So, I was thinking, was General Melville Goodwin. I had worn a uniform for a while but I possessed few of the soldier’s instincts. If I had been present in that Berlin street scene, my first and perhaps my only reaction would have been one of curiosity. I should immediately have selected some point from which I could see everything. I should not have done this because of physical fear but rather because I was trained for observation, and it would never have occurred to me that any action of mine could have altered such a scene in any way. If the Russian officer had pointed his tommy gun at my middle, I would not have felt in my pocket for a cigarette, and certainly I would not have pushed his tommy gun away, either gently or briskly. My presence would have had no calming effect upon the officer. He would have shot me through the guts because I would have been expecting it. I could even feel the bullet ripping through me now. I could not have done these things because, unlike Mel Goodwin, I was a civilian, not a soldier, and I had the civilian’s fallacious point of view that a peaceful environment continued to exist, even in a war.
Until the year 1939, except for a rented room on Myrtle Street in Boston and considerably later a two-room walk-up on West Tenth Street in New York, I had never lived in a home of my own. If there had been anything that approached a home environment in my youth, it was the run-down farm which my Uncle Will had bought outside of Nashua, New Hampshire, when he had retired as manager of one of the smaller textile mills in that city. When I was in my teens I was there often, and the farm was always more of a home to me than the rented stucco house on Wilton Street in West Newton where I lived as a child. We had looked on this anyway as nothing more than a temporary dwelling from which we would move to something better as soon as my father got further along in the insurance business; so when my mother died and I had been boarded for a while with family friends, it was like home when I went to stay with my Uncle Will. When my father married again, he moved to Natick, and though my stepmother wished me to live there, too, there never seemed to be room for me in a new household in a new life with new children, and that element of security which child psychologists now consider of such importance was denied me.
Nevertheless when I finished college and went to work on a Boston paper, I seemed to be no more insecure than anyone else in the city room, where security rested mainly on individual ability. Looking back, I seldom missed the solidity of home, and I never cared much about possessions. If I wanted pictures, I could see them in a museum. If I wanted books, there was always the public library. All I needed in those days were some suitcases, two suits of clothes and some ties, and a typewriter and some copy paper—and you could always get all the copy paper you wanted in the city room if you cared to write in your spare time. However, there was always a deadline somewhere, which permitted little opportunity for considered contemplation or for a leisurely co-ordination of ideas. I never cared about food or gracious living in those days, because what I was doing was an adequate substitute, and even now, when I hear a linotype machine or smell that sweet pervasive odor of printer’s ink up in some composing room, my old contentment returns.
I never cared what was in jewelers’ windows or who rode in limousines, except in a purely academic way. I never thought seriously of marriage or of the future but only of seeing all I could while I was alive. When I was on the Paris Bureau, it was easier to sit still than it had been in America, but I never wanted to buy anything even there, except possibly a few books from the stalls along the Seine.
I returned to New York in 1939 after writing three magazine articles on the Middle East and I still did not care where I ate or slept until I married Helen. She was an assistant editor then on a home furnishings magazine, and her work had made her deeply conscious of décor. We rented four rooms on the third floor of a pretentious old dwelling in the West Fifties between Fifth and Sixth avenues. It was noisy but near to everything. Helen furnished the apartment with odds and ends from auction rooms and she was always rearranging them. She was always saying that I would get used to them in time and that I was the most undomestic man she had ever known, but actually there had hardly been time for us even to get used to each other. Helen could never manage to get my clothes in order, and even when Camilla was born in the winter of 1940 and was moved into the back bedroom with her bottles and her bathtub, we were still not used to the apartment. We left it in 1941, when I joined the army and Helen and Camilla went to live with Helen’s parents in Delaware, and we never did have a home in the accepted sense until suddenly in the spring of 1949 we bought the place in Connecticut called Savin Hill.
Helen had said we had to start living somewhere, instead of just subletting one Park Avenue apartment after another, and now that we could afford it we ought to think about Camilla and move to the country. Besides, Gilbert Frary felt we should consider the personality value of such a change. Helen and Camilla and I needed a gracious, welcoming home that would look like something—something solid, perhaps with horses.
“Why horses?” I asked.
Gilbert said that he had merely suggested horses because they had a social significance that built up personality.
“Not that you haven’t a lovely personality as it is, Sidney,” he said, “but Helen knows what I mean.”
He meant that we must have roots somewhere that had a build-up value, and it ought to be Connecticut, not Long Island, because Long Island was rootless. He knew exactly the man who could find us such a place, he said, and larger country places were going begging now, and most of the upkeep could come out of the expense account.
I first saw the house that we now occupied one morning early in the previous spring. Helen woke me up at eight o’clock, which has always seemed to me an ungodly hour for starting a day—five or six if necessary, or else eleven-thirty, but never eight o’clock.
“What’s the matter, Helen?” I asked her. “Is it something about Camilla?”
“Oh, Sid,” Helen said, “please wake up. I want to get there so you can see it in the morning sunlight. There are crocuses all over the lawn along the drive—orange, white and purple crocuses. Do you remember the boy with the crocus on that frieze in the Palace of Knossos?”
