Devon shook her head at him. “I’m trying to get away from this topic, do you understand?”
Austin didn’t seem to hear her. “And when I told Mr. Berducido, he said, ‘that girl, the one you were talking to on the porch?’ and I said, ‘exactly,’ and he said, ‘excellent.’”
“That’s a wonderful story,” Devon said with a sigh. “Let me ask you this: is there anyone in the world you haven’t told about this? Is everyone I know already plotting to send me to Spain with you?”
“Not your parents,” Austin said, without missing a beat. “I’m saving them for last. They might be a challenge.”
She huffed at him. “Excuse me. I’m the challenge.”
Austin took a step closer to her. She realized they hadn’t been this close since their date down at Agawam. “No,” he said. “You’re easy.”
“Shut – ”
She tried to be angry with him, but he kissed her under the awning, and she felt herself weakening. Too much of this, and she would again be ready to agree to anything. He pulled back from her a few inches. “Who am I going to hang out with when I’m there otherwise?” he asked “A bunch of curvy, smooth-skinned Spanish women?”
She stepped back from him. Crossed her arms. “That is not nice.”
“I’m asking you to visit me,” he said. “Like a good friend would. Isn’t that nice enough?” He held out a hand to her. Beckoned her.
She threw up her hands. “Let’s go into the club already,” she said suddenly. Her hesitation from before was gone. Maybe because she was now desperate to change the subject. But maybe because it seemed possible that there would be plenty of privacy in there. “I’ve always wanted to see what’s actually inside this stupid place,” she said, trying to sound irreverent. Trying to sound as though she weren’t thinking about looking for another place he could kiss her.
He nodded, and they headed up the stairs and through the door on the right.
The one that had been conveniently kept unlocked for them.
3
Austin nodded silently at the man sitting behind the front desk. The man nodded back once, and he rose to bolt the door they had just entered. He didn’t nod at Devon. He didn’t even seem to see her.
“This is weird,” she whispered.
“Just keep walking.”
Devon saw elevators on the right, but Austin steered her toward a wide set of stairs. “One floor at a time,” he whispered.
They walked up the staircase, which was huge and marble and seemed to be set into the corner of the building itself. It was covered in a wide blue runner of thick carpet, and there were sconces with vases of flowers set into the wall at intervals along the way.
“Already this is absurd,” Devon whispered. “Who’s replacing these flowers every day?”
Austin shrugged. “Gnomes. Wait until you see the second floor.”
They arrived at the landing, and Devon had to stop for a moment. She almost didn’t want to go any farther. “Who designed this?” she said in a tone of wonder. “Why is the ceiling so high?”
Austin shrugged again, and he shook his head. Nothing about the Racquet Club made any sense unless you pretended you were a king. Or at least a duke. In which case it all felt just about right. He led her into the main sitting room, which was in semi-darkness now that the club was officially closed. It was an immense space with a huge central table and the biggest oriental rug Devon had ever seen. Along the walls were large paintings of horses and fox hunts and men in tuxedos, and near the walls were leather easy-chairs and backgammon tables and racks of the day’s newspapers threaded into portable reading bars. On the central table were magazines organized by category and huge, silver trays and tea canteens for the 3 PM daily service. At the far side of the room were two enormous doors that opened out onto a balcony. Devon walked up to these doors and looked out, and then Austin was at her side, opening one of the doors.
“Wait, someone might see – ”
He ignored her and pulled her along. Now they were standing out on the balcony, high above the street despite being only on the second floor, looking south across Park Avenue. The building across the way had been built back from the street, leaving space for a fountain and a public square; the extra breathing room made their view from the balcony seem not just privileged, but regal. Oratorical. As though they had come out to address their subjects in matters of state.
A single cab sped under them on the street below.
“Okay,” Devon whispered, as though fearful of being discovered at any minute. “Back inside.”
Austin closed the doors behind them. “This is the main hall,” he said, as though narrating a tour. “During regular hours, no one’s allowed on the second floor without a suit. Or at least a coat and tie. The library and dining room are over there, and the restaurant is over here.”
They went first to the restaurant, which was even darker than the main room without lights on. But Devon could still see the large tables, the leather-upholstered booths, the long, polished bar.
They walked back past the main room, and then they were headed for the dining room and the library. Austin took a quick left through a set of doors, flicked a switch, and suddenly they were in a huge pool hall. Eight green-felt-covered tables sat in the silence, waiting. Pool cues lined the walls, each with a name stenciled carefully above it. Above the cues were boards with rows and rows of gold-painted names.
Austin saw Devon looking up at the boards. “Champions from each year,” he said. “They take their tournaments pretty seriously around here.”
Devon nodded and looked back down at the pool tables. She realized there was something wrong: most of the tables had no pockets.
“How do you play pool on these things?”
“It’s billiards, not pool. You just use three balls. You try to make the cue ball hit both of the others in one shot.”
Devon paused, waiting for more. “That’s it?”
“That’s it. There’s Bottle Pool and Cowboy and a whole mess of other variations, but it’s basically all the same thing.
“Do you play?”
