The Last Bastion

by Peter C. Wensberg

  “I say no. We cannot become a party to this egregious,” he smiled for an instant, savoring the word, “invasion of a life we have created for ourselves, harming no one, denying business opportunity to no one, conceived in fact, and built in fact, for one hundred and twenty-five years, on the now apparently reprehensible notion that men might enjoy each other’s company without resorting to the dross of commercial conversation. There must be a way.” He delivered these last words with unexpected force and intensity then, spent, sat down to smoky, thoughtful silence.

  Passion largely expended, the fourth meeting of the Strategy Committee ended twenty minutes later. Other clubs in other cities were mentioned: Cosmos, Bohemian, Metropolitan. Fellow sufferers in Boston were reported on: St. Botolph, Tavern, Somerset, Pilgrim. It was suggested that the Charles try to discover their intentions. A traveler recently returned from London reported that he believed the issue would not arise during Mrs. Thatcher’s reign. No plan of action was proposed let alone agreed upon.

  As they walked down the broad stairway, Dormant leading the way, Owen limping painfully, Gland said over his shoulder, “Holderness girls must look damned attractive in their hockey uniforms.”

  “Yes, very cute, I imagine.” Owen stared at him, the phrase office boy in the back of his mind.

  “Those baggy padded shorts and suspenders.”

  “I haven’t actually seen them play a game.”

  “At least their generation has rediscovered the garter belt.”

  Owen had no reply. He felt, as he often had before, that Seymour had carried the evening.

  Chapter 19

  Owen yawned as he buttoned a Saturday shirt. It had been a frustrating week. The question of whether a job as an analyst was work for a real person lodged in the back of his thoughts. Seymour added regularly to the pile of business plans on Owen’s desk. He was sorting them into two stacks. The short stack would get a second reading. Despite several calls each day he had not been able to speak to Demi. Over a cup of instant coffee he sat flipping Friday’s bills into a basket on the table. There were fewer of them than there had been in Weston and for lesser amounts. His telephone bill rarely rose above the minimum charge since he made most of his calls at work, while it had often exceeded two hundred dollars a month in Weston. Even with the fourteen thousand a year from Abbie’s trust fund Weston had been a financial struggle. But incredibly he was still struggling. He had six payments to go on the Volvo, and the monthly bill from the Charles Club was a shocker. He read the event sheet that accompanied the bill a list of four names posted for membership and an invitation to meet the Candidates for sherry on the day after Thanksgiving; a game dinner on December. 18th. Owen glanced at the list to see if he knew any of the nominees, was unsurprised to find he did not.

  It was a depressingly bright morning for the weekend before Thanksgiving. Owen felt restless and unwilling to spend the day alone. He was not sure why the holiday was important to him since he had little history of festive Thanksgivings either when he was growing up or in Weston, where cocktail parties and dinner out had been the usual plan. The season’s change, more subtle in New Mexico than the gaudy death of summer in New England, always seemed the emptiest moment of the year. When he called Demi he reached only her echo on the machine. She had not returned any of his calls. Maybe she was out of town. Without making a conscious decision he grabbed a scarf and a tweed jacket with a hole in one pocket and reached for the leash. Tasha was at the door before he picked it up, speaking in the Samoyed tongue which came out as a querulous, gargling, muted howl. All seasons were hers, the only emptiness indoor space.

  They bolted from the badger hole and jogged down Fairfield, across Marlborough and Beacon, up Back Street—the alleyway that separates the garages and sheds of the Water Side of Beacon from the canyon of Storrow Drive—over the footbridge whose height above the speedway always gave Owen a twinge of agoraphobia. Tasha, immune to neuroses, smelled the river. Down the iron stairway they ran for the path along the shore. The riparian landscape was still green, the grass slick with moisture, the trees bare but alive and in motion against the sky. Traffic of another sort flowed around them as Owen unsnapped the leash and Tasha bolted after a careless squirrel. Bicyclists in the latest tour gear, roller skaters sailing by on wings of urethane, babies on wheels and in sacks, slow walkers, power walkers, weight walkers, Olympic walkers, and sonambulistic runners, dreaming through their pain of marathons to come: the pathway was filled with refugees from the city fleeing in both directions. Winter was coming.

