Melville Goodwin, USA

by John P. Marquand

  He was fourteen years old when he told Muriel that he wanted to be a soldier, and then he was in high school, but he was small for his age and he still wore knickerbockers. One cold afternoon in March, his father had asked him to help out in the drugstore because Elmer Thomas was ill at home with the grippe. The afternoon was so gray and dark that his father had turned on the new electric lights. Melville could still remember the green shades and the quivering carbon filaments of those early light bulbs, each of which had its own individual switch. No one he had ever known, Mel often thought, had his father’s eye for detail. Mr. Goodwin would have made a fine sergeant. He could carry the whole store’s complicated inventory in his head, he could find dirt and dust anywhere, and nothing ever quite suited him. Melville was polishing the glass of the showcases for the third time, and his father in his spotless white coat was standing watching him, when their congressman, Mr. Orrin Curtain, entered the store.

  “That’s better,” Mr. Goodwin was saying, and he leaned sideways to view the glass from another angle, “but it isn’t done yet, Melville. Don’t pretend that you don’t see the streaks. Oh, good afternoon, Orrin,” and his father and Mr. Curtain shook hands. “When did you arrive, Orrin?”

  “On the four o’clock trolley, Robert,” Mr. Curtain said in a fine ringing voice. “I arrived in Nashua yesterday from Washington and I cannot go back again without seeing my good friends in Hallowell.… And how are Mrs. Goodwin and the young people?”

  “They’re fine, Orrin,” Mr. Goodwin said. “Everyone is fine.”

  “And how is business?” Mr. Curtain asked.

  “Well, it isn’t all I’d like it to be,” Mr. Goodwin said, “but I’m still keeping busy.”

  “I was mentioning your store only the other day to Senator Lodge in Washington,” Mr. Curtain said. “I met him buying a headache powder on F Street. I told him you had the best-run store in my district, Robert.”

  “Well, that’s kind of you,” Mr. Goodwin said. “What sort of headache powders does he use?”

  “It’s interesting that you ask that,” Mr. Curtain said. “I don’t remember. What do you recommend for headache powders? I’d like to pass the information on to Senator Lodge.”

  Melville was working hard on the glass showcase, but he still could listen and feel a glow of pride that Mr. Curtain in his tight-fitting overcoat and derby hat and gloves talked to his father in such a friendly way.

  “I was just thinking, Robert,” Mr. Curtain was saying, “that it will be time soon to do garden planting. The Department of Agriculture has a very fine assortment of vegetable seeds this year, and I might be helpful along these lines, if you could bring the subject up to any customers, Robert, and forward their names and addresses to me. I’m almost certain they’ll get seeds promptly and a much better selection, too, than were available before I was elected.”

  “Why, certainly,” Mr. Goodwin said. “I’m always glad to help in any little way I can.”

  “I know,” Mr. Curtain said, “and when I say I don’t forget my friends, I mean it. Look at those electric lights. You and I know how electric lights got to Hallowell, don’t we, Robert? There’s no use being in my position if I can’t be helpful. And who’s your young assistant, Robert? Wait, don’t tell me. He’s your own boy, isn’t he? Why, this is young Melvin.”

  “You certainly do remember everything,” Mr. Goodwin said. “That’s pretty near to it, but his name is Melville, after his grandfather Allen.”

  “Melville,” Mr. Curtain said, “of course it isn’t Melvin. I apologize, young man. Well now, Melville, when I was a boy, I used to like to plant radishes. How about some radishes, Melville? You’ll get them as soon as I get to Washington. I’ll see about it personally.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Melville said.

  “It’s fine to see a boy who isn’t loafing,” Mr. Curtain said, “but helping his daddy out around the store.”

  Melville was working on the showcase again but he could feel their eyes on him.

  “How old is Melville now?” Mr. Curtain asked. “About fourteen? If everything goes right, I might help out with Melville. I’m not promising but there might be an appointment to West Point.”