“Nope. I’m a racquet man.”
“Ah, yes,” Devon said. “How could I forget? Captain of the team. You must do well around here.”
“So-so. There’s no tennis here. Not that kind, anyway.”
She frowned at him. “We’re in the Racquet and Tennis Club, right?”
“Right, but hold on a second.” He flicked off the lights and led her out of the billiards room. “This is the dining room, and this is the library. Just so you can say you’ve seen the whole club.”
Devon took a quick look. Two more immense rooms. Ceilings so high you could fly a kite. Beautiful, arch-topped windows, and paintings along the walls that looked as though they had been taken from the Metropolitan Museum. She blew air out of her mouth, trying to sound unimpressed. “Is there going to be any kissing on this tour?”
“There is.”
He drew her close and kissed her, and she was aware of the complete silence around them. So strange in the middle of New York City. They stood in a silent, twenty-foot-ceilinged room with gilded moldings and infinite space, and enjoyed a kiss in a club where no women were admitted.
It was a delicious kiss, Devon decided.
“As you know, women are allowed to come in here sometimes,” Austin said after he had released her. “But that’s just for parties and events now and then.” He gave her another quick kiss. Then another. As if to make sure her lips were properly placed, like a fastidious painter putting the finishing touches on a favorite piece. “But women are never, ever allowed on the third floor.” He paused and grinned at her. “So let’s get going. There’s something I want to show you up there. You’ll like it.”
She didn’t bother arguing. She followed him to the stairs, and they headed up.
4
Peter Hall would have been surprised to learn that his daughter was about to visit the third floor of the Racquet Club, th
ough not especially concerned. If asked, he would have said that the no-women rule there was equivalent to the one in a men’s bathroom. Granted, the Racquet Club was no bathroom. But in the end it was still just a big building where boys could congregate and talk to each other. Like a very large, very well-appointed tree house.
In any case, he and Cynthia were enjoying a quiet night on their own with the Southampton house empty. They had even allowed themselves a couple of drinks, despite the doctor’s warnings to the contrary. By 11:30, which was approximately the same time that Austin was leading Devon up the stairs to a floor where no women were ever supposed to go, Peter and Cynthia Hall were ready to call it a night.
They crawled into bed without even turning on the bedside lamp, because there was no use pretending that either one of them had the energy for reading. Or for anything else. This was the latest that Peter had been up since coming home from the hospital, and Cynthia’s nerves were still frayed from having to stand constant watch; changing her husband’s bandage every day kept her in a state of permanent vigilance, permanent fear. The fear that Peter might fall suddenly. Or begin slurring his speech. Or any one of the half-dozen things that would indicate a complication – an aneurysm, a stroke, anything at all – stemming from his injury. Nighttime was a relief for her, simply because she could not be on watch. She had slept more deeply in the last two weeks than she had since the age of seventeen.
They had settled in now, adjusted the pillows and the sheets and the comforter in the personal, idiosyncratic ways that couples do. Peter with one leg outside the blanket. Cynthia with her entire body wrapped up as tightly as possible, like a caterpillar awaiting metamorphosis. Then the quiet came down on them, and already Cynthia was beginning the small, involuntary twitches that meant sleep was coming upon her; her head sunk one inch deeper into the pillow.
Peter whispered in the dark.
At first she thought she had dreamed it. She took a quick breath through her nose and opened her eyes. She stared up at nothing and waited, as if listening for the second step of a prowler downstairs in the kitchen somewhere. Then her husband spoke again.
“What did they call it?” he whispered.
Cynthia gave her mind a second to process, wondering if they had been in the middle of talking about something right before bed, something she had forgotten as she drifted off. But no previous thread occurred to her. No conversational blocks dropped into place.
She closed her eyes again, and the need to sleep was so strong that she almost forgot to answer. “What did who?” she whispered. Even more quietly. “Call what?”
There was a long pause, and Cynthia was relieved. She had dreamed it. He hadn’t been speaking to her. She could go to sleep.
No she couldn’t.
“When I was out,” Peter whispered. “All that time when I was unconscious after the accident. What did the doctors call it? How did they refer to me?”
She let this sink into her head. Then all at once she could see where he was going. She could predict, could almost hear the exact words that would make up the rest of this conversation. They called it a coma-like state, she would say. He would think about this, and then he would say, Which is like a vegetative state? To which she would reply that she wasn’t sure, and they would go back and forth trying to put their fingers on the exact, precise definition of what his condition had been at the time. Eventually there would be no more room for stalling, which would force him finally to ask if he had ever been declared – in a binding, legal sense – to be in a state that would require a transfer of powers of attorney, and blah blah it didn’t matter because it would eventually get all the way to the place she didn’t want to go.
All the way him actually speaking the phrase.
Non Compos Mentis.
She would be forced to reply. She would be forced to react. And whether she lied or told the truth or said nothing at all, he would know. He would know that the lawyer had come with his hateful briefcase of notes and papers and large manila envelopes, and Peter would know that she had read the note. That she had read it, and that she knew.
That she knew all of it.