  They moved downriver toward the salt and pepper shaker towers of the Longfellow Bridge. A stiff breeze from Cambridge drove a little chop against the riverbank. Tasha, who relished all that was wet, cold, and unbounded, was tempted but Owen whistled her back. A Red Line train rumbled over the granite bridge and disappeared into the bowels of Cambridge as they turned right past the last softball game of the year, crossed a backwater on a footbridge decorated with gryphons and graffiti and stopped by General Patton. While Tasha was busy Owen studied Old Blood and Guts. Poised on the balls of his feet, booted, spurred and gloved with his tanker’s goggles pulled up on his helmet, Patton radiated Washington’s calm superiority with none of his benevolence. The grips of his twin revolvers were polished by the reverent hands of Boston’s youth. “Move it or lose it,” Patton said to him as they passed. I’d like to have seen him ride, thought Owen. A polo pony at Myopia or Santa Barbara, a Lippizaner from the Spanish Riding School, a tank in the Rhineland. Classy bastard, he thought. No paint on Patton’s pedestal.

  They re-crossed Storrow Drive at the Esplanade, trotted across Beacon, hurried down Commonwealth. Owen hungered for lunch and for someone to talk to. For Demi. For a Thanksgiving. He felt he was marking time, running in place. The thought made him run faster. What was he waiting for? Why wasn’t he doing something? The question immediately rose: what precisely should he be doing? Making a million dollars in Boston? Something back home? What was home? It seemed hard to imagine his destiny was a two-bit spread in Santa Fe. Maybe he should get married again. Nothing seemed beyond consideration on a glorious day at the moment of summer’s extinction. He tied the leash to a fence rod as Tasha settled down on the little patch of grass beside the club steps. No one was likely to reach a hand through the wrought iron no matter how inviting her white pelt. The eyes discouraged it.

  Owen bounded up the steps, opened the wide door, and collided with the solid bulk of the Architectural Critic. “Sorry!”

  “Quite all right. I was about to leave. Club’s as empty as a tomb. An empty tomb, that is. Are you coming in for lunch? If you are, I’ll join you, if I may. The only reason I came over here on a beautiful day like this was to find someone to jaw with. Hope you don’t mind? Perhaps you weren’t thinking of lunch. Have a drink then. What would you like? A bit early, I concede, but within hailing distance of noon. What is your pleasure?”

  Owen hastily interjected his pleasure as they moved toward the little bar off the lobby. Abel nodded a greeting. Owen pinched the open throat of his shirt and raised a questioning eyebrow. Abel smiled and shook his head as he handed the drinks to his only guests. They moved into the Library and sank into chairs by The Window. Following Owen’s glance his companion said with evident pleasure, “What a magnificent beast.” Owen grinned. “So, you keep a dog in the city. An affirmation. Of course it is a bother, creates problems, but it is a statement. Worth all the effort and more. It says,” he leaned forward and fixed Owen with his rather pop-eyed gaze, “that the city is liveable. Not merely habitable, liveable. A place to live and enjoy all that life has to offer, including that most satisfying and reinforcing relationship, the companionship of animals. How many do you have?”

  “Animals? Just that one. At the moment.”

  “Had you more in another life?”

  “Well, yes. When I was growing up I had quite a few dogs, sometimes two or three at a time. And about a dozen horses. A cow and usually a calf. A few barn cats. A
kitten in the house if my mother could catch and tame one. Chickens.”

  “And did you live in Boston during that period?”

  “No. A little town called Tesuque. I doubt you’ve heard of it.”

  “I know it well. I’m out there for the opera every August. I drop in on the sculpture gallery at Shidoni to see what atrocities are being committed in the name of architectural sculpture. I knock on Eliot Porter’s door to see if he will show me any of his current photography. I stop by Felipe Archuleta’s house next to El Nido to beg him to sell me a wooden pig. The galleries have pushed folk art prices beyond all reason, but I keep hoping he will take pity on me.” He paused and tasted his drink. “Do you collect anything, besides animals, I mean?”

