Melville Goodwin, USA

by John P. Marquand

  For a few days correspondents in the rear areas had been curious as to who General Goodwin was, and about his previous service, and a few people who knew everything, or thought they did, began supplying information. Goodwin had been in North Africa. He had been a brigadier at Kasserine Pass and had done something or other in that unhappy affair that had been favorably mentioned. Someone recalled that General Patton had spoken highly of him and had referred to him as Mel and had even called him a two-fist slugger. He was in the Regular Army, a West Point graduate, but never on what was sometimes called the “first team.” Yet first team men had liked to have him in their groups and everyone could not be a prima donna.

  When we had dinner that evening in Dottie’s sitting room at the Ritz, an extra trimming which Dottie insisted on paying for with her own traveler’s checks, I knew these facts about Mel Goodwin. I felt the genuine respect for him that anyone in my position was bound to feel for someone who had been through what he had. I wanted just as much as Dottie to give him a good time and to take his mind off things that worried him. Dottie was always good at little dinners and she loved to show how much she knew about wines and food. As she told us, she might be stupid about some things, about French for instance, which she could read but had never learned to speak, but she did know how to make men comfortable, and we could be a lot more comfortable at the Ritz than we would be at the Tour d’Argent or any of those crowded restaurants. I could do the ordering because I could speak French, and I could be bartender, too.

  “Sid and I are almost like brother and sister,” she said, “we’ve known each other so long.”

  She took a key ring from her purse. I could go into the bedroom, she said, like a darling, and open the alligator-skin case, not the big one but the small one, that she kept the bottles in, and, like a darling, I could bring out the Scotch she had bought yesterday and the gin and vermouth. Then while we rang for ice and glasses, she would go in and put on something more comfortable than her old traveling suit, but we must be sure not to say anything interesting until she came out. I could hear her whistling a little tune as she closed the bedroom door. I never knew what the tune was, but it was one I had often heard her whistle when she was happy, and it reminded me of her little apartment in Greenwich Village in the days before I went to the Paris Bureau. I could almost see her studio couch and her armchair and her bookcase with the copy of T. S. Eliot’s poems that I had given her, and the paper-bound volume of Ulysses, which I had never been able to read except in snatches, beside her Fowler’s Modern English Usage.

  Dottie had no need to worry. The General and I said nothing interesting while she was in the bedroom. The General sat down heavily in a French armchair with rather dingy silk upholstery.

  “By God,” he said, “this is a good soft chair.”

  It was the first time I had seen him relaxed, but he was not wholly relaxed. His feet were placed so that he could spring up quickly if he had to, and though he had leaned his head back and half closed his eyes, he seemed to be listening to the street noises outside, to the staccato sound of motor horns one always hears in Paris, and to the sound of a plane. The lines on his forehead and at the corners of his eyes and mouth had not softened. His face had the stamp of the other faces of people I had seen who had come recently out of action into a quiet area. They always reminded one of a half-erased page still bearing a few distinguishable words left there by mistake.

  “Son,” he said, “it’s peaceful here. How about taking a touch of that whisky before we get the ice?”

  I was thinking as he held out his glass that we neither of us were as out of place in that sitting room as we might have been, in spite of its marble-topped Empire tables, its Louis Quinze sofas and its gilded mirrors. Other soldiers had been there before us—French and English and American—when the Big Bertha had fired on Paris back in 1918. More French and British had been there twenty years later, and then Germans and again Americans. The Ritz was as inured to soldiers as Paris was to war and riot.

  When the waiter came with the ice, I asked him to send up one of the maîtres d’hôtel. We wanted to order a very good and a very special dinner.

  “He understands you, doesn’t he?” the General said. “I learned some French at the Point but it never seems to work right for me over here.”

  I told him that he could speak French as well as I could if he were obliged to, that it was all a matter of necessity.

  “I wouldn’t know,” he said. “Frankly, I have never gone in much for languages, because if you know a language your neck is out. Now when I was in Tientsin, a friend of mine went to language school in Peking.…” He stopped; he was not interested in what he was saying. “So you and Mrs. Peale are old friends.”

  He glanced at the closed door of the bedroom.

  “Yes,” I said, “we’ve known each other for quite a while.”

  At least Dottie was something for us to talk about, and I told about Park Row and about her marrying Henry Peale, and how she had taken over the publishing business.

  “Why didn’t you two kids get married?” he asked. “You sound as though you’d liked each other.”

  I had not meant to sound that way. I did not measure up to her specifications, I said, and then I laughed.

  “She was looking for a man,” I said. “What’s that poem—about asking Abraham Lincoln to give us a man?”

  He had not heard of it, though he liked some poetry, and he asked if I was married now, and the memory of Helen and Camilla came back forcibly, as it did sometimes. Then we started to go through that little ceremony of showing photographs of our wives and children, and I remember the General’s saying, when he drew a wallet from his inside pocket, that he wished he had one of Muriel when she was younger. He had lost his snapshot of the two boys, but they were good boys, real army brats. One of them was a lieutenant in the Pacific and the other was getting ready for the Point.

