THE BREATHING METHOD

1: The Club

I dressed a bit more speedily than normal on that snowy, windy, bitter night - I admit it. It

was 23 December, 197-, and I suspect that there were other members of the club who did

the same. Taxis are notoriously hard to come by in New York on stormy nights, so I

called for a radio-cab. I did this at five-thirty for an eight o'clock pick-up - my wife raised

an eyebrow but said nothing. I was under the awning of the apartment building on East

58th Street, where Ellen and I had lived since 1946, by quarter to eight, and when the taxi

was five minutes late, I found myself pacing up and down impatiently.

The taxi arrived at 8.10 and I got in, too glad to be out of the wind to be as angry with the

driver as he probably deserved. That wind, part of a cold front* that had swept down

from Canada the day before, meant business. It whistled and whined around the cab's

window, occasionally drowning out the salsa on the driver's radio and rocking the big

Checker on its springs. Many of the stores were open but the sidewalks were nearly bare

of last-minute shoppers. Those that were abroad looked uncomfortable or actually pained.

It had been flurrying off and on all day, and now the snow began again, coming first in

thin membranes, then twisting into cyclone shapes ahead of us in the street Coming home

that night, I would think of the combination of snow, a taxi, and New York City with

considerably greater unease ... but 1 did not of course know that then.

At the corner of 3rd and Fortieth, a large tinsel Christmas bell went floating through the

intersection like a spirit

'Bad night,' the cabbie said. "They'll have an extra two dozen in the morgue tomorrow.

Wino Popsicles. Plus a few bag-lady Popsicles.'

'I suppose.'

The cabbie ruminated. 'Well, good riddance,' he said finally. 'Less welfare, right?'

'Your Christmas spirit,' I said, 'is stunning in its width and depth.'

The cabbie ruminated. 'You one of those bleeding-hear liberals?' he asked finally.

'I refuse to answer on the grounds that my answer might tend to incriminate me,' I said.

The cabbie gave a why-do-I-always-get-the-wisenheimers snort... but he shut up.

He let me out at 2nd and Thirty-Fifth, and I walked halfway down the block to the club,

bent over against the whistling wind, holding my hat on my head with one gloved hand.

In almost no time at all the life-force seemed to have been driven deep into my body, a

flickering blue flame about the size of the pilot-light in a gas oven. At seventy-three, a

man feels the cold quicker and deeper. That man should be home in front of a fireplace ...

or at least in front of an electric heater. At seventy-three, hot blood isn't even really a

memory; it's more of an academic concept.

The latest flurry was letting up, but snow as dry as sand still beat into my face. I was glad

to see that the steps leading up to the door of 249 had been sanded - that was Stevens's

work, of course - Stevens knew the base alchemy of old age well enough: not lead into

gold but bones into glass. When I think about such things, I believe that God probably

thinks t great deal like Groucho Marx.

Then Stevens was there, holding the door open, and a moment later I was inside. Down

the mahogany-panelled hallway, through double doors standing three-quarters of the way

open on their recessed tracks, into the library cum reading-room cum bar. It was a dark

room in which occasional pools of light gleamed - reading-lamps. A richer, more textured

light glowed across the oak parquet floor, and I could hear the steady snap of birch logs

in the huge fireplace. The heat radiated all the way across the room -surely there is no

welcome for a man or a woman that can equal a fire on the hearth. A paper rustled - dry,

slightly impatient. That would be Johanssen, with his Wall Street Journal. After ten years,

it was possible to recognize his presence simply by the way he read his stocks. Amusing

... and in a quiet way, amazing.

Stevens helped me off with my overcoat, murmuring that it was a dirty night; WCBS was

now forecasting heavy snow before morning.

I agreed that it was indeed a dirty night and looked back into that big, high-ceilinged

room again. A dirty night, a roaring fire ... and a ghost story. Did I say that at seventythree

hot blood is a thing of the past? Perhaps so. But I felt something warm in my chest

at the thought ... something that hadn't been caused by the fire of Stevens's reliable,

dignified welcome.

I think it was because it was McCarron's turn to tell the tale.

I had been coming to the brownstone which stands at 249 East 35th Street for ten years -

coming at intervals that were almost - but not quite - regular. In my own mind I think of it

is a 'gentleman's club', that amusing pre-Gloria Steinem antiquity. But even now I am not

sure that's what it really is, or how it came to be in the first place.

