BOOTSIE AND I made a date for a lesson the following morning at her parents’ court, since there was no way I was displaying my crappy forehand at the club for all the Merriwethers to see. Maybe I really did have some talent with a racket, I thought hopefully, despite about thirty years of evidence to the contrary, as Bootsie left and headed back to her office.
At four, I decided no one was buying any more antiques today. I took Waffles home, showered, did a quick makeup and hair blitz, and put on the white dress. I checked in with Hugh Best, who hadn’t heard from Jimmy; I encouraged Hugh to keep calling friends in the Princeton alumni directory, and promised to spend the next morning driving around town hunting for Jimmy. I decided to head over to the club early, leaving Waffles on his bed in the kitchen, snoring.
Five minutes later, I parked under my usual tree at the club, but the familiar, charming old building didn’t do much to quell my anxiety. I was an hour and half early for a date with a guy who was married to—okay, separated from, but legally married to—the Perfect Woman, and would probably reconcile with her any day now. I looked down at my outfit, smoothing the skirt of Holly’s Max Mara dress.
I went inside to have a soda at the bar with Ronnie—that might calm my nerves. I was determined not to have any wine at all before my date. I went in the club’s front door, crossed the hallway to the bar, peeked into the room, and saw the Binghams had invaded Ronnie’s bar, and were currently working their way through a fresh bottle of white zinfandel. Darn! I did a U-turn and trotted back out the front door.
The only option left was the 19th Hole, the club’s snack shed by the driving range, which dispensed beer, wine, and hot dogs. I shouldn’t get that worked up about meeting the vet, I told myself, since it was the first and last date ever with him. I ordered myself to buck up as I passed banks of lilies along the clubhouse exterior. The Hole, as it’s known, with its cold Heineken and free-flowing pinot grigio, was a cheerful spot, perfect for golfers during the summer. I could really go for a pinot grigio. I revised my self-imposed rule about no wine before the date. Wine was a good idea, I decided.
It was a perfect afternoon, breezy, quiet, and peaceful, with the metallic whump of golf clubs in the distance. What was the use of torturing myself over one more going-nowhere date? I tried to convince myself. I’d had plenty of those before!
I still had a few good years left in me, and I was about to learn tennis! Who needed a cute vet, anyway?
Just then, as I passed the golf cart shed, I saw a flash of red through a window that caught my eye as out of place within the shed’s freshly painted, dark green clapboard exterior and orderly rows of golf cars within. Dusty, rusty red, with a metallic, gritty quality that stuck out amid the white carts, it caught my eye as something familiar, a flash of shape and color that I’d seen many times before. I paused and backtracked, sliding open the garage door that led into the roomy shed, which at night accommodated some three dozen carts, and peered deeper into the dim expanse. There was no mistaking it: The Bests’ Volvo was in the back corner, a large cloth tarp partly concealing its dinged-up, late-seventies glory.
I walked over to the car and gingerly lifted one side of the tarp: There was the familiar giant dent in the driver’s side door, and the inspection sticker dated July 1989. The Metamucil and Kleenex were intact on the front seat, but the backseat of the car was now stuffed with what looked like most of the contents of the Bests’ attic. Silverware and napkin rings in ancient plastic baggies and old books littered the seats, and on the floor were cardboard boxes and a moth-eaten deer head mounted on a wooden plaque.
I let the tarp fall back into place and tiptoed out of the shed into the late-afternoon sun, closed the sliding door behind me, then walked back into the clubhouse and down the air-conditioned hallway toward the locker rooms. There, I sat on a chintz-upholstered bench for a minute to digest the presence of the Volvo at the club. A portrait of a 1950s-era club president in a gray flannel suit stared down at me sternly from across the hallway, which didn’t help me process my next step, now that I’d tracked down my missing neighbor’s car.
Had Jimmy asked Ronnie if he could park the Volvo here while he holed up somewhere local—maybe the Marriott in Villanova? It seemed unlikely. Jimmy was way too cheap to pay one hundred thirty-nine dollars a night for the Marriott, even if it did include a breakfast buffet and a free glass of wine each evening. He didn’t seem to have many friends, but was Hugh right—could an old fraternity brother have taken Jimmy in?
One of the ancient members of the club, Mr. Conwell, heir to a soup fortune, walked by on his way to play tennis, and we smiled at each other. He was a very inspiring old guy, lean and fit in his eighties, much like my grandfather had been until the year before he got sick and passed away.
Too bad Jimmy Best wasn’t more like the friendly Mr. Conwell, I thought. But then again, Mr. Conwell is in possession of approximately seven hundred million dollars’ worth of stock in his family’s food company, so you’d expect him to be in a good mood.
