“Are they rich?” old Mrs. Forrest suddenly demanded.
“They must be well off if they took Dan Warner’s house.”
“Then they’ll get in all right.”
“They won’t get into the Kennemore Club,” said Pierce Winslow. “I happen to come from a state with certain traditions.”
“I’ve seen the bottom rail get to be the top rail many times in this town,” said the old lady blandly.
“But this man’s a criminal, grandma,” explained Forrest. “Can’t you see the difference? It isn’t a social question. We used to argue at New Haven whether we’d shake hands with Al Capone if we met him—”
“Who is Al Capone?” asked Mrs. Forrest.
“He’s another criminal, in Chicago.”
“Does he want to join the Kennemore Club too?”
They laughed, but Forrest had decided that if Rikker came up for the Kennemore Club, his father’s would not be the only black ball in the box.
Abruptly it became full summer. After the last April storm someone came along the street one night, blew up the trees like balloons, scattered bulbs and shrubs like confetti, opened a cage full of robins and, after a quick look around, signaled up the curtain upon a new backdrop of summer sky.
Tossing back a strayed baseball to some kids in a vacant lot, Forrest’s fingers, on the stitched seams of the stained leather cover, sent a wave of ecstatic memories to his brain. One must hurry and get there—“there” was now the fairway of the golf course, but his feeling was the same. Only when he teed off at the eighteenth that afternoon did he realize that it wasn’t the same, that it would never be enough any more. The evening stretched large and empty before him, save for the set pieces of a dinner party and bed.
While he waited with his partner for a match to play off, Forrest glanced at the tenth tee, exactly opposite and two hundred yards away.
One of the two figures on the ladies’ tee was addressing her ball; as he watched, she swung up confidently and cracked a long drive down the fairway.
“Must be Mrs. Horrick,” said his friend. “No other woman can drive like that.”
At that moment the sun glittered on the girl’s hair and Forrest knew who it was; simultaneously, he remembered what he must do this afternoon. That night Chauncey Rikker’s name was to come up before the membership committee on which his father sat, and before going home, Forrest was going to pass the clubhouse and leave a certain black slip in a little box. He had carefully considered all that; he loved the city where his people had lived honorable lives for five generations. His grandfather had been a founder of this club in the 90’s when it went in for sailboat racing instead of golf, and when it took a fast horse three hours to trot out here from town. He agreed with his father that certain people were without the pale. Tightening his face, he drove his ball two hundred yards down the fairway, where it curved gently into the rough.
The eighteenth and tenth holes were parallel and faced in opposite directions. Between tees they were separated by a belt of trees forty feet wide. Though Forrest did not know it, Miss Rikker’s hostess, Helen Hannan, had dubbed into this same obscurity, and as he went in search of his ball he heard female voices twenty feet away.
“You’ll be a member after tonight,” he heard Helen Hannan say, “and then you can get some real competition from Stella Horrick.”
“Maybe I won’t be a member,” said a quick, clear voice. “Then you’ll have to come and play with me on the public links.”
“Alida, don’t be absurd.”
“Why? I played on the public links in Buffalo all last spring. For the moment there wasn’t anywhere else. It’s like playing on some courses in Scotland.”
“But I’d feel so silly… Oh, gosh, let’s let the ball go.”
“There’s nobody behind us. As to feeling silly—if I cared about public opinion any more, I’d spend my time in my bedroom.” She laughed scornfully. “A tabloid published a picture of me going to see father in prison. And I’ve seen people change their tables away from us on steamers, and once I was cut by all the American girls in a French school… Here’s your ball.”
“Thanks… Oh, Alida, it seems terrible.”
“All the terrible part is over. I just said that so you wouldn’t be too sorry for us if people didn’t want us in this club. I wouldn’t care; I’ve got a life of my own and my own standard of what trouble is. It wouldn’t touch me at all.”
They passed out of the clearing and their voices disappeared into the open sky on the other side. Forrest abandoned the search for his lost ball and walked toward the caddie house.
“What a hell of a note,” he thought. “To take it out on a girl that had nothing to do with it”—which was what he was doing this minute as he went up toward the club. “No,” he said to himself abruptly, “I can’t do it. Whatever her father may have done, she happens to be a lady. Father can do what he feels he has to do, but I’m out.”
After lunch the next day, his father said rather diffidently: “I see you didn’t do anything about the Rikkers and the Kennemore Club.”
“No.”
“It’s just as well,” said his father. “As a matter of fact, they got by. The club has got rather mixed anyhow in the last five years—a good many queer people in it. And, after all, in a club you don’t have to know anybody you don’t want to. The other people on the committee felt the same way.”
“I see,” said Forrest dryly. “Then you didn’t argue against the Rikkers?”
“Well, no. The thing is I do a lot of business with Walter Hannan, and it happened yesterday I was obliged to ask him rather a difficult favor.”
“So you traded with him.” To both father and son, the word “traded” sounded like traitor.
“Not exactly. The matter wasn’t mentioned.”
“I understand,” Forrest said. But he did not understand, and some old childhood faith in his father died at that moment.
II
To snub anyone effectively one must have him within range. The admission of Chauncey Rikker to the Kennemore Club and, later, to the Downtown Club was followed by angry talk and threats of resignation that simulated the sound of conflict, but there was no indication of a will underneath. On the other hand, unpleasantness in crowds is easy, and Chauncey Rikker was a facile object for personal dislike; moreover, a recurrent echo of the bucket-shop scandal sounded from New York, and the matter was reviewed in the local newspapers, in case anyone had missed it. Only the liberal Hannan family stood by the Rikkers, and their attitude aroused considerable resentment, and their attempt to launch them with a series of small parties proved a failure. Had the Rikkers attempted to “bring Alida out,” it would have been for the inspection of a motley crowd indeed, but they didn’t.
When, occasionally during the summer, Forrest encountered Alida Rikker, they crossed eyes in the curious way of children who don’t know each other. For a while he was haunted by her curly yellow head, by the golden-brown defiance of her eyes; then he became interested in another girl. He wasn’t in love with Jane Drake, though he thought he might marry her. She was “the girl across the street”; he knew her qualities, good and bad, so that they didn’t matter. She had an essential reality underneath, like a relative. It would please their families. Once, after several highballs and some casual necking, he almost answered seriously when she provoked him with “But you don’t really care about me”; but he sat tight and next morning was relieved that he had. Perhaps in the dull days after Christmas—Meanwhile, at the Christmas dances among the Christmas girls he might find the ecstasy and misery, the infatuation that he wanted. By autumn he felt that his predestined girl was already packing her trunk in some Eastern or Southern city.
It was in his more restless mood that one November Sunday he went to a small tea. Even as he spoke to his hostess he felt Alida Rikker across the firelit room; her glowing beauty and her unexplored novelty pressed up against him, and there was a relief in being presented to her at last. He bowed and passed on, but there had been some sort of communication. Her look said that she knew the stand that his family had taken, that she didn’t mind, and was even sorry to see him in such a silly position, for she knew that he admired her. His look said: “Naturally, I’m sensitive to your beauty, but you see how it is; we’ve had to draw the line at the fact that your father is a dirty dog, and I can’t withdraw from my present position.”
Suddenly in a silence, she was talking, and his ears swayed away from his own conversation.
“…Helen had this odd pain for over a year and, of course, they suspected cancer. She went to have an X ray; she undressed behind a screen, and the doctor looked at her through the machine, and then he said, ’But I told you to take off all your clothes,’ and Helen said, ’I have.’ The doctor
