Melville Goodwin, USA

by John P. Marquand

  “But just the same,” I said, “you people don’t get around very often where we can see you. You regulars always stick together.”

  “You’re damned well right we do,” the General said. “We don’t like having people look at us as though we were witch doctors. Do you think I’m a witch doctor, Sid?”

  “No,” I said, “but you’re all of you conditioned and you’re all in a clique.”

  “That’s a fancy, disagreeable word,” the General said. “Everyone’s conditioned in some way or other. I do have certain skills and certain developed capabilities, but so does that radio fellow who was here last night, the one who kept calling me General Goodman.”

  “Oh yes,” I said, “Gilbert Frary. He has capabilities.”

  “If I were you, I’d watch that fellow, Sid,” the General said. “He acts like someone in some big headquarters … but getting back to me, maybe I’m an easy mark when I get outside what you call my ‘clique.’ Just the same, I wish that Muriel here wouldn’t always be afraid I’m going to make a fool of myself with strangers.”

  In the end it was only the old interplay between any wife and husband, and just then Melville Goodwin was any husband, but still, there were overtones of another way of life. The General was still a general, though off his guard.

  “Now, Mel,” Mrs. Goodwin said, “sometimes you don’t understand people outside the service very well. Do you remember that couple we met when we were in Atlanta, the man you played golf with who wanted to interest you in the orange grove in Florida?”

  “I always told you,” the General said, “that I hadn’t the remotest intention of buying that orange grove. What about that man’s wife in San Francisco who got you buying stocks when I was in the War College”—the General smiled at her officially—“and second-hand cars? It doesn’t do any good to tell you to get in touch with Harry if you want a car—that’s my brother Harry, Sid. He has a Buick agency in Michigan.”

  “Yes, I know, Mel,” Mrs. Goodwin said. “When it comes to civilians, we’re both babes in the wood.”

  “All right,” the General said, “as long as you’re a babe, too, baby,” and then he laughed because I was there—the outside audience.

  “I never worry about you when you’re with troops,” Mrs. Goodwin said, “only when you’re in Berlin or Paris or somewhere.”

  “Or waiting around here?” the General said very brightly.

  “I hope you’ll hurry things here as much as you can,” Mrs. Goodwin said. “Don’t you think perhaps tomorrow I’d better go back to Washington? I won’t start pulling wires.”

  “All right,” the General said, “maybe it would be a good idea if you looked over the lay of the land—but don’t wrap up any package for me before I get there, Muriel.”

  The idea of her going to Washington seemed to have lifted a weight from the General’s mind.

  “Now go back and tell them how you got into West Point,” Mrs. Goodwin said. “Do you remember when we went to Nashua to call on Mr. Francis J. Garrity and I stayed outside and talked to the girl who was doing the typing?”

  “Now wait a minute,” the General said. “I know you can do a lot, Muriel, but you didn’t make that congressman put me into the Point.”

  I believe they had finally forgotten I was there until I spoke.

  “I thought Mr. Orrin Curtain was the congressman who got you into the Point,” I said.

  Both of them looked as surprised as though I had walked into their room without knocking.

  “What a memory you have, Sid,” the General said. “Orrin Curtain was defeated when he ran again. Francis Garrity, a Democrat, beat him, and maybe I wouldn’t have dared go see Garrity if Muriel hadn’t made me.”

  “Melville,” Mrs. Goodwin said, “your Croix de guerre ribbon is twisted, and I think the palm is coming loose. Come here and I’ll fix it.”

  “That leaf is always coming loose,” the General said, and he reached instinctively to the left side of his blouse.

  “Don’t,” Mrs. Goodwin said. “I can fix it, Melville.”

  He walked to the sofa and bent over Mrs. Goodwin and then as her hands moved toward the ribbons he kissed her cheek.

  “Why, Melville,” Mrs. Goodwin said, “you startled me.”

  The theory so prevalent in American art forms, that it is the matriarchal little woman who runs the world by outwitting the preposterously dumb menfolk around her—who fall like sitting ducks before her patience, wisdom and manipulative cleverness—has always seemed to me suspect. Admitting that most women believed this legend, in my limited experience they were not completely successful in following it. Yet I was not quite sure about Mrs. Goodwin. It was just possible that she might always have managed Melville Goodwin instead of merely thinking that she managed him. There were depths to her character that were not perceptible on the surface, and shoals and rapids beneath her placidity.

  The General, too, was deceptive. He was never as dumb as you thought he was going to be. When he wanted, he had a poker face.

  He straightened up and bent down his chin so that he could examine the alignment of the ribbons on the left side of his coat. It would have been an awkward pose for a civilian, but not for him.

  “Thanks, Muriel,” he said, “it looks fine now.”

