“Something You Just Don’t Do in a Club,” first published in The New Yorker (April 29, 1961), may seem in its first few pages to be out of touch with the average reader—assuming that the average reader has little experience with or interest in exclusive New York clubs for men of wealth—but the reversals and revelations toward the end of the story are worth the wait.
Something You Just Don’t Do in a Club
by Brendan Gill
It will be telling you more about a club I belong to than about me when I say that, as a lawyer, I’m apt to be looked down on by the other members. Artist members of the club are particularly skeptical of giving us lawyers the run of the place, but they’re by no means alone in their prejudice—even the architects appear to consider themselves better than we are, though it beats me how a follower of that dog-eat-dog profession could possibly stick up his nose at anyone outside it. Such distinction as we lawyers may have acquired in the world is beside the point in the Parnassus; there we are simply people who are not “creative,” whatever that anomalous word may mean, and our supposed uncreativeness makes us the butt of innumerable not very witty jokes. Still, there are times when, far from being looked down on, we come close to being looked up to. These occasions are familiar enough in any club: some nasty little mess, usually involving both money and an infraction of club rules, arises and must be dealt with as quickly and quietly as possible. Oh, then how eagerly we’re sought out and begged—with many a flattering word about our special competence in manipulating people and keeping confidences—to clean up the mess, report its cleaning up in a discreet whisper to the powers that be, and leave not a trace of the mess or our secret labors behind!
More than once in my twenty-odd years in the club, I’ve been called on to do such a job. The last time was only a couple of weeks ago, and, to put it far more temperately than it deserves, I’m still of two minds about it. As a lawyer, I like to stand well back from a situation. I haven’t been able to do it in this case, and the sensation is novel and unpleasant. No doubt the affair has troubled me more than it should have, because it marks one of my rare failures. (I risk sounding vainglorious when I use the word “rare,” but the truth is that my failures, both at the bar and away from it, have been exactly that. After all, the record has been piling up for a good many years now, and can be examined.) I notice among the younger men in the club a tendency to belittle the competitive spirit, but I was brought up believing in it, and I still do. I like to succeed at things; what’s more important, I hate failing at them. Frankly, it irks me to have failed so conspicuously in respect to Johnny Pinkham. I gather that I am not—or not yet—a laughingstock in the club, but I feel like one. I feel outwitted. A certain small sum of money has been lost to me, probably forever, but the money doesn’t matter. My annoyance springs from my having been exposed to ridicule in an episode that I strongly preferred to play no part in. It will be a long while before I can be forced to play such a part again.
I say “forced,” and the term is not too strong, for, in my opinion, the board of governors, of which I am myself a member, did wrong to drag me into the very middle of the affair. To make an Irish bull, I oughtn’t to have been dragged into it, because I was already there. Pinkham was an old friend of mine—I had, indeed, put him up for the club. To the board, this fact and the fact of my having dealt successfully with similar club matters were reason enough for placing the whole burden of Pinkham’s case on my shoulders; to me, however, these facts were precisely the reason for not having the burden placed there. As Pinkham’s proposer, I was, after all, an interested party, potentially subject to two thoroughly contrary temptations; one threatened injury to the club, and the other threatened injury to Pinkham. Either I might be tempted to whitewash him in order to protect my reputation as a judge of men, or I might be tempted to blacken his name unduly in order to punish him for having implicated me in a club mess. Needless to say, to a man of honor both of these temptations were bound to remain potential, but, knowing human nature, the law has seen fit to remove all such temptations from the ordinary processes of adjudication, and even in private matters they ought not to be lightly disregarded. Moreover, as a lawyer I had already rendered the Parnassus a sufficient number of unrecorded services; in my modest, “uncreative” way, I had done my share to keep the club the fine institution it is. I tried to beg off on these grounds, and the president said, affecting to speak to the board at large but staring at me across the table, “Somebody is going to have to do the dirty work, and it is a tradition in the club that, wherever possible, this particular dirty work be done by a friend.”