  Owen’s mouth dropped open at this recital of the cultural elite of his hometown. “Not folk art. I sort of took it for granted when I lived there.”

  “Well, do not lose Tesuque in Boston, my boy. When I get completely distracted by the abominations being committed by the builders in this city, I go back to Santa Fe to refresh my soul.”

  He was momentarily interrupted as Abel handed them menus and the order slip, which the Architectural Critic seized. Owen seized the moment. “I must say I don’t think that Boston is being spoiled. It seems much more, ah, beautiful than I’ve ever seen it.”

  “Odd you should see it that way,” said his companion studying the menu. “What I see is destruction. Devastation. Decay.” A pause. “Duplicity.” He seemed to have exhausted the list. “Dumb decisions,” he said with finality. He scribbled their orders and they went into the empty dining room together.

  “Well, I can’t agree,” said Owen. “I love Boston’s architecture. It’s what makes the city great. If it weren’t for the architecture this would be just another state capital populated with less than friendly people, with a polluted harbor, and a bunch of bad drivers. Did you read …?”

  “Yes, indeed. Much of what he said was quite true. But we should examine your views about the cityscape. What do you like about it?”

  “About the old buildings?”

  “No, most of what has escaped the wrecker’s ball by now will survive us, I suppose. It’s the new ones that give the most pain.” Before Owen could frame an answer, his host went on. “Let me cite two much-noticed examples within a few blocks of this very spot: the new Back Bay train station, and that building at the other end of Newbury Street that Frank Gehry has remodeled. Now, that’s an interesting one. It was just a big forties business block when the developer bought it. Then this clever California—designer is what I would call him—turned it inside out. He covered the outer walls in a kind of chainmail of lead sheets, the sort of thing which might be used to line an elevator shaft. Then he hung a structure of platforms and supports, also clad in lead plates, over the street. It suggests the skeleton of the building protruding from the flesh. No real function, but admittedly a striking effect. Like nothing ever seen in Boston.

  “Now then, ten blocks away in a direct line we have the Back Bay railroad station. Used to be an unoffending little terminal where you could catch the train to New York without having to go all the way downtown to South Station. Boston, of course, could never quite connect the northern lines with the southern lines so we’ve always had two major termini, North Station and South Station, two monuments to bad planning, venal politics, and, in the one case, hockey, circuses, and basketball. But to return to our little whistlestop station in Back Bay, a few years ago it was decreed that it must become a monument itself. So where did the architects turn? Why to Europe, to the great gares and bahnhofs of the nineteenth century with their grand arched roofs, sometimes a hundred feet high. Magnificent buildings of iron and glass, like giant greenhouses, through which trains and passengers and baggage trucks and armies and brass bands and crowds of folk moved like tiny toys, put into proper perspective by the soaring aspirations of the new age of steam transportation.

  “But why, you might ask, did they build the great arched roofs? It is obvious, on a moment’s reflection: to allow the steam and the coal smoke to rise above the busy platform. Perhaps the steam might condense and sprinkle a black little shower on the travellers below, but the stupendous roof shielded them from God’s rain and snow which fell outside. So what is amiss with the new Back Bay station, caricature as it is of a bahnhof, with its tall laminated arches and its huge enclosed space? Nothing, except it encloses nothing. No trains. The trains creep beneath the floor of the station, ugly diesel cows pulling strings of mismatched cars. The station is just another stage set. No magnificent panorama of transportation. Just greeting cards and tee-shirts.

  “They are both clever stage sets,” he said sadly. “Better than most. But empty of meaning. That is, if you consider meaning to be the structure which underlies the surface. Boston’s new architecture is all surface, no meaning. Or, I suppose, the surface is the meaning.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” said Owen, cutting off the flow, “my old town is more of a stage set than Boston. Every gas station in Santa Fe is built of fake adobe.”

  “Perhaps, but so beguiling to an Easterner.”

  “It’s still cement block plastered over to look like adobe. The meaning of it all is that you can pump your own gas for a dollar-twenty a gallon.”