“What?” I asked her.
“The boy with the crocus,” Helen said. “You used to talk to me about him before we were married. It made me think you knew something about art. You were going to take me to Crete.”
“That’s right,” I said, “Crete.”
I had seen the mountains of Crete from the deck of an American Export liner on my way to Alexandria before the war, and I had always wanted to explore the Minoan ruins but I did not see how we could very well go there now with Camilla.
“Please get up, Sid,” Helen said, “and put on your tweed coat and your gray slacks. I do want you to see it when everything is fresh in the morning.”
“All right,” I said, and I got out of bed. “Now just what is it we are going to see, Helen?”
“I wish I ever knew whether you were being vague on purpose or because you can’t help it,” Helen said. “The place in Connecticut—I was telling you all about it last night. Remember?”
The place in Connecticut had slipped my mind, because I had given it no careful thought. I had not been able seriously to envisage Helen or me in the country any more than I could envisage the new vistas that only recently had begun to stretch before us.
We drove out, I remember, in the new Packard convertible with the top down. I still enjoyed the Packard because I had never owned anything larger than a Chevrolet until that year. The Packard handled beautifully on the Merritt Parkway, and Helen began talking about this place again. I mustn’t be depressed by its general size, she said. She knew that it was hard to make new plans now that it was possible so suddenly to do so much.
“Oh, Sid,” Helen said, “I do wish sometimes you would let yourself go and try to be happy about everything.”
“I’m happy about most things,” I told her, “but I can’t seem to relax like you.”
Of course there were a number of other people like us in New York, but Hollywood was where we should have been or some similar place where money was not exactly money.
Savin Hill, from the first moment I saw it, was a sort of sword of Damocles for me. Day and night the spirit of Savin Hill hung over me by a thread, a perpetual reminder of the existence of material instability. The house had been built by a Mr. Edgar Winlock, who had died very suddenly from a coronary accident, and it was up for sale, furnished, to settle the estate. At least it was not a remodeled farmhouse. Instead, it was built along the lines of a Virginia plantation. A shaded avenue led up to it with fields resembling paddocks or pastures on either side, enclosed by deceptively simple white board fences. The place was trying to look like a farm, but the driveway had a rolled tar surface.
“You see, the Winlocks kept horses,” Helen said. “There’s a stable and a three-car garage.”
“My God, Helen,” I began, but she stopped me.
“We can afford it, Sid,” she said. “Gilbert says we can”—she was pathetically eager to have me like it—“and a couple and an upstairs maid can look after the house.” She had learned all about such arrangements, of course, from playing around with the editors of fashion and home decoration magazines and from writing pieces about gracious living. Having me dressed in a tweed jacket and slacks was her idea of part of the decor, and it was just as well for both of us that Helen had some training.
“All right,” I said, “I’m Mr. Edgar Winlock. Do the horses come with it, Mrs. Winlock?”
“I wish you wouldn’t give up without a struggle,” Helen said. “It isn’t like you, Sid.”
The truth was that I could think of no fixed line of argument. If she really liked it, I told her, and if she thought she could run a place with a sunken garden and crocuses and a swimming pool, we would try it.
“Aren’t you going to argue about it at all?” Helen asked. “Do you like the furniture? Of course, the living room ought to be in Chippendale, but still the Winlocks did have good taste.”
I wondered whether it was the Winlocks’ taste or that of an interior decorator. The living room was Louis Quinze, with a brilliant Aubusson carpet and a crystal chandelier—but Helen would change all that—and the dining room opened on a terrace that overlooked the swimming pool. I could face it all objectively, but not subjectively. I almost felt that I was a reporter again, visiting the estate for some professional purpose.
“And here’s the library,” Helen said. “You can have the library.”
“Why, thanks a lot,” I said.
“And you can do it over any way you like.”
The trouble was I had never had an opportunity to develop any individual taste, and the last thing I wanted to do was to do something over.
“Sidney,” Helen said, “don’t you like the books?”
I wondered whether Mr. Winlock had liked them. They looked to me like a wholesale acquisition from the library of an English county family—tooled leather sets of the British poets and the British novelists.
“Isn’t there a bar somewhere?” I asked.
“No,” Helen said, “this isn’t Hollywood, but we could use the flower room and have it paneled.”
“Oh, no,” I said, “I don’t particularly want a bar.”
“Sidney,” Helen said, “haven’t you any suggestions at all?”
“Why, no,” I said. “I can’t think of anything—except that there ought to be some place where I could do some writing.”
“You can do some writing in the library,” Helen said.
“Oh, yes,” I said, “I had forgotten about the library.”
“Darling,” Helen said, “don’t you think it’s about time you were housebroken? Isn’t it time we stopped camping out and had a home of our own?”
Of course you had to start sometime, somewhere, having a home of your own, but I always felt as though I were camping out at Savin Hill. I could never entirely get rid of the idea that the Winlocks might come back.
“I wonder if there is any shooting around here,” I said.
“Shooting?” Helen asked me. “Do you mean a war?”
“No,” I said, “game bird shooting with a shotgun.”