Having given in to the president—for all his jokes and stories, there is iron in the man, and few people manage to refuse him what he really wants—I rang up Pinkham in the country and arranged to meet him at the club in the following week, on the occasion of his next visit to town. It appeared that he would be taking a late-afternoon train back to Connecticut that same day, so, at some inconvenience to myself, I agreed to come up to Gramercy Park a little before three. It meant leaving Wall Street a couple of hours early and throwing away the best part of the afternoon, but I had no choice; as far as I’d let Pinkham know, our meeting was to be entirely social, and I was afraid that if I made difficulties about the time, he would suggest, in his amiable way, postponing it.
I’d asked Pinkham to meet me in the so-called Red Room of the club (“so-called” because it was long ago painted white and gold; the clubhouse was once a private mansion and is old enough to be full of such booby traps for new members). It is a rather forbidding room, and few members of the club ever go into it, so it was an admirable place for our encounter. I expected Pinkham to be late and had armed myself with a copy of Country Life and, though it was by no means my usual hour for having a drink, a long Scotch, but he surprised me by being on time. This made me more uneasy than ever about my task. His punctuality was, I thought, a pretty good sign that he suspected why I’d invited him to stop by. We often saw each other in general gatherings at the club, but it had been a couple of years since we had had a private drink together.
Catching sight of me at the windows, Pinkham rushed across the room in his usual boy-athlete fashion—I half expected him to vault the couch that lay between the door and me. Would he never slow down, I wondered, never act his age, which was surely past fifty by now? The curious thing was his being all of a piece in his youthfulness. Some of us, as we grow older, contrive to remain youthful in one or two respects, but rarely in many; Pinkham was remarkable for the fact that his body, his manner, his interests, his very way of thinking were all those of a playful, intelligent undergraduate. Furthermore, it apparently cost him no effort to keep these diverse aspects of himself up to the same bouncy mark. I would have liked to think that his legs ached from running up to the club’s third-floor dining room two steps at a time, as he always did, but I was sure they didn’t suffer the slightest twinge. Instead, it was my legs that ached as I rode up in the elevator and thought of how his legs ought to.
I was sure, too, that Pinkham’s enthusiasm for new people, new books, new works of art was as spontaneous now as it had been at twenty. Pinkham was a sculptor, and it’s been my experience of sculptors that they tend to go sour a lot earlier than the rest of us. For all I know, this is a hazard of the profession—maybe there aren’t enough juicy commissions to go around these days, or maybe the gaps between the different schools of sculpture have become so great that they’re no longer schools but armed camps. (I owe that witticism to our president; it is one of his good things.) Whatever the reason may be, it strikes me that sculptors speak more disagreeably about the new men coming up than painters and writers do, and a thousand times more disagreeably than lawyers do. But I except Pinkham. I don’t know whether he was a first rate or second-rate sculptor, but I know he was a generous one. There was what can only be called a sweetness about the way he welcomed younger men—a sweetness that was itself intrinsically young. I had yet to see in him a trace of that tired miserliness of feeling that people have in mind when they call somebody patronizing.
But that, of course, is my point: Pinkham never was tired, never had to fake a freshness he didn’t feel. Even in respect to his memory (my own began to decay in my twenties and is now a daily embarrassment to me, not only professionally but at home), Pinkham remained a marvel of undiminished alertness. The impressions he took in might have been each of them a first impression, they were so clear and ineradicable. It was unheard-of for him to repeat a story or fail to recall the name of a person to whom he had been even casually introduced. In the nature of things, this made him a very desirable member of the club, and I had often been congratulated on having proposed him. It was unnatural for a man to be as pleased with simply being alive as Pinkham appeared to be, but, far from striking a false note, his pleasure in life seemed to all of us in the club the truest thing about him. We may not have understood what made him tick—I, for all our years of friendship, certainly didn’t—but we were grateful for his joyous presence amongst us; though he had been a member for only five or six years, which is a very short time indeed as time inside the club is measured, he was well on his way to serving as our model of a perfect Parnassian.
Yet here I was in the Red Room, waiting, at the request of the other members of the board of governors, to ask him to resign.
“You’re looking very well, Edward,” he said, and the formality of this—for I am nearly always addressed as Eddie—I took for a clue to how much he suspected.
