The Last Bastion

by Peter C. Wensberg

  “Exactly. Quite coals to Newcastle. The only infestation worse than journalists in this town is politicians.” He took a last lingering look at his white locks and the two men strolled to the door, parting the swinging louvered panels, heading for the bar. As they gave their pre-luncheon order to Abel, each patted his own head in an unconscious gesture.

  “Where is he, Gland?”

  “Actually, I don’t know. We were to meet for breakfast this morning, but he wasn’t here when I arrived. Abel told me he signed the book last night, so he is in residence in any case.”

  “I’m not certain I understand the point of all this.”

  “Yes, Roger, well, I’m sure you recall that at the meeting of the Strategy Committee last month it was agreed that we should strike back on all fronts.”

  “What are the fronts, again?”

  “The legal, the political,” Gland paused to take a sip of his drink, “and the pee-ah,” he said.

  “Quite.”

  “DePalma is handling the legal. Another of our many distinguished lawyers, Tom Appleyard, is handling the political. He has excellent connections on the Hill.”

  “Beacon?”

  “No, Capitol. But I think he can deal with the local pols without much difficulty. And I volunteered to supervise pee-ah.”

  “And this man from California?”

  “First of all, the expense, which everyone seems to be carping about, is negligible. Bear in mind that Lapstrake is one of America’s leading newspaper writers. I persuaded him to come here for expenses only. We are not paying him a fee to help us tell our story. And the fact that he is from out of town derives to the greatest advantage. He won’t be influenced by anything the Sphere has already regurgitated.”

  “I suppose not.”

  “And we agreed, the entire Strategy Committee agreed, that we must spend what is necessary to win the battle. Even if it means a special assessment. We are fighting for the continued existence of the Club, you know.” Dormant started to speak. “But there’s more,” said Gland in a gleeful whisper. “I’ve set them up.”

  “The Strategy Committee?”

  “No! The Sphere. They’ve agreed to print Lapstrake’s columns while he’s here in Boston.”

  “However did you arrange that?”

  “It is a masterstroke, if I do say so.”

  “No doubt.”

  “My secretary, Rachel James, has been, ah, seeing the assistant editor of the Sphere’s Metro Region section. They know Lapstrake by reputation. He’s syndicated in something like fifty newspapers, you know. They have agreed to run up to four of his columns on Boston. I, or rather Ms. James, has the agreement in a letter,” said Gland positively chortling, “an agreement in writing!”

  “And you think these pieces will help the cause?”

  “Of course. That’s what pee-ah is all about. Lapstrake is not a typical liberal, left-wing toady like most of the Sphere reporters. He’ll write what he thinks. We can’t always be on the defensive, Roger. Each time another Sphere writer calls Pinhead, they ask him questions he can’t answer. He dithers, and equivocates, and contradicts himself, and they put it all in the story.”

  “Really, Gland, I don’t like the practice of calling Walter Junior …”

  “Successful pee-ah has to be offensive. You have to create the story yourself. I have studied this extensively. It’s more or less a science. You take the fight to the enemy. The newspaper editor is a lazy scut. Write the story for him, that’s the ticket. Get your own hired gun. Take the offensive and you can win the war. Sit back and react to each attack and they cut you to ribbons!” As they were talking they moved, glasses in hand, into the Library, where Gland’s dissertation was forced to compete with the Eldest Member, whose hearing disability caused him to speak louder than most of the others. Gland fell silent until the patriarch subsided. Then he leaned down and shouted in his withered ear, “Sir, your voice fills the room.”

  “AND YOURS EMPTIES IT,” snapped the Eldest Member as he struggled to his feet.

  When he hung up the phone the night man on the Metro Region Desk picked up the copy that had been dropped in front of him. “The fuck is this?” he snapped at the pretty brunette standing by his desk.

  “Why do you feel it necessary to talk like a character in a George Higgins novel?”

  “Well, I graduated from the University of Oregon, not Harvard, as you did, so I have to compensate the best I can.”

  “Is that why you wear untied Reebok hightops and red suspenders?”

  “Yes. And I don’t wear pyjama tops.”

