“Now, Helen, you were just saying that I never ask any of my old friends up here,” I told her. “Nothing’s too good for old Mel, and I know you’ll love him, and besides, I know Gilbert will like it.”
“I’m getting pretty sick of doing things because Gilbert will like it,” Helen said.
Before I could answer, Oscar had opened the library door.
“Don’t tell me. I can guess,” I said. “It’s Mr. Frary on the telephone,” and I smiled at Helen. “You’d better go back and listen in the hall.”
There was no one more adequate in telephone conversations than Gilbert. It always gave him inordinate pleasure to be chatting with the Coast or arranging calls with the overseas operator, and he was never bothered by the expense.
“How is everything in Connecticut, Sid?” he asked. “Settling down comfortably for a quiet night, I hope?”
“It’s delightfully comfortable out here, Gilbert,” I said. “You can hear a pin drop at any odd minute.”
“Ha, ha,” Gilbert said. “If you drop one, tell Helen to pick it up and all that day you’ll have good luck, as the old adage goes.”
“Maybe you don’t have good luck at night,” I said. “It doesn’t say anything about night.”
“Any home with the graciousness of yours and Helen’s will have good luck day or night, I’m sure,” Gilbert said.
“That’s sweet of you to say so, Gilbert,” I answered. “And Helen loved the gardenias. They came as a complete surprise.”
“They were but nothing,” Gilbert said, “but it did seem to me that fresh flowers in the country … Oh, by the way, Sid, to be serious for a moment, did an army officer from Public Relations at the Pentagon get in touch with you about that general, General Goodman?”
“That’s right,” I said, “he’s just been on the wire.”
“Well, I thought he had some rather good suggestions, didn’t you? Not that you don’t know more about these things than I do, having served with the army yourself overseas. I told him you had great loyalty to old associations.”
“That’s right,” I said, “loyalty.”
“I knew we’d see eye to eye,” Gilbert said. “Then you’ll be down at the airport and I’ll have flowers from you for Mrs. Goodman, and perhaps you can think of some slightly comical favor for General Goodman, something that will look amusing in a picture.”
“What’s that?” I asked, and I was fascinated. “You want me to give him something?”
“Just something for a gag, Sid, that will look well in front of the cameras and the newsreel. I was depending on your own imagination, but how would a floral hammer and sickle be, or maybe perhaps you present him with a tommy gun, muzzle foremost, something with a laugh to lighten up the newsreels, Sid, and to give you the spot.”
Gilbert’s mind was never at rest, and I enjoyed so much hearing him run on that I hated to topple over his house of cards.
“Now, Gilbert,” I said, “let’s quiet down. I’m not going to Mitchel Field.”
“Now, Sidney,” Gilbert said, “I appreciate your reaction perfectly, but before deciding definitely, please give it a second thought. It may be better to have the ceremony somewhat more dignified and impressive, such as a simple frank handclasp and a word or two. I will withdraw the gag gift idea—but I do feel, without the slightest ambiguity, that this is all a real build-up for the program, and I know that George will approve of it. He always attends the newsreels, and if Helen can’t make it, I know there will be another lovely lady there.”
“Who?” I asked. “The General’s wife?”
“No, no, Sid,” Gilbert said, “but you know who—someone in your past and General Goodman’s past. You know who.”
“Goodwin!” I said. “Not Goodman—Goodwin.”
“I wish I had your sharp-etched memory, Sidney,” Gilbert said. “I’ve been talking about General Goodwin with someone who is intensely interested in him. You know who.”
“Don’t make me guess,” I said. “Who is it?”
“Now, Sid,” Gilbert said, “don’t be so ambiguous. It’s Dottie Peale, Sidney. She called me after you left the studio. She guessed they would be sending for the General. There’s no one with Dottie’s public relations sense. She’s the one who thought about the gag present. She’ll be at the airport, too, and Dottie’s still photogenic, the minx.”
Gilbert’s thoughts were off again, and it seemed a pity to stop them.
“Listen, Gilbert,” I said, “I’m not going to be there, but I wouldn’t have Dottie either if Mrs. Goodwin is coming.”
“Oh-oh,” Gilbert said. “Oh-oh—does that convey an implication, Sidney?”
“You put it very nicely, Gilbert,” I said.
“I cannot see how I was so inopportune,” Gilbert said. “You mean he’s seriously that way about Dottie?”
“He was the last time I saw him,” I said, “but he was under strain, Gilbert; we were all under strain.”
“Oh-oh,” Gilbert said. “I love the way you put things, Sidney—so completely devoid of ambiguity.”
“All right,” I said, “how about our going to sleep now, Gilbert? I’m not going to the field, but I’m sending for him. I’m asking him to stay here.”
“I wish I had your restrained taste, Sidney,” Gilbert said, “yours and Helen’s. I can see that will be better. The gesture has so much more integrity, and you can broadcast from your library tomorrow night with the General beside you, and some photographs.”
“You’ll come, too, won’t you, Gilbert?” I said.
Gilbert’s mind was working again in a new channel. It was going to be quite a party, a warm, intimate party—two old friends meeting after the wars.