“I’m fine,” I said. “A little overweight but fighting it. What’ll you drink?”
“Maybe I should wait awhile. I had a couple at lunch.”
I knew I would feel better if he had a drink in his hand.
I said, “You can’t let me drink alone.”
“Is that a Scotch? All right, I’ll have one, too.”
I banged a bell and ordered a Scotch for Pinkham. (Bells are another booby trap in the club. Though they all look pretty much alike, some must be banged and others twisted to make them ring, and it takes a man years to distinguish bangers from twisters.) It seemed wise to keep off the reason for our meeting until after his drink had arrived, but Pinkham would have none of it. He was always so open and offhand that it was impossible to build any polite constructions between oneself and him. Ordinarily, one didn’t want to, though as a lawyer I may note that I’ve a higher opinion of such constructions than most people appear to have nowadays.
“Never been in this embalming room before,” Pinkham said. “I wouldn’t call it exactly friendly-feeling.”
“Oh, I like it,” I said, thinking that if Pinkham had felt an air of unfriendliness, it must be mine and not the room’s. We can never be sure how much of even our most carefully disguised emotions we emanate; it was certainly true that I was feeling unfriendly, and it was possible that he detected it but mistook the source. Unfriendly, and with good reason, for hadn’t he let me down in the shabbiest possible way? I was justified in my irritation, no doubt of that; yet I didn’t want him to become aware of it. The interview promised to be painful enough as it was. “I come in here a lot,” I said. “Especially when I’ve some heavy reading to do.”
Pinkham ducked his head at the Country Life in my lap. “Don’t let me stop you.”
That was his way of being droll.
“‘Heavy,’ I said. I only look at the pictures in this.”
“You buying a place in England? I pick about three a week out of those front pages. Usually in the Cotswolds. And always with a walled garden.”
“Aren’t they beautiful? But England must be getting very rich—the prices have been going up at a terrible rate. Even in my imagination, I can’t afford anything but old rectories.”
“Oh, I never worry about the money part!” Pinkham exclaimed, taking his drink from the waiter. “That’d spoil the fun.”
Over Pinkham’s conventional, not very strong protest, I signed the chit for his drink. He had given me the perfect opening, but I couldn’t make out whether it had been given to me on purpose; his face was a merry, boyish blank. “Now that you’ve brought up the subject,” I said.
Still blankly and merrily, he asked, “What subject is that? Houses? England?”
“Money.”
“Oh, Lord, did I? How dull.”
“Johnny, listen. This is serious. I’m sore as hell at you because of money.”
Maybe I’d been wrong in thinking he knew why I’d asked him to the club. His ingenuous protest sounded entirely real. “Eddie! What on earth have I done?”
“For one thing, you’ve been extremely rude to my friend John Stanley.”
“Stanley? I don’t even know him, so how can I have been rude to him?”
“Stanley is the club treasurer.”
“Oh, my God! You’re talking about my bills.”
“I’m talking about the fact that you’ve been in arrears on your dues for a solid year and in arrears on various house charges for at least eighteen months. And haven’t had the courtesy to answer a single one of the three perfectly nice, polite letters that John Stanley sent you, asking you either to pay up in toto or, if you couldn’t afford that, to talk over with him some arrangement for paying up little by little.”
“Where the hell did you get all this inside poop?”
“I’m on the board of governors. At our regular meetings, matters of this sort come up. Last time, you came up.”
“Oh-oh. Very embarrassing for poor Eddie.”
“Well, damn it, it was! And all the more so because you were not a routine case. Nearly always it is a question of some poor old boy who’s been retired on a diminished income and can’t make ends meet but who hates to give up coming to the club for a drink now and then. When those old boys get in too deep, Stanley babies them along as best he can, sometimes in open defiance of the club rules. He’s a kind man, Stanley; he truly is. But in all my time on the board, there’s never been a case like yours, where a person has not only run up a big bill but has deliberately failed to answer the treasurer’s letters—has deliberately refused to give any explanation of his conduct.”
“So your kind Stanley’s turning ugly?”