  “Neither do I. I think you’ll like this stuff. It’s from Leonard Lapstrake, a syndicated columnist for the San Francisco Clarion. He’s visiting Boston for a week and we have a release to use what he does here. I took a chance and told him, told a friend who knows him, that we might use a couple, as many as four, if we decide we want to.”

  “You did take a chance. Is he any good?” His phone started to ring.

  “I think so. We don’t have anyone around here who can do this. I can see why his column is syndicated in ten papers. Do you want to get that?”

  “Wouldn’t that be a deal? Ten papers. He probably does three or four a week. Say they pay a thousand, less, say, twenty-five percent for the syndicator, that’s, what is that?”

  “He does four a week with two weeks off a year, so his column runs two hundred times a year.” The phone continued to ring. “But he probably doesn’t get a thousand a column. More like six hundred. So his gross is a hundred and twenty thousand, but his net is maybe two-thirds, say eighty thousand above salary.” The phone stopped ringing as they thought about eighty thousand above salary. “It sounds great,” she said, “but you’re on camera every day, and it better be good or you’re in the archives.”

  “And you think he’s good?”

  “Decide for yourself.”

  “Why don’t you wear pyjama tops?”

  “Because I don’t wear pyjama bottoms.”

  TALES OF TWO CITIES

  by Leonard Lapstrake

  BOSTON. Special to the Boston Sphere. Copyright San Francisco Clarion, 1987.

  NOTES ON THE BACK OF A BOARDING PASS: They call it the City on the Hill. Jack Kennedy said it, and he was quoting old John Winthrop, and now it’s Boston chitchat.

  But where are the hills? The local bumps and knobs are to real hills what New Hampshire “mountains” are to the Sierra.

  The expatriate longs for the visceral tug when you crest the top of a real hill, the moment of truth when you are staring over your car’s hood at the sky, wondering what’s happening in front of you in the next second. Will it be a little old lady, a fire truck, Steve McQueen in “Bullitt”? Or maybe just the top of the hill almost wide enough to let you catch your breath before you shoot down the other side. Beacon Hill? It is to laugh. A blister. A Dr. Scholl’s Corn Pad.

  The few locals who have ventured as far as the Pacific come back with horror stories about San Francisco hills and the dangers of motoring thereon. Those who journey from the Bay Area to the Bay State return with a genuine horror of driving anywhere in Boston. The automobile is not used merely for transportation here. It is a weapon in a class war that rages on many fronts.

  The drive to work and back are but the first and last skirmishes of the day. In between the real bloodletting takes place. Ever been to Filene’s Basement? But, to begin the day with a Search and Destroy mission at least gets the adrenaline pumping.

  Warning: Don’t look the enemy in the eye. That’s right, the enemy, your opponent, the guy ahead of you. Whether he’s afoot or behind the wheel, he’s going to get you if you don’t get him first. How do you score? Cut him off. Move him over. Leave him at the light while you sneak through on the last of the yellow. Press him. Make him jump. Pass him, then slow down yourself. You know, all those nasty moves you learned as a teenager.

  If the driver is a woman, score yourself an extra point. But watch out. She may be more road warri
or than you are. Remember, don’t look them in the eye. The head fake and the quick lane change. Peripheral vision is everything in this game. That, and a healthy contempt for drivers not as good as you are.

  Another warning: Bostonians play these street games because there is no enforcement. Don’t try them in nearby states like Connecticut or New Hampshire where they write a lot of tickets, especially for Massachusetts drivers.

  No, this isn’t California, and Boston ain’t San Francisco. I’ve only been away three days and I’m already homesick for a glimpse of the Bay Bridge from the corner of Hyde and O’Farrell. The Tobin Bridge just doesn’t cut it. I will never complain about San Francisco weather again. God is punishing Boston for calling itself the Hub of the Universe. But more about the weather later.

  Sure, Boston has architecture, but the seafood is boring and it all comes from somewhere else. The shrimp come from India, the salmon from Norway, the swordfish from the Bahamas, and the lobster from Canada. No edible creature swims or crawls in the toilet that surrounds this city. The water is brown and thick and lumpy. Ships leave ghastly, grey wakes behind them as they plow through the muck of Boston Harbor. I miss the fishing fleet from the window of Tarantino’s. I’ll have the Rex sole and a very cold bottle of Montelena Chardonnay.

