The Last Bastion

by Peter C. Wensberg

  “We met at the Charles Club just before Thanksgiving. You’re Roger Dormant’s friend.”

  “Leslie Sample.”

  “I remember, both the name and the voice. Owen Lawrence.”

  “Yes, I remember, too.”

  “Isn’t it incredible out? If it turns cold again, we’ll have two feet of snow. I just ducked in because I was drowning. Actually, I’ve never been here before. May I join you?”

  “Sure. I did the same thing. Isn’t it harsh? I must look a mess. I lost my heel, too.” She extended one of her best features from which dangled the ruined shoe looking like a tiny boat without a keel.

  Owen ordered a drink. This was nice. Really very nice. He smiled at Leslie and raised his Jack Daniel’s. “Cheers. This is really very nice.” She looked younger than he remembered with her dark brown hair pulled severely back in a bun. Almost no make-up.

  “I think so, too.” I’ll stay if he asks me to dinner, she thought as she drank her sour water.

  Owen wondered how much cash he had with him. He knew his Visa card was over the top because it had bounced back when he was trying to charge groceries at DeLuca’s the day before. If I wasn’t sitting next to such a pretty girl I’d feel sorry for myself. “Were you serious about wanting to join the Charles Club?” he asked.

  “Of course I was serious. I wouldn’t have gone there, to that awful whatever it was, reception, if I wasn’t serious.” Her husky voice was even lower than he remembered.

  “I saw your picture in the Sphere.”

  “Oh, God, did you? I’ve given up hoping someone will take a good picture of me sometime.”

  “I thought it was great.”

  “I got a lot of calls from that article. Even a call from a reporter in San Francisco. And I got one sale.”

  “Sale?”

  “Yes. I’m in real estate. A broker. John Coster and Co.?”

  “I didn’t realize that. I’ll bet you’re good.”

  “I am good. The best. Well, except for my boss and one other guy in the office. And they keep all the big stuff to themselves. I’m mostly, almost entirely, in residential. But I work in the high end of the market. Nobody beats me there.”

  “What made you decide you wanted to join the Charles?”

  “Well, it’s really too complicated to explain. My friend Ann, Ann Dormant, said I should do it. I had been there for lunch and I liked it, and I had run into all sorts of people who were, like, connected with it in one way or another, so I just thought why not do it? When I get something into my head I usually just do it.” She looked into Owen’s eyes, which she rather liked. “To be honest, Ann conned me into it. I had no idea what was involved.”

  “Well you certainly caused a commotion.”

  “I suppose they all laughed at me.”

  “No. No one laughed.” Almost no one, Owen thought to himself. “Would you like another drink?” He waved his finger over their glasses to the bartender and she set up two more.

  “I hope everyone has forgotten about it.”

  “Well, there are at least two members who are trying to get you elected, but it will take a change in the constitution of the Club to do it and that’s a big step.”

  “You’re kidding! Who are the two?”

  “One is Roger Dormant.”

  “Who is the other one?”

  “Would you like to have dinner?”

  “Only if we go Dutch.”

  Roger Dormant was lying on top of the quilt in his pyjamas and bathrobe nursing a highball and wishing he felt sleepy. The television set in the corner, a concession to Celia’s insomnia, was dark. A bedside radio mumbled quietly. Roger almost never watched television unless there was a golf match on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon at a course that had some passing resemblance to those he had played in his youth. Since many of the tournaments seemed to emanate from Texas or California courses with palm trees or mountains or cacti, he rarely kept a set on at all. I wasn’t a bad golfer, he thought. Far from scratch, perhaps a twelve handicap at my best, but that was twenty years ago. When he realized by counting on his fingers that it was thirty-five years ago, he dropped golf as a subject of contemplation. Before he found a new one the telephone beside the bed rang.

  “Hullo?”

  “I was wondering if I would find you there.”