Then I remembered a winter night in the club bar a few years ago, when my grandfather had regaled me with stories of the club’s glory days in the years just after World War II. Apparently, the club had been a crazy party palace in the late forties, with black-tie dinner dances on the lawn, rollicking nights in the basement bowling alley, martinis being drunk around the clock, and a teenage Grace Kelly dropping by. “Prettiest girl I’d ever seen,” Grandpa had said, sitting on the Chesterfield sofa and sipping his vodka tonic, “including your grandmother, but I hadn’t met her yet.”
The club had been Grandpa’s second home back then. He’d spent all his spare time there, because his parents had figured he couldn’t get into too much trouble at a country club. Actually, the activities that went on in the basement bowling alley weren’t all bowling, he’d hinted, but he clarified that he never got to “bowl” with Grace Kelly. There had been drinking, dancing, and other fun distractions for everyone back then, and members had always been dressed in great-looking suits and tuxedoes, or pretty silk gowns, or tennis whites. Old photos of parties and tennis matches hung on the locker room walls, which attested to the glamour of the forties and fifties.
“Upstairs on the third floor was where the real action was in those days,” Grandpa had told me, swirling his Scotch and smiling.
“The third floor?” I’d never been in that part of the club. In fact, I’d never realized there was anything other than an attic on the third floor of the clubhouse, with its turrets and eaves under a shingled roof.
“Rowdy bunch up there,” Grandpa had told me, and explained that in the first half of the twentieth century, there had been small apartments on the top floor—suites of rooms that served as a kind of upscale retirement home for members whose wives had passed away. The old guys who lived up there had wandered the halls in their bathrobes and held a poker game that began every morning at eleven, continued through dinner, and raged on until midnight, when the busboys would make everyone go to bed. Apparently, the guys were a cigar-smoking, waitress-pinching, whiskey-chugging bunch who spent their golden years in pure glee. “Good system, actually,” Grandpa said.
“Very Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon,” I had agreed.
Remembering this conversation, I suddenly got up and, on a hunch, walked to the end of the hallway past the locker rooms and up a small flight of stairs that led to the second floor of the club. Here, a lofty, maple-paneled ballroom took up most of the floor—silent at this time of day, of course, with bits of dust floating peacefully in the sunlight. Just down from the ballroom, a warren of small administrative offices occupied the space directly above the locker rooms. The little stairway I had ascended landed right between the ballroom’s open double doors and a warren of offices at the other end of the hallway, where, it appeared, no one was working at this time of day.
I knew that there had to be stairs somewhere that led up to the third floor. As I passed office doors marked “Food and Beverage” and “Club Manager,” I came to an old wooden door painted dark green. It was unmarked, and a bit larger than the office doors.
I tried the handle to the unmarked green door. Locked.
As I yanked on the doorknob one more time, something caught my eye on the old millwork around the door frame. It was to the right, and just above my head. Something shiny. I peeked up, and hanging from a tiny nail in the side of the millwork was a very old key. And when I slipped it into the lock in the door handle and turned, the old door creaked open loudly, but easily, and revealed a set of wooden stairs. I put the key on the bottom stair (the last thing I needed was to get locked in the club attic), closed the door behind me, and started to climb.
“OH, FUCK,” SAID Jimmy Best. “It’s you.”
I didn’t take it personally.
Once upstairs, it hadn’t taken much work to find him. The flight of stairs ended in a long hallway that was frayed by age. The walls were covered with red-and-yellow-striped wallpaper—faded, but as chic as the day it had been installed. There were bronze light sconces, prints of hunting scenes, and wide, beautifully aged, polished plank floors. At each end of the hallway was a round, lounge-like room with pretty, if slightly dusty, mullioned windows overlooking the club lawns. These round rooms must be the interiors of the shingled turrets that flanked each end of the club, I realized, and they were just as appealing here as they were on the building’s exterior. There were two ancient poker tables in the room to my left, complete with chips and yellowed playing cards, and what I recognized as the door to a dumbwaiter directly in front of me. At the other end of the hall, I could see a billiard table and a small wooden bar. It was hot up here, of course, being late May at the top of a stuffy old shingle-and-brick building, but there was something frankly awesome about this secret part of the club.
I’d turned right when I heard jazz floating quietly from that end of the hallway. The music appeared to be coming from under a door marked the “Conwell Suite”—named for the family of the handsome old man I’d just seen downstairs. This had to be a good suite, I thought to myself, with all that soup money.
