The Loving Couple Page 3

  Then he had dashed down the stairs, with her shrieking after him, and left the house. Forever. That had neatly—or untidily—wound up five years and ten months of marriage.

  He had been so engrossed in the playback of their epic fight, that he hadn't noticed that he was already at the gates of Riveredge. Only a violent honking and a strident female voice bawling out something quite senseless made him snap to attention. He saw a dark red Jeepster disappear around a bend and realized that he had missed his last chance to see his sister-in-law Alice Marshall. That was all to the good. Alice was one of Riveredge's many features he'd be delighted never to see again.

  The gates of Riveredge were large, wrought iron, impressive and firmly closed to all who had no business to be in Riveredge. Even now Murphy, the gateman, strutting like a bantam cock, was eloquently ordering away a dented old Dodge filled with faintly swarthy people. Its rusty bumper bore a spattered streamer proclaiming a visit to Howe Caverns. A pair of soiled baby shoes swung against the windshield and a sluttish kewpie doll hung in the back window. One needed less than half an eye to see that such people had no business in Riveredge.

  "Figawd's sakes, we on'y wanna look. Is there a lore against that?"

  "Be off with yez, now," Murphy said grandly. "Awnly the guests of members of Riveredge is allowed inside. On yer way, now." The car chugged off and Murphy turned around imperiously, "Writchid farriners! Oh, good marnin' sir. Lovely marnin'!" Murphy touched his cap, proving that he could also grovel.

  "Good morning, Murphy," John said. "Would you please telephone the station for a taxi?"

  "Not takin' yer foine big ottymobile out on a beautiful day like this, sir?"

  "No. Just a taxi, please."

  "Certainly, sir. Right away, sir. How's the pretty missus, sir?" Murphy disappeared into the gatekeeper's lodge. In a moment he was back. "The cab'll be here in foive minutes, sir."

  Just five minutes and he'd be out of Riveredge forever. "Thank you, Murphy," he said and handed the old pirate a quarter.

  Two

  The train pulled out of 125th street station, rolled with increasing speed past sordid tenements and then plunged into its dark hole—out of sight of the chill affluence of upper Park Avenue—for the last lap of its trip toward Grand Central.

  Sitting grimly on a green-plush seat in the Smoking Permitted car, he thought for the hundredth time that this commuters’ train was his cross, and a cross with fourteen stations, for there were just fourteen jerking, shrieking, clanging stops between Grand Central and the nondescript little town that served as a point of departure for the denizens of Riveredge.

  "Only ninety-nine scenic minutes from Grand Central," had seemed almost pleasant when printed in tall Egmont type in the Riveredge brochure. Yet "ninety-nine scenic minutes" never sounded as long as the just-short-of-two-bloody-damned-jouncing-hours they actually were. For a time he had tried to read, to work, to sleep on the commuters' train.

  But the men of Riveredge were a clannish group, a close-knit contingent bound together by the superiority of their names, addresses and incomes. If you lived in Riveredge, you took the Riveredge bus with the other Riveredge squires. You waited at the sooty little station in a shifting knot of Riveredge men, well apart from the lesser village males. Then you got onto the next-to-the-last car, which was unofficially recognized as Riveredge's own, and you talked to another Riveredge man—about business or Republican politics or Riveredge—or else you played a frenetic, murderous and costly bridge game on a plywood board with three Riveredge men. To isolate yourself in a book, a paper, or work was considered anti-social, eccentric, anarchistic. To get into another car was betrayal.

  However today's was a late train and a Saturday train. It was even older, slower, dingier. There were no men from Riveredge, thank God, but there were, instead, suburban housewives piling on at every stop in shrill, overdressed throngs, bound for Schrafft's and the Helen Hayes matinee. By the time the train came to a halt at Grand Central Station, he felt that he had aged a hundred years in the gabble of the ladies.

  He made his way hurriedly through the station and got into a taxi.

  "Where to, Mac?" the driver asked.

  Well, that question stumped him. He hadn't really thought about where he was going. The Algonquin, was the classic address, he supposed, for all men who have left their wives. But he was damned if he was going to be trite. Besides, he had very little money on him and he'd need to cash a check.

  "I sez where to?"

  "The Bacchus Club."

  "The where?"