“You’re damn right he is. We all are. Who the hell do you think you are, anyhow?”
I had begun to lose my temper, or, rather, I was making no effort to control it. I was trying to shock Pinkham into perceiving the enormity of what he had done, and I calculated that with him, as with a certain kind of flippant but vulnerable witness in court, my own obvious emotional involvement would produce such a shock.
“John Pinkham, Esquire, who was, is, and ever shall be your old friend, till debt us do part.”
Just for a second, I’d forgotten the question to which he was replying, and the thought flashed through my mind that he had gone insane; then I remembered, and said, “Spare me your rotten jokes.”
“All right,” he said, with perfect good humor, grinning and turning his glass of Scotch round and round in his hands. “No jokes.”
It was surely up to him to speak, but he appeared to feel no obligation to. He sat there unabashed, forcing me by his silence to move on into the unpleasant country ahead. “Talking about you at the meeting, Stanley was a lot nicer than you deserved,” I said. “He said that for all he knew you were traveling about on different jobs and hadn’t received your mail. He said we were all aware of how scatterbrained about money matters our artist members were apt to be.”
“But you were able to assure him that, in fact, I hadn’t been anywhere.”
“Somebody asked me that, and of course I had to tell the truth. Not that Stanley didn’t already know. He had the dates of all the chits you’d signed—he could see for himself you were still running up bills at the club. Why the devil didn’t you answer him?”
Still smiling, he said, “Honestly, I tried. I just couldn’t think of a thing to say.”
“Nonsense! You could have apologized and paid up.”
“That’s where you’re wrong, Eddie boy. That’s precisely what I couldn’t do.”
“Why not?”
“Oh, how pleasant it must be to be married to a rich wife and never, never have to learn the score.”
Once on the defensive, a certain kind of witness always resorts to personalities. Still, it was a curious remark for Pinkham to make. He had himself been married at one time to a rich wife, and since I had handled his end of the divorce, he must have realized, even as he was speaking, that his words would bring his past into my mind. If my wife was rich, his wife had been far richer, and he had not been above accepting a considerable settlement from her, disguised as a fair division of properties they had held in common. “If that remark is addressed to me,” I said, “I assure you I’ve always been able to earn a very good living on my own.”
“Yes, but you’ve had Barbara’s big, fat income behind you. You’ve never had to make a buck in your life. Never not had a buck.”
“All this is neither here nor there.”
“No? It’s by way of saying I didn’t have a dime and therefore couldn’t write to your friend Stanley.”
“That was the thing to write. It was what he was waiting for, in order to help you.”
“You think it’s all that easy to say to a perfect stranger? If that’s how much you know, don’t get riled when I mention Barbara’s dough.”
“Other people have had to write him.”
“Other people aren’t me.”
Now I was controlling my temper and not finding it easy. “If what it comes down to is your being so goddam special—”
In his maddening, cheerful way, he said, “It comes down to just that.”
“I don’t believe you mean it—no sensible man believes that about himself. Nor do I believe it about your being broke. After all, I used to know something about your affairs.”
“That was a long time ago. I’ve never been very good at hanging on to things.”
“I wouldn’t have asked you to join the club if I’d thought you couldn’t afford it.”
“I could at the time. I’m hoping I can again. You know what sculptors’ commissions are—it’s a hell of a long time between the big ones. Uncle Sam seems to have run out of military cemeteries that need a couple of hundred thousand bucks’ worth of bronze and marble. As soon as I can, I’ll pay up here, as I’ll pay up at all the other places in town Brooks Brothers, Abercrombie—that carry you forever when things go bad.”
I shook my head. It was extraordinary how much he didn’t know, and yet it was he who had accused me of being ignorant of life—of never learning the score! “Owing Abercrombie is one thing, owing this place is another,” I said. “Not paying your bills is something you just don’t do in a club. Now it’s too late.”
For the first time, I felt I had got inside that youthful, smiling surface. “What do you mean, too late? I never said I wouldn’t pay. I want to pay, for God’s sake!”
“Johnny, I told you this was serious. You wouldn’t answer Stanley, and he was obliged, under the club rules, to report your case to the board of governors. Now they’ve asked me to speak to you.”