On the night Emlyn McCarron told his story - the story of the Breathing Method - there

were perhaps thirteen clubmembers in all, although only six of us had come out on that

howling, bitter night. I can remember years when there might have been as few as eight

full-time members, and others when there were at least twenty, and perhaps more.

I suppose Stevens might know how it all came to be - one thing I am sure of is that

Stevens has been there from the first, no matter how long that may be ... and I believe

Stevens to be older than he looks. Much, much older. He has a faint Brooklyn accent, but

in spite of that he is as brutally correct and as cuttingly punctilious as a third-generation

English butler. His reserve is part of his often maddening charm, and Stevens's small

smile is a locked and latched door. I have never seen any club records - if he keeps them.

I have never gotten a receipt of dues - there are no dues. I have never been called by the

club secretary - there is no secretary, and at 249 East 35th, there are no phones. There is

no box of white marbles and black balls. And the club - if it is a club - has never had a

name.

I first came to the club (as I must continue to call it) as the guest of George Waterhouse.

Waterhouse headed the law firm for which I had worked since 1951. My progress upward

in the firm - one of New York's three biggest - had been steady but extremely slow; I was

a slogger, a mule for work, something of a centrepuncher ... but I had no real flair or

genius. I had seen men who had begun at the same time I had, promoted in giant steps

while I only continued to pace -and I saw it with no real surprise.

Waterhouse and I had exchanged pleasantries, attended the obligatory dinner put on by

the firm each October, and had little more congress until the fall of 196-, when he

dropped by my office one day in early November.

This in itself was unusual enough, and it had me thinking black thoughts (dismissal) that

were counterbalanced by giddy ones (an unexpected promotion). It was a puzzling visit.

Waterhouse leaned in the doorway, his Phi Beta Kappa key gleaming mellowly on his

vest, and talked in amiable generalities - none of what he said seemed to have any real

substance or importance. I kept expecting him to finish the pleasantries and get down to

cases: 'Now about this Casey brief,' or 'We've been asked to research the Mayor's

appointment of Salkowitz to -' But it seemed there were no cases. He glanced at his

watch, said he had enjoyed our talk and that he had to be going.

I was still blinking, bewildered, when he turned back and said casually: There's a place

where I go most Thursday nights - a sort of club. Old duffers, mostly, but some of then

are good company. They keep a really excellent cellar, if you've a palate. Every now and

then someone tells a good story, as well. Why not come down some night, David? As my

guest.'

I stammered some reply - even now I'm not sure what it was. I was bewildered by the

offer. It had a spur-of-the-moment sound, but there was nothing spur-of-tbe-moment

about his eyes, blue Anglo-Saxon ice under the bushy white whorls of his eyebrows. And

if I don't remember exactly how I replied, it was because I felt suddenly sure that this

offer -vague and puzzling as it was - had been exactly the specific I had kept expecting

him to get down to.

Ellen's reaction that evening was one of amused exasperation. I had been with

Waterhouse, Garden, Lawton, Frasier, and Effingham for something like twenty years,

and it was clear enough that I could not expect to rise much above the mid-level position

I now held; it was her idea that this was the firm's cost-efficient substitute for a gold

watch.

'Old men telling war stories and playing poker,' she said. 'A night of that and you're

supposed to be happy in the Research Library until they pension you off, I suppose ... oh,

I put two Becks' on ice for you.' And she kissed me warmly. I suppose she had seen

something on my face - God knows she's good at reading me after all the years we've

spent together.

Nothing happened over a course of weeks. When my mind turned to Waterhouse's odd

offer - certainly odd coming from a man with whom I met less than a dozen times a year,

and who I only saw socially at perhaps three parties a year, including the company party

in October - I supposed that I had been mistaken about the expression in his eyes, that he

really had made the offer casually, and had forgotten it. Or regretted it - ouch! And then

he approached me one late afternoon, a man of nearly seventy who was still broadshouldered

and athletic looking. I was shrugging on my topcoat with my briefcase

between my feet. He said: 'If you'd still like to have a drink at the club, why not come

tonight?'

'Well,..I...'

'Good.' He slapped a slip of paper into my hand. 'Here's the address.'

