Melville Goodwin, USA Read online

  Gilbert was looking at me affectionately now, yet in a speculative way that I could appreciate. Gilbert had made me what I was today. He had picked me out of nowhere for his own purposes. He was a very bright entrepreneur, one of those peculiar, highly astute products of the American entertainment world. Gilbert, I often thought, could have succeeded in any field which demanded negotiating skill and intelligence. He could have been as successful in the film industry as in radio. He could have run a racing stable or a fighter stable. He had theories which he could relate to reality, and best of all, he did not have enough perspective to engender doubt of self. He was the son of a Kansas City grocer, one of a family of eight. Occasionally, in an intimate mood and with the successful man’s wonder at what had befallen him, he did not mind speaking of his background—but you would have had no idea where he had come from as he sat there in his tuxedo. He had what he called “changes” in his office dressing room, and he always appeared in a tuxedo at six o’clock.

  Gilbert was always saying that he loved people. He needed them around him. He was always saying that he loved me, and I imagine he honestly believed this, though of course his handling of my career reflected favorably on himself. Love never did mean quite the same thing in the entertainment business as in less volatile circles.

  Gilbert had picked my voice out of the air one night. He always liked to tell the story. He was just sitting casually in his suite at the St. Regis before going to the theater, and for no good reason he had turned his radio dial to a program from London put on by Army Public Relations shortly after V-E Day. My job with SHAEF at the time had consisted of personally conducting Very Important People to very important points of interest, and I had been ordered to introduce some of these personages on the air. There was no end to the strange things they made you do in those days. I had to compose an introduction for Valerie James, the actress, I remember, and God knows why any branch of the army had ever given Valerie James a free trip abroad, and I had also been ordered to prepare a few words about Mr. Hubert Hudson, who owned a string of Middle Western newspapers and who, I am sorry to say, had fallen in love with Valerie James at Claridge’s. I had not minded writing the script, because I had been a newspaperman myself before I had gone down to Washington to do what I could for my country, but when a man named Major Marcus, who knew all about radio and who was going to read the script, could not be found at the crucial moment because he had disappeared somewhere with the little Wac who did the typing, I had objected violently to taking his place. There you have it, the whole little drama that Gilbert Frary always loved to re-enact. Sitting in his suite at the St. Regis, no doubt in his tuxedo, Gilbert had been impressed by my voice. It had new quality, he said, freshness, unself-consciousness and integrity.

  “Sidney,” he used to say when he told the story, and he had been telling it more and more often recently, “would you mind saying a few words, just anything, so that everyone can understand what I mean.… You see what I mean now, don’t you? Sidney’s a natural. You get the impact, don’t you? You would believe Sidney if he told you he had stopped beating his wife. You see what I mean? His words stand out and at the same time hang together, and you see what I mean by his timing? It all makes up into what, for want of a better word, I call integrity. Sidney’s voice is what Spencer Tracy and Gary Cooper are in the movies photogenically. Like Spencer and Gary, Sidney has effortless sincerity, which is the same thing as integrity in the final analysis, isn’t it?”

  When Gilbert continued along those lines, it was best to listen to him as little as possible, but at any rate he had made me what I was. Another man, even an agent, would have left the St. Regis, gone to the theater and forgotten all about it, but Gilbert called up Washington, and now there we were, four years later.

  “Well, good-by, Sidney,” Gilbert said. “By the way, Marie and I are giving one of our Sunday night suppers at the St. Regis for George Burtheimer. He’ll be in from Chicago. Just a few interesting people. I think Spencer may be with us. He’s coming on from the Coast.”

  “That sounds wonderful,” I said, “but I’ll have to ask Helen. I don’t know what Helen’s planned for Sunday.”

  A year ago I would have simply said it sounded wonderful. I would not have said I would ask Helen what she had planned, and Gilbert knew it. The trouble was he had done too well with me. He had made me into a Frankenstein creation which might move out of his control. He now had to guard against my becoming a monster. My voice had too much integrity.

