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 249 East 35th, 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 Theatre 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. Johansson 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 corner 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 colour 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 Johansson … 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 candlesdck-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 249), 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 goodboy! 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, still 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, DC. 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
‘ “I’ve got to talk to Joe right now,” he reiterated as if he hadn’t heard me.’ “There’s something in the trunk of my car … something I found out at the Virginia place. I’ve shot
it and stabbed it and I can’t kill it It’s not human, and I can’t kill it”
‘He began to giggle … and then to laugh … and finally to scream. And he was still
screaming when I finally got Mr Woods on the phone and told him to come, for God’s
sake, to come as fast as he could …’
It is not my purpose to tell Peter Andrews’s story, either. As a matter of fact, I am not
sure I would dare to tell it Suffice it to say that it was a tale so gruesome that I dreamed of
it for weeks afterwards, and Ellen once looked at me over the breakfast table and asked
me why I had suddenly cried out ‘His head! His head is still speaking in the earth!’ in the
middle of the night
‘I suppose it was a dream,’ I said. ‘One of those you can’t remember afterwards.’
But my eyes dropped immediately to my coffee cup, and I think that Ellen knew the lie
that time.
One day in August of the following year, I was buzzed as I worked in the Readers’
Library. It was George Waterhouse. He asked me if I could step up to his office. When I
got there I saw that Robert Garden was also there, and Henry Effingham. For one moment
I was positive I was about to be accused of some really dreadful act of stupidity or
malfeasance.
Then Garden stepped around to me and said: ‘George believes the time has come to
make you a junior partner, David. The rest of us agree.’
‘It’s going to be a little bit like being the world’s oldest JayCee,’ Effingham said with a grin, ‘but it’s the channel you have to go through, David. With any luck, we can make you
a full partner by Christmas.’
There were no bad dreams that night. Ellen and I went out to dinner, drank too much,
went on to a jazz place where we hadn’t been in nearly six years, and listened to that