He was waiting for me at the foot of the steps that evening, and Stevens held the door for

us. The wine was as excellent as Waterhouse had promised. He made no attempt

whatsoever to 'introduce me around' - I took that for snobbery but later recanted the idea -

but two or three of them introduced themselves to me. One of those who did so was

Emlyn McCarron, even then in his early seventies. He held out his hand and I clasped it

briefly. His skin was dry, leathery, tough; almost turtlelike. He asked me if I played

bridge. I said I did not.

'God damned good thing,' he said 'That god damned game has done more in this century

to kill intelligent after-dinner conversation than anything else I can think of.' And with

that pronouncement he walked away into the murk of the library, where shelves of books

went up apparently to infinity.

I looked around for Waterhouse, but he had disappeared. Feeling a little uncomfortable

and a lot out of place, I wandered over to the fireplace. It was, as I believe I have already

mentioned, a huge thing - it seemed particularly huge in New York, where apartmentdwellers

such as myself have trouble imagining such a benevolence big enough to do

anything more than pop corn or toast bread. The fireplace at 249 East 35th was big

enough to broil an ox whole. There was no mantle; instead a brawny stone arch curved

over it This arch was broken in the centre by a keystone which jutted out slightly. It was

just on the level of my eyes, and although the light was dim, I could read the legend

engraved on that stone with no trouble: IT IS THE TALE, NOT HE WHO TELLS IT.

'Here you go, David,' Waterhouse said from my elbow, and I jumped. He hadn't deserted

me after all; had only trudged off into some uncharted locale to bring back drinks.

'Bombay martini's yours, isn't it?'

'Yes. Thank you. Mr Waterhouse -'

'George,' he said. 'Here it's just George.'

'George, then,' I said, although it seemed slightly mad to be using his first name. 'What is

all of-'

'Cheers,' he said.

We drank. The martini was perfect. I said so instead of finishing my question.

'Stevens tends the bar. He makes fine drinks. He likes to say it's a small but vital skill.'

The martini took the edge off my feelings of disorientation and awkwardness (the edge,

but the feelings themselves remained - I had spent nearly half an hour gazing into my

closet and wondering what to wear; I had finally settled on dark brown slacks and a rough

tweed jacket that almost matched them, hoping I would not be wandering into a group of

men either turned out in tuxedos or wearing bluejeans and L.L. Bean's lumberjack shirts

... it seemed that I hadn't gone too far wrong on the matter of dress, anyway). A new

place and a new situation makes one crucially aware of every social act, no matter how

small, and at that moment, drink in hand and the obligatory small toast made, I wanted

very much to be sure that I hadn't overlooked any of the amenities.

'Is there a guest book I ought to sign?' 1 asked. 'Something like that?'

He looked mildly surprised. 'We don't have anything like that,' he said. 'At least, I don't

think we do.' He glanced around the dim, quiet room. Johanssen rattled his Wall Street

Journal, I saw Stevens pass in a doorway at the far end of the room, ghostly in his white

messjacket. George put his drink on an endtable and tossed a fresh log onto the fire.

Sparks corkscrewed up the black throat of the chimney.

'What does that mean?' I asked, pointing to the inscription on the keystone. 'Any idea?'

Waterhouse read it carefully, as if for the first time. IT IS THE TALE, NOT HE WHO

TELLS IT.

'I suppose I have an idea,' he said. 'You may, too, if you should come back. Yes, I should

say you may have an idea or two. In time. Enjoy yourself, David.'

He walked away. And, although it may seem odd, having been left to sink or swim in

such an unfamiliar situation, I did enjoy myself. For one thing, I have always loved

books, and there was a trove of interesting ones to examine here. I walked slowly along

the shelves, examining the spines as best I could in the faint light, pulling one out now

and then, and pausing once to look out a narrow window at the 2nd Avenue intersection

up the street. I stood there and watched through the frost-rimmed glass as the traffic light

at the intersection cycled from red to green to amber and back to red again, and quite

suddenly I felt the queerest - and yet very welcome -sense of peace come to me. It did not

flood in; instead it seemed to almost steal in. Oh yes, I can hear you saying, that makes

great sense; watching a stop-and-go light gives everyone a sense of peace.

