“You once wanted me to go and see Stalin,” ventured the P.A.
“I’m expecting to see him myself, Lanny, before this month is over. That is strictly entre nous, of course.”
“Sure thing, Governor. I suppose I’ll go to Florida again, or perhaps to California. There are some people there who will bear watching, as you know, and I might combine business with pleasure.”
“That’s the ticket! Take your wife along. From what my wife reports about her, she can be of use to you.”
“Thanks, Governor. Tell me this: would it be proper for us to have enough gasoline to make a motor trip of it?”
“You have earned a tank-car,” was the response. “Tell Baker to fix you up. Go and see what Willie Hearst is up to now. That will make it official business!”
Lanny looked at this careworn man, so eagerly providing a vacation for a friend, and so obviously needing one for himself. How gladly would Lanny have exchanged with him; but the Constitution of the United States did not permit it to be done. The fates were spinning the thread of Franklin Roosevelt’s life, and when they were ready to cut it, no human hand could stay them.
XIV
In the morning Lanny paid his visit to the old brick building by the gasworks; he spent the day with the men who had handled the job of getting him out of Italy. He thanked them; and they, being human, would no doubt have been interested to tell him the story of how they had managed it, but that was against the rules. Oh, So Secret! Now and then it was, Oh, So Social!—for this office was staffed largely with men of means, who had been footloose and fancy free and had been attracted by the idea of enacting in real life the thrillers which they had read in the small hours of the morning and which they had seen on the stage and in the movies—and had called “old-hat” and “ten-twenty-thirty.”
They put him through a grilling as thorough as Heinrich Himmler could have provided—except that they didn’t use scopolamine. The German section in the morning and the Italian in the afternoon—they had relays of stenographers and wanted to know everything he had seen, every word that had been said to him, and the names and addresses of every person he had met. For who could tell when some other “Traveler” might be coming through by that route? They might be sending somebody on it any day. The German section was enraptured by the information concerning the Wolf Dietrich Stollen, the salt mine under the Duernberg Mountain, and began that very day a search in the Congressional Library for data on the salt-mining industry of Austria. They promised Lanny they would report any news about Marceline Detaze and Oskar von Herzenberg; also that they would trace the matter of the young doctor who had deserted his charge and would see that he was never again invited to act as a conductor on the underground railroad.
Lanny was flown to New York that evening, and his wife was there with the car which the ever-thoughtful Robbie had sent down. The ever-thoughtful Laurel’s emotion was touching to see. She had been such a proud person, so reserved and independent, but now she couldn’t keep her voice from choking up. When a woman has given her heart to a man, and especially when she has borne him a child, he has become a part of her being, and her welfare is irrevocably bound up with his. Now for a couple of months Laurel had lived with the thought that she might never see her man again; that he might at this moment be dead, or suffering things worse than death. To have him come suddenly down out of the sky, veritably a god out of a machine to her, was happiness almost beyond enduring, and impossible to hide from passengers at an airport.
Driving back to the city, he told her of the program which the Big Boss had laid out for them. For the first time he was free to name F.D.R., for he had said that Laurel was to help. Lanny pledged her to secrecy, of course; they wouldn’t even tell Robbie, but would just be two runaways, traveling on bootleg gasoline. The only trouble was, how would they get into the hotels? All over the country everything was jam-packed; people were leaving the country districts and crowding into the towns, where wages were high and war work was a patriotic service; the women were traveling to join their husbands near Army camps or wherever the men might be ordered. “Is this trip necessary?” read the signs at railroad stations.
Lanny stood by the little bed where his baby slept, pink-cheeked, warm, and blissful, utterly unaware of the cruelty and wickedness of the world which surrounded him. Father and mother stood with their arms about each other. What would they not have given to be able to protect the child from contact with that evil, from even having to know that it existed. But, alas, there seemed no prospect that a cooperative commonwealth, free, democratic, and humane, would come into existence in the course of the next couple of decades. War-torn and haunted by the specter of bloody revolutions, the world presented itself as a cause for grief and despair, and Laurel had heard women say that they would not bring a child into such a barrel of snakes. But here was Baby Lanny, and they must do their best for both him and the world he had to live in.
XV
They drove up to Newcastle. Never would Lanny hear the name again without translating it—Neuschloss—and thinking of poor Marceline and what might be happening to her. But never would he breathe a word about it to anyone. He would see Frances Barnes Budd, and be sure that she was well and happy, and write a detailed letter to her mother, as he had promised. He would meet all the Budd tribe, taking what was good in them, as he had learned long ago, and sharing with his wife a chuckle over what was eccentric and egocentric. Old, three-hundred-year-old New England they were, and the mighty megalopolis to the west of them was a foreign land, mostly under the dominion of Satan. The lesser megalopolis which was growing up around them was likewise getting out of their control—an evil contrivance known as the CIO had moved in and was taking it over, and the “right” people of the town laid it all to “That Man,” shortened from “That Man in the White House.” The world was going to the demnition bowwows, and the elder Budds lived in their old mansions and grumbled at it. The ladies dusted every gimcrack every day with their own hands, because you could no longer get a servant at any price—Robbie had lured them all into his monstrous airplane plant and was ruining them with two dollars an hour.