  This was obviously a driver unaccustomed to transporting homeless husbands in the higher social and financial brackets. No use trying to explain to him that the Bacchus Club was, in its special way, as one with the Union, the Knickerbocker, the Century. He wouldn't have heard of those, either.

  "Just drop me at Lexington and Thirty-eighth," he said.

  It was really too easy to give the driver fifty cents and stroll ten paces into the Bacchus Club. He almost wished for a few cumbersome properties, such as a trunk, a briefcase, two or three satchels, golf clubs. They were the snowstorm and illegitimate baby in the melodrama of a male leaving home. It also occurred to him, as he strode up the club's single marble step, that a few such burdens as a toilet kit, check book and clean linen would be essential to his new way of life, unless he intended to go native.

  "Well, here I am," he announced to absolutely nobody whatsoever in the dim foyer of the Bacchus Club.

  The Bacchus Club was a wildly social organization which he had been invited to join, much to his surprise, at college. In fact, he had been so surprised at being asked along with far tonier intellects, that he had accepted. And that had surprised him even more.

  At college the Bacchus Club had not been the oldest club, And certainly not the most respectable one. But it was the club that attracted the most curiosity, the most envy, the most inexhaustibly festive membership. It was also the only club on campus which had contained enough jovial alumni so as to set up permanent postgraduate quarters in New York, where it had continued to operate at only a small deficit.

  In the year he had been born, the Bacchus Club had been founded by a group of fun-loving undergraduates dedicated to high living, deep drinking and the discreet manufacture of nontoxic gin. Its John Hancock, so to speak, had been Teddy Edwards, an incorrigibly gay blade who was the contemporary and nodding acquaintance of such luminaries as Scott Fitzgerald, Connie Bennett and Red Grange.

  Teddy Edwards had been so perfectly cast as the Ivy League child of the Twenties that he had never forsaken the role. Teddy had attended college from Tuesdays through Thursdays on a sort of lax Five Year Plan and a fat allowance from his grandmother. Teddy's career as permanent Undergraduate, Founder, Supreme Arbiter, President and Angel of the Bacchus Club had seemed a lifetime vocation when, on the very day Lindbergh landed in Paris, Teddy learned that he had amassed sufficient credits in snap courses like Music Appreciation and Art History to graduate. The shock had nearly killed him.

  But no cloud was without its silver lining in the Twenties. The shock had killed Teddy's grandmother. A week after commencement Teddy was stocking Granny's cellar with "the real stuff, right off the Cite de Paris" to be served across the walnut bar already in Granny's back parlor. Granny's passing had brought to birth the Bacchus Club—New York branch—and assured it of a long and lusty life.

  Today the silence of the Bacchus Club was as unusual as it was depressing.

  John stood at the yawning fireplace in the hall, beneath the life-sized portrait of Teddy Edwards as Bacchus, and yelled up the gloomy old staircase. "Hey! Anybody here?" There was no reply.

  He walked into the empty lounge and flung himself onto a rump-sprung old leather couch. The place was even shabbier than he remembered.

  At some length he was greeted by the shuffling old steward. "Yassuh," the man said with less than no interest.

  "Where is everybody? Where's Mr. Edwards?"

  "Mist' Edwa
rds's up in his room talkin' to the movahs."

  "Oh? Is the club moving?" It dawned on him suddenly that he hadn't been here for more than a year, and that he'd visited very rarely before then.

  "Club closin', suh."

  "Closing?" It was like hearing that the U.S. Mint had decided to sell out to Tiffany's. "Why?"

  "Ask Mist' Edwards, not me. He be down tereckly."

  "Is—is the bar still open?"

  "No, suh, it ain't. We got cookin' whiskey an' apple jack. That's all. An' it's cash, no mo' chits."

  "Bring me cooking whiskey and plain water, please."

  "Good thing you ask fo' branch water. Mist' Edwards finish all the seltzer las' night an' . . ."

  "Okay, okay. I don't want soda. I said I didn't."

  Still muttering, the steward shuffled off.

  He had just taken the first sip of his drink—and cooking whiskey it was—when he heard Teddy's high, rather excitable voice from the head of the stairs. "But I tell you, I can't give you anything in advance. I don't get my own check till the fifteenth. It's unheard of to pay down for moving a few pieces of furniture—most of it'll go in the auction, anyway . . ."

  "Not this stuff, it won't, Mr. Edwards."