  “Well, come if you possibly can,” Gilbert said, “and if you and Helen are entertaining any friends over the week end, Marie and I would love to have them also, and you can come, can’t you, Art?”

  “Why, yes, Gilbert,” Art said, “it sounds wonderful.”

  “That new chauffeur of yours is working out all right, isn’t he, Sidney?” Gilbert asked.

  “Yes, Gilbert,” I said, “he’s wonderful.”

  “I am glad the new chauffeur and the Cadillac are working out, Sidney,” Gilbert said. “Well, so long. We must have a good long talk some day soon, the way we used to. I am very glad that George Burtheimer was happy about the general.”

  For a long while I had been struggling with an increasing sense of being far removed from everything which I had hitherto considered real. Quite suddenly I had been relieved of most of my old ambitions as well as of nearly every species of material want. If this unfamiliar condition was creating new ambitions and new desires, these did not appear to have the urgency of the old ones. It was all disorientating—the corridors with the ushers, the air-conditioned purity which banished even a puff of cigarette smoke, my own gay office, my secretary, who was very beautiful like all the front-row company secretaries, and certainly Gilbert Frary. If I had been killed in Normandy—hardly a possible contingency, but then something did occasionally happen to Public Relations officers—I would never have had to cope with present problems. My career might have formed the plot of the sort of slick story that women read in beauty parlors, when they are waiting under the dryer in another world of unreality.

  “Sidney,” Gilbert had said to me once, “this all—I mean what has happened to you, if you understand me—must seem to you very much like a fairy story, coming as suddenly as it has.”

  “If you mean that there are a lot of them around, you are right, Gilbert,” I said.

  “No, no,” Gilbert answered, “I mean it entirely in a nice way, but if you were to write down what has happened to you, it would be unbelievable. It would not have true fictional value.”

  “You mean, Gilbert,” I asked, “that truth is stranger than fiction?”

  “You know I’m not as obvious as that, Sidney,” Gilbert said. “I mean that few episodes in real life fit snugly into a fictional frame. They are too incongruous. Willie Maugham told me that once.”

  “I thought his name was just W. Somerset Maugham,” I said.

  “His friends call him Willie,” Gilbert said. “Didn’t you know? I call him Willie. Marie is devoted to him. You would like each other because you have one great trait in common.”

  “All right,” I said, “what trait?”

  “Integrity,” Gilbert said. “Both you and Willie have great integrity, and what is more, you have something else that is even more valuable. You have loyalty, Sidney, great loyalty.”

  “If you mean I recognize all you’ve done for me and that I won’t let you down …” I began.

  “I know you won’t let me down,” Gilbert said, “and that’s why I’ll always love you, Sidney.”

  Perhaps he would always love me, but I knew he would let me down at any moment if it would do him any good.

  Miss Maynard was waiting for me when I stopped in to get my sandwich.

  “A call has just come in for you, Mr. Skelton,” she said. “I sent one of the boys to page you. Didn’t he find you?”

  “I thought all calls were going to be stopped down at the board,” I told her.

  “I know,” Miss Mayna
rd said, “but this was personal. She said you would want to speak to her. It’s Mrs. Peale.”

  “Oh, all right,” I said, and I picked up the telephone. “Hello, Dottie.”

  “Hello,” Dottie said, “how’s your goddam voice?”

  “It’s fine,” I said. “It’s got me a chauffeur and a Cadillac.”

  “How’s your integrity?” Dottie asked.

  “It’s fine,” I said, “how’s yours?”

  There was a second’s silence, as though she were thinking of something, but she would not have called me up if she had not thought already.

  “Darling, how about your dropping everything and taking me out to dinner?”

  “I can’t,” I said. “Helen’s expecting me, but I’d like to some other time, Dottie.”

  “How is Helen?” she asked. “Why does everyone who gets anywhere move to Connecticut?”

  “You never have,” I said.