All right; it made no sense. I grant you that. But the feeling was there, just the same. It

made me think for the first time i r years of the winter nights in the Wisconsin farmhouse

where I grew up: lying in bed in a draughty upstairs room and marking die contrast

between the whistle of the January wind outside, drifting snow as dry as sand along miles

of snow-fence, and the warmth my body created under the two quilts.

There were some law books, but they were pretty damn strange: Twenty Cases of

Dismemberment and Their Outcomes under British Law is one title I remember. Pet

Cases was another. I opened that one and sure enough, it was a scholarly legal tome

dealing with the law's treatment (American law, this time) of cases which bore in some

important respect upon pets - everything from housecats that had inherited great sums of

money to an ocelot that had broken its chain and seriously injured a postman.

There was a set of Dickens, a set of Defoe, a nearly endless set of Trollope; and there was

also a set of novels - eleven of them - by a man named Edward Gray Seville. They were

bound in handsome green leather, and the name of the firm gold-stamped on the spine

was Stedham & Son. I had never heard of Seville nor of his publishers. The copyright

date of the first Seville - These Were Our Brothers - was 1911. The date of the last,

Breakers, was 1935.

Two shelves down from the set of Seville novels was a large folio volume which

contained careful step by step plans for Erector Set enthusiasts. Next to it was another

folio volume which featured famous scenes from famous movies. Each of these pictures

filled one whole page, and opposite each, filling the facing pages, were free-verse poems

either about the scenes with which they were paired or inspired by them. Not a very

remarkable concept, but the poets who were represented were remarkable - Robert Frost,

Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Louis Zukofsky, and Erica

Jong, to mention just a few. Halfway through the book I found a poem by Archibald

MacLeish set next to that famous photograph of Marilyn Monroe standing on the subway

grating and trying to hold her skirt down. The poem was titled The Toll' and it began:

The shape of the skirt is

-we would say-

the shape of a bell

The legs are the clapper -

And some such more. Not a terrible poem, but certainly not MacLeish's best or anywhere

near the top drawer. I felt I could hold such an opinion because I had read a good deal of

Archibald MacLeish over the years. I could not, however, recall this poem about Marilyn

Monroe (which it is; the poem announces it even when divorced from the picture - at the

end MacLeish writes: My legs clap my name:/Marilyn, ma belle). I have looked for it

since then and haven't been able to find it;.. which means nothing, of course. Poems are

not like novels or legal opinions; they are more like blown leaves and any omnibus

volume titled The Complete So-and-So must certainly be a lie. Poems have a way of

getting lost under sofas - it is one of their charms, and one of the reasons they endure. But

-

At some point Stevens came by with a second martini (by then I had settled into a chair

of my own with a volume of Ezra Pound). It was as perfect as the first. As I sipped it I

saw two of those present, George Gregson and Harry Stein (Harry was six years dead on

the night Emlyn McCarron told us the story of the Breathing Method), leave the room by

a peculiar door less than three feet high. It was an Alice Down the Rabbit-Hole door if

ever there was one. They left it open, and shortly after their odd exit from the library I

heard the muted click of billiard balls.

Stevens passed by and asked if I would like another martini. I declined with real regret

He nodded. 'Very goodt sir.' His face never changed, and yet I had an obscure feeling that

I had somehow pleased him.

Laughter startled me from my book sometime later. Someone had thrown a packet of

chemical powder into the fire and turned the flames momentarily parti-coloured. I

thought of my boyhood again ... but not in any wistful, sloppily romantic-nostalgic way. I

feel a great need to emphasize that, God knows why. I thought of times when I had done

just such a thing as a kid, but the memory was a strong one, pleasant, untinged with

regret.

I saw that most of the others had drawn chairs up around the hearth in a semi-circle.

Stevens had produced a heaping, smoking platter of marvellous hot sausages. Harry Stein

returned through the down-the-rabbit-hole door, introducing himself hurriedly but

pleasantly to me. Gregson remained in the billiard room, practising shots, by the sound.

After a moment's hesitation I joined the others. A story was told - not a pleasant one. It

was Norman Stett who told it, and while it is not my purpose to recount it here, perhaps

you'll understand what I mean about its quality if I tell you that it was about a man who

drowned in a telephone booth.