  Thunder, unusual for March, rumbled in the distance. Roger heard rain and sleet whipping the storm windows. “Yes. Hullo, Celia. Where are you?”

  “I’m in Palm Desert with Ann. We’re staying with friends of the Cartrights. They have a beautiful house here.”

  “I saw Peg the other night. She didn’t say anything about Palm Desert. Where is it, in Nevada or someplace? I’ve been rather worried.”

  “Peg doesn’t know we’re here. I ran into these people in the lobby of the Beverly Wilshire. We saw them when they were in Boston a year ago. They just invited us and we came.”

  “It’s good to hear your voice.”

  “What about the Sample person?”

  He set his drink carefully on the night table. “What about her?”

  “Are you seeing her?”

  “Of course I’m not seeing her. What a strange notion. I haven’t seen her since the reception at the Club. That was months ago. Why do you ask?”

  “Do you know how many people have called me about that little evening at the Club?”

  “No. How many?”

  “So, now you have decided to be the one to overturn tradition and champion women’s rights at the Charles Club.”

  Roger sat up and straightened his pyjama bottoms. “Well, not exactly.”

  “What exactly then do you think you’re doing?”

  “As a matter of fact, I just got tired of all the ruckus at the Club. You’d think the Redcoats were coming again. I believe the whole issue is stupid and irrelevant. So I am sponsoring a woman for membership. I think it will be good for the Club as a matter of fact.”

  “Why that woman?”

  “Why not? She’s a friend of Ann’s. And she’s charming.” He immediately wished to retract the last remark.

  “She’s not a close friend. They weren’t at Smith together. In fact, I haven’t been able to find out where this person went to college, if she did.”

  “Can’t Ann tell you?”

  “She probably could but she won’t. I’m not particularly pleased with my family at the moment.”

  Roger felt an unaccustomed pang of gratitude toward his daughter. At least she wasn’t trying to make things worse. Then again, she had precipitated the whole situation.

  “Are you there?”

  “Yes, I’m here,” he said.

  “If you want to do something silly you might at least do it with someone we know.”

  “Would that make it better?”

  “No, as a matter of fact, it wouldn’t. It’s just bizarre to think of you doing something like this. And don’t expect me to sit around in Dover fielding telephone calls about it from my erstwhile friends.”

  “Aren’t you coming home?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What are you and Ann doing?”

  “When we do anything we shop.”

  Roger shuddered and pulled his pyjamas out of his crotch again. “What are you shopping for?”

  “Ann is buying clothes and looking for a horse. I am looking at antiques.”

  “What kind of antiques can you find in Nevada?”

  “That’s not a bad question. Perhaps we’ll fly to Reno or Las Vegas and do some research.”

  Roger could not think what to say.

  “I hear she is very attractive, young.”

  He still had no answer.

  “Are you going to persist? To make yourself a laughingstock?”

  That helped him. “Yes,” he said and heard her hang up.

  Chapter 31

  The Music Room of the Pilgrim Club, because of the sunlight, the handsome French furniture, and the peach silk draperies, was the tea location of
choice. Large formal teas were held in the Guest Parlor. Intimate teas for which some desire or need for privacy existed were poured in the cheerful little Conservatory, except in the summertime when the glass walls and skylight heated the room above the comfort level. The Mansion, as the older members called their brownstone clubhouse, was larger by one story than the Charles Club. Its kitchen had been redesigned by a master chef in 1942 and was conceded to be one of the best equipped in Boston, the equal of some of the better hotels and restaurants. A ballroom occupied half the third floor. The ten guest apartments on the fifth were pretty and comfortable. The mortgage had been burned in 1950. Even the cellar was orderly. An efficient thermostat which compared the outside temperature with those of twelve interior zones kept the heating system both economical and comfortable. The Pilgrims, three hundred and eighty women who lived in and around Boston and twenty-six who dwelt in other cities and maintained non-resident memberships, took their comfort serenely for granted. Peg Cartright had decided this complacency needed to be challenged.