  “I wish I had a better photograph of Muriel,” he said.

  But I did not have a chance to see Muriel that evening, because, just as he was going to hand me the picture, Dottie came out of the bedroom wearing a black evening dress that looked as though it had never been in a suitcase.

  “What are you doing with the wallets?” Dottie asked.

  “Oh,” I said, “just looking at our wives.”

  “Oh dear,” Dottie said, “am I intruding?”

  “As long as our wives aren’t here,” I said, “it’s nice that some understanding woman is.”

  “Muriel has never seen Paris,” the General said. “She’s always wanted to. I wish you could both meet Muriel.”

  “I hope I can meet her sometime when the war is over,” Dottie said. “I’m glad I’m not a soldier’s wife, especially a handsome soldier’s wife.”

  “Does that mean me?” the General asked.

  Dottie’s nose wrinkled as she smiled at him. “Sid, darling, you’re not being a good barkeep,” she said. “Mix me my Martini.”

  The shadow of that unknown Muriel dissipated itself quite rapidly as wives’ shadows customarily did in the ETO. It was no one’s fault that it was hard to keep memories of wives perpetually green in that extreme and changing environment, even with the aid of the photographs and love-gauges that one carried overseas. The European Theater of Operations was not a place where home ties fitted into a successful design for living. Memory interfered with work, and if you thought too much about past domesticity, you became a maladjusted burden. Instead it was advisable to think of home as a Never-Never Land, and of your present milieu as a region with drives and emotional values that no one at home could possibly comprehend. It was just as well to believe that the things you did and said in this milieu into which you were thrust in order to keep your land safe and your loved ones secure, would have no effect whatsoever on what went on at home. Some day we would all get safely back to that Never-Never Land. Some might never return, but this would not be true of us as individuals. We would get back, and this Great Adventure
would be the tale of an idiot. If you did not have this philosophy, you would not be a useful soldier.

  The shadow of Muriel was vanishing as the shadow should of any well-trained army wife, and if the shadows of Helen and Camilla remained a little longer in that apartment at the Ritz, they were distinctly my shadows, and I was simply an innocent bystander. The General was the central figure, and Mel Goodwin—I began calling him Mel occasionally because it fitted our escapist mood—was beginning to have a very good time. By the time our dinner arrived, he must have concluded that he was comparatively safe and that Dottie and I would not let him down, though of course he never broke security. He was equally good at handling military secrets and liquor. Our conversation, consequently, never touched on future operations, and we never said mean things about high commanders. Dottie always possessed a brand of tact and intuitive good sense that could guide her in any situation. If she had learned nothing else, she was often fond of saying, she had learned how to be a good hostess and how to make men comfortable, though perhaps not women—she never did have much of a faculty for getting on with protected women.

  Dottie had a good tough mind that did not object to monosyllables or facing facts, but she could also be a nice-girl-among-grownups. She could twist and turn a man and adjust him by some sort of mental osteopathy so that he always felt he was unusually brilliant and remarkably gay. There was no reason why she should not have been caviar to the General because she had been to a lot of more complicated characters. The General was having a wonderful time, and so was I, for that matter. We were under the illusion that we were all old, reunited friends, and this was not wholly due to the Scotch and the champagne. It was mostly due to Dottie.

  “I can’t tell you what this means to me,” the General said. “In fact I wouldn’t want to tell you.”

  Maybe it was just as well that he did not try. He was a soldier there at the Ritz, the representative of a great tradition with all the attributes of professional soldiers, from the days of the Macedonian phalanx. Mel Goodwin was not handsome, and nothing he said had brilliance, but the close cut of his hair, the level assurance of his glance, and the molding of his face, so devoid of the softness and the flabbiness that creeps into middle-aged civilian features, made him a part of the ages. He was Ulysses having a little talk with Calypso, Lancelot chatting with Guinevere, or Bertrand Du Guesclin, fresh from the Marches, divested of his armor, drinking his mulled wine and cracking his filberts between his strong white teeth. Even when I told myself that he was just big brass, he still retained a faint mist of glory. Once or twice—not more I hope, and for only brief intervals—I even found myself wishing that I, too, might be something like Mel Goodwin—a warrior from the wars—though I realized that this was a very adolescent wish and I soon pulled myself together. Yet I had never felt so strongly about any other military figure. I had never felt this desire for emulation when I had met Eisenhower or Patton or Bradley, but then I had never dined with any of them quietly at the Ritz, with Dottie to sit listening to their discourse like Desdemona with Othello.