“O.K., so you’ve spoken to me. Many thanks. And you can report back, if that’s what they want, that I’m turning over a nice shiny new leaf.”
“If you haven’t any money, I don’t see how you can turn over any kind of leaf.”
“Goddam it, I’ll go to a bank right now and borrow enough of the lousy stuff to pay off the club. Will that satisfy you Scrooges?”
“New debts for old?”
“That’s my lookout, isn’t it?”
“You keep refusing to listen to what I say. Of course I want you to pay off your debt to the club, and of course it’s none of my business how you get the money to do it, but even though you pay up, it’s still too late. This isn’t prep school, you know. What the club is asking for isn’t an improvement in your conduct, it’s your resignation.”
Then, at last, he stopped smiling. The smooth surface had begun to break up. His face was that of any middle aged man, and when he tried to reconstruct a smile and failed, his mouth, in its trembling, seemed not merely middle-aged, but old. This sort of sudden change isn’t as rare as many people think. I’ve often seen it happen in court, when a jury brings in an unfavorable verdict. The uttering of a single word is enough to transform a man, and why not, if the word happens to be one that will alter his whole life?
At the start of my interview with Pinkham, the uneasiness had been on my side; now it was on his. Those blazing blue eyes had, I thought, a distinct flicker of panic in them. He said, “Now you’re the one that’s telling jokes.”
“On the contrary, I’m in deadly earnest. I have been all along. Can’t you be clear about the situation? You’ve been acting like a spoiled ten-year-old, you’ve been an irresponsible brat, but God knows I’m still your friend and would rather a thousand times not be telling you this—” I broke off. “I hope you understand that much?”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Eddie!”
“But the board has requested me to tell you you’ve no choice except to resign.”
He put down his glass and said, “Let’s have another round.” He twisted the bell, but nothing happened. “Damn these fool things!” he said. “If I live to be a thousand, I’ll never learn.” Then he banged the bell and, as the waiter approached, gestured to him that we would like two more of the same. “Tell me, do I write this famous letter before or after paying up?” he asked. “I’m sure you know the etiquette.”
“The best arrangement would be to write the letter and enclose with it a check in payment of your total indebtedness to the club. Then the board can vote to accept your resignation at the next meeting and the incident will be closed.”
” ‘Incident,’ Eddie?”
“I was trying to use a kind word, not a harsh one.”
“You keep saying ‘kind.’ Stanley’s kind, you’re kind, I suppose the whole board is kind. And discreet, as well?”
“As to that, nobody in the club will ever know anything.”
“Except that I’ve resigned. I can’t help hoping that somebody will notice that.”
“I was about to say how much you will be missed here, Johnny. You were certainly one of the most popular members of the club.”
” ‘Were.’ I see what you mean by ‘kind.’ ”
“Don’t make this any more difficult for me than it is already. You know how much I personally will miss you in the club. And how proud I’ve always been of your popularity among the members. If I’d been a different sort of person, I’d have been bound to be quite openly jealous of you. In my twenty years here, I’ve made nothing like the mark you’ve made in five.”
“Thank you for them words.”
How he spoiled things! But I kept on. For his sake, I wanted to leave nothing unsaid. “If I’d known about your troubles earlier, if you’d dropped me the slightest hint, I might have been able to straighten the whole thing out. The business of your being broke—I’d have been glad to help you over that hurdle.”
“Thank you for that, too.”
I couldn’t resist adding, “With my money, I may say, not Barbara’s.”
“I’m sorry I said that.”
“No matter.”
“You say you might have helped me. I don’t suppose you could help me now?”
“Financially? I’m certainly willing; to talk it over and see what we—”
“Nothing that simple. It just occurred to me that you might be kind enough, generous enough, to practice a little hanky-panky for my sake.”
I didn’t like it—there was something unpleasantly crafty in his tone. A trifle grimly, I said, “Go on.”
