Rainer Men's club (A)

It seemed the afternoon meeting at the Conservatory had moved to the Rainer House, a men’s club in downtown Seattle. Formalities of the outside world were shed at the entrance with briefcases and full-length coats. It was a place where one could enjoy a hard game of squash, a swim, or simply speak freely about business and stocks without the medaling of wives and other underlings who felt fit to speak out of turn on subjects they knew nothing of. It was the last fraternal outpost, where a man could be…a man. Membership came at a considerable cost and the working class could not afford it, which was not accidental. Cultural lines were drawn not so much by law, but by money. Permission was granted or denied by it. Money was not something everyone could come by, and for good reason; money provided access to the social tiers of society. Much of the color and passion of the Irish and Italians had amalgamized themselves into American culture a generation before. Their thuggish infiltration to government, public service, and civil duty had a top-down effect into the fabric of American culture. Both groups proved themselves as formidable pseudo-Anglos and thusly, accepted, so long as no one had an accent or made heavy mention of culture or religion publicly. Coloreds and other immigrants had housing jurisdictions in neighborhoods kept separate from whites which meant that even if any of them could afford membership, social grace would be limited to nil in tolerance of their presence within. Jews kept to their own clubs of culture and didn’t care if they were excluded or not. The Chinese had their own parts of town by the docks where one could buy fish, spices and fabrics while others could find their way into alcoves draped in a labyrinth of curtains which kept secret rooms with women and pipes filled with hypnotic smoke where a man could drift away into his dreams and never return. Andre Bane liked things this way. He believed that people found their place in the culture by a combination of breeding and hard work. Could a man work his way into social culture, in a way, but he would always have a “smell” to him.