Robbie was looking tired, but he had accustomed himself to living in the midst of a whirlwind and would have missed it if it had blown past. Robbie’s life consisted of payrolls and costs of raw materials and reports of output achieved and expected; also, of course, new blueprints, new mockups, new ideas and theories. Lanny found that Robbie had got every item of the information which Lanny had sent out through Red Erickson; but Robbie didn’t know that it had come from Lanny, and Lanny had to resist the temptation to tell him. The P.A. gave information, but he had to say that he had picked it up in North Africa and Allied-held Southern Italy. If he had told Robbie about having been into Italy and Germany, Robbie might have trusted his other two sons with the secret, and one of these might have trusted his wife, and so the whisper would have spread in Newcastle and beyond.
Robbie had trained those two sons and they were carrying a good share of the burden. Since the day that Lanny had made his appearance in the world the father had never given up the hope that this first-born might help also. Now, the moment he heard that Lanny and Laurel were going to take a vacation trip, his busy organizing mind went to work to make use of them. An “executive” mind, it was, and though it wouldn’t have said so in crude words, what it wanted was to execute art, music, literature, and even politics, and turn all the energies of mankind to the manufacture of material things—at present to be used for the taking of other men’s lives. A painful necessity, the president of Budd-Erling would admit, but he would add, “There have always been wars and always will be, men being what they are.” Lanny must have heard him say it several hundred times in forty years.
What he said now was, “Why don’t you two go and look over our new plant in New Mexico?” He said “our,” because both Lanny and Laurel were stockholders, and he wanted to keep that fact in their minds. “It’s beautiful country, and a deligh
tful climate in winter.”
“What would you want us to do?” asked Laurel, who would never let anybody get anything by indirection.
“Just look the place over and meet the people in charge and give me your impression of them and whether they’re up to the job. That’s a stockholder’s duty, isn’t it—a public duty and a service in wartime?” The sly old rascal!
“But we don’t know anything about jet propulsion, Robbie.”
“Lanny has picked up a lot about planes, and you are a judge of character. A report from you both would be a service to me, I assure you.”
“Yes, but he’s supposed to be taking a rest now.”
“He’ll get a rest motoring out; and he doesn’t have to do any more than he feels like. It will help you as a writer, because you’ll meet new kinds of people—executives on a big job, scientists, workingmen from all over the country, Indians, ranchers, cowboys.”
“You make it sound very tempting,” admitted a lady who was tired of writing about Nazi criminals.
“It would give me an excuse to supply you with gasoline; and I can solve the hotel problem for you, too—I’ll give you a trailer, I’m having them built by the hundreds for my workers, both here and out there. They are made of aluminum, and very light; they have a butane-gas heater and cookstove, and connections for electric light and water; two beds with the best mattresses, closets, shelves, everything complete. You hitch it on behind your car and it follows wherever you go, and only adds about ten per cent to your fuel bill. You can travel at night and never have to worry about getting accommodations. You can go to New Mexico and see the plant and then go on to California, and when you get tired of the trailer you can sell it for more than it cost you, because it won’t cost you anything.”
Laurel looked at her husband, and he saw the light of new enterprise in her eyes. “Let’s have a look at one of the things,” he said.
BOOK SIX
Much Have I Seen and Known
16
California, Here I Come!
I
So now Laurel and Lanny were going to have a honeymoon, nearly two years after they had been married in Hongkong. Maybe their trip through China had been a honeymoon, but it had been hard to enjoy while escaping from the Japs. A bride is supposed to have a veil and a train, orange blossoms in her hair, a trousseau and a goingaway dress; but all Laurel had had was a pair of Chinese trousers and a loose jacket, and such belongings as could be stuffed into a duffel bag; that, plus deadly fear.
Now they drove back to New York and got their belongings. Laurel wouldn’t let her husband bring the trailer into city traffic on his first trip, for she imagined all sorts of complications. They loaded up the trunk of the car with suitcases and bundles, and piled the back seat with clothing for both winter and summer; they were starting out in the midst of a chilly snap, and later on they would be crossing hot deserts. They made arrangements with Agnes to take care of the baby, whom she adored as her own; she had a friend who would serve as baby-sitter now and then. Lanny said, “It is not the American custom to take babies on honeymoons.”
They returned to Newcastle, and one of Robbie’s welders put the ball on the back of their car, the smooth steel ball over which the trailer hitch is fastened, leaving the trailer free to turn on it. Their clothes were packed in drawers or hung in the small closets; the suitcases were tucked away under the two beds—one bed at each end of the vehicle, crossways. It wasn’t quite as if they were going through darkest Africa, Lanny mentioned; there would be towns on the way, and they could buy what they needed. So off they went, right after lunch on a Monday that happened to see the first snowfall of the season. Esther stood and waved good-by to them, along with her butler and her parlormaid and the governess of some of her grandchildren.