“Suppose I borrow some money today and pay off my debt here, then drop out of sight for a week or two, and at the next meeting of the board you explain that you haven’t been able to get in touch with me and therefore haven’t been able to ask me to resign. Then Stanley pops up and says, ‘Well, anyhow, the little so-and-so is all paid up.’ And you say—couldn’t you say?—’In that case, since Pinkham doesn’t know of the action we took at our last meeting and has had the decency to clean up this mess on his own, is there any possibility of our forgetting the whole thing, of not asking the poor fellow to resign, after all?’ Adding, if you felt up to it, ‘I think I can promise on his behalf that the problem will never come up again’?”
It was I who had tried to shock Pinkham, but it was Pinkham who had succeeded in shocking me. I felt now that I had seriously misread as much of his character as had been open to my observation. It struck me that back of the boyish openness, the generous high spirits, there must lie a distinct talent for duplicity. That gift was far from being merely youthful; the only word I could find to apply to it was “feminine.” Women tend to solve problems in what they call a sensible or practical fashion, which is to say without regard to morality, sailing past all abstract questions of right and wrong as if they were the sheerest irrelevancies. I hadn’t expected to find that tendency in Pinkham, and I said, “Do you honestly think I could do such a thing?”
“Now, Eddie!” he said. “Don’t go climbing up on your high horse!”
“The governors made a certain decision, which I was requested to carry out. That’s what I’m doing now, as justly as I can.”
As if it were the most natural thing in the world to say such a thing, Pinkham said, “I’m not asking for justice, Eddie. I’m asking you to do me a favor.”
“Which I tell you I can’t do.”
“Won’t do.”
“Mustn’t do—is that any clearer?”
“I should think it would be pretty awkward sometimes having such goddam high principles.”
“It’s awkward right now, but the principles are still there.”
“Poor Eddie. I’ve put you through a lot, haven’t I?”
The waiter set down our drinks, and Pinkham reached for the chits, and, with a show of lightness but intending a warning (for I know how even the most loyal of club servants gossip belowstairs), I said, “Johnny! The drinks are on me.”
“No, no, this time they’re mine,” he said, and reached up to take a pencil from the waiter.
I intercepted the pencil. “I don’t want to pick a public fight with you,” I said, indicating the waiter as best I could with a raising of my eyebrows, “but the fact is you can’t sign for anything here any more.”
He had crouched forward to scribble his name on the bits of paper the waiter had put on the table between us. Now, as he watched the waiter pick them up and carry them away, he maintained the awkward posture, intent and yet helpless-seeming, of a paralytic waiting to be shifted from one chair to another. Slumped forward like that, he looked a hundred years old. It was a hard moment for both of us, and, to hurry us past it as tactfully as possible, I raised my glass and said the first thing that came into my head: “Votre santé!”
“Santé,” he mumbled, with a sidelong glance of s4rprise, then, “Thanks for the libation. Much obliged.”
“Don’t be silly.”
He emptied his glass in two or three long swallows. Our club drinks are notoriously strong, and tossing them down like that, no matter what the provocation, is always a fool thing to do. Pinkham got slowly to his feet. “So long, Eddie,” he said. “I’m off to the bloody bank.”
As he stood there, two things—my own evocation of the happiness he had once brought us and the look of him slumped in the chair and sloshing down that far too powerful drink—prompted me to wonder if there was any as yet unconsidered way out of the mess. In my experience, this sort of question reaches the surface of the mind only when an answer to it has already been prepared somewhere in the depths. No sooner did I begin to consider the problem afresh than a possible solution occurred to me. It was one that couldn’t have occurred to me before the start of our interview, because it was the interview itself that had provided the necessary ingredients. What if Pinkham were to pay up before the next meeting of the board and if, at that meeting, I were able to make a statement, disturbing but not too specific, about the condition I had found him in? A statement that would make the other members of the board sympathetic to rejecting his resignation? I would have to say something that wasn’t a lie, and therefore wouldn’t betray the board’s confidence in me, but that would nevertheless rehabilitate Pinkham in their eyes. What would such a something be? Plainly, something to do with health. I could tell them, and not with a bad conscience, that I had reason to believe he had undergone some kind of obscure emotional breakdown in the course of the past year, evidence of which I had detected in his speech, his manner, his very eyes; that this breakdown had led to his deplorable irresponsibility in respect to money and his still more deplorable rudeness in respect to John Stanley; but that I felt sure (here I could mildly hint at having received a medical opinion) that, if he was by no means cured, the worst was over and that the board would have nothing to fear in future from our brilliant and high-spirited friend. . . . Yes, I thought, I might just bring it off. It would be worth trying, and, as a born advocate, I would be interested to try it.