  I hoped they would say something more, but Helen came into the living room just then, and broke up the little scene. She looked fresh and beautiful, an emissary from the inscrutable civilian civilization of which the Goodwins had been speaking.

  “Good morning,” she said. “I thought the men were all doing that thing in the library.”

  “The men ought to be,” the General said, “but men can’t get on without women.”

  “It’s nice to know that,” Helen said. “I was just wondering whether Mrs. Goodwin wouldn’t like to take a drive with me and see the country. It’s such a lovely morning.”

  “Why, yes, dear,” Mrs. Goodwin said, “I’d like to very much if it isn’t any trouble.”

  Helen said that it would be no trouble at all. She was going downtown to do some shopping and they could drive along the ridge, and we were going to have luncheon at half past one if it would be all right for everybody. Yet on the other hand, if Mrs. Goodwin would rather not go for a drive there was no reason, absolutely no reason for her to go, but Mrs. Goodwin was glad to go for a drive, glad to get some fresh air. It was amazing how two women could construct a situation out of nothing. The General and I fidgeted slightly while Mrs. Goodwin tried to ascertain whether or not it really would be convenient for Helen to take her for a drive, and while Helen endeavored to discover whether Mrs. Goodwin really wanted to go for a drive, or whether she would be happier staying in the living room, because it made no difference which. Neither of them seemed able to estimate the situation.

  “Make up your minds, girls,” the General said.

  “Why don’t you two run along?” Mrs. Goodwin said. “I’ll just go upstairs and put on a hat.”

  “You don’t need a hat,” Helen said, “unless you’d rather.”

  “Come on, Sid,” the General said, “let’s put the show on the road.” He took my arm and we walked out of the living room.

  “Muriel’s never happy unless she’s running something,” the General said, “and usually it’s me. I ought to be on wheels and then she wouldn’t have to push so hard. What were you and Muriel talking about?”

  “About you,” I told him, “and about the service.”

  “Did she ask you anything about Paris?”

  It was the old problem of loyalty again and perhaps men always did stick together.

  “She was just asking if I had seen you in Paris,” I said.

  “Oh,” the General said, “well.… Was that all she said about Paris?”

  “That’s all,” I said. “We didn’t talk about you all the time.”

  “Say, Sid,” the General said, “when this project is over here, I think maybe I’ll spend a day or two in New York before I go dow
n to Washington. It’s been a long while since I’ve seen New York.”

  “If I were you,” I said, “everything considered, I would go right down to Washington.”

  “I don’t know whether you would or not,” the General said, “but then you’re not me, are you?”

  “No, I’m not,” I answered.

  “God damn it, Sid,” the General said, “we’ve got to be ourselves. Let’s go back and answer questions.”

  Miss Fineholt and Philip Bentley and Colonel Flax were waiting for us in the library and when we appeared they all stood up. It was natural for the colonel to do so, but I was surprised to see Miss Fineholt and Phil Bentley snap into it, too, exactly as though they were troops.

  “Please don’t get up,” the General said. “I’m sorry if I kept you waiting.”

  He was not very sorry. He was only acknowledging a military courtesy, telling the troops to rest and carry on, and he immediately sat down in his chair by the fireplace.

  “Well, let’s go,” he said. “Where were we?”

  “You were just starting up to Nashua to see that congressman,” Phil Bentley said.

  “Oh, yes,” the General said, “Congressman Francis J. Garrity. Let’s see … I didn’t want to tell my folks what I was going to do. Father was talking college, now that I was finishing high school. He had that doctor business on his mind. I told him I couldn’t work in the store that day because I had promised to take Muriel to Nashua to the movies, which was technically true. It’s funny what a big town Nashua seemed like.”

  The General picked up a cigarette from a box on the table beside him. Colonel Flax leaped up with his lighter, but Phil Bentley was ahead of him.

  “Here, let me, sir,” Phil Bentley said. He would never have thought of making such a gesture a day before.

  XIV

  Your Congressman Always Knows Best

  It occurred to Melville Goodwin that most of his reminiscences about Hallowell started at the plainest place in that plain town, the square. Overshadowed by the volunteer fire-engine house on one side, the square was protected on another by the brick façade of the hat factory, which was adorned with a white bell cupola and plumes of steam. Melville always seemed to be leaving that square on the trolley, and perhaps this was eminently as it should be. Already the boys around high school were saying that Hallowell was a dead little dump without even a motion-picture theater; if you wanted to get ahead, you had to go to Manchester or Nashua. Hallowell gave you an American boy’s healthy restlessness. Even if he had not gone to the Point, he would never have stayed in Hallowell. He could not have been a Dr. Byles. He had not the limits to ambition nor had he developed the inner contentment that allowed someone of his own father’s latent ability to live out his life in Hallowell.

