“I want to talk to you about it sometime while we’re here, just to fill in background,” Phil Bentley said, “if you don’t mind, Sid.”
“No, I don’t mind. Any time at all,” I said.
Miss Fineholt smiled, the weary, studious smile of a raker in dust heaps.
“I wonder whether Mrs. Goodwin knows anything about the General in Paris?” she asked. “Nobody seems to know if she does.”
“Maybe she does,” I said. “She seems to be quite an authority on the General.”
“This is a very lovely room,” Miss Fineholt said. “Are all these antiques original?”
“They’re all certified,” I said. “They give you a pretty good idea of my income, don’t they?”
“Oh, I didn’t mean to be rude,” Miss Fineholt said, “and of course we know your income anyway. You know the bad habits we get, snooping, in this business, and besides, Phil and I might have to do a piece on you sometime.”
“I can’t wait,” I told her.
I was back in an old world that I understood. I knew all about the proclivities and loyalties of research girls, but I hoped that Miss Fineholt would never be on a team doing a piece about me.
Time was moving on. Just before my broadcast I could always feel an inevitable pressure.
“Oh, Sid.” It was Gilbert Frary speaking, and I saw that one of the company technicians was with him. “Excuse me please, Miss Fineholt, for interrupting an interesting conversation. It is ten minutes to seven, Sid. Perhaps we had better go in and settle down.”
“Oh, it’s the broadcast. May I come, too?” Miss Fineholt asked.
I told her that of course she could, that I would feel hurt if she didn’t. It never did any harm to be kind to research girls.
“Sidney is never embarrassed by anyone,” Gilbert Frary said. “He is utterly uninhibited before the microphone. Without intending to promote anything, I hope that before long you and Mr. Bentley will be working on a warm and friendly little piece about Sidney.”
“Come on, Gilbert,” I said, “let’s get going.”
“I have suggested to General Goodman that he might sit at the desk beside you,” Gilbert said, “for the photographs afterwards. He is enthusiastic about the idea, Sidney.”
The minutes were beginning to press closely around me when the General and I walked into the library. Often as I had gone through the motions, there still was a ceremony to sitting down at the microphone. Often as I might tell myself it was superficial and ridiculous, still a great deal depended on the smoothness and perfection of this act. Without having to make any mental checkup in case something was forgotten, I still found myself doing so, not out of nervousness but out of habit. The microphones and all the paraphernalia were in place. Art Hertz was standing near them ready to take the pages from my hand so they would not rustle. A technician stood near him with his watch, ready to give the signal, and the adjustments had already been made for my voice. Approaching the microphone, I was like a prize fighter climbing through the ropes. The little show, I saw, impressed the General because he understood the value of formalities.
“Imagine me walking into anything like this,” he said.
“It’s the way I pay for supper,” I told him, “but it’s too bad they bother you with it.”
It was the way I paid for everything. I was lucky, if you wanted to call it luck. I might have been doing the same kind of work as Phil Bentley, but not as well—not possessing his facility or insight. As I saw him watching the tableau before the microphone, I was positive that much the same thought was crossing his own mind, and then I observed the General sitting beside me. He and I were in somewhat similar positions, in that we had each reached a climax in our careers. The only difference between us was that the General’s career had reached a logical climax.
“We will be on the air in just one minute,” Gilbert Frary said. “Will everyone please settle down?”
There was a ridiculous, churchlike stillness in the library. The eyes of everyone were on me and General Goodwin. The show was on the air, and the voice of Stanley Rose came through from the studio speaking for the sponsor.
“In just a moment Mr. Sidney Skelton will be with you with his personal interpretation of the day’s news, but before hearing Mr. Skelton I should like to ask you a single question: Do not your thoughts often turn to a fine full-bodied soup in this crisp autumn weather?…”
Soup or shaving cream or hair tonic—it would have made no difference. We were riding the waves of free enterprise again.
“… and so tomorrow morning, drop in at your nearest dealer’s and look for that simple, friendly name on the can. You can’t miss it. And now … Mr. Sidney Skelton.”
It was Gilbert Frary who insisted on the “Mr.”—just one more little grace note to give the program quality and integrity.
“Good evening, friends,” I said.
The machine was moving in high gear. I could hear my own voice dealing with the revelations of a congressional investigation, and I had to admit it sounded well. Without my understanding where my incisive enthusiasm had come from, it was there, and the sentences did reflect my personality. If I stammered or stopped, Savin Hill would go up in smoke, but I knew I would not stop. I had a measured assurance which never exhibited itself in everyday living. I was completely at home in this ridiculous show.
“And what about the situation in Berlin tonight?” I was saying. “Thanks to Major General Melville A. Goodwin, the big brass is saying tonight, the situation in that city is less tense, and General Melville Goodwin reported on this situation personally in Washington this morning. It has been quite a day for Mel, a name his old army friends, and lots of the GIs, too, know him by. Mel got off the plane this morning to be greeted by a kind of barrage with which he’s never had to cope, a barrage of cameras and of popular acclaim, but he plowed right through it. As a matter of fact, Mel Goodwin is right beside me here, as I am speaking to you from my home in Connecticut, and—well, he’s still the same old Mel I used to know when his division, the Silver Leaf Armored, was knifing its way through France and rolling across Germany. He wishes the newspaper boys, as he calls them, would let him alone, but they won’t. They’ve even followed him right up here. They can’t wait for this broadcast to finish before asking what makes him tick. Well, good luck, Mel.… And now, out in San Francisco this afternoon on the great Golden Gate Bridge …”
I was finished with Mel Goodwin—his spot was over. It had been of value. Somehow an unseen presence by the microphone always helped to create dramatic effect.
