John MacDonald - Slam the Big Door

And so it was a sobered, apprehensive and completely determined young man who drove south to Riley Key through the gaudy lights of sunset, his brown hands sweaty on the wheel of the agile little car.

At the key club at the southern end of Riley Key, Sunday night was known, in the Club bulletins, as Family Night. The Club was housed in an old rambling roomy frame structure that had originally been a hunting and fishing lodge built by a Cleveland industrialist. He had owned six hundred feet of land from Gulf to bay, and had built the lodge on the bay side, close to a natural lagoon that cut into the Key from the bay side. When the Cleveland man had died in 1923 a group of his friends who had often been guests at the lodge, remembering the freedom of their annual visits, and the good times they had enjoyed, had banded together and purchased the lodge from the estate and, after establishing ground rules and installing a Bahamian couple to operate it, had incorporated it as the ultra-private Key Club.

In 1932, after most of the members had died physically or financially, the Club would have folded had not one of the original members, who had retired to Florida at precisely the right time, been determined to save it as a club. He opened the membership list to suitable applicants in Ravenna, fourteen miles to the north, and in the much smaller town of Gulfway, five miles to the south. At that time there were also a few wealthy retireds, a very few, who had settled on Riley Key and were potential members.

The Club did not thrive, but it did continue to exist. It had been so solidly constructed of black cypress and hard pine that there were few maintenance problems.

By 1959, though the original structure was largely unchanged, the Key Club was fashionable, expensive, exclusive and beautifully operated. There were rental cabañas on the Gulf side for landlocked members and the guests of waterfront members lacking guest facilities. The entire structure was air-conditioned. Kitchen facilities were entirely modern. Lighting effects were dramatic and professional. The lagoon had been widened and deepened, the channel dredged and marked. There were dockage facilities for a considerable number of sizable watercraft.

Though it took a staff of sixteen to operate the Club and facilities, and monthly bills were prepared on the most modern of accounting equipment, and the initiation fee made the new member think thrice, the membership still insisted upon calling the Club homey and quaint, pointing out as evidences of quaintness the dark-beamed cathedral ceilings, the dusty throngs of stuffed fish mounted high on the walls, the enormous stone fireplaces.

The shrewd and well-paid young manager of the Club, a graduate of the Cornell Hotel School, was called Gus by the membership, and, during his few years of tenure, had managed to establish a public personality which led the uninformed to guess that he had been born among the mangroves and had been yanked off a shrimp boat and charged with the confusing chore of running the Club. Gus was particularly adept in selecting and hiring bartenders and waitresses who were sufficiently casual with the members to be known and loved as characters, but never overstepped that invisible line of protocol and gave offense. Gus and the help never gossiped about a member to a member, never permitted an emotional relationship with a member to become established, ranged confidently back and forth within that narrow area between obsequiousness and rudeness — and knocked down every dime they could.

On the occasion of Mike Rodenska’s first visit to the Key Club, the gathering was large and informal. April was more than half over. Most of the short-season winter visitors had left. House-guests were in short supply. Everybody told everybody else how wonderful it was to have the season over so you could relax and have fun with your friends. The night air was balmy. Tinted spotlights on palm boles dimmed the circus of stars overhead. Cruisers were arriving, and there were private cocktail parties on the cruisers and in some of the beach cabañas. The main bar was three deep. There was a constant roar of conversation, and rumble of the gentle surf, and the car doors chunking in the parking lot, and squealing of sunbaked children and incomprehensible cawings of teenagers, and clatter of crockery from the early diners, and swift swoopings of waitresses, and drinks held high and handed back. Polite hootings of dowager laughter, and hearty splashings in the lighted pool — and here and there the careful walk and wooden grimace of the alcoholic. It was Family Night.

If, during the day, you’d had a few knocks and a swim and some sun and a nap, you were ready. You cavorted under the dusty glass eyes of the fish who had lost battles long ago.

Mike, dizzied by the surge and noise in the bar, where the air-conditioning labored vainly against animal heat, made his way slowly to a side door and went out onto a broad porch. He looked in through a window. Shorts, halters, dinner dresses, cocktail dresses, swim suits. Gleams and glints of teeth, eyes and jewels. Skin of scarlet, pink, brown, taffy — in a shifting, laughing turmoil of shoulders and throats and thighs.

Voices came to him, blurred by the closed window: “... never had such a wonderful... went to Miami to... haven’t seen you, darling, since... on the third flight to Havana... when she’s looking sick... talk about new engines... for the silly girl he met in... menopause she doesn’t... cracked up the car over in... that motel where Ruthie caught... good marks last year but... cold war doesn’t mean we... remember that tarpon you... finished the marriage when she... sold it for two hundred a foot... in the hospital again with... backhand is weak... with strep throat only fourteen years old Tuesday... with a third martini is all... you should stop telling me what I should... give a stock dividend... before Betty’s party...”

“Here he is!” a voice said, close and gay, and he turned his back on the window and saw, in the light from the window, Debbie Ann with a particularly handsome brunette with bangs and furry black brows and a look of insolence, and a broad compulsive mouth. “Watching the snake pit, Mike?”

“Nobody gave me a scorecard. I can’t tell the players.”

Both girls were in tailored slacks and seagoing blouses. They were the same height, both carrying drinks, both a little tight, but under control.

“Shirley, this is Mike Rodenska, our house-guest. Mike, Shirley McGuire. Mike and I... I was about to say we’re roommates, but that doesn’t sound right. Wingmates. We’re both in the guest wing. We share a bath. That makes us intimate, doesn’t it?”

“You leave it like a swamp. It’s like living in a sorority house. Perfume, steam, hair in the sink. Soap.”

“So I’m clean, but I’m not neat. I told you, Shirley. This may be an honest man.”

“Nice to know there is such a thing,” the McGuire girl said. She was almost a baritone. The contrast with Debbie Ann’s little-girl voice was startling.

Rob Raines suddenly appeared out of the darkness. “I’ve been looking all over for you, Debbie Ann. Good evening, Mr. Rodenska.”

“Hello, lover,” Debbie Ann said acidly. “Shirley, I’m not particularly interested in having you meet Rob Raines, but I guess it can’t be helped. Shirley McGuire. Now why don’t you go swimming or something, Robert? Go tweak girls.”

Raines looked nobly pained. “Please, Debbie Ann. I’d like to talk to you a minute.”

Debbie Ann turned to Shirley. “I’ll have to humor him, dearie. Take Mike to the Devans’ cabaña. I’ll join you there.”

Mike left the porch with Shirley McGuire. As they walked toward the Gulf he said, “What’s this cabaña deal?”