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.
"Is there a guest book I ought to sign?" I asked. "Something like that?"
He looked mildly surprised. "We don't have anything like that," he said. "At least, I don't think we do." He glanced around the dim, quiet room. Johanssen rattled his Wall Street Journal. I saw Stevens pass in a doorway at the far end of the room, ghostly in his white messjacket. George put his drink on an endtable and tossed a fresh log onto the fire. Sparks corkscrewed up the black throat of the chimney.
"What does that mean?" I asked, pointing to the inscription on the keystone. "Any idea?"
Waterhouse read it carefully, as if for the first time. IT IS THE TALE, NOT HE WHO TELLS IT.
"I suppose I have an idea," he said. "You may, too, if you should come back. Yes, I should say you may have an idea or two. In time. Enjoy yourself, David."
He walked away. And, although it may seem odd, having been left to sink or swim in such an unfamiliar situation, I did enjoy myself. For one thing, I have always loved books, and there was a trove of interesting ones to examine here. I walked slowly along the shelves, examining the spines as best I could in the faint light, pulling one out now and then, and pausing once to look out a narrow window at the Second Avenue intersection up the street. I stood there and watched through the frost-rimmed glass as the traffic light at the intersection cycled from red to green to amber and back to red again, and quite suddenly I felt the queerest--and yet very welcome--sense of peace come to me. It did not flood in; instead it seemed to almost steal in. Oh yes, I can hear you saying, that makes great sense; watching a stop-and-go light gives everyone a sense of peace.
All right; it made no sense. I grant you that. But the feeling was there, just the same. It made me think for the first time in years of the winter nights in the Wisconsin farmhouse where I grew up: lying in bed in a drafty upstairs room and marking the contrast between the whistle of the January wind outside, drifting snow as dry as sand along miles of snow-fence, and the warmth my body created under the two quilts.
There were some law books, but they were pretty damn strange: Twenty Cases of Dismemberment and Their Outcomes Under British Law is one title I remember. Pet Cases was another. I opened that one and, sure enough, it was a scholarly legal tome dealing with the law's treatment (American law, this time) of cases which bore in some important respect upon pets--everything from housecats that had inherited great sums of money to an ocelot that had broken its chain and seriously injured a postman..
There was a set of Dickens, a set of Defoe, a nearly endless set of Trollope; and there was also a set of novels--eleven of them--by a man named Edward Gray Seville. They were bound in handsome green leather, and the name of the firm gold-stamped on the spine was Stedham & Son. I had never heard of Seville or of his publishers. The copyright date of the first Seville--These Were Our Brothers-was 1911. The date of the last, Breakers, was 1935.
Two shelves down from the set of Seville novels was a large folio volume which contained careful step-by-step plans for Erector Set enthusiasts. Next to it was another folio volume which featured famous scenes from famous movies. Each of these pictures filled one whole page, and opposite each, filling the facing pages, were free-verse poems either about the scenes with which they were paired or inspired by them. Not a very remarkable concept, but the poets who were represented were remarkable--Robert Frost, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Louis Zukofsky, and Erica Jong, to mention just a few. Halfway through the book I found a poem by Algernon Williams set next to that famous photograph of Marilyn Monroe standing on the subway grating and trying to hold her skirt down. The poem was titled "The Toll" and it began: The shape of the skirt is
--we would say--
the shape of a bell
The legs are the clapper--
And some such more. Not a terrible poem, but certainly not Williams's best or anywhere near the top drawer. I felt I could hold such an opinion because I had read a good deal of Algernon Williams over the years. I could not, however, recall this poem about Marilyn Monroe (which it is; the poem announced it even when divorced from the picture--at the end Williams writes: My legs clap my name:lMarilyn, ma belle). I have looked for it since then and haven't been able to find it... which means nothing, of course. Poems are not like novels or legal opinions; they are more like blown leaves, and any omnibus volume titled The Complete So-and-So must certainly be a lie. Poems have a way of getting lost under sofas--it is one of their charms, and one of the reasons they endure. But--
At some point Stevens came by with a second scotch (by then I had settled into a chair of my own with a volume of Ezra Pound). It was as fine as the first. As I sipped it I saw two of those present, George Gregson and Harry Stein (Harry was six years dead on the night Emlyn McCarron told us the story of the Breathing Method), leave the room by a peculiar door that could not have been more than forty-two inches high. It was an Alice Down the Rabbit-Hole door if ever there was one. They left it open, and shortly after their odd exit from the library I heard the muted click of billiard balls.
Stevens passed by and asked if I would like another scotch. I declined with real regret. He nodded. "Very good, sir." His face never changed, and yet I had an obscure feeling that I had somehow pleased him.