  ". . . besides, my credit is excellent. All you have to do is ask around town and . . ."

  "That's just what we done, Mr. Edwards. Now supposin' you call us up after you get this check and then we can talk turkey about the . . ."

  "But everybody knows I've sold this house. It's being pulled down next month. Why, as soon as I clear away a few minor obligations, I'll have . . ."

  "That's the trouble, Mr. Edwards. It's them minor obligations. Now you just wait till you get that check, then give us another ring and . . ."

  "Well," Teddy's voice was growing higher and higher; he spoke more and more in italics. "Just let me assure you that it'll be a frosty Tuesday in hell before I call your firm to move my . . ."

  "Suit yourself, Mr. Edwards. G'bye now."

  John could hear two pairs of feet on the stairs—one heavy, one light. The front door slammed. "Thug," he heard Teddy mutter.

  "Hey, Teddy!" he called.

  "Who's that?" Teddy answered irritably. Then he poked his head into the lounge. "Hey, Chum! Long time no see!" Teddy came bustling into the room and threw himself down on the couch, which responded with a death-rattle of broken springs.

  The shock of finding the club on its last legs was nothing to the shock of seeing its founding father and subsequent house mother, Teddy. He recalled an old photograph of Teddy in the Bacchus Club at college—round and pudgy, moonfaced; his dark hair parted in the center and slicked down with what was apparently Simonize. He had worn a sweater with a jazz stripe, plus-fours, hound's tooth hose and saddle shoes.

  But today Teddy looked every minute of his age. His hair was plastered across his bald cranium in six wispy strands. Teddy's stomach bulged beneath his Bacchus-striped waistcoat. The cuffs of his J. Press jacket were frayed. His suntans were too tight and badly spotted. Teddy's eyes bulged and the broken blood vessels across his nose and cheeks gave his bloated moon face the appearance of raw hamburger.

  "Well, Chum," Teddy cried, "come back to the fold at last." Teddy took both his hands in his own trembling ones and held them for just a moment.

  "Actually, I only came in to cash a check." It struck him that he hadn't said a very tactful thing. "And of course to have a drink with you."

  "A check, Chum?" Teddy said vaguely. There was a short pause and then he raced on. "Gee, that's too bad. I just made a great big deposit. Hate to have a lot of cash kicking around over a weekend."

  So it was as bad as that. Poor old Teddy. He'd probably been supporting the Bacchus Club, both on campus and off, with Granny's bequest ever since the depression.

  "I hear you're closing down,” he began cautiously. Now, I'd better give him a break, he thought. "What's the matter? Getting sick of throwing the drunks out?"

  Teddy looked at him gratefully. "That's it, Chum. Besides I've finally sold the old place. It's coming down on the first. They're going to put a big skyscraper here—all glass and air conditioning. Of course I held out for a while, but they made such a whopping offer that I really couldn't refuse. Besides . . ." he paused and looked down at his plump little hands, which were faintly dirty. "Besides, the membership here is dropping off. A lot of the real old sports—men in my class at school are dying. They aren't old, either. Hell, I'm only fifty-four. Guess it's all the rotgut we put away back in the good old days."

  "It's a shame about the club, Teddy. A real shame." The only emotions he actually felt were pity for Teddy and remorse for himself. At college he hadn't taken the Bacchus Club at all seriously. During the war he had found it only a place to get a decent meal and a drink, a shower and a night's lodging. After the war, when he had been a struggling young writer, he couldn't really afford the club. He'd only come in rarely to order a beer and cash a check that wouldn't be quite good until another check had cleared. Knowing Teddy's laxity in matters of money, the practice had always proven safe.

  When he got married, he was poorer still and he'd thought of resigning. But one way or another he'd always managed to pay his dues, even if he never set foot in the place, except to come in and thank Teddy for the standard Bacchus Club wedding present—a complicated silver bottle-opener adorned with an intricate pattern of grape leaves, as ugly as it was useless and expensive. His wife had relegated the gift of the Bacchus Club to a high shelf with his tennis trophies, well out of view, not that he had blamed her. Today, however, he felt that she had been particularly cruel and unkind about the club gift.

  "No, Chum," Teddy was saying, "I don't think I've seen you for more than a year."