When Stett - who is also dead now - finished, someone said, 'You should have saved it

for Christmas, Norman.' There was laughter, which I of course did not understand. At

least, not then.

Waterhouse himself spoke up then, and such a Waterhouse I never would have dreamed

of in a thousand years of dreaming. A graduate of Yale, a Phi Beta Kappa, silver-haired,

three-piece-suited head of a law firm so large it was more enterprise than company - this

Waterhouse told a story that had to do with a teacher who had gotten stuck in a privy.

The privy stood behind the one-room schoolhouse in which she had taught, and the day

she got her caboose jammed into one of the privy's two holes also happened to be the day

the privy was scheduled to be taken away as Anniston County's contribution to the Life

As It Was in New England exhibition being held at the Prudential Center in Boston. The

teacher hadn't made a sound during all the time it took to load the privy onto the back of a

flatbed truck and to spike it down; she was struck dumb with embarrassment and horror,

Waterhouse said. And then the privy door blew off into the passing lane of Route 128 in

Somerville during rush hour -

But draw a curtain over that, and over any other stories which might have followed it;

they are not my stories tonight. At some point Stevens produced a bottle of brandy that

was more than just good; it was damned near exquisite. It was passed around and

Johanssen raised a toast - the toast, one might almost say: The tale, not he who tells it.

We drank to that.

Not long after, men began slipping away. It wasn't late; not yet midnight, anyway; but

I've noticed that when your fifties give way to your sixties, late begins coming earlier and

earlier. I saw Waterhouse slipping his arms into the overcoat Stevens was holding open

for him, and decided that must be my cue. I thought it strange that Waterhouse would slip

away without so much as a word to me (which certainly seemed to be what he was doing;

if I had come back from shelving the Pound book forty seconds later, he would have been

gone), but no stranger than most of the other things that had gone on that evening.

I stepped out just behind him, and Waterhouse glanced around, as if surprised to see me

... and almost as if he had been startled out of a light doze. 'Share a taxi?' he asked, as

though we had just met by chance on this deserted, windy street

'Thank you,' I said. I meant thanks for a great deal more than his offer to share a cab, and

I believe that was unmistakable in my tone, but he nodded as if that was all I had meant.

A taxi with its for-hire light lit was cruising slowly down the street - fellows like George

Waterhouse seem to luck onto cabs even on those miserably cold or snowy New York

nights when you would swear there isn't a cab to be had on the entire island of Manhattan

- and he flagged it.

Inside, safely warm, the taxi-meter charting our journey in measured clicks, I told him

how much I had enjoyed his story. I couldn't remember laughing so hard or so

spontaneously since I was eighteen, I told him, which was not flattery but only the simple

truth.

'Oh? How kind of you to say.' His voice was chillingly polite. I subsided, feeling a dull

flush in my cheeks. One does not always need to hear a slam to know that the door has

been closed.

When the taxi drew up to the kerb in front of my building, I thanked him again, and this

time he showed a trifle more warmth. 'It was good of you to come on such short notice,

he said. 'Come again, if you like. Don't wait for an invitation: we don't stand much on

ceremony at two-four-nine. Thursdays are best for stories, but the club is there every

night'

Am I then to assume membership?

The question was on my lips. I meant to ask it; it seemed necessary to ask it. I was only

mulling it over, listening to it in my head (in my tiresome lawyer's way) to hear if I had

got the phrasing right - perhaps that was a little too blunt - when Waterhouse told the

cabbie to drive on. The next moment the taxi was rolling on towards Madison. I stood

there on the sidewalk for a moment, the hem of my topcoat whipping around my shins,

thinking: He knew I was going to ask that question - he knew it, and he purposely had the

driver go on before I could. Then I told myself that was utterly absurd -paranoid, even.

And it was. But it was also true. I could scoff all I liked; none of the scoffing changed

that essential certainty.

I walked slowly to the door of my building and went inside.

Ellen was sixty per cent asleep when I sat down on the bed to take off my shoes. She

rolled over and made a fuzzy interrogative sound deep in her throat. I told her to go back

to sleep.

She made the muzzy sound again. This time approximated English:

'Howwuzzit?'

For a moment I hesitated, my shirt half-unbuttoned. And I thought with one moment's

utter clarity: If 1 tell her, I will never see the other side of that door again.

'It was all right,' I said. 'Old men telling war stories.'