On several grounds, I couldn’t let Pinkham in on my plans. Circumstances might make it impossible for me to attempt it, or I might attempt it and fail, in either case causing him bitter disappointment. A worse hazard was Pinkham’s taking offense at my belief—the honorable basis for my solution to the problem—that, by George, there was something a little odd about him. Pride is a curious emotion, flaring up at the most inappropriate moments, and Pinkham might flatly refuse to let me plead his oddness before the board. Though I was thus prevented from offering him any reason to hope for a reprieve, much less a full pardon, I had to make certain that he sent in his check to Stanley as quickly as possible. Our interview was on a Wednesday, and the board was to meet on the following Tuesday. Stanley, that naturally forgiving man, would need a day or two in which to begin to forget Pinkham’s offense before his case came up. It seemed obvious that the fastest way to get the money to Stanley would be for me to lend it to Pinkham.
Breaking the awkward silence, I said, “Don’t tell me if you don’t want to, but how much will you be needing?”
“I must owe three or four hundred here—”
“Three hundred and seventy-six fifty, to be exact.”
He stared, then went on. “So maybe I’d better ask the bank for five. They’ll think I’m good for that, won’t they?”
“Of course. But let me handle it instead. I’ll give you a lot better terms than any bank. They pretend to be charging six per cent, but it’s closer to twelve. I’ll let you have whatever you need for as long as you need it, and at no interest.”
Then he said something that fitted very nicely into my plans. I grant it was the sort of teasing remark with which any sensitive person might reject an offer that he was nevertheless grateful to have heard a friend voice; still, it could also be cited as establishing a certain emotional imbalance on the part of the speaker. “I’d much rather stick a bank with a bad debt than you,” he said. “I wouldn’t feel free to step in front of a bus or fall off a bridge or have any fun at all if I owed money to a friend.”
I noted, for my own purposes, this sufficiently clear threat of suicide, then brushed it aside. “I’d really like to do it, Johnny.”
“I don’t know when I could pay it back.”
“I’ve said it doesn’t matter.”
“You don’t think five sounds like too much?”
“I’d just as soon make it six.”
He shrugged then, as if on an unexpected impulse of surrender. I suppose I’ll never know whether this had been his intention from the start. At the time, I felt sure I had prevailed on him to accept the money against his better judgment. Perhaps a little inflated by this victory, I reached for my wallet, fished a blank check from it, and made it out to Pinkham in the sum of seven hundred and fifty dollars. “Somehow, that always seems a rounder sum to me than six,” I said.
“No, no! It’s too much!”
“I want it that way.”
“This is more money than I’ve seen in ages. You’re tempting me to run amuck.”
“Nonsense,” I said. “I’m not worried about that.”
Pinkham took the check, folded it, and put it away in a trousers pocket. I understood that it would have been impossible for him to thank me. He turned and walked carefully across the room—the Scotch couldn’t have begun to take effect that soon, but he walked as if it had. In the door way, he swung about, and, poor as the light in the Red Room always is, I was able to make out the look of incredulity on his face. “My God, Eddie!” he said.
“What on earth’s the matter?”
“I’ve forgotten his name.”
“Whose name is that?”
“Your kind friend. The one I’ve been so rude to.”
“Stanley. John Stanley.”
Then he smiled and said the last thing I was ever to hear him say in the club: “So this is what it feels like to forget things.”