It was a new way of life, of American invention. It had become popular before the war and now was spreading fast; every workingman who wanted to move to higher wages wanted a rolling house to move in and to live in when he got there. Some who couldn’t find one took the chassis of an old car and built a wooden box on top. Arriving at a new place and unable to find even a chicken house to live in, some would build themselves a shack in trailer shape, hoping to put two axles and four wheels under it later on. Trailer parks and “motels” sprang up all over the country, some of them a new sort of slum, and others with modern conveniences and even luxuries—swimming pools, dance floors, playgrounds for the “kiddies.”
II
Neither one of this bridal couple had ever tried this new way of life. They discovered to their relief that the trailer followed right along behind and didn’t jerk or otherwise misbehave; soon you came to take it for granted. The only difference was that rounding corners in a city you had to clear the curb more widely, and when you wanted to stop you had to put on the brake a few feet sooner. The trailer didn’t slide off the road in the snow any more than the car did. Observing this, Laurel consented for the expedition to cross the George Washington Bridge; but they must approach it from the north, avoiding the city traffic, and they must find a secondary road westward, and not venture on a main highway between speeding trucks loaded with heavy goods.
So began a six-thousand-mile journey that might have been faster if they had wanted it so; but Laurel was seeing her native land for the first time and didn’t care to rush past it at a mile a minute. They crossed New Jersey and a corner of Pennsylvania, finding their way by less-frequented routes. They avoided the mountains, keeping in the Atlantic plain until they got to the southernmost tier of states, and thus had little snow and cold. They started early and did their traveling by daylight; when darkness approached they didn’t worry about finding a resting place, for any good farmhouse would do. They would pay for the privilege of running their electric light cord to a connection, usually in the barn. A bucket of water was the only other thing they needed.
Trailer life had its drawbacks, they learned. The little room was crowded, and when you started off in the morning you had to stow everything away, otherwise you would discover that it had slid off the shelf or the table, and maybe had skidded under the bed where it was difficult to reach. Trailer builders had learned this sliding business, so all the drawers had little notches which kept them from opening until you lifted them a quarter of an inch or so.
The apparatus for cooking and washing dishes looked most attractive, but this couple decided that they would have one hot meal in a restaurant in the middle of the day, and for breakfast and supper would make out with bread and milk and fruit, so they could use paper cups and plates and spoons and throw them away. On trailer trips you rarely saw the same people for long, so you didn’t have to dress—that is, you put on clothes for comfort and not to demonstrate your social position. The name Budd was a fairly common one, and nobody guessed that these were the Budds; so Laurel could wear a sweater and skirt and Lanny didn’t have to have his trousers pressed.
This was really seeing America. They could get out and look at the landscape, climb a hill, gather hickory nuts and wild persimmons in a wood, or buy cider from a farmer. They could stand and talk when they met an amusing character, and then move on to the next adventure. Goods were scarce in the city department stores, but in general stores at country crossroads you would still find things that had been made before the war, and these were the best. If you liked plain food well-cooked; you could find it, and after a few mistakes they learned how to judge eating places. When they had got settled in the evenings they would stretch out and indulge in the greatest of all luxuries, reading a good book. They had accumulated many and never had time for them before. They would take turns reading aloud, or read separately, and during the long drives tell each other what they had found.
Also, there was the radio, a powerful instrument of culture sadly misused. But you could learn to dodge the commercials and get the same war news anywhere in America, and the same commentators to tell you what it meant. The Russians were pressing steadily on, taking German fortified positions or by-
passing them, chewing up German manpower and resources. There was the continuing clamor for a second front by the Russians and their friends, and the same secret fear in many hearts that the Soviets might make another deal with the Nazis and get out of the war. Lanny said, “Our salvation lies in the fact that Hitler has shown himself a man whom nobody can trust.” He didn’t have to say more, for Laurel had been in Hitler’s home and knew him as a woman knows a man who has offered her the supreme insult.
That had been only four years ago, but it seemed ages away from these peaceful American scenes. Crimes were committed in this country too. Lanny had a Budd automatic in the car and took it into the trailer at night, just on chance; but no such chance befell. It was a grand country if you had a little money, and pretty nearly everybody had it now. That was the irony of the free enterprise system, so ardently praised by the enterprisers; the system could keep the people in comfort so long as the energies of the community were being devoted to killing other people; but the moment they settled down to enjoy the peace their valor had won, they found themselves heading into another depression, with breadlines and apple-selling on the streets and boondoggling and leaf-raking on the country roads.
III
Down through the middle of Virginia, and then, avoiding the crowded Highway Number One, along the coast of the Carolinas and into the land of palmettos and magnolias and live oaks draped with Spanish moss. It was warm; they dug out their summer things, and strolled in the moonlight and listened to the mockingbirds—a honeymoon according to the tradition of all romantic novels about the Old South. How long would they be able to enjoy it when they read in the newspapers and heard over the radio about American boys fighting in the rain-filled trenches in front of Monte Cassino, and in the terrible jungles of the Solomon Islands, where it had always been believed that no white man could survive?
One Clear Call I Page 44