  Did I say class war? Yes, that’s what I said. Boston is not a friendly city. It is not only rude to its visitors (who are so dumb they can’t find their way around a town that was laid out by wandering cows), it saves its worst manners for its own. There are more class divisions in Boston than in your old junior high. A neighborhood is not a place to grow out of, it’s a place to keep those people out of. No melting pot, this. No glorious racial and ethnic and cultural stew that makes Baghdad by the Bay such an exciting place to live. Boston is a series of sealed compartments. The best game in town is trying to pry open someone else’s. More fun than lions and Christians.

  The latest civic circus is tormenting a rather pitiful prey. Boston is prising open the private clubs, which for a hundred years have been the hidey holes for men who can’t find any other place to hide.

  The local rag called the Boston clubmen “dinosaurs,” but that’s the wrong slant.

  These are not the movers and shakers of this world. These are the small fuzzy ones crouching under a leaf. Comets, glaciers, cataclysmic collisions won’t kill them. But open up their burrow and let the sun and the strange creatures in and they are doomed. In this case the strange creatures are women. The whole town is laughing because, if the men’s clubs don’t admit women members early next year, their liquor supply is turned off. From the fuzzy ones’ point of view, the only thing worse than seeing a woman standing at the bar of the club is no bar at all.

  Stay tuned for late-breaking developments. But, you women, think carefully about what you’re getting into. An evening at the Charles Club is like waiting tenth in line to take off from Logan. When the air traffic controllers are on strike. And the plane’s air conditioning doesn’t work. It’s at least as much fun as a hijacking. Makes you wonder why you ever made the trip in the first place.

  “That’s outrageous,” said Roger Dormant to Owen, gesturing at a copy of the Sphere that lay open on the library table. “Did you read what he said about the seafood?”

  Chapter 16

  Owen sat by what he had come to call The Window. The Charles Club had forty-three windows, nineteen facing Commonwealth Avenue, ten on the Hereford Street side, fourteen on the alley. Of these, the four front curved-glass windows on the first floor formed the salient grouping around which the facade of the building arranged itself. Two looked out from the Parlor, where female guests were entertained. The other pair were in the Library, which was reserved for the members. The thick glass bowed in a gentle arc, its faintly purple depths framed in hard pine, an occasional dimple, the odd ripple, adding character to the view. In all seasons these windows afforded a pleasing picture of that portion of the world that included one hundred yards of the avenue and the Mall.

  The small front yard of the club was protected by a black wrought-iron fence whose corners and gate posts were bundles of bars and spears. The yard itself contained two mature tulip magnolia trees. For ten days in April they burst into sensuous glories of pink and cream if the last snowstorm of the winter did not frost the fragile exhibition, snow melting from petals which in an hour would turn brown and fall. Under the magnolias an indifferent patch of grass and ivy stitched the building to the earth. Beyond the iron palings a dark forest of oaks, sycamores and an occasional ancient elm scarred by the plague stretched in each direction. The two highways of Commonwealth Avenue are separated by a strip of grass one hundred and twenty feet wide, itself divided by an asphalt walk down the middle. In this linear wood between Hereford and Gloucester lurks the somber figure of Domingo Sarmiento, an Argentinian statesman of the nineteenth century. His presence on the Mall in the company of Hamilton, Glover and the other North Americans puzzled Owen. He imagined a room full of brave Argentine immigrants passing a hat into which money was being stuffed. “Por Sarmiento!” and “Viva Sarmiento!” they cried as they parted with their life savings. Now the profoundly melancholy figure loomed just within sight of the curved plate glass of the club windows. The local artist had written BORGO across Sarmiento’s pediment, the smooth surface encouraging unusually broad, flowing strokes of the paint can.

  The trees even in December muffled traffic sound. The Charles Club was situated on the Sunny Side of Commonwealth Avenue where it received the morning rays of God’s glory. Addresses on the Sunny Side, deemed the superior location, bore odd street numbers. The tulip magnolias grew only on the Sunny Side. Even-numbered residents pointed out, however, when as was sometimes the case they were patronized by their neighbors across the street, that they in fact had the view of the magnolias which the owners did not. Nevertheless tout Boston—from meter maid to matron—knew the Sunny Side of Commonwealth was the good side, just as the Water Side of Beacon Street, the next street over but one which paralleled the Charles River, was the good side of Beacon because the back windows of the buildings faced upon the Charles River Basin.