Cynthia could not imagine what would happen to them as a couple – as husband and wife – if they were ever forced to confront that kind of truth together. So she used the only tool available to her. She feigned sleep. Sleep and ignorance. “Life-threatening,” she mumbled, trying to sound vaguely annoyed. As if she didn’t want to rehash the details of this ordeal. As if he were being self-indulgent. She rolled away and pulled the blankets around her more tightly, like a lover spurning an advance. “They said you had suffered a life-threatening injury, and an ischemic event, and that you were in critical condition,” she said.
And there’s nothing more to say about it.
She made her breathing sound deep and heavy, like that of someone drifting off to sleep again, and she waited for him to push back. To ask again, in a way that she would be unable to parry with medical terms and emotion.
But he did not ask again. He sighed once and turned over the other way.
Cynthia was careful not to cry. She would have trouble going to sleep now, but she could wait. She could wait as long as necessary, just so that Peter would think she had drifted off to sleep, completely unconcerned. No idea what he was driving at. She had fielded Devon’s question about this a few days ago, and now she had handled her husband. So maybe they could all just go back to the way it had been.
And this might have been true, if it hadn’t been for what Devon saw at the Racquet Club that night.
The name on the wall.
5
“This doesn’t look so special,” Devon said when they had reached the top of the stairs. The layout here on the third floor was less formal. There was a wall-to-wall green carpet on the floor and less free space. More walls, more chairs and corridors and doorways. Directly ahead of them was an open door leading to a gym area with weights and treadmills. “What, women aren’t allowed to see workout equipment?”
“This whole floor is essentially a locker room,” Austin explained. “The dressing room is down there to the right, and the showers and sauna and steam room are to the left. There’s a pool, too. Point is, naked men walk through here all the time during the day. Sometimes they wear a towel, but sometimes not.”
Devon looked left and right, as though checking for stray naked men who might have forgotten to leave the club at the proper hour.
“Don’t get excited,” Austin said. “Anyway, the squash courts are over here, and above us are the Racquets courts and the Tennis courts. We’ll get to those in a minute.”
“I thought you said there was no tennis here.”
He sighed. “Seriously, just wait. You’ll see what I mean.”
“I don’t see any lockers. Where do you keep all your gear, all your athletic clothes and sneakers and stuff? Do you bring a backpack?”
Austin let out a good-natured laugh. “You just come to the dressing room, and someone brings your clothes in a roll.”
“They bring them?”
“When you’re done you go shower, and you leave your sweaty stuff on the floor. By the time you’re back from your shower it’s been picked up. And it’s clean the next day when you come back.”
Devon smiled. “So you’re nothing but a bunch of spoiled boys.”
“Correct.” He pointed up above the doors to the gym. “This is what I wanted to show you. Look there.”
Devon looked, and she saw another series of huge boards hung along the wall. Like the ones she had seen in the billiards room. These boards had titles like “Racquets Ladder Champion” and “Court Tennis Challenge Cup.”
“That one,” Austin said, pointing. “About a quarter of the way up.”
Devon scanned the board he was pointing to. It said “Doubles Squash Annual.” She scanned the names, each one painted in a firm, gold copperplate. The older ones had started to fade, and they were difficult to read. But lower down the paint was fresher,
and the names there stood out in brilliant contrast to the dark green background of the boards themselves. She finally found what Austin was talking about.
At first she was delighted, but then she was confused.
And then troubled.
1990………… Peter Hall
“There you go,” Austin said triumphantly. “Squash champion. I’m sure you already knew he was good at it, but there’d be no way you would ever actually have a chance to see his name on the board. I wanted to get you up here. So you could take a look for yourself.”
Devon nodded slowly. Tried to smile back at him. Tried to look appreciative. Then she just stood there, looking up at her father’s name. She did like seeing it there.
But there was a problem.
I didn’t know he played squash.
Not that she cared. Not that she needed to know what sports her father played, or how he spent his time when he was out of the house. And yet something about it made her uncomfortable. It nagged at her.
He won the whole tournament, she thought. He was the champion. There isn’t a squash racquet in our house. Or a squash ball. Or a shirt with a little picture of a squash racquet on it. There’s nothing.
And again, no big deal. Not really. The year he had won, 1993, was the year just before Devon had been born, so maybe Peter Hall had simply decided to abandon the game once his baby girl had come along. Maybe he had decided he no longer had the time. Which would have been fine. Which would have made sense.
Except for this: there was another name on the board.
It was a doubles championship, so Peter Hall had not stood alone that year. He had needed a partner. The line on the board read, in full, as follows:
1993…………Peter Hall & Jerry Dunn
And that seemed strange.
Because her father and Jerry Dunn could never have been partners. In squash, or in anything. Then, or now, or ever. They had nothing in common. Her father was refined and gentle and focused, and Jerry Dunn was simply a lout. Yes, the Dunns and the Halls belonged to the same clubs in Southampton, but that was just a coincidence. Jerry Dunn and Peter Hall were not friends. They didn’t joke with each other. Or even talk with each other. Neither one seemed to acknowledge the other’s existence.
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