  “The evening was quite beyond description,” she said to the twelve women grouped around her in the sunniest corner of the Music Room. “I have not had so much to drink since my son’s wedding, and that was twenty, no, twenty-two years ago. I had no idea how I was going to get home. It was two in the morning and we were sitting on empty wine crates in this indescribably filthy cellar, passing around a bottle of port all covered with cobwebs and dust, the bottle I mean, gulping it down, it was delicious, or so I thought at the time, out of every sort of glassware imaginable, when …”

  “How did you?”

  “How did I what?”

  “Get home?”

  “In a limousine. Delivered to my door, thank goodness.”

  “How foresighted. But aren’t they awfully expensive?”

  “Not this one. It was ‘on the house,’ as he put it. I was the guest of the owner.”

  “The owner of the limousine?”

  “The owner of the limousine company. He gave me his card. Told me to call them anytime. I must say, he was terribly ingratiating.”

  “What was he like?”

  “Was he younger?”

  “Was he a member of the Charles?”

  “He was an Elk, and I found him charming, and that’s all I’m going to say about him.” Peg extended her cup for some hot water and tried to get back on track. She felt like Paul Revere but no one was looking out the window. “The point I’m trying to make, not very successfully, is that the entire evening at the Charles Club reminded me of nothing so much as a fraternity party out of control.”

  “Isn’t that a redundancy?”

  “In my memory it is.”

  “What do you mean, ‘an Elk’?”

  “It sounds like fun.”

  “It sounds like the old Tennis & Racquet Club.”

  “Now, exactly. I can remember my father talking about the goings on at the T&R,” said Peg, struggling to advance the discourse.

  “If you try hard, you can probably remember some yourself,” said the tall woman sitting behind the coffee urn.

  “Well, as a matter of fact, I can. Do you know they kept a suitcase in the cloakroom for couples who wanted to check into the Copley, or wherever, for the night? Adam Winchester was in the process of doing just that when the bellboy picked it up and the clasp let go and a dozen empty Champagne bottles went all over the lobby floor. His date, needless to say, fled.”

  “Who was she?”

  “That’s not important.”

  “Then why are you blushing?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. I’m just not getting the message across, am I?”

  “You are to me.”

  “What message?”

  “Well,” Peg picked up the cudgels again, “the Charles Club are a bunch of little boys whose clubhouse is in simply appalling condition. They may have the second best chef in Boston, and a huge stock of wine, which apparently barely suffices, but the place is falling down around their ears, and they have an immense mortgage.” She paused and looked around the circle.

  “Is that the message?”

  “And they want to merge,” said Peg.

  “Merge? In what sense?”

  “In every sense of the word if the behavior at the party was any indication,” said Charlotte Coupon crisply.

  “What did you think of it? Them?”

  “Some of them were rather abominable. The rest were actually quite nice.”

  “Which? That is, which were which?”

  “Never mind that. This is an issue we must discuss. They have not put it forward in any formal way.” Peg’s handsome square jaw and lofty forehead framed in slabs of carefully arranged white hair gave her a resemblance not so much to Paul Revere as to Alexander Hamilton, who stood on his pediment outside the window. “We can expect their proposal any day now.”

  “Proposal? I mean, really.”

  “It might be worth considering, a proposal, I mean,” said Charlotte, to Peg’s intense annoyance. The other women looked at her with varying degrees of surprise. She had only been a member for a few months and she rarely spoke unless spoken to. She was younger and not from Boston. Nevertheless, she gathered her courage and pressed on. “You know why they want to do it. Seymour Gland was the one who explained it all to me. It’s a question of survival.”

  “Whose survival?”

  “Certainly theirs,” said Peg Cartright. “They are one of the prime targets of that woman on the Licensing Board. They have less than a month to do something, or …”

  “Or run dry. A lot of good that wine cellar will do them then.”

