"I guess I can tell you. You need just over seven hundred votes to come in. You've got—" Her eyes glazed for a moment. She was looking through some clerk's eyes, somewhere on the island. "You've got about a hundred and fifty so far. Takes time, doesn't it? But it's worth it in the end."
"How many 'no' votes?"
"None." She said gently, "You'll never have but one, love, because that's all it takes."
He stared. The girl gook took up his hand and kissed it lightly. "One blackball's enough, yes, but never fear. Rosie's on your side."
Restlessly Chandler stood up and made himself another drink. His head was beginning to buzz. They had been drinking on her sun terrace since early afternoon.
Rosalie came up beside him soothingly. "I know how you feel. Want me to tell you about when I went through it?"
"Sure," he said, stirring the ice around in the glass and drinking it down. He made another drink absently, hardly hearing what she said, although the sound of her voice was welcome.
"Oh, that lousy headdress! It weighed twenty pounds, and they put it on with hatpins." He caressed her absently. He had figured out that she was talking about the night New York was bombed. "I was in the middle of the big first-act curtain number when—" her face was strained, even after years, even now that she was herself one of the godlike ones—"when something took hold of me. I ran off the stage and right out through the front door. There was a cab waiting. As soon as I got in I was free, and the driver took off like a lunatic through the tunnel, out to Newark Airport. I tell you, I was scared! At the toll booth I screamed but my—friend—let go of the driver for a minute, smashed a trailer-truck into a police car, and in the confusion we got away. He took me over again at the airport. I ran bare as a bird into a plane that was just ready to take off. The pilot was under control.... We flew eleven hours, and I wore that damn feather headdress all the way."
She held out her glass for a refill. Chandler busied himself slicing a lime for her drink. Now she was talking about her friend. "I hadn't seen him in six years. I was just a kid, living in Islip. He was with a Russian trade commission next door, in an old mansion. Well, he was one of the ones, back in Russia, that came up with these." She touched her coronet. "So," she said brightly, "he put me up for membership and by and by they gave me one. You see? It's all very simple, except the waiting."