A major attraction at the club during the early years—major because Americans could not live without it and Japanese could not obtain it elsewhere—was the presence of meat on the menu. Shipped frozen from the States, steaks and chops were crucial to the club's success. The first recorded club employee, biculturally named Walter Watanabe, had as his duties "sweeping the floor, locking and unlocking doors, guarding the liquor, fixing the lights, and cooking the food carefully."
By the late 1930s, the club had established its own premises in an old office building near the hotel and had grown to several hundred members. Diplomats and newspapermen from over a dozen countries joined the Japanese and American businessmen in dining and social intercourse. Walter Watanabe became only one of thirteen employees on the payroll, and his responsibilities had shrunk to "keeping the billiard room neat at all times." The chef was listed as being Monsieur Adachi, and his job description omitted the adjective "carefully." He was merely charged with the responsibility of "cooking the food."
Later, suspicions that the club harbored spies, malcontents, revolutionaries, anti-militarists, seditionists, oppressors, fifth columnists, appeasers, constitutional democrats, and folks without a sense of humor about world affairs had gradually diminished the pleasure of the dining and social intercourse. (It seems that both Walter Watanabe and Monsieur Adachi had been drafted—their names disappeared from the roster.) Discretion being the better part of valor, the organization ceased operation during the 1941-45 misunderstanding.
In 1946, three Japanese attorneys—prewar members—popped up and presented the U.S. Occupation authorities with documents relating to the original club charter. The last prewar club president, older and definitely wiser, was prevailed upon to become the first postwar president. By 1947 the organization was off and running again. But the scope of operations rapidly surpassed anything that the collective imagination of the founders with the forty-six chairs might have conjured.
Today the club occupies several acres of its own land in a Beverly Hills-Park Avenue-Nob Hill equivalent of central Tokyo. The membership of thirty-five hundred hails from forty-four countries and totals, counting spouses and dependents, about eleven thousand individuals.
The organization runs thirty-eight adult-education classes and arranges tours all over Asia. There are youth activity programs, including baseball, soccer, basketball, swimming, and scouting. Hundreds of formal and informal business meetings occur at the club each week—about half the two thousand meals served each day in the six dining facilities are in the expense-account category. A successful candidate for the presidency of the United States initially announced his availability in the club—and a prime minister of Japan successfully announced his resignation in the club. And as confirmation of the role played by the organization at the core of the members' lives, the videotape library averages over a quarter-million checkouts each year.
Yet despite its humble beginnings, its checkered early history, a cook named Walter, its accidental position next to the Russian Embassy, the potpourri of membership, and the rogues galley of organizational geniuses, dedicated public servants, buffoons and madmen at the helm, the club had never dealt with a situation such as that currently at hand. No one, at least as far as records indicate, had ever whacked off the general manager's head and deposited it, along with an unidentified Japanese body, in the club swimming pool. (But then again, the pool wasn't built until 1974, and Walter's whereabouts remain unknown.)
* * * *
Angie Peterson awoke with a funny taste in her mouth and the chill of a horrible nightmare still tingling just below her consciousness. The low winter sun was streaming in the window and across her blanket. That's strange, she thought, Pete always closes the shades before going to bed. Stranger yet, the blanket was only used on the very coldest of nights. Rolling onto her stomach she realized that she was still wearing her brassiere. What on earth?
The pile of clothes in the armchair next to the bed suddenly moved. Wait a minute. Angie sat up, squinted her eyes into focus, and recognized the sleeping young lady from the night before. It was true. Good God, the dream was true. She howled, the young lady howled, and the next half hour was lost in a maelstrom of hysteria.
Angie and Pete had been married six years. Pete's first wife, a waitress at the Palmer House Hotel, was the mother of Peter Junior. He was born four months after the wedding and had enjoyed a stable family life for approximately six months. Pete's first child, now age forty, was one year older than Angie. Pete had only seen his first-born a half dozen times down through the years, and he had not seen his first wife, he maintained, since the day of the divorce.
Pete's second marriage lasted seventeen years and produced two daughters, both now married, who were the pride and joy of his life. Both had visited Japan within the last two years, both adored Angie, and both considered their father to be the finest human being on the planet. Their mother, to everyone's complete amazement, had suddenly picked up one day and walked out on the family and into the arms of a Swiss maitre d' employed by Pete at the Philadelphia Cricket Club. She still sent Christmas cards from Switzerland each year and, though divorced, still used the name Peterson.
Pete's third wife was a colossal mistake. Reeling from the shock of losing his helpmate of nearly two decades to a "yodeling gigolo," and traumatized by the prospect of raising two teenage daughters alone, he married a woman named Kate early one morning during a Club Managers of America convention in Las Vegas. The next day Pete helped the woman named Kate pack for the trip back to Philadelphia, got her on the plane, and got her off the plane in Philadelphia and to the club. The morning after that, Pete again helped the woman named Kate pack, got her on the plane, and never saw her again. As part of that divorce settlement he agreed to make child-support payments to an offspring he couldn't remember siring.
Angie met Pete in her bank. He would come into the bank once a week, and as the months went by he would manage more often than not to visit her teller's window. When the bank adopted the "express line" concept, the choreography of "timing" became crucial. Angie would stall customers at her window—counting and recounting bills—until Pete hit the front of the line. Her "next" would then ring loud and true.
Pete was considerably older, Angie knew, but he was good-natured and seemed quite virile in a mature and intriguing way. Her first husband, from whom she was divorced long before Pete began coming to her bank, had been a high-school classmate from Scranton. He and Angie graduated from school, and from going steady to marriage, on the same day.
Although Angie and her first husband had been married ten years, virility and maturity were not attributes he had brought to the relationship. It was as if, Angie came to realize, he had stopped growing and would always remain a nineteen-year-old. His interests were confined to playing Softball in the industrial league for machine-shop employers, and hanging around the neighborhood bar before and after the games. He and Angie spent time together, of course, but drinking beer in the car at outdoor movies had its social limitations. Without really knowing what it was, Angie began to believe that there was something better for her in life. She left her husband and started the search for something better the day he came home with a wedding anniversary present for her—a tattoo on his arm that said "Angie."
Angie and Pete dated for nearly eight months, and Pete proposed marriage slightly over six years ago during a Thanksgiving party at the club he was managing. The flowers, champagne, diamond ring, and whispered endearments were touches of class that overwhelmed the girl who had spent so many wasted hours at drive-ins. Angie accepted the proposal with only one small worry—that Pete thought she, né Angela Garcia, was a blonde.
Today, in fact, would have been their sixth anniversary. Aggie flopped back onto the bed and gave in to another bout of hysteria.
* * * *
"It's a big place," Tim Kawamura reported