I walked slowly to the door of my building and went inside.
Ellen was sixty per cent asleep when I sat down on the bed to take off my shoes. She rolled over and made a fuzzy interrogative sound deep in her throat. I told her to go back to sleep.
She made the muzzy sound again. This time it approximated English: "Howwuzzit?"
For a moment I hesitated, my shirt half-unbuttoned. And I thought with one moment's utter clarity: If I tell her, I will never see the other side of that door again.
"It was all right," I said. "Old men telling war stories."
"I told you so."
"But it wasn't bad. I might go back again. It might do me some good with the firm."
" 'The firm,' she mocked lightly. "What an old buzzard you are, my love."
"It takes one to know one," I said, but she had already fallen asleep again. I undressed, showered, towelled, put on my pajamas ... and then, instead of going to bed as I should have done (it was edging past one by that time), I put on my robe and had another bottle of Beck's. I sat at the kitchen table, drinking it slowly, looking out the window and up the cold canyon of Madison Avenue, thinking. My head was a trifle buzzy from my evening's intake of alcohol--for me an unexpectedly large intake. But the feeling was not at all unpleasant, and I had no sense of an impending hangover.
The thought which had come to me when Ellen asked me about my evening was as ridiculous as the one I'd entertained about George Waterhouse as the cab drew away from me--what in God's name could be wrong with telling my wife about a perfectly harmless evening at my boss's stuffy men's club... and even if something were wrong with telling her, who would know that I had? No, it was every bit as ridiculous and paranoid as those earlier musings ... and, my heart told me, every bit as true.
I met George Waterhouse the next day in the hallway between Accounts and the Reading Library. Met him? Passed him would be more accurate. He nodded my way and went on without speaking ... as he had done for years.
My stomach muscles ached all day long. That was the only thing that completely convinced me the evening had been real.
Three weeks passed. Four . . . five. No second invitation came from Waterhouse. Somehow I just hadn't been right; hadn't fit. Or so I told myself. It was a depressing, disappointing thought. I supposed it would begin to fade and lose its sting, as all disappointments eventually do. But I thought of that evening at the oddest moments--the isolated pools of library lamplight, so still and tranquil and somehow civilized; Waterhouse's absurd and hilarious tale of the schoolteacher stuck in the privy; the rich smell of leather in the narrow stacks. Most of all I thought of standing by that narrow window and watching the frost crystals change from green to amber to red. I thought of that sense of peace I had felt.
During that same five-week period I went to the library and checked out four volumes of Algernon Williams's poetry (I had three others myself, and had already checked through them); one of these volumes purported to be The Complete Poems of. I reacquainted myself with some old favorites, but I found no poem called "The Toll" in any of the volumes.
On that same trip to the New York Public Library, I checked the card catalogue for works of fiction by a man named Edward Gray Seville. A mystery novel by a woman named Ruth Seville was the closest I came.
Come again, if you like. Don't wait for an invitation ...
I was waiting for an invitation anyway, of course; my mother taught me donkey's years ago not to automatically believe people who tell you glibly to "drop by anytime" or that "the door is always open." I didn't feel I needed an engraved card delivered to my apartment door by a footman in livery bearing a gilt plate, I don't mean that, but I did want something, even if it was only a casual remark: "Coming by some night, David? Hope we didn't bore you." That kind of thing.
But when even that didn't come, I began to think more seriously about going back anyway--after all, sometimes people really did want you to drop in anytime; I supposed that, at some places, the door always was open; and that mothers weren't always right.
... Don't wait for an invitation ...
Anyway, that's how it happened that, on December 10th of that year, I found myself putting on my rough tweed coat and dark brown pants again and looking for my darkish red tie. I was rather more aware of my heartbeat than usual that night, I remember.
"George Waterhouse finally broke down and asked you back?" Ellen asked. "Back into the sty with the rest of the male chauvinist oinkers?"
"That's right," I said, thinking it must be the first time in at least a dozen years that I had told her a lie... and then I remembered that, after the first meeting, I had answered her question about what it had been like with a lie. Old men telling war stories, I had said.
"Well, maybe there really will be a promotion in it," she said... though without much hope. To her credit, she said it without much bitterness, either.
"Stranger things have happened," I said, and kissed her goodbye.
"Oink-oink," she said as I went out the door.
The taxi ride that night seemed very long. It was cold, still, and starry. The cab was a Checker and I felt somehow very small in it, like a child seeing the city for the first time. It was excitement I was feeling as the cab pulled up in front of the brownstone--something as simple and yet complete as that. But such simple excitement seems to be one of life's qualities that slip away almost unnoticed, and its rediscovery as one grows older is always something of a surprise, like finding a black hair or two in one's comb years after one had last found such a thing.
I paid the driver, got out, and walked toward the four steps leading to the door. As I mounted them, my excitement curdled into plain apprehension (a feeling the old are much more familiar with). What exactly was I doing here?
The door was of thick paneled oak, and to my eye it looked as stout as the door of a castle keep. There was no doorbell that I could see, no knocker, no closed-circuit TV camera mounted unobtrusively in the shadow of a deep eave, and, of course, no Waterhouse waiting to take me in. I stopped at the foot of the steps and looked around. East Thirty-fifth Street suddenly seemed darker, colder, more threatening. The brownstones all looked somehow secret, as if hiding mysteries best not investigated. Their windows looked like eyes.
Somewhere, behind one of those windows, there may be a man or woman contemplating murder, I thought. A shudder worked up my spine. Contemplating it ... or doing it.
Then, suddenly, the door was open and Stevens was there. I felt an intense surge of relief. I am not an overly imaginative man, I think--at least not under ordinary circumstances--but this last thought had had all the eerie clarity of prophecy. I might have babbled aloud if I hadn't glanced at Stevens's eyes first. His eyes did not know me. His eyes did not know me at all.
Then there was another instance of that eerie, prophetic clarity; I saw the rest of my evening in perfect detail. Three hours in a quiet bar. Three scotches (perhaps four) to dull the embarrassment of having been fool enough to go where I wasn't wanted. The humiliation my mother's advice had been intended to avoid--that which comes with knowing one has overstepped.
I saw myself going home a little tipsy, but not in a good way. I saw myself merely sitting through the cab ride rather than experiencing it through that childlike lens of excitement and anticipation. I heard myself saying to Ellen, It wears thin after awhile... Waterhouse told the same story about winning a consignment of T-bone steaks for the Third Battalion in a poker game ... and they play Hearts for a dollar a point, can you believe it? ... Go back? ... I suppose I might, but I doubt it. And that would be the end of it. Except, I suppose, for my own humiliation.
I saw all of this in the nothing of Stevens's eyes. Then the eyes warmed. He smiled slightly and said: "Mr. Adley! Come in. I'll take your coat."
I mounted the steps and Stevens closed the door firmly behind me. How different a door can feel when you are on the warm side of it! He took my coat and was gone with it. I stood in the hall for a moment, looking at my own re
flection in the pier glass, a man of sixty-three whose face was rapidly becoming too gaunt to look middle-aged. And yet the reflection pleased me.
I slipped into the library.
Johanssen was there, reading his Wall Street Journal. In another island of light, Emlyn McCarron sat over a chessboard opposite Peter Andrews. McCarron was and is a cadaverous man, possessed of a narrow, bladelike nose; Andrews was huge, slope-shouldered, and choleric. A vast ginger-colored beard sprayed over his vest. Face to face over the inlaid board with its carved pieces of ivory and ebony, they looked like Indian totems: eagle and bear.
Waterhouse was there, frowning over that day's Times. He glanced up, nodded at me without surprise, and disappeared into the paper again.
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."
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.