“And now,” I was saying, “thanks for listening, and I’ll try to tell you how things look to me tomorrow.”
The program was off the air and I stood up.
“You see what I mean,” I heard Gilbert Frary saying to Mrs. Goodwin. “The intimate touch is what does it. It’s just as though Sidney were chatting to us informally. And now, Sid, if Burt could take a few candid shots of you and General Goodman, just telling some little anecdote to each other by the microphone.”
“I’m sorry about this, sir,” I said.
“Cut out this ‘sir’ business,” Melville Goodwin said. “Why didn’t you tell me in Paris you could put on a show like that?”
“Because I never knew I could, in Paris,” I told him.
“That’s beautiful,” I heard Gilbert Frary saying. “Don’t mind the lights. Just keep talking to him naturally, General Goodman.”
If Mel Goodwin was annoyed by being called Goodman, he did not show it.
“The truth is, nobody knows what he can do until he squares up to it,” he said. “I have noticed that quite often. Let’s get the girls over, too. They’d like to be in the picture. Come on over, Muriel.”
“Oh no, Mel,” Mrs. Goodwin said, “you know how I look in photographs.”
I had forgotten there would be photographs until it was too late. I would have looked much better in country clothes. Phil Bentley was watching us, critically, but at any rate the sh
ow was almost over, and dinner had been announced.
It was a strange little dinner, with all of us there for the ghoulish purpose of prying into the workings of General Melville Goodwin and all pretending that we were not. I can recall almost verbatim everything that Mrs. Goodwin said. She had changed into a long dress of sturdy lavender crepe, and she still wore the orchid corsage, because, as she said, she wanted to get all she could out of it. The last time she had worn orchids was six years before, when she happened to be visiting some service friends stationed in Philadelphia, and she had been asked, since the General was at Salerno and would get his second star soon, to christen a Liberty ship. There had been orchids then, but nothing like these orchids.
“This dining room reminds me of a dining room in Georgetown,” she said, “belonging to a service friend of ours, Colonel Ainsley. You may have met him as an attaché somewhere abroad—of course he has a comfortable income beside his army pay. Such a nice dining room, and your wife looks so delightful in it, Mr. Skelton! I hope someday soon the General and I can have a permanent home where we can receive our friends. We keep picking up odds and ends for that home. I have some lovely lacquer that we bought once in Tientsin, but that must wait until the General retires. Until then home must always be where we’re ordered.”
“I have moved around a good deal myself,” I said. “I know pretty well what it’s like.”
“But you’re permanently fixed now,” she said. “This all looks very permanent.”
There was always a gap between people in and out of the service, and Mrs. Goodwin was as aware as I that she was here in line of duty.
“Everyone’s been so nice to Mel today,” she went on. “I only wish he weren’t disturbed by public attention. You wouldn’t think he was shy to look at him, would you?”
“Why, no,” I said.
“He doesn’t like taking credit for anything that he doesn’t think he deserves. He keeps saying that this is all a fuss about nothing, and perhaps it is, but it’s about time Mel received some recognition. He’s done a great deal that nobody outside the service knows about. I hope you’ll help that newspaperman to find it out, but you’ll have to lead Mel on.”
“I’m sure he’ll find it out,” I said.
She looked down the table at the General. She was a good army wife, so good that it was hard to tell what she was like herself.
“I think the General looks well, don’t you?” she said. “You wouldn’t know that he’d flown the Atlantic and been in Washington all morning, would you? I always tell Mel he’s very durable. When he got up to that delightful guest room of yours this afternoon, he just sat down in a chair and closed his eyes and was asleep before I could finish talking to him, and when I woke him up he picked up the conversation again, just where we had left it, wanting to know the latest about Robert and about our son Charles—Charles is still at the Point, you know—and all our closer friends. It’s amusing in the service how you make friends and lose them and find them again … that is, if they’re not killed. We lost so many good friends in the war.… I wish I could sleep at any time like Mel.”
I wished that I could myself, I told her. I did not need to put my mind on what she was saying.
“Mel is so durable,” she said, “that he still looks very much like the pictures taken when he graduated from the Point. I should know. You see, Mel and I were married the day after he graduated.”
“Were you really?” I said, “the day afterward?”
“We were in high school together,” she said. “He doesn’t look so very different, a little heavier perhaps. Of course, I always knew he’d be a general someday.”
“Why were you so sure?” I asked.
It was a careless question, but she answered it literally.
“Because I always wanted it. If you want something enough, you get it. Don’t you think that’s true?”
“Maybe it’s true,” I said.