  Of the four bay windows of the Charles Club, Owen preferred the library window farthest from the entrance. It looked out upon the corner of Hereford, included a glimpse of Sarmiento, and viewed the retreating traffic of the westbound lane of Commonwealth. In front of The Window was a black leather chair, much worn but often oiled and polished. It was precisely the chair Owen had always known men’s clubs would have. He first saw the chair in a cartoon in a New Yorker magazine one summer when he was working during school vacation in the stacks of the Santa Fe Public Library. It was his first job away from chores at the ranch. He found wheeling carts of books back into the stacks where they were painstakingly returned to their holes an unexpectedly rewarding activity. It satisfied a sense of order which, at sixteen, he had only begun to recognize. No one in the stacks ever told him to stand up straight. The level of activity at the Carnegie Library rarely exceeded six carts of books in a day. When he had replaced them all he was free to wander and sample. After he had located the key to the locked cage and leafed through the meagre collection of sex and anatomy he found the bound periodicals occupying most of his attention. Unfamiliar worlds sifted like luminous sand from the pages of the old Vanity Fair, from Blackwood’s, from Scientific American, from the Boston Evening Transcript. He wasn’t sure why he found Peter Arno’s choleric men-about-town so pleasing but a 1938 New Yorker supplied his first knowledge of proper men’s club chairs. To discover, twenty years later, how closely life mirrored art was balm to that sense of order lately so severely damaged.

  He balanced a cup of black coffee on his knee and tried in vain to suppress a sense of well-being rising from the pit of his stomach. He was more than a little concerned about Seymour. Something was not right. Office boy still rankled. It was like those moments in New Mexico before a heavy thunderstorm when the body felt what the mind did not know or the eye could not see.
Seymour was up to something and Owen somehow was part of it. The vision of Demi in a black slip on the Indian rug passed unbidden in front of his eyes and another organ stirred. His early dinner had been excellent, as usual, and since there had been only one other diner—a short, rotund man in a salt-and-pepper suit whom Owen did not recognize—he ate in peaceful, pungent silence. When Anton Pesht stepped outside the kitchen Owen complimented him on the fragrant curry and was rewarded with a grave nod. Owen had been tempted to order a half bottle but settled instead for a glass of Graves with his perfect crème brûlée. He was dutifully exploring the wine list and Abel had proved a cheerful guide, willing to advance the research by opening various bottles for sampling. The Graves and the crème brûlée said something nice to each other.

  Owen was running up a considerable bill at the Charles. He rarely missed dinner there although he knew he should be eating more often at home. Meals and wine at the club were much less expensive than at local restaurants and the cuisine superior, if not always the service. But his budget was stressed to the point of collapse between the all too occasional dates with Demi and his club expenses. He watched the last evening light disappear into the meager incandescence of the nighttime avenue. The problem is, he thought, these are such new experiences. First finding Demetria. Then discovering food.

  Food had never been a significant part of Owen’s life. For thirty-eight years he had eaten because he was told to by his mother, his dormitory master, his wife. The association of food with pleasure was as foreign to him as religion. It was a necessary interruption—like shaving or cleaning a rifle—of more important activities. Now to his surprise it produced such pleasure that he continually sought to prolong it, repeat it. He was not unaware that this was the definition of addiction. He would become addicted to Demi too as soon as she would let him. For some time, since his courtship of Abbie in fact, he had not associated pleasure with the company of a woman. Now he was wondering if he would seem a fatuous idiot to call Demi before he went to bed. Or when he was in bed. The telephone was in easy reach from almost anywhere in the apartment. The introduction to pleasure, like any conversion, produced unfamiliar doubts, guilt, ecstasies, and visions. He found himself thinking of Demi as a glorious dessert. If only he could afford to live this way. The legal fees from the divorce, the Volvo payments which seemed never to end, the initiation fee for the club prorated over his first year of membership, all stretched his new salary to the limit. Seymour had offered him $50,000. It was less than he had been making at Portman and Sells but it sounded adequate for a quiet, celibate existence. Now he was neither quiet nor celibate. Where was the money going?