“What in heaven’s name made you think of that?” Helen asked.
“Oh,” I said, “I used to go out with my Uncle Will when he shot woodcock in New Hampshire. He had a dog named Mac.”
“I didn’t know you liked dogs,” Helen said.
“I don’t know whether I do or not,” I told her. “I never had time to own one.”
“Well, darling,” Helen said, “you have time to own one now, and Camilla ought to get used to dogs. We could get a poodle.”
“Why a poodle?” I asked.
Before I had married Helen, and in fact until Camilla was born, I had always believed that I understood quite a lot about women. It had never occurred to me that women, including young mothers, would need more than a moderate amount of sympathetic personal attention. I had never considered those demands of security which I now know directly follow the excitements of childbirth. I did not understand that urge for building up something and for making a firm place for a child, but I was glad to give Helen Savin Hill if she wanted it.
As the Cadillac turned into the black-topped driveway that October evening, I had much the same feeling about the place that I had experienced in early spring when the Winlock executors had passed the papers. I was thinking, as Williams blew the horn and as the lights of the house became clear in front of us, of an advertisement for an expensive automobile which I must have seen before the war. It was entitled, “The Day That Took Years in the Making,” and above the headline was a pretty picture of a nice middle-aged couple standing on a stair landing looking out of an arched window. The man, gray at the temples, appeared somewhat buffeted by life, but his wife beside him looked very, very happy and very, very proud. Outside on the drive stood a brand-new automobile with, if I am not mistaken, a Christmas wreath upon it—the apotheosis of the day that took years in the making. This couple, we were told, had moved shoulder to shoulder through the years, because he had faith in her and she had faith in him. First they had lived in a small bungalow with a wretched automobile, then in a somewhat larger house with a passable car, because he had faith in her and she had faith in him, and today we could see the fruition of that faith. The Car was at the door. I remembered this advertisement because it was an almost flawless piece of materialism, and now here I was in a Cadillac, approaching the gracious landscaped entrance of Savin Hill. Yet the couple in the advertisement had some advantages over Helen and me. They had struggled upwards through economic gradations, whereas Helen and I had come cold on Savin Hill.
When Williams blew the horn, the door opened as though the sound of the horn had released some electronic mechanism, and there was Oscar, the houseman, in the tan alpaca coat that Helen had selected for him. Oscar was smiling in his mannerly Swedish way. Williams handed him the box of gardenias and hastily but delicately pulled the robe from my knees as I began to struggle with it.
“There has just been a telephone call for you, sir,” Oscar said, “from Washington—they had your unlisted number—from the office of the Secretary of the Army.”
It seemed to me that Oscar might at least have waited until I had stepped indoors, but Oscar was always overhelpful.
“Who was calling?” I asked.
“It was a colonel, sir, a Colonel Flax,” Oscar said, “from Public Relations. He asked for you to call him back the moment you came in. He said it was very urgent.”
Everything, I remembered, was always urgent around there, but I was not in the army any longer and I had never heard of Colonel Flax.
“If he wants me badly enough, he can try me again,” I said, and I dismissed the whole thing from my mind. Public Relations was always after something, but I was not in the army any longer.
“Are there any orders yet for tomorrow, sir?” Williams asked. It was near
ly nine o’clock, and I wanted to think of the present, but Williams repeated his question very gently.
“Well, I won’t know about tomorrow,” I said, “until I wake up tomorrow morning, but I’ll tell you what you can do. Take it up with Mrs. Skelton, Williams. She’ll probably have some sort of schedule.”
“Yes, sir,” Williams said, “Mrs. Skelton was talking about Miss Camilla’s going to a birthday party tomorrow afternoon if you weren’t going to need me to take you anywhere.”
“Oh,” I said, “can’t Miss Otts drive her over in the station wagon?”
“Miss Otts was going to New York for the day tomorrow,” Oscar said. “That is why Madam thought that Williams could drive Miss Camilla, but if you need Williams, sir, why I could drive Miss Camilla in the station wagon. It is my afternoon off, but I would be pleased to help.”
It was cool outside the car, and the air was very clear. Even though we owned three cars and a pickup truck, these problems of transportation still persisted.
“Whose birthday party is it?” I asked.
“It’s at the Jacksons’, sir,” Oscar said, “at half past four o’clock.”
I could not remember who the Jacksons were.
“Well, well,” I said, “you’d better take up the whole problem with Mrs. Skelton. Mrs. Skelton will fix it so Miss Camilla will get to that birthday party, and I’ll tell you what I’d like, Oscar. How about getting me a Scotch and soda?”
I was thinking that if Oscar wanted to be helpful, this might divert his mind into more useful channels.
Helen had done the hallway over, and now it was green. The wrought-iron railing of the winding staircase was bronze green. The noiseless stair carpet was a deeper green, and on the wallpaper was a design of large plantain leaves. I had told Helen when she was finished with it that all we needed were a few bird calls and it would be a jungle. It had the same quiet quality as the rain forest around Belém, but then it was not raining, and Helen had never seen Belém. She was standing in the hall waiting for me and she looked very happy and very pretty.
Melville Goodwin, USA Page 3