“I always wanted to marry Mel, and I married him. I wanted two boys, and the children were boys. If you think of something long enough and hard enough, it comes true. At least I’ve found it that way.”
“You have to do a good deal about it besides thinking,” I said.
“Doing is part of the wanting, I think,” Mrs. Goodwin said, “or perhaps not doing too much is part of it. The General never likes it when I try to do too much.”
“And what do you want now?” I asked.
It was impertinent to ask her but I could think of years of wanting in Hawaii and Manila and Tientsin.
“I want him back,” she said, “but now that I’ve got him back for a few days and now that Robert’s back from the Pacific, I don’t know that I want anything except to have Robert and Charles here tonight.… Oh yes, and I want them to find something worth while for the General to do—something beside returning him to his command in Germany, though it’s hard to leave a field command, when a war is over. I don’t mean that we like war, but after all, that’s what the service is made for.”
She stopped and looked down the table again at the General.
“I don’t suppose I should have said that,” she said, “but I won’t take it back.”
Her expression as she watched her husband—a complete understanding that was both devoted and detached—made me see why they had married the day after Melville Goodwin had become a commissioned officer. In fact, if I had been Melville Goodwin, with all my career ahead of me and in a period of youth when anything must have been possible—I might very well have wanted to marry her myself. At any rate, I was able to move back through time for a second or two and to imagine what their early years must have been like in spite of her lavender crepe and her orchids.
“Why shouldn’t you say that about war?” I asked her. “It seems to me like a very sensible remark.”
Her glance moved away from the end of the table, as though she had just seen me.
“Because you’re not in the Regular Army,” she said. “Of course you have been in the service, but temporary service isn’t the same thing. It only sounds ugly to you to think of people living and waiting for a war, but I don’t mean it in that way”—she spoke as though she wanted to hurry quickly to some firmer ground—“I only mean that a service wife has to be prepared for her man to go when a war starts, in a different way from an outside wife. Now directly after Mel and I were married, he sailed to France with a school detachment in the First World War. I learned my lesson then. I learned that I must want him to see front-line service with troops because I had to want it.… He went in at Château-Thierry, which is more than most of his classmates did. He was lucky and what he did I am sure has always helped on his record. All we live for is a service record, even if it’s always concealed in a file, and a wife has to be a part of it.”
She stopped and I was no longer aware of the voices of the others at the table. I was thinking of young Melville Goodwin and the guns of Château-Thierry and of the first time he saw Paris—just passing through.
“We all have to live by some sort of record,” I said.
“Yes, but not in black and white, the way we do,” she answered. “Mel has what I like to think of as a straightforward record. I don’t want anything to spoil it.” She stopped again. “You like Mel, don’t you?… I can always tell when anyone likes Mel,” she went on before I could answer. “Now this incident in Berlin will go on his record. I suppose there will be some sort of decoration, but he won’t want it because he will say it isn’t a sincere decoration. He doesn’t believe in collecting medals.” She leaned toward me and lowered her voice. “I don’t like to ask this, since I hardly know you, but I hope you’ll help him with these newspaper people. He has to see them, and it’s in line of duty, but Mel isn’t the kind of officer who likes his name in print. Please don’t let them twist things he says. Please don’t let them hurt his record.”
I wanted to tell her not to worry, but instead, I began to worry myself, for fear she might be implying more than she had said. Dinner was a
lmost over, and there was an abrupt silence at the far end of the table. Then I heard Colonel Flax speaking in a way that instantly caught my attention.
“Of course by that,” I heard the colonel saying, “the General doesn’t mean he’s sorry the war is over.”
Then I knew that the General had been meeting the press all by himself at the far end of the table while Mrs. Goodwin and I had been talking. Phil Bentley and the others were staring at him in a bewildered manner, and the General’s face was set in conventional lines.
“I’m not speaking in the broad, humanitarian sense,” the General said. “William T. Sherman was right. War is hell, and war is a hell of a profession, but looking at it from a professional point of view, it’s pretty tough on professionals when a war stops and we’re not wanted any more. Now old Clausewitz would understand me and so would Julius Caesar. War’s an art. We professionals start getting good and just when everything gets cracking right the war’s over. Look at the old Silver Leaf. That was a sweet division, a coordinated, battle-wise division, and where is it now? Can you blame me if losing something like that hurts me artistically? You can call it fascist if you like. I haven’t had much time to study ideology.”
Philip Bentley’s glasses glittered in the candlelight, and I saw him glance meaningly toward Miss Fineholt.
“I see what you mean,” Phil Bentley said. “I never heard it put quite that way before.”
“Well, you asked for it,” General Goodwin answered. “You said I almost seemed sorry that the war was over. I say I have mixed emotions on the subject, and so would you if you were in my shoes.”
“Perhaps I would,” Phil Bentley said, and the candlelight was reflected again from his glasses.
“You’re damned well right you would,” the General said.
Helen pushed back her chair and stood up and I looked at Phil Bentley as anxiously as if I were Colonel Flax.
“To use an old military expression,” I heard myself saying in my sincerest voice, “perhaps we’d better put the show on the road. I’m sure the General would like to get started. We can go into the library any time now if you want to, Phil.”
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