The Last Bastion

by Peter C. Wensberg

  “When I made that call, it was to a real estate firm on Commonwealth Avenue,” continued Walter Junior. “I asked for Leslie Sample and was promptly connected to a person who seemed very much aware of the situation. This, uh, person had a rather low, husky voice, but, uh, I recall thinking at the time, a somewhat effeminate manner. Of course, I do not feel that automatically must exclude potential members. We do, after all, have …” He faltered under the ferocious glare of Gland, who leaped from his chair and began pacing.

  “Well, here we are again! I, for one, am not aware that we have admitted so many effeminate members over the years. I assure you that, were I aware, they would not have been admitted. Now, it seems, we are presented, through the good offices of Mr. Roger Dormant, with a completely effeminate candidate.”

  “She’s not effeminate,” said Owen reasonably, “she’s female.”

  “Let us not bandy words,” said Seymour, a finger held admonishingly aloft.

  This was too much for the Eldest Member. “OH, WHY IS HE LECTURING US? MY GREAT-UNCLE WAS AS LIGHT AS A FEATHER. RAN A DANCING SCHOOL IN DUXBURY FOR YEARS. WOUNDED HIS MAN IN A DUEL. WAS A MEMBER HERE LONG BEFORE WHAT’S HIS NAME WAS BORN. RING THE BELL.” This last was addressed to Appleyard, who hastily summoned aid from below.

  “As I was saying,” said Walter Junior, “the combination of the, uh, person’s name and the unusually low pitch of, uh, her voice led me to believe that I was speaking to a, uh, male. He, that is, uh, Sample, expressed great interest at the prospect of becoming a member of the Charles Club. In the spirit of our agreed-upon goal to strengthen the Club by injecting new, uh, blood, I invited, uh, I invited, I invited her to come last evening. And she came,” he finished lamely.

  The silence was broken by Abel, who swiftly collected drink orders from around the room and departed. After a moment Appleyard spoke. “There’s really no problem here. Yes, admittedly it is embarrassing, but it was an honest mistake on the Club’s part. Our bylaws are explicit on the gender question. We have made and, as far as I know, contemplate, no change in those bylaws. An apology, perhaps, is in order to the young lady. But nothing has changed.”

  “Nothing has changed?” DePalma’s brows shot to their peak. “I see the situation in quite another light. We have, by our own stu …” Abel’s return gave him a moment to reflect. “We have, by our own errors and misunderstandings, provided our nemesis at the Licensing Board and, most particularly, the Sphere and the other media ghouls, a perfect opportunity to attack us again. Now there is a division in our ranks. Now there is a woman, a very attractive, I might add photogenic, woman, who, rightly or wrongly, has been proposed for membership. We must face this fact and we must deal with this fact in a timely fashion.”

  “How would the Sphere hear about it?” asked the Architectural Critic. A buzz around the room supplied the many possible avenues of information transfer.

  “Well, what is Dormant going to do?” demanded Gland.

  “I think he may stick to his guns,” said Owen.

  “I really can’t believe that,” said Appleyard.

  “WELL, WHY DON’T YOU ASK HIM?”

  The room fell silent as Roger entered, a third martini resolutely in hand. He gazed at his favorite corner, glanced at the cold fireplace, looked up for a moment at Sargent’s improbably beautiful family. Then he eyed his erstwhile friends. “Yes,” he said, “why don’t you ask me, instead of hiding away up here?”

  Leslie grabbed the receiver and gave the lighted button on the console a jab, breaking a dark red nail. The click of computers, the buzz of phones, the prattle of printers faded as she shoved the earpiece under her heavy hair. “Ann, where are you?”

  “I don’t want to say.”

  “Ann.”

  “If I tell you, torture may force you to reveal my whereabouts.”

  “No, really, where are you?”

  “I’m in Santa Barbara, if you must know. At El Encantado. Or, as they put it on this coast, the El Encantado. But since it is raining here, I’m thinking of taking an Air Plastic flight to San Diego, maybe stay at the Coronado for a few days.”

  “Ann, I’m in the most ghastly mess.”

  “Mess?”

  “Yes, mess. The Charles Club thing. They called me and invited me to come to a party to meet the members, and then just went out of their way to embarrass me and make me feel cheap. I’m furious.”

  “Tell me more.”