I’d knocked lightly, then gingerly opened the door to Jimmy’s sour greeting. He sounded as grouchy as ever, but underneath his mustache and frown, he actually looked relieved to be found. For my part, I was thrilled that he was fully dressed in a pair of old khaki shorts and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up.
“I’m so glad you’re okay!” I told him, truthfully.
“Oh, I’m more than okay, darling,” he said with a grin, and lit up a cigar. “I’m fantastic. I can’t tell you how good it is to be finally free of that nagging hen of a brother. I’m smoking, drinking, and eating red meat around the clock. Should have moved up here in 1976, when I divorced my fourth wife.”
Jimmy was happily ensconced on a leather sofa. White cotton curtains fluttered in the late-afternoon air by a set of double windows that had been cracked open for fresh air, and a small air conditioner hummed. Not the most energy-efficient setup, but it definitely provided comfort.
“This is nice,” I admitted, “but what about your brother? He’s terrified that something’s happened to you.”
“That old woman!” hooted Jimmy, puffing on his stogie contentedly. “He reminds me of Angela Lansbury.”
I sighed. I’d have to somehow convince Jimmy to go home, or at least to call Hugh and tell him he was okay. In the meantime, it was hard to deny the appeal of his attic lair. For one thing, the view of the club grounds was gorgeous from up here. There was a cute window seat, and I perched there for a few moments to look out at the lawn, which unfurled in front of me in its emerald lushness. A few tennis players were still out swatting balls, and I squinted to see if any of them were John Hall or, horrors, Lilly Merriwether (which they weren’t—none of the women playing was as annoyingly slim and tan as the reedlike Lilly). A trumpet vine had grown up from the porch roof and curled around the window frame, its orange bell-shaped flowers framing the sill perfectly. There was a pleasant clinking of glasses and murmur of people chatting below on the porch.
What with the relaxing music, and it now being past five, I thought to myself, well, now that I’m here, I could really go for a glass of wine.
“Your Scotch, Mr. B.,” said Ronnie the bartender just at that moment, entering discreetly with a silver tray bearing a glass of Dewars, a chilled glass of chardonnay, and a dish of peanuts. “Kristin.” He nodded at me, handing me the glass of wine and a cocktail napkin as nonchalantly as if I was sitting on the porch with Joe and Holly, rather than sitting in an attic with a seventy-five-year-old man who’d run away from home.
“Gosh, you’re good!” I told Ronnie admiringly. Clearly, the network of secret passageways and staff gossip in the club is extensive enough that everyone who knew Jimmy was stashed away up here also already knew that I was upstairs visiting him. Were there cameras throughout the club, or did Ronnie and his staff have some kind of sixth sense for what the members were up to? I’d have to ask Ronnie when I got a minute alone with him in the bar. In any case, some of the club staff had clearly decided to take Jimmy under their wing, and were taking exceptionally good care of him. There was an open door behind Jimmy’s leather couch that led to a bedroom, where I could see that a bed was made up with crisp white linens. A thick white terry bathrobe borrowed from the men’s locker room hung on a peg beside the bedroom window, and on a chest of drawers to my right, a tray held a pitcher of water, some glasses, and a bottle of Amaretto.
“Roast beef tonight, Mr. Best?” asked Ronnie. Jimmy nodded happily, rubbing his hands together with glee. I loved the fact that Jimmy, who had almost no money, was being so well taken care of in a club where ninety percent of the members were enviably rich. Jimmy’s long-standing membership and no-bullshit style had clearly made him a staff favorite of the waiters and barmen, and of course he’d always flirted relentlessly with the sixty-year-old waitresses, to their delight. Most of the members hated Jimmy, but he didn’t give a fig about that.
“Are you staying for dinner, Kristin?” Ronnie asked politely.
“No, thanks,” I told him. “I have an, um, appointment tonight.” I looked at my watch surreptitiously. I still had thirty-five minutes before my rendezvous with John. That should be enough time to convince Jimmy to forgive Hugh and go home.
On second thought, maybe not. Jimmy was as cozily settled in here as Hugh Hefner on movie night at the Playboy Mansion. He clinked my glass from his perch on the sofa as I sat down on the red chintz chair. “He’s a reliable bastard,” he said fondly about Ronnie, as the barman silently disappeared. “Good bartender, too.”
“He does always seem to know just when you need a drink,” I agreed.
“Now that you’ve found me,” said Jimmy, waggling his bushy gray eyebrows at me, “what do you plan to do with me?”
“I’m not sure,” I admitted. “Maybe have another cocktail?”
