The Lincoln Lords [antikvár]

Lincoln lord turned off Fifth Avenue and entered the Greenbank Club at exactly high noon, the hands precisely overlapped on the clock above the iron-strapped door. He was aware that he was early—members of stature rarely came in before twelve-thirty-but the forenoon had been a torture that demanded ending. Inside the lobby, he accepted the instantaneous recognition of William, the ancient guardian of the club's portals, and stopped to ask the old man about his granddaughter. She had been stricken with a mild attack of polio some years before and, although she had long since made a complete recovery, her health remained a staple topic of inquiry, repeatable every day of the week with no apparent diminution of its ability to incite old William's gratitude. Across the lobby, he left his coat and hat with Frank, another club retainer of the same vintage as old William, to whom he addressed a no less effective question about a son who was an attorney in some small town in New Jersey. "He'll be proud to know you were asking about him, Mr. Lord," Frank beamed. "I'll tell him the next time I see him." "You do that," Lincoln Lord said earnestly, his tone and manner as freshly sincere as if this were not the third time in five days that he had made the same response to the same statement, varied now only by adding, "He must be a fine boy." "They all say he's the best laviyer in the county," Frank responded, giving special attention to selecting a hanger for Mr. Lincoln Lord's custom-tailored topcoat. "I'm sure it's true," he agreed, his hand extended in the standard pretense of expecting a brass check. [9] Frank shook his head. "No need for a check, Mr. Lord. Not likely I'd be forgetting you, sir." And this, too, was a routine now firmly established. There was nothing unusual about it—Lincoln Lord was accustomed to being recognized and remembered—yet it was rather pleasant and, these days, carried the extra significance that there had been no deterioration in the regard with which he was held by the club employees. They were always the first to demote a member who had lost stature. Tall and straight, his shoulders squared, his handsome head held high, he walked boldly to the bulletin board. Although his attention was seemingly centered upon the results of last month's progressive bridge tournament, his true interest was revealed by a guarded glance to the left, where there was a posting of the names of members whose bar and restaurant bills were unpaid. The list was the same one that had been there for five weeks, originally thirteen names, seven of which were now obliterated with heavy penciling. Apparently there was nothing too unusual about a busy member temporarily overlooking the payment of a bill. The Greenbank was, above all else, a gentleman's club. Relief warmed his mind, arousing again the retrospective realization that joining the Greenbank Club had been the wisest move that he had made in the past six years. He could not, however, credit himself with foresight. Actually, his acceptance of membership had been no more than a fortunate happenstance. He had been president of the Frazer Glass Company at the time and, when Fred Foyle had asked the privilege of proposing his name, he had felt it undiplomatic to refuse, Foyle being the president of the New York bank from which Frazer Glass secured most of its short-term loans. Although even the nonresident dues were rather high, they had been a deductible item on his personal tax return and, in the bracket where his income had then placed him, the net cost had been negligible. Now, with no income, the expense was totally his own, a burden only temporarily offset by the possibility of charging his luncheon checks. Eventually there would be a day of reckoning but, if worse came to worst, there was still the possibility of borrowing on his life insurance. Now, again routinely, he turned right and took the three long strides that brought him to the brass-grilled wicket in front of the telephone switchboard. "Good morning, Katherine," he said, not calling her Katie as some of the members did, speaking in the tone that he had learned to use when addressing wealthy widows in stockholders' meetings. The tone of her response was, as always, incongruous with her appearance. The enforcedly sedentary means by which she earned her livelihood, coupled with an insatiable appetite for pastry leftovers spirited in from the kitchen, had turned her into a fat woman of side-show proportions, [10]