  “Well, the only ones that showed even a little bit of friendliness and politeness were your father, who I must say is a rather confused person, he didn’t seem to fully understand that he was my sponsor, I suppose you know that every candidate needs a sponsor? Yes, you told me that, didn’t you? Well, I have two in fact, the other one is in real estate, I believe, but I didn’t even get to meet him in all the confusion, and then there was a sweet one named Lawrence.”

  “Owen Lawrence? He was the other one who was nice?”

  “I thought it was Lawrence Owen, but whatever, yes, he was. And, can you believe this? Another one of the candidates was that odious friend of Avery Coupon’s.”

  “The Italian hunk?”

  “Yes, and he was exactly what I expected, just the sleaziest. Manipulative? I can’t begin to tell you.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Did you go out with him?”

  “Well, sort of. I was so devastated by the way those old farts treated me.”

  “I hate to say I told you so.”

  “Well, don’t then. Ann, you got me into this!”

  “Not quite true. I helped you into this. You wanted a ride in the car. I opened the door for you.”

  The jetstream howled faintly on the transcontinental connection.

  “Has the Sphere called you?”

  “Yes. That’s why I was so desperate to talk to you.” Leslie sucked for a moment on her fractured nail. “I don’t know what to say to them. I’m so glad you called, Ann. How could they hear about all this? It only happened last night. I wish you were here. I need help. A reporter is coming to see me in an hour. What am I supposed to say?”

  “What was the Italian hunk like, really?”

  “Oh, he was no problem. I just let him run on and played the smiling little listener.”

  “Was that all you played?”

  “Ann, get real. Are you coming back here, or what?”

  “Probably not. For a while, at least. When the Sphere reporter, male or female, you don’t know, when he shows up tell him, her, everything. Everything. But if there’s no photographer along, don’t talk to them at all. You are going to have your picture on the front page, remember.”

  “I’ve decided I don’t want that.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “I’m not at all sure I want to be interviewed either. In fact, I know I don’t want to.”

  “It’s too late.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You are going to be famous, as I promised.”

  “What if I don’t want to be famous?” Leslie wailed.

  “That has nothing to do with it. You will see your beautiful puss smiling out of tomorrow’s paper.”

  “Oh, God.”

  “Look at it this way. It will be good for business.” The disconnect echoed across the intervening miles.

  It could hardly be called an argument since there was no exchange of views, simply a simultaneous volley of all the emotional ammunition the Strategy Committee members had with them. The room echoed, then gradually quieted, as first one and then another fell back, magazines exhausted. Gland was the last one firing. He faltered on the word “quagmire” as he noticed the room was silent again. The target of the fusillade stood in the doorway apparently unwounded, his glass held delicately to his lips.

  “Well,” demanded Gland.

  “Well, what?” responded the criminal Dormant.

  “Well, what do you propose to do to get us out of this, uh, quagmire?”

&nbs
p; “Nothing.”

  “Nothing at all?”

  “Nothing.” He seemed unperturbed at the vacuity of the exchange.

  “Perhaps, Roger, if you explained to the girl,” began Walter Junior.

  “I think we should invite her to join. I have already mentioned that to her,” said Dormant. The room was stony.

  “But, we can’t, Roger,” said Appleyard, as if explaining matters to a particularly obtuse client, “because our laws don’t allow it.”

  “I have come to the conclusion that we should change our laws. We may as well do it before we are forced to do it.”

  “But why make an issue of this woman?” asked De Palma. “She’s not at all like any of the,” he hesitated, “well, any of the wives.”

  “That’s true,” said the Architectural Critic, “not exactly the Charles Club sort, perhaps.”

  “CERTAINLY WOULD CATCH THE WIVES’ ATTENTION,” said the Eldest Member.

  “What is our sort?” asked Owen. The room exploded again.

  Roger turned to Owen as the noise clattered around them. “Yes, that’s a question we should think about, I suppose. We never have to ask. We always seem to know. But I would like Leslie to be able to come to lunch here, and have a drink in the Library if she wants to. She’s not at all our sort. That’s why it would be so pleasant.”

  “Are you going to press the issue?”

  “Yes, I think I am. They can all shout at me, but I don’t think they can throw me out.”

  “What will your wife think about this, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “I really don’t know,” said Roger. “Celia is an unusual woman. In some ways, that is. In other ways she’s extremely predictable.”

  “Which will she be about, ah, Miss Sample?”

