executives themselves. The rest, in this proper environment, talked among themselves and were almost certainly all wives. The day you brought a mistress would be your last as a member of the Cosmopolitan Club.
Cyrus, with Raff following, was led to a corner overlooking the Mobile River. Raff went over to the two-sided window to look out. He stared at the traffic twelve stories below, then beyond to Cooper Riverside Park and the new Convention Center. Well away to the south he could see Pinto Island and the northwestern shore of Mobile Bay. He squinted to peer where the river flowed into the bay. Somewhere out there on the water, a great-grandfather on Ainesley's side, working as ship's engineer, had died when the boat caught fire and sank. Raff tried to picture that tragedy. He turned his attention to a freight train moving slowly northward out of the Mobile Yards. Its whistle blew once, the kind of three-o'clock-in-the-night farewell that never fails to stir a wisp of melancholy.
From the Alabama State Docks a bay pilot boat had begun its journey south to the shoals of Dauphin Island, where it would pick up another freighter from the bar pilots and bring it safely down the dredged channels of the Mobile Bay shallow.
Raff had come home. He had perspective now, and seeing its physical whole from this height he thought about Old Mobile when Marybelle was built, when sailing merchantmen crowded close in a forest of spars at the head of the bay. There was still continuous old-growth pine savanna close by to the north and south. People living at the center of the city could take a wagon to the bayfront and harvest crabs and oysters from still-unpolluted waters. The economic engine of Alabama was growing swiftly then, in the plantations and freeholds along the great river that ended here. Bales of cotton and tobacco flowed down onto the docks. Sugar, rum, and tropical hardwood timber flowed in from the West Indies, and every kind of manufactured goods arrived from the Atlantic Seaboard and faraway Europe. Down below, close by the Bankhead Tower, near the foot of Government Street, once stood the open slave market, where African people were bought and sold, families sundered in perpetuity, and sent upriver to work the plantations and docks.
"Beautiful, isn't it?" Cyrus broke Raff's reverie.
Raff sat down, and two waiters brought them water and menus, speaking softly back and forth in a foreign language. It was Spanish. That's something new around here, he thought.
They began lunch. Crab gumbo and lobster Caesar salad. The lobster was the spiny Caribbean species, not the big-clawed kind from up North.
The conversation started up with Raff's career at Harvard Law and his impressions of life there, interspersed with Cyrus's comparing those from his own experience at the University of Alabama Law School.
Coffee and dessert were served, the latter a chocolate-and-brandy concoction Raff did not try to identify. Cyrus pulled out a Havana cigar from an inner coat pocket, unwrapped and lit it. He dragged deeply and blew the smoke upward toward the ceiling in a well-formed ring, as was his custom, then searched for an ashtray. There was no ashtray. Cyrus remembered: these conveniences had grown scarce at the Cosmopolitan Club. Many fewer members used them now, and the younger trustees of the club's board had begun to speak of making the Cosmopolitan Club smoke-free. One had commented, "What's so radical about that? This club used to have spittoons all over the place for tobacco chewers. Would you like to bring those back?"
Diners who still smoked often used coffee-cup saucers as ashtrays. Cyrus would have nothing to do with such an impropriety. He signaled a waiter by pointing to his cigar, and an ashtray was brought to him.
"I may have to bring my own in my pocket one of these days," he said.
Then he turned to Raff and came to the point.
"Well, have you made any plans yet? What do you want to do? All I can say is, I and a lot of our friends around here hope that whatever it is, you won't be straying too far away from Mobile."
Raff tensed. He'd rehearsed his response several times, and he had no idea what kind of reaction he was going to get.
"Well, sir, I know this might surprise you a bit. I've had some wonderful offers, more than you might imagine, from out of town. But what I really want to do is work here in Mobile as a legal