'I told you so.'

'But it wasn't bad. I might go back again. It might do me some good with the firm.'

' "The firm",' she mocked lightly. 'What an old buzzard you are, my love.'

'It takes one to know one,' I said, but she had already fallen asleep again. I undressed,

showered, towelled, put on my pyjamas ... and then, instead of going to bed as I should

have done (it was edging past one by that time), I put on my robe and had another bottle

of Beck's. I sat at the kitchen table, drinking it slowly, looking out the window and up the

cold canyon of Madison Avenue, thinking. My head was a trifle buzzy from my evening's

intake of alcohol - for me an unexpectedly large intake. But the feeling was not at all

unpleasant, and I had no sense of an impending hangover.

The thought which had come to me when Ellen asked me about my evening was as

ridiculous as the one I'd entertained about George Waterhouse as the cab drew away from

me -what in God's name could be wrong with telling my wife about a perfectly harmless

evening at my boss's stuffy men's club ... and even if something were wrong with telling

her, who would know that I had? No, it was every bit as ridiculous and paranoid as those

earlier musings ... and, my heart told me, every bit as true.

I met George Waterhouse the next day in the hallway between Accounts and the Reading

Library. Met him... Passed him would be more accurate. He nodded my way and went on

without speaking ... as he had done for years.

My stomach muscles ached all day long. That was the only thing that completely

convinced me the evening had been real.

Three weeks passed. Four ... five. No second invitation came from Waterhouse.

Somehow I just hadn't been right; hadn't fitted. Or so I told myself. It was a depressing,

disappointing thought. I supposed it would begin to fade and lose its sting, as all

disappointments eventually do. But I thought of that evening at the oddest moments - the

isolated pools of library lamplight, so still and tranquil and somehow civilized;

Waterhouse's absurd and hilarious tale of the schoolteacher stuck in the privy; the rich

smell of leather in the narrow stacks. Most of all I thought of standing by that narrow

window and watching the frost crystals change from green to amber to red. I thought of

that sense of peace I had felt.

During that same five-week period I went to the library and checked out four volumes of

Archibald MacLeish's poetry (I had three others myself, and had already checked through

them); one of these volumes purported to be The Complete Poems of. I reacquainted

myself with some old favourites, including my favourite MacLeish poem, 'Epistle to Be

Left in Earth.' But I found no poem called 'The Toll' in any of the volumes.

On that same trip to the New York Public Library, I checked the card catalogue for works

of fiction by a man named Edward Gray Seville. A mystery novel by a woman named

Ruth Seville was the closest I came.

Come again, if you like; don't wait for an invitation ...

I was waiting for an invitation anyway, of course; my mother taught me donkey's years

ago not to automatically believe people who tell you glibly to 'drop by anytime' or that

'the door is always open'. I didn't feel I needed an engraved card delivered to my

apartment door by a footman in livery bearing a gilt plate, I don't mean that, but I did

want something, even if it was only a casual remark: 'Coming by some night, David?

Hope we didn't bore you.' That kind of thing.

But when even that didn't come, I began to think more seriously about going back

anyway - after all, sometimes people really did want you to drop in anytime; I supposed

that, at some places, the door always was open; and that mothers weren't always right.

... don't wait for an invitation ...

Anyway, that's how it happened that, on 10 December of that year, I found myself putting

on my rough tweed coat and dark brown pants again and looking for my darkish red tie. I

was rather more aware of my heartbeat than usual that night, I remember.

'George Waterhouse finally broke down and asked you back?' Ellen asked. 'Back into the

sty with the rest of the male chauvinist oinkers?'

'That's right,' I said, thinking it must be the first time in ai least a dozen years that I had

told her a lie ... and then I remembered that, after the first meeting, I had answered her

questions about what it had been like with a lie. Old men telling war stories, I had said.

'Well, maybe there really will be a promotion in it,' she said ... though without much

hope. To her credit, she said it without much bitterness, either.

'Stranger things have happened,' I said, and kissed her goodbye.

'Oink-oink,' she said as I went out the door.

The taxi ride that night seemed very long. It was cold, still, and starry. The cab was a

Checker and I felt somehow very small in it, like a child seeing the city for the first time.