  “Hard to predict,” said Roger glumly. Then he looked at Owen. “But you haven’t said what you think about all this.” He ducked his head and said into the remnant of the martini, “Are you fer me? Or agin’ me?”

  Owen smiled and touched his glass to Roger’s. In his best Gary Cooper voice he said, “Pardner, I’ll back your play.”

  Chapter 22

  This Monday began as many Mondays before it. Anton Pesht leaned into the entrance of the refrigerator room surveying the devastation within. His shoulders bulged under his spotless white shirt. The naked head thrust forward, the fencer’s legs spread apart, the wild eyes veiled, the mouth under its awning of black moustache twisted in a grimace of ennui and disgust: Hercules venturing his first glance into the Augean stables. The normally well-organized refrigerator was in a state of disarray. The Annual Game Dinner the evening before had required four pheasants to be hung dripping for several days in one corner. A suckling pig had occupied one complete shelf. Twelve complicated courses had placed unusual strain on the resources and staff of Pesht’s domain. Before it was concluded with applause, singing, ribald toasts, and a triumphant if reluctant appearance by the chef to accept the gratitude of the table, the delicate balance of the kitchen, the pantry, the larder, and the walk-in refrigerator had been upset. Chaos met Pesht’s eye wherever he turned. The zinc counters were stacked with clean but unhoused plates and cups. A pile of mixing bowls tottered on a stool. The stove had been hastily cleaned. The oak cabinets above the counters gaped at him, their glass doors hanging open. He kicked a dish towel that lay on the floor and sent it fluttering. His staff had all been exhausted when they left the club around midnight.

  “Fool, fool,” cried the great man. He pronounced it full, echoing in the cavernous cooler. Pesht addressed the empty kitchen. “Where you are?” he demanded. “Come out, to be dealed with.”

  The door of the pantry opened slightly. Pesht’s eye pounced upon the crack. “Come here. Come in. Face me, I demand you.”

  “How dare you speak to me like that?” said a small voice from behind the pantry door.

  “What?” Pesht asked, his deep voice rattling the copper pans which hung above the central worktable like bunches of overripe fruit. “Speak like what? I speak to you like I wish. You and your box destroy my icebox, my kitzen, my life.” Slamming the heavy door, he strode across the room. The pantry door quivered but did not open. Pesht stood, arms akimbo, his eyes like augers. “You don’t face me,” he said accusingly.

  “Yes, I can.”

  “No, you don’t. You and your little green stupid box. You cannot face.”

  “Yes, I can.” The door, however, only trembled.

  “Come out, or I kill it.” He grabbed a tablecloth that was draped over one corner of a counter under the spice cupboard and jerked the cloth into the air. Beneath it, like a memorial group unveiled, was a small computer with keyboard and printer huddling close to the blind monitor. Pesht glanced around his disheveled kitchen for an appropriate weapon. He lifted a heavy wooden pestle used to force meat through the grinder, glanced at an array of carving knives stuck like quills in a wooden porcupine, then seized a large pastry roller. With a thin smile of satisfaction at the balance and heft of the long tapered pin he waggled it in the manner of a golfer focussing his concentration before a drive.

  “Don’t dare,” snapped Miss Ontos as she stepped from behind the door. Black curls radiated from her agitated face like a thousand little springs. Her eyes were wide with alarm and arousal. She pressed her five-foot frame against the door that had shielded her, then staggered a little as it swung out as well as back, giving her a familiar pat. Regaining her stance she faced the ogre, her courage held tightly in clenched fists. “It is so typical of you to blame the computer, when it is clearly your own lack of foresight which creates the problems in this kitchen.”

  Pesht slashed the roller in widening, waist-high sabre strokes. It was evident he enjoyed the sound of the tip ripping through the stale air of the kitchen. He lunged forward in a sudden extension and with a powerful backhand stroke which carried the full force of his wrist and forearm cracked the weapon into the corner of the cupboard inches from the computer screen. The pastry roller splintered, the oak of the ancient cupboard groaned. Miss Ontos screamed in satisfactory fashion. Pesht grinned at her as she removed hands from her eyes to survey the damage which proved to be a small dent in the leading edge of the cupboard and the broken pin. “I feel like kill, but I am merciful man.”

  “You are bestial.”

  “I am artist, not accountsman.”

  “You are a throwback.”