  It sounded exactly like one of the books he had read at the Memorial Library. He kept working on the showcase, but his head felt light; all of him felt light.

  “Well, that’s kind of you to think of it, Orrin,” he heard his father say, “but I’d sort of like Mel here to be a doctor. Dr. Byles and I talk about it sometimes.”

  Then the telephone rang, and its bell cut through everything like a knife.

  “Hello,” he heard his father saying, “yes, I can send Melville right up with it, Mrs. Reece.”

  “Nothing wrong at the Reeces’, I hope,” Mr. Curtain said.

  “Sam Reece has grippe,” Mr. Goodwin answered, and he deftly wrapped a small bottle and put an elastic around it. “This is the grippe season. Here, take this up to the Reeces’, Melville, and then you’d better go home and do your studying.”

  “Good-by, Melville,” Mr. Curtain said. “I wish I were a boy again, with everything ahead of me.”

  Melville took the neatly wrapped package and went out in back for his overcoat and his rubbers. When he left the square and the green and then turned to Prospect Street, the slushy ground beneath him was completely devoid of its old texture of reality. His wagon was hitched to a star in the shape of Mr. Orrin Curtain, that big-hearted, selfless man upon whose word you could rely implicitly because he was a member of the Congress of the United States. It was as though the Constitution of the United States had assured Melville that it would send him to West Point, and it made no difference whatsoever that his father had dismissed the promise. From the moment Mr. Curtain had spoken, he knew that he would go to West Point.

  Dirty melting snowdrifts still covered much of the sodden ground. The eaves of the Congregational Church were dripping icicles, and the air was so thick with the damp humidity of the river that it seemed to stick in his throat. No climatic condition in any other country he had known compared to March in the northeastern United States, but Melville was not conscious of climate. It might as well have been June with peonies blooming in the flower beds. He passed his own house without noticing that it was there and he hardly knew he was at the Reeces’ until he had passed the ornately turned pillars of the veranda.

  “Hello, Melville,” Mrs. Reece said, when she opened the front door. “My, you got here quickly.”

  When she asked him to step inside and get warm by the parlor stove, he must have thanked her, but he was still in his daydream. The Reeces’ parlor off the front hall was comfortably warm. He could see the coals glowing through the isinglass in the door of a hot-air stove, ornately trimmed with nickel, and Muriel Reece was sitting at a table working at her algebra.

  “Here’s Melville, Muriel,” Mrs. Reece said. “He’s coming in to warm himself up for a minute. I’ll just run upstairs now with the medicine.”

  “Take off your rubbers, Mel,” Muriel said, “so you won’t track mud on the carpet.”

  Seeing Muriel was no novelty. They both had desks in Miss Macy’s room at the high school, and neither of them had ever taken the slightest interest in the other.

  “I’m only going to stay a minute,” he said.

  “You’ll track in dirt just the same,” Muriel said.

  The Reece parlor was a very nice, comfortable room, somewhat more elaborate than the Goodwin parlor, which was natural because Mr. Reece was sales manager and vice president at the hat factory. There was a handsome Brussels carpet on the floor and a comfortable sofa and a Morris chair, with a smoker’s stand beside it, and a bookcase near it containing Ridpath’s Great Races of Mankind. The lamp on a cherry table in the center of the room was already lighted, and Muriel, with her yellow hair in two long braids, leaned over her book, half in the shadow and half in the lamplight. She looked exactly like any other girl in high school freshman year. She was wearing a brown, usef
ul-looking dress, with a pleated skirt reaching halfway between ankle and knee. She had not put up her hair and she was not yet wearing a shirtwast. Girls usually did these things only in the second year at Hallowell High.

  “I’m doing my algebra,” Muriel said. “Have you done yours yet?”

  If you were a boy at Hallowell High, it was fashionable to be sloppy with your homework, and Melville had done nothing on his algebra.

  “Why don’t you sit down and do it now?” Muriel asked.