Laughter startled me from my book sometime later. Someone had thrown a packet of chemical powder into the fire and turned the flames momentarily parti-colored. I thought of my boyhood again... but not in any wistful, sloppily romantic-nostalgic way. I feel a great need to emphasize that, God knows why. I thought of times when I had done just such a thing as a kid, but the memory was a strong one, pleasant, untinged with regret.
I saw that most of the others had drawn chairs up around the hearth in a semi-circle. Stevens had produced a heaping, smoking platter of marvellous hot sausages. Harry Stein returned through the down-the-rabbit-hole door, introducing himself hurriedly but pleasantly to me. Gregson remained in the billiard room--practicing shots, by the sound.
After a moment's hesitation I joined the others. A story was told--not a pleasant one. It was Norman Stett who told it, and while it is not my purpose to recount it here, perhaps you'll understand what I mean about its quality if I tell you that it was about a man who drowned in a telephone booth.
When Stett--who is also dead now--finished, someone said, "You should have saved it for Christmas, Norman." There was laughter, which I of course did not understand. At least, not then.
Waterhouse himself spoke up then, and such a Waterhouse I never would have dreamed of in a thousand years of dreaming. A graduate of Yale, Phi Beta Kappa, silver-haired, three-piece-suited, head of a law firm so large it was more enterprise than company--this Waterhouse told a story that had to do with a teacher who had gotten stuck in a privy. The privy stood behind the one-room schoolhouse in which she had taught, and the day she got her caboose jammed into one of the privy's two holes also happened to be the day the privy was scheduled to be taken away as Anniston County's contribution to the Life As It Was in New England exhibition being held at the Prudential Center in Boston. The teacher hadn't made a sound during all the time it took to load the privy onto the back of a flatbed truck and to spike it down; she was struck dumb with embarrassment and horror, Waterhouse said. And when the privy door blew off into the passing lane on Route 128 in Somerville during rush hour--
But draw a curtain over that, and over any other stories which might have followed it; they are not my stories tonight. At some point Stevens produced a bottle of brandy that was more than just good; it was damned near exquisite. It was passed around and Johanssen raised a toast--the toast, one might almost say: The tale, not he who tells it.
We drank to that.
Not long after, men began slipping away. It wasn't late; not yet midnight, anyway; but I've noticed that when your fifties give way to your sixties, late begins coming earlier and earlier. I saw Waterhouse slipping his arms into the overcoat Stevens was holding open for him, and decided that must be my cue. I thought it stran
ge that Waterhouse would slip away without so much as a word to me (which certainly seemed to be what he was doing; if I had come back from shelving the Pound book forty seconds later, he would have been gone), but no stranger than most of the other things that had gone on that evening.
I stepped out just behind him, and Waterhouse glanced around, as if surprised to see me--and almost as if he had been startled out of a light doze. "Share a taxi?" he asked, as though we had just met by chance on this deserted, windy street.
"Thank you," I said. I meant thanks for a great deal more than his offer to share a cab, and I believe that was unmistakable in my tone, but he nodded as if that were all I had meant. A taxi with its for-hire light lit was cruising slowly down the street--fellows like George Waterhouse seem to luck onto cabs even on those miserably cold or snowy New York nights when you would swear there isn't a cab to be had on the entire island of Manhattan--and he flagged it.
Inside, safely warm, the taxi-meter charting our journey in measured clicks, I told him how much I had enjoyed his story. I couldn't remember laughing so hard or so spontaneously since I was eighteen, I told him, which was not flattery but only the simple truth.
"Oh? How kind of you to say." His voice was chillingly polite. I subsided, feeling a dull flush in my cheeks. One does not always need to hear a slam to know that the door has been closed.
When the taxi drew up to the curb in front of my building, I thanked him again, and this time he showed a trifle more warmth. "It was good of you to come on such short notice," he said. "Come again, if you like. Don't wait for an invitation; we don't stand much on ceremony at two-four-nine-B. Thursdays are best for stories, but the club is there every night."
Am I then to assume membership?
The question was on my lips. I meant to ask it; it seemed necessary to ask it. I was only mulling it over, listening to it in my head (in my tiresome lawyer's way) to hear if I had got the phrasing right--perhaps that was a little too blunt--when Waterhouse told the cabbie to drive on. The next moment the taxi was rolling on toward Park. I stood there on the sidewalk for a moment, the hem of my topcoat whipping around my shins, thinking: He knew I was going to ask that question--he knew it, and he purposely had the driver go on before I could. Then I told myself that was utterly absurd--paranoid, even. And it was. But it was also true. I could scoff all I liked; none of the scoffing changed that essential certainty.