  “You know me,” she said. “I’m a city girl, but I’ll motor out sometime if you’ll ask me. How’s Camilla? Did she get the copy of Little Women I sent her? I just saw it in a window and thought of Camilla. I was brought up on Little Women.”

  Her thoughts, I knew, were returning as they often did to her small-town girlhood, and as time had gone on, Dottie could tell about it very prettily.

  “Camilla loved it,” I said, “and now she’s reading Little Men.”

  “I’m glad,” she said. “Jo should have married Laurie, shouldn’t she?”

  “Everything pointed that way once,” I said. “How have you been otherwise, Dottie?” There was another hesitation, not exactly a silence. I knew she did not want me to take her to dinner and that she wanted something else.

  “Darling,” she said, “I just heard you on the air. Isn’t it wonderful about Mel?”

  “Oh—Mel,” I repeated, and she laughed.

  “Don’t be so vague, darling,” she said.

  “Why, yes,” I said, “it’s swell.”

  “Don’t sound cross about it, darling,” she said, “just because he made you run errands for him at the Ritz and I made you run errands, too.”

  I shifted my weight from one foot to the other. I had never liked chatting over the telephone, and Dottie was never out of reach of one, but at least I knew what she wanted as soon as she mentioned Mel Goodwin.

  “If you want his address,” I said, “I don’t know it, or his number.”

  “Oh, Sid,” she said, “don’t you know anything about him?”

  Mel Goodwin belonged to the war world I had left.

  “Oh, Sid,” she said, “don’t you even know if he is coming home?… Well, please let me know if you do hear anything.”

  “Why don’t you leave that poor old guy alone?” I said. “He’ll look different over here.”

  “Don’t be so censorious,” she said. “When can I see you?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Darling,” she said, “how about lunch on Monday?”

  II

  So Jolly Boys Now … Here’s God Speed the Plough … Long Life and Success to the Farmer

  Gilbert Frary had always handled my contracts, documents which, even when I tried to read them, left me intellectually unfulfilled. I cannot believe that Gilbert understood the verbiage either, but he could put his finger on the basic points. A contract, he said, was an instrument out of which you either made or lost money. I needn’t bother about any of this, he said. It was best to leave it all to him, and I always had left it to Gilbert until recently, when I had been having the whole business checked by an independent law firm. Gilbert and I had always enjoyed some sort of a mutual trust, and he had been deeply hurt when he found that I had been doing this, because, he said, his own lawyers were protecting us. At any rate, in the latest contract there was a large appropriation for travel and business entertainment outside of salary, and somehow even the house in Connecticut had entered into the transaction. Also, a Cadillac car, “or any other motor in this general price range,” and “a responsible and adequate chauffeur” were set aside in the contract for my business use.

  This business transportation was waiting outside the building now, directly in front of the main entrance between two No Parking signs. The police understood the arrangement, and perhaps this, too, was included in the contract, although I had never asked. Williams, the chauffeur, was out on the sidewalk the moment he saw me, and as always he impressed me as unlike the ordinary chauffeur who drove cars for people who were used to cars. He was overemphasized in every way—a sort of stage effect. He was too eager, too sober, too reliable. He was both a friend and an old retainer, and he always made me wonder how many other people he had retained for and who they could have been, because he did it all so perfectly. His uniform was too new, but there was no false detail. He was a nicely planned part of the program, and he was so far beyond criticism that I could only criticize my own uneasiness.

  As he opened the door, the interior of the Cadillac was flooded with mellow light. When I stepped inside, he wrapped a robe around my knees as skillfully as a trained nurse. I never wanted Williams to do this because there was an excellent heating system in the Cadillac and there was no need for a robe, but Helen liked the robe. Somehow Helen could adjust herself perfectly to unreality.

  There was a fragile white box in the car, tied with green cellophane ribbons.

  “Where did that come from?” I asked.

  “It’s some gardenias, sir, for Mrs. Skelton,” Williams answered.