  “All right,” Melville said. “I may as well, now that I’m here.”

  They were on simultaneous equations, and he remembered the example still.

  “You haven’t got it right,” he said.

  Muriel had always been pretty dumb at algebra. He pulled a straight-backed golden oak chair to the table beside her and picked up a pencil.

  “Now look,” he said, “you do it this way.”

  The great thing about figures was that they were either right or wrong. There was no middle ground. There might be two ways about Ivanhoe, which they were studying in English, but there were no two ways about algebra.

  “You smell all over drugs,” Muriel said.

  “Well, I’ve been working down to the store,” he told her.

  “I don’t mind,” Muriel said. “It’s a nice smell. What girl do you like best in school, Melville?”

  “I don’t know,” Melville said. “I’ve never thought.”

  “It’s just the same way with me about boys,” Muriel said. “All the girls are beginning to talk about boys. I don’t know what boy I like best either.”

  He had never conversed for such a long while with a girl, and it occurred to him that Muriel had changed without his having noticed. She was no longer fat and dumpy. Instead, she was almost thin, and her hair was the color of pulled molasses candy. She did not have as many freckles, and her mouth was no longer as big as it had been.

  “You’re awfully good at algebra,” Muriel said.

  “Oh,” he said, “algebra is easy.”

  “I guess we’d better keep on with these old examples,” Muriel said. “It’s silly just to sit talking, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Melville said, “I guess it’s kind of silly.”

  “When you grow up,” she said, “I suppose you’ll work in the drugstore.”

  “No, I won’t,” he said. “I’m going to West Point.”

  He had told her without thinking, but he was glad that he had told her. She turned quickly in her chair to face him.

  “Oh, go on,” she said. “You’re fooling.”

  “You wait and see,” he said. “It’s a secret. Don’t tell anyone, but you wait and see.”

  He could remember the next moment as though it had just happened, not that anything in particular did happen. He was back again in the Reeces’ parlor and Muriel was looking at him, and he could hear the ticking again of the clock on the mantel.

  “Of course I won’t tell anybody,” Muriel said. “Oh, Mel, I think that’s awfully nice. You look sort of like a soldier.”

  It wasn’t a memorable speech, but somehow nothing that anyone had ever said to him had ever sounded quite that way.

  General Goodwin colored slightly and cleared his throat.

  “Bentley,” he said, “you have certainly got me going. I don’t know why I should run on this way about Muriel in front of strangers but you’ve got me thinking about those days. We were just kids like any other kids. Hell, you’ve got me thinking of it and I like to think of it. I’m proud of it, and kid stuff is pretty funny sometimes, but just you mind, Bentley, all of this is off the record—strictly off the record. I don’t know why but I consider you cleared. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, sir,” Phil Bentley said.

  Generals liked to talk off the record. If anyone was cleared, they often enjoyed being confidential, and the words “off the record” always had a magic of their own for the military mind.

  The next morning, just by accident, Melville happened to be starting for school just as Muriel walked by his house, and he walked to school with her, and when school was over, they started home together at the same time—but he was always sure that walking to school with Muriel had started just by accident.