“And whoever is doing the definitive news story, it would be gracious to ask him to do it in your home, don’t you think?” Gilbert said. “We mustn’t have any slip-up. I’ll arrange the whole thing, Sidney, and I’ll call Helen in the morning. It will all be studio expense. Tell Helen not to worry.”
I looked up to discover that Helen was still in the library.
“Helen won’t worry,” I said. “Helen loves parties. Call us in the morning. Good night, Gilbert.”
Helen stood scowling at me, and I laughed.
“Let’s go back and toss rings to Farouche,” I said.
“I don’t see what you think is so funny,” she said. “What are you laughing at?”
“About the General,” I said, “my old close friend, Mel Goodwin.”
“Sid,” Helen said, “you never told me about the General and Dottie Peale. Was it that time you took all those writers and people over in a plane?”
“Yes,” I said, “it was that time, but it doesn’t amount to anything, Helen. You know Dottie Peale.”
“Well, as long as it was the General and not you,” Helen said.
At least she was no longer worried about the party, and the evening was over and it was time to put out the lights downstairs, and once again you could almost hear a pin drop.
“Helen,” I told her, “don’t forget that Dottie gave Camilla Little Women.”
IV
If Necessary, She Would Have Done Very Well in Iceland
Now that I had become so suddenly the old friend and host of General Melville Goodwin, I began to be acutely conscious of the commercial side of the transaction. I had started by being amused—and it was best always to be amused by such things—but now a sensitivity, of which I could never get rid, gave me a faint distaste for all that shoddy contriving. I felt ashamed that I should have to defer to anyone like Gilbert, and I wished that I were not so facile or so dependent on tawdry artificiality. I thought of sitting on Camilla’s bed with my Scotch and soda. I thought of my integrity. It was getting shopworn and so were my old friends and so were my ambitions. All at once I felt as weary as King Solomon when he wrote Ecclesiastes and besought his readers to remember their Creator in the days of their youth before the years came in which they took no pleasure.
“Sid,” H
elen asked me, “what’s the matter?”
“Nothing’s the matter. I was just thinking, Helen.”
“What were you thinking about?”
“Oh, this and that,” I said. “I was just thinking that life makes almost everyone into something that he never exactly wanted to be, and then the time comes when he can’t very well be anything else.”
“But you never knew what you wanted to be.”
“That’s right,” I said. “I never gave it much attention—but look at General Goodwin. Everything’s closing in on him, except he probably hasn’t the introspection to realize it.”
“You’re just talking in circles again,” Helen said, but as she went upstairs she must have been thinking about General Goodwin, too. “Don’t start worrying about the lights. Oscar always puts them out. Don’t you remember? Now come upstairs and tell me about Dottie Peale and the General, and don’t be delicate about it, and don’t think I’m worried about Dottie. You’re always so funny when you think I’m worried about Dottie. I’m only jealous of her for just one thing. I wish I had known you as long as she has.”
“If you had,” I told her, “you wouldn’t like me any more than she does.”
“But you liked each other once,” Helen said.
I had first met Dottie when she was make-up girl for the special-feature pages, and we had seen a lot of each other when we both worked down on Park Row. Right from the start Dottie had been an ambitious girl, who knew exactly what she wanted, and it did not take her long to find that I did not answer her requirements. She wanted an older man, in those days, with money and sophistication. She also wanted power, and the combination of these desires afforded the best explanation for her marriage to Henry Peale, the publisher, a few weeks after I left to join the Paris Bureau. Henry was very sweet, she said when I had dinner at their enormous house in the East Seventies the first time I came back from Paris. Henry was very sweet, but he needed his night’s rest in order to face his problems in the morning. Henry would not mind at all our going out somewhere and dancing, and Henry could find something better for me to do than rattling around in the Paris Bureau. It was time I settled down and did something serious, and she would have a talk with Henry about me in the morning, and after we had got back to Seventy-second Street at two o’clock in the morning, she knew that Henry would not mind my kissing her good night because Henry knew that we knew each other so well—almost like brother and sister—well, not quite like brother and sister, but almost.
“Sid,” Helen said again when we were upstairs, “what was it about Dottie Peale and the General?”
“I think Dottie was a little bored,” I said, “and Dottie learned how to get on terribly well with generals.”
It was a long story, one of those rather mechanized sagas that arise out of too much living, but Helen wanted to hear it all, and I was still telling her about it long after the lights were out in the largest master bedroom at Savin Hill.
In February 1945 I had been obliged to cross the Atlantic with Dottie and a peculiarly ill-assorted group of literary and publishing geniuses in an Army C–54. The idea was undoubtedly part of the program to make the Ground Forces popular, but I never knew who thought up this particular stunt or why I should have been sent back to Washington from the European Theater of Operations to take those people over; but obviously someone must have suggested to some high and publicity-conscious source that a group of writers who represented the arts, not the papers, ought to see at first hand what the war was about in order to appreciate the effort that the Ground Forces, not the Air Force or the Navy, were making to win the war. The idea had obviously received very high endorsement, either from somewhere in the Chief of Staff’s office or that of the Secretary, because the whole trip had been given every possible clearance. Besides, the Air Force had pulled off such a trip already, and there was no reason why the Air Force should grab everything in Public Relations. The Ground Forces needed Public Relations, too. Hemingway had been a combat correspondent, but it was about time that other novelists, poets and playwrights should understand that the Infantry was the key to ultimate victory.