“I’D LOVE TO look through these boxes with you, Jimmy,” I said, sipping chardonnay and feeling the delightful California grapes surging through my bloodstream. Jimmy’s good mood was contagious, and Ronnie had delivered another round without being asked. I pushed the glass of wine away and focused on the stuff from the Bests’ house that Jimmy wanted me to look through. “I only have ten minutes before I have to leave, so I’ll have to make it quick,” I told him.
Jimmy had transported several incredibly dusty boxes and an old leather suitcase to the club from his house, which he told me he planned to have me sell at The Striped Awning or take out to Stoltzfus’s flea market, and the stuff was currently shoved into a corner of the Conwell Suite. My white dress (well, Holly’s white dress) would be ruined if I unpacked these musty old boxes without some kind of protection, so I asked Jimmy if I could put his on his bathrobe over my dress to protect it from smudges. He agreed affably.
“Might give old Ronnie fodder for the club rumor mill if he sees you in my robe,” he said with some interest as I shrugged it on and rolled up the long sleeves.
Borrowing a pad and paper I’d noticed on the sideboard where the Amaretto bottle was perched, I sat down cross-legged on the floor, and began to open one of the old cardboard moving boxes. I didn’t feel comfortable selling any of the Best heirlooms without first asking Hugh, but I could at least look through the stuff while I was here.
“You’ll probably really miss Hugh by tomorrow,” I told Jimmy without much conviction, as I pulled out old newspaper that was stuffed into the box to protect its contents.
Jimmy stared at me with utter contempt. “I don’t think so, darling,” he finally said from the sofa, swirling his Dewars disdainfully. “Been living with him for most of the last seventy-plus years, except when I was married, and haven’t missed him once.” Inwardly, I agreed with Jimmy. It seemed like they could really use a trial separation. But Hugh was so worried about his brother, it would be cruel to keep him in the dark about Jimmy being found safe.
“You have to at least let him know that you’re safe,” I pleaded. “And you two have to figure out together what to do about your house and moving to Florida. And what your plans are for all this stuff you brought here.” I wasn’t sure how Jimmy had ever gotten all this stuff out of the house by himself, but there I sat, making a quick mini-inventory of the silver and china in the box in the short time before my cute-vet date. It was your basic WASP hodgepodge: There were mismatched Limoges plates, and two ancient leather-bound Nathaniel Hawthorne books coated in pale dust. There was most of a silver tea service in urgent need of polishing, and old leather photo albums, a beautiful but tattered family Bible, and a set of gilded salt cellars. I was touched by seeing it all spread out around us, elegant reminders of when the Best family had been more prosperous, gathering for black-tie dinners and roast pheasant suppers in the proper old Philadelphia way. It was familiar, and oddly reassuring, to see the remnants of this charmed and long-gone style of living.
While I made notes, Jimmy munched his way through the bowl of nuts and told me about the last two days, which had been spent watching porn and baseball (Ronnie had wired the old TV in the bedroom into the club’s satellite dish), gulping cocktails, and inhaling fatty foods.
“I check out the tennis on the lawn in the afternoon,” he added gesturing toward the window seat, with its view of the grass courts, “though I must say the players here aren’t exactly Maria Sharapova in the looks department. And last night at eleven, I snuck down and bowled a few frames in the basement. Easy to wander around here at night, since the old bastards who belong here all have dinner at six. Boring fuckers, really.”
There was no way Jimmy could stay for too much longer, because even if the club still allowed members to move in—which it didn’t—he’d never be able to afford it. And why would the staff hide him for more than a day or two? It’s not like Jimmy was Anne Frank. And he had to tell his panicked brother where he was. Or at the least, he had to tell him he was alive.
“Jimmy, you have to get in touch with Hugh,” I told him. “If you want, I’ll tell him that you’re fine, but aren’t ready to come home yet, and that you’ll get in touch with him in a couple of days, okay?”
“Fine, fine,” he muttered, picking up a Racing Form and rolling his eyes.
I kept unpacking his stuff, but I didn’t have the heart to tell him that the things I’d uncovered so far, while loaded with sentiment and charm, wouldn’t bring more than a hundred bucks all told at The Striped Awning. Maybe I’d have better luck with the contents of the battered old leather suitcase. The top layer of old newspaper contained some ancient and not very clean fish forks held together by a rubber band. Next was a bunch of embroidered linen napkins, and underneath those, a faded black leather box about the size of a box of animal crackers.
