at the Athletic but at the Union Club. Babbitt
explained with frequency, “You couldn’t
hire me to join the Tonawanda, even if I did have a
hundred and eighty bucks to throw away on the initiation
fee. At the Outing we’ve got a bunch of
real human fellows, and the finest lot of little women
in town—just as good at joshing as the
men—but at the Tonawanda there’s
nothing but these would-be’s in New York get-ups,
drinking tea! Too much dog altogether. Why,
I wouldn’t join the Tonawanda even if they—I
wouldn’t join it on a bet!”
When he had played four or five holes, he relaxed
a bit, his tobacco-fluttering heart beat more normally,
and his voice slowed to the drawling of his hundred
generations of peasant ancestors.
At least once a week Mr. and Mrs. Babbitt and Tinka
went to the movies. Their favorite motion-picture
theater was the Chateau, which held three thousand
spectators and had an orchestra of fifty pieces which
played Arrangements from the Operas and suites portraying
a Day on the Farm, or a Four-alarm Fire. In the
stone rotunda, decorated with crown-embroidered velvet
chairs and almost medieval tapestries, parrakeets
sat on gilded lotos columns.
With exclamations of “Well, by golly!”
and “You got to go some to beat this dump!”
Babbitt admired the Chateau. As he stared across
the thousands of heads, a gray plain in the dimness,
as he smelled good clothes and mild perfume and chewing-gum,
he felt as when he had first seen a mountain and realized
how very, very much earth and rock there was in it.
He liked three kinds of films: pretty bathing
girls with bare legs; policemen or cowboys and an
industrious shooting of revolvers; and funny fat men
who ate spaghetti. He chuckled with immense, moist-eyed
sentimentality at interludes portraying puppies, kittens,
and chubby babies; and he wept at deathbeds and old
mothers being patient in mortgaged cottages.
Mrs. Babbitt preferred the pictures in which handsome
young women in elaborate frocks moved through sets
ticketed as the drawing-rooms of New York millionaires.
As for Tinka, she preferred, or was believed to prefer,
whatever her parents told her to.
All his relaxations—baseball, golf, movies,
bridge, motoring, long talks with Paul at the Athletic
Club, or at the Good Red Beef and Old English Chop
House—were necessary to Babbitt, for he
was entering a year of such activity as he had never
known.
It was by accident that Babbitt had his opportunity
to address the S. A. R. E. B.
The S. A. R. E. B., as its members called it, with
the universal passion for mysterious and important-sounding
initials, was the State Association of Real Estate
Boards; the organization of brokers and operators.
It was to hold its annual convention at Monarch, Zenith’s
chief rival among the cities of the state. Babbitt
was an official delegate; another was Cecil Rountree,
whom Babbitt admired for his picaresque speculative
building, and hated for his social position, for being
present at the smartest dances on Royal Ridge.
Rountree was chairman of the convention program-committee.