  And indeed Teddy hadn't. On the day when fate had brought him to Mr. Popescu of the Popescu Pulse-Beat Eternal Non-Magnetic Watch, he had come to the Bacchus Club for a private little celebration—still not believing that from an obscure young script-writer with more prestige than income, he had suddenly been catapulted to a fifteen-thousand-dollar-a-year job as head man with the Popescu family. He'd got mellow that day on martinis and lobster farci and hock and told Teddy of the rich business luncheons and dinners he was going to hold in the private dining room at the Bacchus Club.

  But it hadn't worked out that way. Mr. Popescu just wasn't the sort of man one took to a club. Even if Popescu had been, he was never away from Mrs. Popescu—except when he was visiting that secluded bagnio in the West Eighties—and Mrs. Popescu liked to go to places where she could dance. Dancing with Mrs. Popescu, in the Stork Club, the Persian Room, the Maisonette and a dozen other places, had been one of the major occupational hazards of the advertising manager of the Pulse-Beat watch. As for his business meals, they were always spent with the kind of people who preferred Twenty-One, the Chambord and the uptown expense-account restaurants where they could see—and be seen by—all the other people eating on expense accounts.

  ". . . just doesn't seem to be any club spirit nowadays," Teddy was saying. "Kids in college don't do anything but study or get drafted or get married before they graduate. Then they all move out to the country and have a lot of kids. It's the wives that are ruining all the decent drinking clubs these days. Hell, I remember when I was a gay young buck around New York—everybody was a bachelor—had a waiting list here for rooms. Why, Charlie Armstrong—he was '30, no, '29—kept a suite of rooms here and . . ." Teddy took another gulp of his drink and apparently forgot about bachelordom, Charlie Armstrong, and the suite of rooms. "Yep, it's the wives, Chum, they're what . . . By the way, you're married now, aren't you? How is, uh, um, your wife? Janet, that's her name, isn't it?"

  "No, her name isn't Janet," he blurted out. "And she's just lousy, thanks. We're both lousy. We're splitting up as of today." He waited for Teddy's shocked reaction.

  "That's the trouble, Chum," Teddy droned on, "no more club spirit. Can't get the guys to pay their dues. Taxes are double what they were. Been carrying the club myself
for the past . . ."

  My God, he thought, the poor old boy isn't even hearing me. Here I tell him that my whole life is coming to an end and all Teddy can talk about is club spirit! Then he thought again, a little more kindly. After all, I guess this is the end of his life, too—only he's been at it longer than I have. "It's a shame about the club, Teddy," he said inanely. He was getting awfully sick of saying it was a shame about the club. After all he was not a sentimental person given to college reunions, platoon get-togethers and the remembrance of things past. Actually he had fallen away from the Bacchus Club just as painlessly as had all its other members. He wouldn't even have thought of the club today if it hadn't been for her.

  He had come to the club quite selfishly. He had come first to cash a check, second to take a room until he could find something more attractive, and third, to drown his sorrows—yes, that was the term—among the jovial males who traditionally frequented the Bacchus Club's bar. He had come expecting Babylon and found, instead, Philadelphia. The whole place was dusty and gloomy and old and depressing—just as dusty and gloomy and old and depressing as Teddy, himself.

  These thoughts were interrupted by a low rumble and shrieking of plumbing that shook the whole building, followed by a piercing yell of pain. "Jesus!" a distant voice shouted and there was a scampering sound of bare feet on the stairs.

  "Oh, the shower room again," Teddy moaned. "I told Toby to . . ."

  "For Christ's sake," the voice shouted. "That Goddamned shower of yours nearly killed me!" A youngish man, very yellow of hair, very blue of eye, very, very red of skin burst into the lounge, clutching a limp towel around him.

  "Toby!" he cried, getting up from the sofa. "What are you doing here?"

  "What am I doing here?" Toby said, with a lunge toward the rye bottle. "Practically getting my ass frozen off. That's what I'm doing here." He collapsed onto the sofa and poured a large drink.

  Two features of the Bacchus Club have always been notorious for their merry pranks. One was the Scotch needle spray shower,, planned for the assuagement of hung-over members and operated by elementary hydraulics, an archaic pressure pump and sheer luck. More than one member had scampered naked and shocked to safety from its fits and starts, its eruptions and explosions. The other feature was Toby Wentworth, whose alarums and excursions, whose affairs and exploits had kept the gentlemen of the bar chortling for years. That the two should burst forth at the same time seemed an almost Olympian justice.