  “She didn’t say anything about gardenias,” I said.

  “Mr. Frary had them sent down,” Williams said. “Shall we start home now, sir?”

  I had disliked the smell of gardenias ever since the time a large wreath of them had been placed around my neck by the Chamber of Commerce at Honolulu, but it was just like Gilbert to do such a thing. The gesture was what Gilbert called a grace note in human relationship. It always paid, he said, to do nice little things for people, and lately he had begun doing nice little things for people in my name without my knowing it. It was growing confusing to be thanked by comparative strangers for boxes of cigars, champagne and orchids, and now even Helen had begun making these little gestures. I leaned back in the car and closed my eyes, but I was not tired. I was not at all tired.

  On the contrary I was too much awake, too keenly aware of everything, and that telephone call of Dottie’s had remained in my mind. We drove up Fifth Avenue and crossed the Park at Seventy-ninth Street on the way to the West Side Highway, and I began thinking again of Mel Goodwin and this episode in Berlin. He had done something which had a universal appeal, but I could not identify myself with Mel Goodwin. The instincts of a participant in such an action could only be explained in terms of conditioning and training.

  I thought of a bird dog named Mac that my uncle had owned once, a very steady Gordon setter. I could see myself as a young boy on Saturday afternoons in just such clear October weather as we were having now. Uncle Will suffered from arthritis but he still liked to go out for woodcock if he did not have to walk too far. He would ask me to go upstairs and get his twelve-gauge Parker shotgun. The gun was in the paneled closet by the big chimney, resting against the bricks beside Uncle Will’s rubber boots and his canvas shooting coat. We would go out into the yard and back the Model T Ford out of the carriage shed. As soon as old Mac saw the gun he would run around the car in circles. For once he was going to participate in something useful, in something for which his whole species had been created, and when you came to think of it, very few individuals nowadays, dogs or humans, ever had much chance of doing the things for which they had been made. Pekingese, for instance, and men on production lines, and possibly even Williams driving the Cadillac, had probably forgotten their primary purpose years before. Everything was so complicated and possibilities were so limited that perhaps you never did have a chance of knowing what you were made for, but old Mac knew. He would jump into the back seat of the Ford and sit there waiting for us to s
tart, never wriggling his head when I tied a bell to his collar. There was a good covert at Johnson’s Brook. To get there you had to cross a pasture and climb a stone wall and then walk through the brambles. Mac did not have to be told to come to heel any more than I had to be told to walk behind Uncle Will. I could never forget the clear afternoon sunlight on the junipers and the subdued tinkle of Mac’s bell and the gentle complaint of my uncle’s voice, saying that the woodcock flight was not what it used to be. Things were never what they used to be, as I was old enough now to know.

  Uncle Will always took his stand on a little rise just above the alders, because he was not good any longer at walking through brush. I would stand beside him and I remember the strange, pungent odor of the frostbitten asters that grew there and the way he would tell Mac to go on in. Mac would disappear in the thicket, running carefully, not missing anything, but we knew where he was by the tinkling of his bell. When the bell stopped, Uncle Will would send me after Mac. The bird when flushed would be fairly certain to appear above the alders, giving an opportunity for a quick shot, and this was all my uncle needed. I would always find the dog in the alders, frozen motionless, obeying an instinct of his breed, which had nothing whatsoever to do with animal survival. It was a behavior pattern which must have evolved only after a few millennia of hunting with man. Mac always held his point patiently, tail straight and left foreleg raised, but at a word he would bound forward, and there would come that whirr of wings, always unexpected, even though we were ready for it. Then the shot would follow. Mac always seemed to know the exact point in the thicket where the bird would fall. It seldom took more than a minute for him to retrieve the woodcock, which he would bring back to my uncle proudly and gingerly, like a dog in an English hunting print, and again an instinct contrary to the primitive had taught him not to mar the bird or even to clamp his jaws too tightly upon it. He was a good dog, perfectly conditioned.