It was excitement I was feeling as the cab pulled up in front of the brownstone -

something as simple and yet complete as that But such simple excitement seems to be

one of life's qualities that slips away almost unnoticed, and its rediscovery as one grows

older is always something of a surprise, like finding a black hair or two in one's comb

years after one had last found such a thing.

I paid the driver, got out, and walked towards the four steps leading to the door. As I

mounted them, my excitement curdled into plain apprehension (a feeling the old are

much more familiar with). What exactly was I doing here?

The door was of thick panelled oak, and to my eye it looked as stout as the door of a

castle keep. There was no doorbell that I could see, no knocker, no closed circuit TV

camera mounted unobtrusively hi the shadow of a deep eave, and, of course, no

Waterhouse waiting to take me in. I stopped at the foot of the steps and looked around.

Thirty-Fifth Street suddenly seemed darker, colder, more threatening. The brownstones

all looked somehow secret, as if hiding mysteries best not investigated. Their windows

looked like eyes.

Somewhere, behind one of those windows, there may be a man or woman contemplating

murder, I thought. A shudder worked up my spine. Contemplating it ...or doing it.

Then, suddenly, the door was open and Stevens was there.

I felt an intense surge of relief. I am not an overly imaginative man, I think - at least not

under ordinary circumstances - but this last thought had had all the eerie clarity of

prophecy. I might have babbled aloud if I hadn't glanced at Stevens's eyes first His eyes

did not know me. His eyes did not know me at all.

Then there was another instance of that eerie, prophetic clarity; I saw the rest of my

evening in perfect detail. Three hours in a quiet bar. Three martinis (perhaps four) to dull

the embarrassment of having been fool enough to go where I wasn't wanted. The

humiliation my mother's advice had been intended to avoid - that which comes with

knowing one has overstepped.

I saw myself going home a little tipsy, but not in a good way. I saw myself merely sitting

through the cab ride rather than experiencing it through that childlike lens of excitement

and anticipation. I heard myself saying to Ellen, It wears thin after a while ... Waterhouse

told the same story about winning a consignment of T-bone steaks for the 3rd Battalion in

a poker game ... and they play Hearts for a dollar a point, can you believe it? ... go back?

... / suppose I might, but I doubt it. And that would be the end of it. Except, I suppose, for

my own humiliation.

I saw all of this in the nothing of Stevens's eyes. Then the eyes warmed. He smiled

slightly and said: 'Mr Adley! Come in. I'll take your coat.'

I mounted the steps and Stevens closed the door firmly behind me. How different a door

can feel when you are on the warm side of it! He took my coat and was gone with it. I

stood in the hall for a moment, looking at my own reflection in the pier glass, a man of

sixty-three whose face was rapidly becoming too gaunt to look middle-aged. And yet the

reflection pleased me.

I slipped into the library.

Johanssen was there, reading his Wall Street Journal. In another island of light, Emlyn

McCarron sat over a chessboard opposite Peter Andrews. McCarron was and is a

cadaverous man, possessed of a narrow, bladelike nose; Andrews was huge, slopeshouldered,

and choleric. A vast ginger-coloured beard sprayed over his vest. Face to face

over the inlaid board with its carved pieces of ivory and ebony, they looked like Indian

totems: eagle and bear.

Waterhouse was there, frowning over that day's Times. He glanced up, nodded at me

without surprise, and disappeared into the paper again.

Stevens brought me a Bombay martini, unasked.

I took it into the stacks and found that puzzling, enticing set of green volumes again. I

began reading the works of Edward Gray Seville that night. I started at the beginning,

with These Were Our Brothers. Since then I have read them all, and believe them to be

eleven of the finest novels of our century.

Near the end of the evening there was a story -just one -and Stevens brought brandy

around. When the tale was told, people began to rise, preparing to leave. Stevens spoke

from the double doorway which communicated with the hallway. His voice was low and

pleasant, but carrying:

'Who will bring us a tale for Christmas, then?'

People stopped what they were doing and glanced around. There was some low,

goodnatured talk and a burst of laughter.

Stevens, smiling but serious, clapped his hands together twice, like a grammar school

teacher calling an unruly class to order. 'Come, gentlemen - who'll bring the tale?'

Peter Andrews, he of the sloped shoulders and gingery beard, cleared his throat. 'I have

something&nbs
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