinks. “Scotch and soda’s yours, isn’t it?”

“Yes. Thank you. Mr. Waterhouse—”

“George,” he said. “Here it’s just George.”

“George, then,” I said, although it seemed slightly mad to be using his first name. “What is all of—”

“Cheers,” he said.

We drank.

“Stevens tends the bar. He makes fine drinks. He likes to say it’s a small but vital skill.”

The scotch took the edge off my feelings of disorientation and awkwardness (the edge, but the feelings themselves remained—I had spent nearly half an hour gazing into my closet and wondering what to wear; I had finally settled on dark brown slacks and a rough tweed jacket that almost matched them, hoping I would not be wandering into a group of men either turned out in tuxedos or wearing bluejeans and L. L. Bean’s lumberjack shirts... it seemed that I hadn’t gone too far wrong on the matter of dress, anyway). A new place and a new situation make one crucially aware of every social act, no matter how small, and at that moment, drink in hand and the obligatory small toast made, I wanted very much to be sure that I hadn’t overlooked any of the amenities.