"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.