  Dottie was always saying that she loved to entertain graciously, and by this she meant that she liked to do things with a sort of weight-throwing ostentation attributable to her simple beginnings. The maître d’hôtel played up to her as headwaiters and captains always did. She wanted to give us a good dinner, she said, a really memorable dinner, since we were staying with her instead of going out on the town. Expense was no consideration with Dottie. It never had been since she had married Henry Peale. She was a very expensive girl, she used to say, but she knew just what the costs were because she kept the checkbooks and added the bills herself. There was no fresh caviar, and what we did need was a pound tin of fresh caviar, and imagine Paris without it, but we would do with canned caviar. Then there must be very good soup, something clear and bracing, and then pressed duck, and they could bring the machinery right upstairs, and a good green salad—they could bring the oil and vinegar—she would mix it herself—and then crêpes suzettes, and that would be enough unless we could think of something else. Neither the General nor I could think of anything else except coffee, and the General wanted American coffee and not that stuff that the French call coffee. The duck, as Dottie knew, called for a fine, sound Burgundy, but if we did not mind, Burgundy always made her sleepy. What about champagne? She was still a provincial girl at heart who loved champagne. The buckets always meant that it was a real party. We might just as well have a magnum of Lanson, and the maître d’hôtel could decide himself on the vintage—Dottie smiled knowingly at the maître d’hôtel with the special smile she reserved for headwaiters and captains—and brandy with the coffee—she had almost forgotten the brandy. It must be the best in the house, and she knew the maître d’hôtel knew his fine. It must not be caramélisé. She shook her finger at the maître d’hôtel, and her simple diamond bracelet glittered, the only important piece of jewelry she brought on the trip. I could see that she was proud of the word caramélisé.

  “Darling,” she said to me, “do you remember when you bought me the first champagne I ever tasted?”

  That was quite a while ago. I had bought her a bottle of Bollinger at a speakeasy on Murray Hill while she was still working on the newspaper, and her bringing it up made me feel like an old roué, now grown settled and harmless, raking for embers in the ashes—nothing to worry Mel Goodwin.

  “Champagne but not the bracelet, Dot,” I said.

  “You’re damned well right,” Dottie answered, “not the bracelet, darling.”

  The mention of diamonds cast a small shadow over us, but it was soon wafted away like the shadow of Muriel.

  It was really a wonderful dinner, and there was no further effort or worry about what to say to the General after the duck and the champagne, because the General had begun to talk about himself.

  “Sid here knows what I mean,” he kept saying.

  Naturally I felt flattered each time he said it, and now and then I could almost believe that I had seen a lot of service, although I was always careful to tell him that the army had only picked me up because I knew how to run a typewriter.

  “Just the same, Sid knows what I mean,” the General said. “I wish I could take you up forward with me, Sid.”

  “I wouldn’t be any good, Mel,” I said.

  “You were all right at Saint-Lô,” he said. Even Dottie was pleased at this—in a maternal way.

  He said that frankly he never felt at home when he was in a rear area. He was not a politician and he never had been, and that was why he could not thank Dottie enough for having him here. Otherwise he would have been at some mess with a lot of smooth manipulators and Cocktail Joes. It was better where the guns were going off. He knew his way around at the front, where things were simpler, and Sid knew what he meant. Up there people had to come across or they’d be sent back. He could always understand what motivated troops. You could look at men’s faces and tell just how much further you could push them, and Sid knew what he meant. There was nothing like the feeling that you had the confidence of troops. Loyalty came from the bottom up and not from the top down, in his experience. Troops never went back on you if you knew troops, and Sid knew what he meant. The old Silver Leaf was a good division because it had good troops and battle-wise officers, not just paper pushers who were too good to die. That was what hurt, and Sid knew what he meant. You had to estimate casualties, but you never could get immune to them. Now for example, there outside of Maule, there was a situation with tanks. There was no time to mill around. You had to keep them moving. Sid knew what he meant. You had to treat troops like kids sometimes, if you were to keep them moving. You had to show them you could do it, too, even if it was childish. He drove his jeep out ahead of the tanks just to get them going. It was not good judgment and he had no business out there, but it worked. You had to keep them moving.

  Dottie sat in an armchair with her feet curled under her, listening.

  “You mean you were out ahead of everythi
ng?” she asked. She was listening but she could only follow part of it.

  “I shouldn’t have mentioned it,” the General said. “It was a foolish sort of thing to do.”

  “I’m awfully glad you did,” Dottie said. “It makes me sure that everything I think about you is true.”

  Her voice made me realize, now that dinner was over, that neither Dottie nor the General needed me any more. The thing that he hated worst, he was saying, was the period just before troops were committed to action, when you had to walk around among them and talk to them. He no longer said that Sid knew what he meant.

  “You know,” he said, “talking like this gets a lot of things clear in my own mind. That thing you said this afternoon about my being sure—that’s an interesting thought. You’ve got to be sure of the whole works. You’ve got to know the whole thing behind you is going to move ahead. What is that poem about Ulysses?”

  “What poem about Ulysses?” Dottie asked.

  “That poem,” the General said, and he snapped his fingers as though this would stimulate his memory, “that one by Tennyson.”

  “Oh, I know the one you mean,” Dottie said. “It’s about the rowers and Ulysses going to sea again.”

  “That’s it,” the General said, “because he couldn’t sit still.… ‘Push off, and sitting well in order smite the sounding furrows.’”

  None of us spoke for a moment. I had not thought of General Goodwin as emotional until then. He sat staring in front of him, and then he looked at his watch.

  “Don’t,” Dottie said, and she put her hand on his arm. “It isn’t time to go.”