  “But this is our problem as well,” said Charlotte. “We haven’t had all the publicity, those pieces in the Sphere, the jokes on the radio talk shows, but we will have to comply at some point or we’ll lose our license, too.”

  “Well, that would hardly be the catastrophe for us that it will be for the Charles.”

  There was a murmur. “I’m not so sure,” said the tall woman behind the urn. “It would certainly put a damper on things. How could we have a proper party? Remember the Garden Committee Dinner last fall?” They all remembered the Garden Committee Dinner for a moment with the exception of Charlotte, who had not been a member then.

  “My husband,” she said, “who is a member of the Charles Club, still thinks there is some legal thing they can do. There’s a case pending in the Supreme Court. About the New York Athletic Club. But Mr. Gland doesn’t think there is any escape.”

  “None at all?”

  “Except by merging the clubs.”

  “Well, he was hinting at that to me, too,” said Peg, “at least insofar as he was able to communicate that night. Why do they not just come right out and ask?”

  “I think they’re feeling us, well, I think they’re trying to discover what we think about it before they do.”

  Peg set her cup down firmly. “Well, I, for one, am against it. At best, it would be a marriage of convenience, mostly their convenience, and I’m not at all certain they’re the best catch in town.”

  “What about the Somerset?”

  “What, indeed.”

  “Why are we discussing this at all?” asked the woman behind the urn, who was on the Garden Committee but had not attended the fateful event down the street. “Why can’t we just go on the way we have done?”

  “Because we just can’t,” said Peg. “I know that much. But beyond that I’m not sure I know anything at all.”

  Henry Handle sat, hands wrapped around a draft beer, staring at the large screen. Skaters in black and red darted across it in haphazard patterns. Until a few minutes ago he had been following the game. The moment his attention lapsed the logic dissolved and Bruins and Canadiens moved in random choreography. The noise level in the Tap Room was high, usual for a Monday night, one of the busiest of the week, when many members sought recovery from the weekend and more than a few looked for reinforcement for the week to come. Henry’s lack of concentra
tion was interrupted by his son, who pulled up a captain’s chair and sat down beside him at the scarred wooden table. Although thirty pounds lighter, Henry Jr. was six feet four, which put him two inches above his father. Hockey was not the son’s sport. Almost single-handed he had taken the Medford High School football team into the final playoff game against Archbishop Williams in 1979. Although they lost by three points, one brilliant run by Hankie, as he was called, generated an aura which still clung. Heroics on the playing field had a long shelf life in Medford. “What’sa matter, Dad? What’sa score?”

  “I don’t know,” replied Henry. “I’m beginning to think I really don’t know.”

  “No, I mean the score of the game? The Broons?”

  “I don’t know that, either. I lost track. Do you know, Hankie, that this lodge could be ruint, destroyed, messed up so bad we could lose half our membership?”

  “Yeah? What’sa matter? Someone got AIDS?”

  “You know, that’s not funny? I’m serious. This is a serious matter. I don’t think I know how to handle it.”

  “This is about the club thing, right? You went to that big dinner in Boston with all the rich guys?” A shout was cut off like a thrown switch as Cam Neely hit the post of the Canadiens’ goal with a pointblank backhander.

  “Yeah, the club thing. We’re in it, you know. Can you imagine this place without a drop? I think we got to elect a few wives as members and then tell them to stay away.”

  “Dad, you know that’s not going to work. You try that and your ass is grass.”

  “You watch your mouth. But you’re right. Even as I say it, I know.”

  “First of all, you elect somebody’s wife, all the others want to join, too. How’dya choose? What’dya say to all the others?”

  “Right.”

  “Then you tell them to stay away? Forget it. All that’s gonna do, make em wanna come in, see what’s going on.”

  “Right.”

  “Better think of something else.”

  “You better think of something else. I’m too old and tired to deal with this. It’s a lose-lose if I ever saw one. I got a business to run. That’s enough grief. You just drive a machine.”