When he went into the breakfast room to say good-bye to Barbara, she asked him if he had any money. When he looked, he found he didn’t, and she shook her head at him, took two hundred dollars in twenties from her purse, and gave it to him.
Barbara was his best friend, he thought, far more than a wife. And whenever she was kind to him, which was often, he was ashamed even more about Cynthia. If Barbara ever found out about that, she would be deeply hurt. Chesty Whittaker would rather lose an arm than hurt her. Mother Nature was a bitch, he thought. If she had caused Barbara to lose interest in the physical side of life, it seemed only fair that she dampen his urges too. And she had not. Cynthia kept him as randy as he had been as a young man.
He left the house by the kitchen door. Chesty squinted against the sunlight. It was so painfully bright as to cause pain. The last damned thing he needed was a headache–or rather another headache. For he’d had a few lately. And this sort of surprised him, because he was otherwise in perfect health.
At fifty-three Chesley Haywood Whittaker, Jr., carried only twenty pounds more than the one hundred eighty-two he had carried as a tackle at Harvard. He played golf at least once a week, squash at the New York Athletic Club every Thursday afternoon, and had giver’ up the boat only when he marked his half century of life. He was, his doctor told him, in as good shape as he’d been at twenty-one.
Edward, the chauffeur, had the Packard waiting. He got behind the wheel and pushed the starter button and ground the damned starter gears. You actually could not feel or hear that the Packard engine was running, but that did not keep him from feeling foolish. He put it in gear and moved away.
Chesty saw Barbara wave at him from the breakfast room. He waved back, and he considered again that she probably sensed he had a woman somewhere. But if she knew, she hadn’t said anything, or done anything. There had not been so much as a hint or a pointed remark.
He forced that thought from his mind again, and the Packard turned past the sign his father had erected and headed for New York on Route 35, through Perth Amboy and into Elizabeth and then around Newark Airport and over the Pulaski Skyway. He smarted, as he always did, at the thought that he did not build the skyway. His firm had bid on it (all it was, really, was a high, paved railroad bridge; bridges were bridges) and had lost out by a lousy eleven million dollars.
There was a holdup of some sort in the Holland Tunneldamned Sunday drivers out for a spin. But Edward managed to bring the car up to the box holder’s entrance to the Polo Grounds in good time. Chesty told the police to let Edward in after he’d parked the car.
The trouble with charming Irishmen was that they were seldom alone. There were seven people in the box with Bill Donovan. If he was going to have a word with Donovan, it would have to be on the train.
“A little Scotch, Chesty?” Donovan said.
“Is there any brandy?” Chesty asked. He had indigestion, or Something. He had the makings of one of those damned headachesfrom the fumes in the tunnel, probably. Brandy usually proved more 1&ctive for him than aspirin.
“We’re getting a little effete in our old age, aren’t we?” Donovan kidded. was gassed in the tunnel,” Chesty said. “I feel a headache coming.”
“I always have some for the ladies,” Donovan went on, looking in his bar box. ,oh, here it is. “For Female Vapors’right on the bottle.”
“Go to hell, Bill,” Chesty said, taking the bottle.
He drank a shotglassful neat, and then poured another to sip on.
Donovan introduced him to the men he didn’t know. A Chicago banker, some relative of Jack Kriendler and Charlie Bems, who ran the ’21″Club on Fifty-second Street, a state senator from Oswego (another Republican who, like Bill himself, had been active in Tom Dewey’s failed attempt to win the 1940 Domination), and a Boston surgeon. The last, Charley MacArthur, was a writer.