  “I accept bestial. I accept throwback. I am proud to be artist of food, who creates with the senses. Nose, hands, eyes.” He leered at her and opened his mouth, from which curled an enormous tongue. He extended it to an impossible length and then touched it to the tip of his nose. “And tongue,” he finished proudly.

  Miss Ontos recoiled in horror, her plump bust heaving. “No artist would behave as you do.”

  “Fah. You know no artists. Only Cambridge pretty boys. Art is bestial. I am proud to be bestial throwback and I don’t want this,” he lunged again with the point of the splintered rolling pin aimed at, but just short of, the computer screen, “in my kitzen.”

  This time Miss Ontos forbore to scream. She marched to the counter, drew up a wooden chair in front of her workstation and switched on the power supply. “I think that is quite enough.” Her slender fingers rattled the keys, sending a shower of file commands down the serene green screen. “Shall we begin?” she asked icily, in control of her voice if not her respiration. “We will start with the menus for the week. Then we will make up the orders.” She stressed the plural pronoun. “I shall call them in by telephone before noon. You will have all of your deliveries by five o’clock except from the Hingham fruit man, who, as you know, delivers on Tuesday morning.”

  Pesht threw his broken rolling pin into the copious gray plastic barrel in the center of the room. With a heroic sigh he began to pace about the room. As he walked he muttered to himself, occasionally casting glances at Miss Ontos’ straight back in its pale blue silk blouse with a row of buttons from nape to waist. “A desolation,”
said Pesht. “Empty. Look, nothing left. For Monday dinner, sole meunière, pot roast with vegetable garnish, scrod creole, duckling with raspberries, leg of lamb, sweetbreads. I am only one man. Cobb salad, endive salad, hearts of palm, Waldorf salad for Mr. Dormant. I need more help. No man can do this all.” As he moved slowly about the large, high-ceilinged old kitchen his voice grew softer. Absently he rearranged the knives in their slotted block, hung the family of mixing bowls in graduated order on their proper hooks. The dishes for the week to come rolled from his tongue wrapped in little puffs of self-pity.

  Miss Ontos’ fingers raced over the keyboard. She was an expert typist whose computer skills had been developed from earliest childhood, honed at Buckingham and Wellesley until at twenty-nine she was as facile with a personal computer as any expensively educated liberal arts major with a specialty in musicology in Boston. Her instrument was an Iguana, one of two obsolete demonstration models Gland had, with much fanfare, given the club two years before when Iguana, one of the crown jewels of Gland, Hollings Ventures, went into Chapter Eleven for the second time only to emerge six months later with new financing and the now famous Iguana II. The computers had been indoctrinated by Miss Ontos with the Club’s accounts payable, its accounts receivable (including a special file for members overdue in various degrees), its payroll, its events calendar, miscellaneous accounting programs, and menus.

  Within an hour Pesht had planned the offerings for seven dinners and five luncheons. Together they prepared the provision orders, taking into account breakfast needs for guests who might occupy the upper rooms. As they worked, Nilson padded in and with a grunt—perhaps intended as a greeting—helped himself to a cup of black coffee. In all, Miss Ontos entered twelve different orders to suppliers of meat, fish, shellfish, lobsters, game, fruit, spices and herbs, bakery goods, bottled water and other items, as well as one large general grocery order to S.S. Pierce. The liquor order would be prepared with Abel in a lighthearted session free of the baser emotions such as fear, lust and shame, which usually colored the Monday mornings with Pesht. The wine order was assembled once a month in a meeting between Miss Ontos and DePalma, the Chairman of the Wine Committee. She did not anticipate these encounters with pleasure. DePalma’s condescension galled her. He sometimes stumbled over her name, never stayed a second longer in her little office below the stairs than was strictly necessary. There the second Iguana was set up on a proper computer table with a special computer chair like a prie-dieu, which allowed her to assume a very correct posture while entering information. This eased her back and enabled her to work without interruption for several hours if necessary. Since the two Iguanas were connected, information input from the kitchen was stored on the basement office disk. A large impact printer of antiquated design produced the order sheets, the bills, the checks, all the announcements issued by the club, and the menus. Miss Ontos, scrupulous in such matters, had chosen tasteful type fonts—a different one for each purpose. She did not mind the noise of the printer, which often clattered along for hours on end. To her it was the work of the world being accomplished. For all her romantic education she had a strong practical streak which required a daily regimen of physical and mental application. The printer sang progress to her. Miss Ontos believed in progress.