  The Critic gazed thoughtfully out the window, sighed, turned to Owen. He seemed about to speak of something which troubled him greatly. Old Jane came in, left lamb chops in front of Owen, shirred eggs with the Critic. As she departed, they exchanged plates and the Critic asked sadly, “Have you ever looked closely at the trunks of the young trees planted in front of all these new hotels and condominiums?” Owen’s answer went unheard as his companion began to pick up momentum again. “Yes, those little trees that get stuck in the sidewalk like pins in a board. Which is what they are, of course, to the current crop of poseurs who think they are architects. Not living things, just matchsticks with a bit of sponge at one end, jabbed into a model.”

  “The trunks?” Owen managed.

  “Yes, that’s the significant thing. That’s what shows you the architect’s true intentions. That’s what characterizes the Boston of the,” he almost whispered the word, “eighties.”

  “I don’t follow you.”

  “It’s the electrical boxes, of course. No one can plant a tree anymore without an electrician. Just consider the thousands of innocent maples and locusts and plane trees with one hundred and ten volts strapped to their trunks, draped with little twinkling Christmas lights THE YEAR ’ROUND!” With his eyes rolled back he seemed to be appealing to the gilt octagon in the ceiling.

  “I see,” said Owen, who did not see at all.

  “One must ask what dramas they think they are playing, these erstwhile rebuilders of the city, in front of their self-created stage sets.” He paused to munch a chop bone, then dropped it on his plate. “I fear, dear boy, it is a little Molière farce whose themes are greed, vanity, and the inability to recognize the portents.”

  “Portents?”

  “Yes. I stand on portents. All fads in architecture forecast the future. Think of the buildings of the twenties. Mannered, European, ornate, fussy with decorations and cosmetics. Consider what followed.” He took breath. “The fact that mere leaves are not sufficient embellishment for a Boston tree tells me what is coming. We no longer build to use. No building has a lifetime of more than a few years now. Real estate development has become our leading industry. They will as happily dynamite a glass tower as a warehouse to get at the land. Buildings are all temporary. Construction is no longer the means, it has become the end. Actually, financing is the most creative architectural function left. Living in a new building is simply a brief interruption of the true real estate cycle. But,” he smiled sadly at Owen, “all that is about to come to an end.”

  As they rose and walked into the hall the Architectural Critic placed an avuncular hand on Owen’s shoulder. “Are you heavily invested in real estate?” he asked. “In the stock market?” Owe
n shook his head. “Good. Then you won’t be hurt too badly. It’s coming soon, you know.” They opened the front door and stepped out into the unexpectedly warm light. Tasha looked up at them, perhaps worried about the expression on her master’s face. Owen wanted to ask what exactly was coming, but it was not necessary. “I think it overly dramatic to call it an economic Armageddon, don’t you? That makes people think in terms of the end of the world. Of course, it is not going to be the end of the world, just the end of a brief economic cycle, say forty or fifty years in length, which by chance has coincided with our lives. Change is not only the end, it is the beginning as well. The important thing about change is to anticipate it, to prepare for it, to benefit from it …”

  “And the lights in the trees say to you that another crash is coming?”

  “But when it comes it is going to seem horrendous to those who were not prepared. All that debt tumbling, crashing down, defaulting.” He nodded happily. “You’re aware, I’m sure, that the ratio of debt to the gross national product is greater than it has ever been in history, the entire history of our country, going back,” he gestured at the statues in the Mall, “to the years in which they built this city. Banks rupturing. Companies turned inside out. The financial structure imploding. Treasure and worth evaporating. It will be,” he said with relish, “something to watch.” He bent down to scratch the dog’s ears.

  “This has been very, very pleasant, my boy. I’m so glad I ran into you. I was really feeling a little blue. Nothing like a good lunch and good conversation to lift the spirits. By the by, please come to the Club Friday night. We’re introducing four new candidates for membership. I’ve been asked to stand sponsor for a friend of Roger Dormant’s family by the name of,” he searched his vast, echoing mind, so like a European train station in its grandeur and activity, “Leslie Sample.”