There was at this period a belief, quite conceivably correct, that there were so many short stories and articles about flyers, Marines, and the Navy that the Infantry was being forgotten to the detriment of its morale. Near the front there was always a pathetic realization that no one at home faced the truth in spite of military artists, newsreels, documentary films, war histories, and combat reporters. In addition, there must have been the discovery that nobody who could write was allowed to approach the combat areas because of age and decrepitude. There was no reason at all, with the Air Transport Command what it was, why a really distinguished group of individuals, including men and women, should not be comfortably transported to the theater of operations and there meet face to face the leaders who could brief them on what was going on and who could arrange illuminating side trips to the front and the devastated areas. The net result of such a trip would be in the nature of a long-term investment and one of great potential value, since out of it might emerge another Red Badge of Courage or another play comparable to What Price Glory.
The whole project had been completely set up by the time I was ordered to Washington from the ETO, and the lieutenant colonel in charge had already arranged the itinerary and suitable accommodations for all the Very Important People, and a timetable down to the last minute, with dinners, cocktail parties and receptions. The commands where we stopped would be responsible for the smooth running of all arrangements, so that I had to act as nothing more than liaison, and if successful, this would be the model for other similar expeditions. It was not the colonel’s business to consider that a lot of temperamental literary and artistic figures might waste the time of a lot of people who might be better occupied with finishing up the war, and it was not my business to tell him.
“We want someone who understands this type of individual,” the colonel told me, “and that’s why you’re here, Major. You’ll leave with the party tomorrow morning, and your orders are to keep everybody happy and reassured. Explain things to them. Smooth over the rough places. Use tact and personality and always see to it that everyone gets what he or she wants. I can’t possibly give you any definite orders except that you’ll see that everyone has a wonderful time, Major—and if anything goes wrong, improvise. There will be a case of Scotch aboard—you had better look after the Scotch—and there’s a fine crew on the plane.”
“You mean I’m going over as a sort of cruise director?” I asked.
He was a civilian colonel, and one did not have to be as careful with high-ranking civilian officers.
I did not like any of it because I could foresee all sorts of areas of trouble, and I was particularly unimpressed by the Very Important People who had been rounded up for the tour. These consisted of two male novelists of whom I had never heard, three female novelists, a short-story writer, two motion-picture scenario writers who called themselves dramatists and some publishers and subeditors of magazines. I was introduced to them all by the colonel at a cocktail party given at a Washington hotel by Army Public Relations, and they all looked self-conscious and strained now that they were on the threshold of the Great Adventure. I was so busy trying to remember each name and face and trying also to appear kindly and official, and above all as though I were used to this sort of thing, that I was not in the least prepared to meet Dottie Peale. I had written her when Henry Peale died, but I had not seen her since the beginning of the war. She was wearing a very smart twill traveling suit, and she had the cryptically bored look that she always assumed when she was out of her element. She was drinking a double Martini cocktail, which I was quite sure was her second one, not that Dottie could not handle liquor.
“Why, darling!” Dottie said. “What the hell are you doing here?”
I explained my assignment and I thought she was going to kiss me, but she must have decided it was not the time or place.
“
Thank God you’re going with us,” she said. “You look wonderful, darling. Oh God, you look wonderful. Who are all these dreadful people?”
“You ought to know,” I said. “You’ve been playing around with them longer than I have, Dot.”
“Darling, I’m so mortified,” she said. “I understood when I accepted the invitation that at least there would be Names and not just a list. There isn’t anybody in the crowd I want to be killed with except you. Please get me another drink.”
“You’re not going to be killed, Dot,” I told her.
“I have an intuition,” she said. “That is—it’s a premonition, isn’t it? It’s been growing on me, Sid, all afternoon. Not that I’m afraid. I’m perfectly glad to die.”
“Well, that’s swell,” I said. “If it happens, it will all be over very quickly.”
“Sid,” she asked, “on the plane—will you sit beside me?”
“Some of the time,” I said, “but I’m a cruise director.”
“Darling,” she said, “you do look wonderful in a uniform. How’s Helen?”
“She’s fine,” I said. “She and Camilla are in Wilmington.”
“Are you happy with her?”
“Why, yes, up to the present,” I said, and she smiled at me as though she were sure I could not be happy with Helen. She smiled wistfully and very understandingly now that we were facing eventual dissolution together on our way to the Great Adventure.
“Sid,” she said, “I wonder if you’re thinking what I’m thinking.”
“I wouldn’t know,” I said, “unless I knew what you’re thinking.”
“Oh, Sid,” she said, “of course you know. Doesn’t it seem queer to meet this way? It’s as though it meant something.”
“Possibly,” I said.
“Oh, God damn it,” she said. “Go and get me that other drink.”
We always knew each other too well to be fooled by each other. Nevertheless I was very glad to see her, and I needed to see a friendly face in that planeload of talent as much as she did.
Melville Goodwin, USA Page 6
