Now, doctor.
He nodded, and as he drew nearer he saw where he could stand. Four big scallops of metal, themselves cross-hatched by girders, formed an undulating line on either side of the bridge. In the middle of the bridge, between the second and third metal curves, a thick steel girder protruded upward.
Jaffrey could not feel the change from the concrete of the road to the steel of the bridge, but he could feel the bridge move beneath him, lifting a little with each particularly strong gust. When he reached the superstructure, he pulled himself along on the rail. After reaching the central girder, he gripped one of the rungs, put his frozen feet on the bottom rung, and tried to climb up to the flat rail.
He could not do it.
For a moment he stood there, hands on one rung and feet on another, like an old man hanging from a rope, breathing so heavily it sounded like sobbing. He managed to lift his slippered foot and put it on the next rung. Then by using what he felt was surely the last of his strength, he pulled his body up onto it. Some flesh from his bare foot adhered to the lower rung. Panting, he stood on the second rung, and saw that he had two more rungs to go before he would be high enough to stand on the flat rail.
One at a time, he transferred his hands to the next highest rung. Then he moved the slippered foot; and with what felt like heroic effort, moved the other.
Pain seared his entire leg, and he clung to the supports, the bare foot lifted into cold wind. For a moment, his foot blazing, he feared that shock would tumble him back down onto the bridge. Once down, he would never be able to climb up again.
Delicately he put the toes of his still-flaming foot on the rung. It was enough to hold him. Again he transferred his numb arms. The slippered foot went up a rung-by itself it seemed. He tried to pull himself up, but his arms merely trembled. It felt as though the muscles in his shoulders were separating. Finally he threw himself up, assisted he thought by a hand pushing upward in the small of his back, his fingers luckily caught the rung, and he was nearly there.
For the first time he noticed his bare foot, bleeding onto the metal. The pain had increased; now his entire left leg seemed to be in flames. He put the foot down onto the flat rail, and held tightly with both exhausted arms while he moved his right foot beside it.
The water glistened feebly beneath him. Wind buffeted his hair, his coat.
Standing before him on a platform of gray wind, dressed in tweed jacket and bow tie, was Ricky Hawthorne. Ricky's hands were clasped, in a characteristic gesture, before his belt buckle. "Good work, John," he said in his dry kind voice. The best of them all, the sweetest, cuckolded little Ricky Hawthorne.
"You take too much guff from Sears," John Jaffrey said, his voice weak and whispery. "You always did."
"I know." Ricky smiled. "I'm a natural subaltern. Sears was always a natural general."
"Wrong," Jaffrey tried to say. "He's not, he's…" The thought died.
"It doesn't matter," came the light dry voice. "Just step forward off the bridge, John."
Dr. Jaffrey was looking down at the gray water. "No, I can't. I had something different in mind. I was going…" Confusion took it away.
When he looked up again, he gasped. Edward Wanderley, who had been closer to him than any of the others, was standing on the wind instead of Ricky. As on the night of the party, he wore black shoes, a gray flannel suit, a flowered shirt. Black-rimmed spectacles were joined at the bows by a silvery cord. Handsome in his theatrical gray hair and expensive clothes, Edward smiled at him with compassion, concern, warmth. "It's been a little while," he said.
Dr. Jaffrey began to weep.
"It's time to stop messing around," Edward told him. "All it takes is one step. It's simple as hell, John."
Dr. Jaffrey nodded.
"So take the step, John. You're too tired to do anything else."
Dr. Jaffrey stepped off the bridge.
Below him, at the level of the water but protected from the wind by a thick steel plate, Omar Norris saw him hit the water. The doctor's body went under, surfaced a moment later and spun halfway around, face down, before it began to drift downriver with the current. "Shit," he said: he'd come to the one place he could think of where he could finish off a pint of bourbon without being cornered by lawyers, the sheriff, his wife or someone telling him to get on the snowplow and start clearing the streets. He tilted more bourbon into his mouth, closed his eyes. When he opened them it was still there, lower in the water because the heavy coat had begun to weight the body down. "Shit." He capped the bottle, stood up and went back out into the wind to see if he could find someone who would know what to do.
II - Jaffrey's Party
Give place, you ladies, and begone!
Boast not yourselves at all!
For here at hand approacheth one
whose face will stain you all.
"A Praise of His Lady"
-Tottel's Miscellany, 1557
1
The following events occurred a year and a day earlier, in the evening of the last day of the golden age. None of them knew it was their golden age, nor that it was coming to an end: in fact they would have seen their lives, in the usual fashion of people with comfortable existences, a sufficiency of friends and the certainty of food on the table, as a process of gradual and even imperceptible improvement. Having survived the crises of youth and the middle years, they thought they had wisdom enough to meet the coming crises of age; having seen wars, adulteries, compromise and change, they thought they had seen most everything they would see -they'd make no larger claim.
Yet there were things they had not seen, and which they would see in time.
It is always true in personal, if not historical, terms that a golden age's defining characteristic is its dailiness, its offered succession of the small satisfactions of daily living. If none in the Chowder Society but Ricky Hawthorne truly appreciated this, in time they would all know it.
2
"I suppose we have to go."
"What? You always like parties, Stella."
"I have a funny feeling about this one."
"Don't you want to meet that actress?"
"My interest in meeting little beauties of nineteen was always limited."
"Edward seems to have become rather taken with her."
"Oh, Edward." Stella, seated before her mirror and brushing her hair, smiled at Ricky's reflection. "I suppose it'll be worth going just to see Lewis Benedikt's reaction to Edward's find." Then the smile changed key as the fine muscles beside her mouth moved, became more edged. "At least it's something to be invited to a Chowder Society evening."
"It's not, it's a party," Ricky vainly pointed out.
"I've always thought that women should be allowed during those famous evenings of yours."
"I know that," Ricky said.
"And that's why I want to go."
"It's not the Chowder Society. It's just a party."
"Then who had John invited, besides you and Edward's little actress?"
"Everybody, I think," Ricky answered truthfully. "What's the feeling you said you had?"
Stella cocked her head, touched her lipstick with her little finger, looked into her summery eyes and said, "Goose over my grave."