Free Bech at Bay by John Updike Page B

was coming to the babbling composer’s rescue, saying, “Perhaps we’re straying from the topic.”
    “What is the topic?” Aaron Fisch unabashedly asked.
    “Isn’t it time for cocktails?” J. Edward Jamison seconded.
    “The topic is the dearth of new members,” Bech told one, and then the other: “It is only ten minutes to six, Mr.Jamison. Let me say, before we proceed to the last item of the agenda”—Edna had cleared her throat and placed, suppressing a stab of impatience, a supremely sharp pencilpoint upon the item still to be discussed—“that I am surprised to hear talk of dissolution, if that is what I have just heard. The purposes for which Miss Baines made her generous bequests are still valid. American society has not been so transformed since 1902 that the arts need no longer be honored, nor is there, to my knowledge, any other organization quite like ours—so purely and disinterestedly honorary. Are any of you suggesting that the artistic spirit—the appetite for truth and beauty—has suddenly died? If so, I missed the obituary in the
Times.
Many worthy prospective members exist, to fill up the spaces in our ranks; a meeting such as this serves, primarily, as an occasion to vent our views. Nominations should be submitted in writing, with the signature of one other member as a second. Then, in due course, we will vote, as our predecessors always have and our successors always will.”
    “Well said, Henry,” Edna murmured at his side.
    Indeed, his firmness in defending an organization he once viewed as superfluous surprised him. The words came out of him as crisply as if teletyped; the president within, whom he had never suspected was there, had spoken. And the elderly bodies seated before him—inspiration-scarred warriors in the battle for precision and harmony, for order in a world where the concept of divine order had become an obscene joke—fell silent under his conservative barrage, his rattling salute to continuity. “The last item on the agenda,” Bech announced, his eyes bent on Edna’s pencilpoint, “is less existential and more practical. Gabriel Mendez, who, as you all know, lives in our basement as caretaker and watchman, has told Edna that he and hisfamily must have more nearly adequate health benefits. Their youngest child evidently needs a great deal of specialized care.”
    Once it was ascertained that the endowment, benefitting from the steady rise in stock prices since the crash of October ’87, could foot the bill, the benefits were voted, eight to none. A good deed done, with money not theirs. Yet, rising from his heady session of presiding, Bech felt the floor under him tip, the long dark desktop curve downward at both edges, and the emptying wing chairs defy perspective. The president was somehow on a slippery slope. Wasn’t the Forty from its turn-of-the-century founding based on a false belief that art naturally kept company with gentility, both gracefully attendant on money—that money and power could be easily transmuted into truth and beauty, and that a club of the favored could exist, ten brownstone steps up from the pitted, filthy, sorely trafficked street? What was he doing here, presiding?
    He lived on the west side of Crosby Street, that especially grim cobbled canyon of old iron-façaded industrial structures running south from Houston, one block east of lower Broadway. He occupied a loft so vast he had been able, finally, to get his books into a single set of shelves, a ramshackle rampart of pine planks on cinder blocks, Marx next to Marvell, Freud in all his frowning paperbacks between the slim poems of Philip Freneau and the leather-swaddled chronicles of Jean Froissart—picked up for four dollars when Bech was a GI-Bill student at NYU.
    Bech could be said to be both a keen reader and the opposite; he nervously plucked at any journal or newspaper within reach of his hand, often leafing through back tofront, a habit left over from his childhood, when