Different Seasons - Stephen King [228]
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 seventy-three 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 35 th, 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 1960, 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