The leather was fraying at the edges, peeling away from the parchment and wood that formed the box, but the S-shaped catch opened easily. Inside, the interior was lined in velvet that had once been black, and was now faded by the years. There was a ring nestled in the velvet, and I lifted it out of its snug place and held it up in the light still flooding in through the windows. The ring was set with a huge dark red stone surrounded by tiny white diamonds set in white gold or platinum. While the jewel was darkened by age, it was still stunning. I don’t know much about jewelry, but this elegant knuckle-grazer seemed like it must be of some real value.
“Jimmy, this ring is gorgeous,” I raved. “Was it your mother’s? I love it!”
“Cocktail ring,” said Jimmy, looking over his newspaper with his reading glasses halfway down his nose. “Looks pretty snazzy, I agree, but not worth much. Came down through Mother’s side of the family. She had it looked at some years ago—well, quite a few years ago—back in the sixties, as I recall. Took it to an antiques market in the city and they said it was basically worthless. Semi-precious stone, apparently.”
“It’s really beautiful,” I told him, disappointed for the Bests’ sake that it wasn’t worth more. I slipped it on my right hand ring finger and admired it. Then I caught sight of my Timex, which looked seriously outclassed by the dramatic ring, and noticed it was 6:24 p.m.
“Shit!” I said to Jimmy. “I’ve gotta go.” I looked down at the other unopened cardboard box in front of me and had a brainstorm. “Can I take this box with me? It might make Hugh feel better if I bring a few things home. Then I’ll come back here tomorrow, and we can look through the rest of this stuff, and figure out when you’re going home.”
“Suit yourself,” said Jimmy. Then he gave me a grin. “Why don’t you wear the ring tonight, darling? It hasn’t seen the light of day in forty years. It might be fun for you. You can always give it back to me tomorrow.”
“I’d love to!” I said. I hung up his bathrobe, washed my hands in his ancient white porcelain bathroom sink in the bathroom off the Conwell apartment’s bedroom, taking care not to ding the cocktail ring, grabbed the box, and waved good-bye as Ronnie opened the door bearing a tray with Jimmy’s dinner, which was being kept warm under a silver dome.
I DASHED DOWN the steps and was trotting down the first-floor hallway of the club, when I nearly ran smack into Bootsie.
She stared at the cardboard box tucked under my arm.
“What’s in the box?” she demanded.
I ransacked my mind briefly.
“Some old silver the club wants to sell off,” I lied. “They never use it, so I’m going to sell it at the store to raise money for the, er, club maintenance fund.”
“Oh,” she said. Luckily, Bootsie was totally bored by this misinformation, and turned to scan the scene on the porch through a south-facing window, missing the cocktail ring on my finger, which was mostly blocked by the dusty old box. “Want to have a quick drink?” she asked, adding, “I’ve got some time, my doubles match was canceled.”
“Oh, sorry, I have to take care of these boxes,” I said. “But I can’t wait for our tennis lesson tomorrow!”
“Okay,” she said. “Remember, 7:30 a.m. sharp. Early tennis is always fabulous!”
“Great!” I yelled over my shoulder as I headed out the front door toward my car, where I quickly stashed the box in the trunk of my car. It was 6:29 p.m., so I dialed Hugh Best as quickly as I could on my cell phone.
“Your brother is fine,” I told him.
“Oh, thank heaven,” bleated Hugh.
“He’s safe and he has all your family heirlooms, but he refuses to come home right now, and I promised him I wouldn’t tell you where he is for at least a couple more days. I think I can talk him into it very soon. Are you okay with that?” I asked Hugh hastily.
“I suppose I have to be,” he sighed fussily. I could hear him uncorking a decanter and sloshing Scotch into a glass. “Stubborn bastard,” he added.
“I’ll stop by your house first thing tomorrow morning,” I promised. I hung up, did a lip gloss and hair check, and inspected the white dress, which was blissfully smudge-free.
My Timex read 6:31 p.m., so I took a deep breath and got out of the car, wondering how I could somehow convince John that we should eat inside the club, hidden in a dark corner of the empty dining room, when everyone else was having a fabulous time outside on the porch on this beautiful night. I just couldn’t conduct a date with the vet under the watchful eye of Bootsie. And even worse, what if Honey Potts, or the dreaded Mariellen—the vet’s mother-in-law—were here tonight, Mariellen sitting and angrily smoking her Virginia Slims on the porch? She seemed to be here every other night of the year.
I looked up and there in front of me in the parking lot was John, in a sport coat and khakis, looking tanned and lean.
“Hey, there. I had an idea,” he said with a smile. “Would you like to go to that new place, Gianni? I get a little tired of eating at the club sometimes.”