  Sex was something that every normal individual had to encounter sometime, and it always seemed to Melville Goodwin, from hearing others talk of their adventures, that a good deal of an individual’s future and his attitude toward women in general depended on this first encounter. Perhaps, looking backward, it was reasonable to assume that his innocuous conversation with Muriel Reece that afternoon was his first true encounter with the biological urge and that he and Muriel had really chosen each other as they sat there doing algebra. From that time on Muriel had always kept a cool eye on his behavior. When Eunice Rogers, who was the prettiest girl in the high school class, passed him a note in the hall that April which read, “Somebody loves you,” Muriel asked him on the way home from school what the note had said, and he showed it to her. When Muriel made a disgusted face at the contents of the note, he could sympathize with her distaste, though it was not his fault that Eunice had given it to him. He had never paid any attention to Eunice Rogers, though her hair was up and she wore shirtwaists with little butterflies and things embroidered on them. Eunice might be good-looking, Muriel said—certainly Eunice was thinking about her looks all the time. She even kept a pocket mirror, a comb and violet talcum powder in her desk. The truth was that Eunice and her friend, Helene Dumont, the French Canadian girl, could not talk about anything but boys and kissing. The truth was, and Melville might as well know it, Eunice Rogers was getting boy-crazy. She was always writing those “Somebody loves you” notes and giving them to boys. Muriel was sorry for Eunice Rogers and sorry for her father and mother; her own mother said that the Rogerses were very ordinary. Nothing was sillier than writing flirt notes, and Muriel hoped that Melville had not answered the note … but then if he wanted to be silly, too, it was entirely up to him … but she knew that Melville was not the silly kind.

  If you were a girl, Muriel said, and if you liked a boy and thought that you might marry him someday, after you had finished with high school, you did not have to send him flirt notes—if he was the sort of boy you wanted to marry someday. You did not have to kiss him either until you were engaged to be married—but then perhaps boys were different from girls. If Melville ever felt as silly as that, if Melville ever felt that he had to hold somebody’s hand, he did not have to make himself laughed at by sending flirt notes to Eunice Rogers. If Melville ever felt silly that way, and she hoped he never would … Muriel stopped talking and stared grimly and coldly in front of her, while they passed the Memorial Library.

  “If you have to be silly,” Muriel said, “you can hold hands with me, but if you try to kiss me, I’ll slap you.”

  “I didn’t say I wanted to kiss you,” Melville said.

  “All right,” Muriel said, “then don’t be silly.”

  Melville was embarrassed and confused. It was not his fault that Eunice had passed him that note. He wanted to escape into a simpler world, uncomplicated by Muriel or by any other girl. He had never wanted to hold Muriel’s hand, and there was no reason for her to suggest that he did, and the last thing in the world he had ever thought of was kissing Muriel Reece. Yet in Hallowell, if you did not want to be peculiar, it was just as well to have a girl friend. If the boys began jesting with him in a clumsy way about Muriel Reece, he could come right back at them because they were not immune themselves. It was due to Muriel, after all, that other girls let him alone, because they began to understand that he was Muriel’s property, and he learned a lot about women from Muriel, not as much as the man in Kipling’s poem, who took his fun where he found it—but quite a lot about women.

  A few changes in the links of circumstance might have altered his life. If he had not delivered Dr. Byles’s standard grippe prescription at the Reeces’, he might have answered that note of Eunice Rogers’s, a
nd if he had answered the note, he might have been the one who had married Eunice, instead of his brother Harry, who began to grow silly about Eunice toward the middle of the ensuing summer.

  His brother Harry, as soon as school was over, went to work in Mason’s garage at Nashua, and shortly afterwards Harry induced their father to purchase a secondhand Model T Ford, the first car the family ever owned. Melville would never forget his first sight of the brass radiator and the brass carbide lamps as Harry drove it into the yard, or how the whole thing shook and pulsed when you cranked the motor after you set the spark and gas. No one worried much about licenses in those days, so Melville had learned to drive it right away, and he was fascinated by the mechanism and by its power. When he was in that Ford with the windshield open, feeling the wind on his face, he could almost forget about West Point.

  In time all his ambitions might have been changed by that Ford, if it had not happened that during the summer a regiment of New Hampshire militia had made a practice route march from Manchester and had camped on the old fairgrounds at Blair, five miles away from Hallowell. There were always first times for everything. He went to the fairgrounds at Blair, driving the Model T, and for the first time he saw troops. It was the first time he was fifteen years old and he would never be fifteen again. It was the first time he had worn long trousers, even if they were only work pants bought in Manchester. It was the first time, too, that he and Muriel Reece had been anywhere alone together, because he had asked Muriel to drive with him to Blair.