A Long Line of Dead Men

"We got together last month," he said. "At Keens Chophouse onWest Thirty-sixth Street. That's where we've been holding our dinners ever since Cunningham's closed in the early seventies. They give us the same room every year. It's on the second floor, and it looks like a private library. The walls are lined with bookshelves and portraits of somebody's ancestors. There's a fireplace, and they lay a fire for us, not that that's what you necessarily want in May. It's nice for atmosphere, though.

"We've been going there for twenty years. Keens almost went under, you know, just when we were beginning to settle in there. That would have been tragic, the place is aNew York institution. But they survived. They're still there, and, well, so are we." He paused, considered. "Some of us," he said.

His glass of Courvoisier was on the table in front of him. He still hadn't taken a sip. From time to time he would reach for the small snifter, letting his hand cup the bowl, taking the stem between his thumb and forefingers, moving the glass a few inches this way or that.

He said, "At last month's dinner, it was announced that two of our members had died in the preceding twelve months. Frank DiGiulio had suffered a fatal heart attack in September, and then in February Alan Watson was stabbed to death on his way home from work. So we've had two deaths in the past year. Does that seem significant to you?"

"Well…"

"Of course not. We're of an age when death happens. What significance could one possibly attach to two deaths within a twelve-month period?" He took the glass by its stem, gave it a quarter-turn clockwise. "Consider this, then. In the past seven years, nine of us have died."

"That seems a little high."

"And that's in the past seven years. Earlier, we'd already lost eight men. Matt, there are only fourteen of us left."

Homer Champney had told them he'd probably be the first to go. "And that's as it should be, boys. That's the natural order of things. But I hope I'll be with you for a little while, at least. To get to know you, and to see you all off to a good start."

As it turned out, the old man lasted well into his ninety-fourth year. He never missed the annual dinner, remaining physically fit and mentally alert to the very end.

Nor was he the first of their number to die. The group's first two anniversaries were unmarked by death, but in 1964 they spoke the name and marked the passing of Philip Kalish, killed with his wife and infant daughter three months earlier in a car crash on the Long Island Expressway.

Two years later James Severance was killed inVietnam. He'd missed the previous year's dinner, his reserve unit having been recalled to active duty, and members had joked that an Asian war was a pretty lame excuse for breaking such a solemn commitment. The following May, when they read his name along with Phil Kalish's, you could almost hear last year's jokes echoing hollowly against the paneled walls.

In March of '69, less than two months before the annual dinner, Homer Champney died in his sleep. "If there comes a day when you don't see me by nine in the morning," he'd instructed the staff at his residential hotel, "ring my suite, and if I don't pick up then come check on me." The desk clerk made the call and had a bellman take over the desk while he went up to Champney's rooms himself. When he found what he'd feared, he called the old man's nephew.

That nephew in turn made the calls his uncle had instructed him to make. On the list were the twenty-eight surviving members of the club of thirty-one. Champney was leaving nothing to chance. He wanted to make sure everyone knew he was gone.

The funeral was atCampbell 's, and it was the first club funeral Lewis Hildebrand had attended. The overall turnout was small. Champney had outlived his contemporaries, and his nephew- a great-nephew, actually, some fifty years Champney's junior- was his only surviving relative in theNew York area. Besides Hildebrand, the contingent of mourners included half a dozen other members of the thirty-one.

Afterward, he joined several of them for a drink. Bill Ludgate, a printing salesman, said, "Well, this is the first of these I've been to, and it's going to be the last. In a couple of weeks we'll be all together at Cunningham's, and Homer'll have his name read with the others, and I guess we'll talk about him. And that's enough. I don't think we should go to members' funerals. I don't think it's our place."

"I felt I wanted to be here today," someone said.