I brought with me to the meeting of the board on Tuesday evening a sheet of foolscap bearing some notes for the talk I planned to give on Pinkham. My assumption was that John Stanley would first report to us that Pinkham had paid his debt to the club and had submitted his resignation, and then suggest that before putting the matter of this resignation to a motion the board might wish to hear a word or two from me. This was the usual practice in these affairs and would provide me with an ideal opportunity to save Pinkham’s life in the club. I knew pretty well what I was going to tell them, and I think—though again this may sound vainglorious—that I would have swept them off their feet. My rough notes will indicate the nature of the proposed oration better and more fairly than I, in my disillusionment, can now do; they go as follows, verbatim:
Such episodes always painful.
This episode especially painful to me.
Pinkham a most charming fellow.
Soul of clubbability.
Our twenty years of friendship.
Proud to put him up for the club.
Bask in reflected glory.
No doubt of his standing in the arts.
Still, sculpture an uncertain gamble financially.
Unbeknownst to me, Pinkham falling on hard times.
Running up large bills here.
Our beloved treasurer’s tactful promptings.
All in vain.
Inexcusable rudeness.
Nevertheless, if any excuse, this was it.
Pinkham emotionally unwell.
That lively, sunny person we saw in the club a mere mask of the real person.
His brightness all for us.
Darkness and despair within.
Too proud to reveal this darkness.
Easy perhaps for doctor to detect.
Discovered by me after long probing.
Terrible look in Pinkham’s eyes.
Air almost of madness.
Threat of suicide.
Horror at having to leave club.
Shame at having offended Stanley.
My question.
Admittedly most irregular, but my judgment perhaps worth something in these matters.
Couldn’t we find it in our hearts, one way or another,. to table poor Pinkham’s resignation?
Give him a second chance?
Make all the difference in the world to him.
Fresh start.
New career.
I personally to vouch for him.
Best tribute to values of club life.
Values of the Parnassus in particular.
So precious to all of us.
As I say, I’m sure my talk, presented with an adequate amount of feeling, would have sufficed to restore Pinkham to the good graces of the board, but, of course, it was never given. John Stanley was late getting to the dinner, and I had no chance to consult with him beforehand. When the president called on him for his report, he got up and mentioned, in his matter-of-fact way, among half a dozen items of no particular importance, that he had heard nothing from John Pinkham since our last meeting, that Pinkham’s debt was still outstanding, and that, unless I had something to suggest to the contrary, he would like to hear a motion to the effect that Pinkham be dropped from the club roster therewith. The president said that his recollection had been refreshed by the treasurer’s remarks and that he now remembered having asked me to solicit Pinkham’s resignation at the last meeting; would I care to speak on that point? I wouldn’t. The fact was that I was too astonished to speak. I could only shake my head and throw up my hands in a gesture of helplessness. Under the circumstances, this was the wisest thing I could have done; heaven knows what I might have said about Pinkham then if I had been able to say anything. The president called for a motion, which was made, seconded, and carried—unanimously, I may add.
The next morning, I received a letter from Pinkham, which I append. You will note from it that he had managed almost overnight to regain his accustomed bouncy high spirits. How he can have written the letter after what passed between us in the Red Room I don’t hope to understand. I’ve said that I feel outwitted, and the letter will show why.
EDDIE, OLD COCK!
Well, I cashed your fat check and then couldn’t resist paying off a lot of nasty little debts up here in Connecticut, including the local grocery store and the water company and the phone company and the light company, and after that I ordered a lot of clay from a place that doesn’t grant me credit any more and that took a big dollop of cash, and before you could say Jack Robinson, I had gone straight through all of your lovely money and there wasn’t a penny left over for the poor old club. Kiss its brownstone walls good-bye for me. I’ll miss those dear old coots and I hope they miss me. I realize, though, that I got out in the nick of time. I was actually growing old in there! Clubs do that, I guess. You seemed such a damnably serious old-maid fussbudget sitting there lecturing me the other day. I thought, my God, my poor Eddie! Is that what the club can do to a man? I know I’m a wretch to have pulled this fast one on you, but if you had any idea how merry I am this morning, setting to work here—! As the fellow said, if I felt any better, I’d be dangerous.
Your wicked but not very contrite,
J.P., Esq.
P.S. Apologize most profusely to the treasurer on my behalf. I swear I’ll pay him sometime.
P.P.S. Stanley his name is. John Stanley.