  One Thursday afternoon toward the end of the spring vacation of his high school senior year, Melville met Muriel at the square and they took the two-o’clock car to Nashua. It was another of those gray afternoons in late March, the beginning of a rather early spring, and the rain of the night before had washed away most of the snow. Melville was seventeen then. Although he had another inch to grow, and his hands were too big for his wrists and his feet too big for his ankles, he wasn’t so badly set up for his age. He had worn a blue suit again, but it was his own and not a hand-me-down, and he had learned from his older brother George, who was now the prescription clerk at Olmstead’s Drugstore in Nashua, that celluloid collars and ready-made ties were small-town. He wore high starched collars now, and his sister Celia had given him a blue tie for Christmas with large white dots, and his mother had given him a solid gold stickpin with a moonstone in it. His shoes were not small-town either. He had bought them at Solomon’s Shoe Shop in Nashua, high russet shoes with pointed toes. He had brushed his hair carefully, using some soap to keep it down, particularly on top, and he remembered wishing that his hair were not such a corn-silk yellow, because it gave his face an innocent, unmilitary look—but then he could do nothing about his hair. If his overcoat was not new—it was a brown overcoat of Harry’s with what they called raglan sleeves—at least his dark green felt hat was, and he did not wear rubbers. He was not going in to call on Congressman Garrity wearing rubbers.

  When he saw Muriel crossing the square, he wished she had not wanted to go with him because it meant that he would have to pretend he was the hero of one of those West Point stories. At least he was familiar fictionally with the mechanics of getting into the Point.

  “Oh, Melville,” Muriel said, “you forgot your rubbers, and you’ll get your feet sopping wet. But anyway, you look slick.”

  He was pleased that Muriel thought so because at that time Muriel had been examining illustrations of men in Everybody’s Magazine and had begun comparing him with them. For that matter, Muriel looked pretty slick herself. She was at least the next prettiest girl in high school, and her yellow hair looked better than his yellow hair. She had borrowed her mother’s coat with the squirrel collar and she was wearing one of the dresses she had learned to make from Butterick patterns.

  The Nashua car still had the stuffy, overheated smell that it had all through the winter. They sat side by side on one of the red plush cross seats in the middle, and Mr. Jacques, the motorman, nodded to them from the front platform. Mr. Mason, the conductor, rang the starting bell.

  “Now, Melly,” Muriel said, “what are you going to tell him?”

  They had been over this several times before.

  “Don’t call me Melly,” Melville said—he was feeling nervous already—“I’m going to ask him about getting into the Point, and I don’t see why you want to go with me.”

  He was pleased that already he could refer easily and casually to that great institution as “the Point.”

  “Don’t you want me to go with you?” Muriel asked.

  “I didn’t say I didn’t want you to,” he answered. “I said I don’t see why you want to.”

  “If I don’t go with you to his office,” Muriel said, “you might get shy.”

  He wished she wouldn’t act so much as though he belonged to her right there in the trolley car, and it was not going to be any help having her watching him get shy.

  “Just look him in the eye,” Muriel said, “and tell him that you want an appointment for West Point, and don’t scratch at yourself. Remember, he’s there to do what people ask him.”

  Perhaps Muriel was partly right. If congressmen did not often do what their constituents wanted, they always enjoyed being asked. Mr. Garrity was the only congressman of whom Melville Goodwin had ever asked patronage or favor. Frankly, he did not have a high opinion of congressmen, senators and politicians. They always made him feel that he was one of those pampered people battening on public funds that could more usefully be appropriated for the improvement of local rivers and harbors; or else he was in the position of having done some grievous injustice to some deserving local boy from some congressman’s constituency. As Clausewitz said, all parts of war are easy but at the same time very difficult, and politicians were one of the elements that helped to make difficulties. Frankly, in Melville Goodwin’s opinion, though he did not wish to be quoted, politicians, particularly congressmen, were narrow-minded, suspicious men who were always trying to withhold necessary funds from the army and who even hated seeing officers drive about in motor cars. Perhaps he should have felt differently about Mr. Garrity. In fact, he had sometimes tried to feel so, but he was afraid that Mr. Garrity was like all the rest.

  Once back in the thirties, on one of those rare occasions when he had spent a few days in Hallowell, he had taken the trouble to go to Nashua, in uniform, wearing his Croix de guerre, his Distinguished Service Cross, his Overseas Service Ribbon and his Purple Heart, to call on Mr. Garrity at his home. Mr. Garrity was a very much older man than the one he remembered and he was wearing pince-nez glasses attached to his waistcoat by a broad black ribbon. Mr. Garrity had not remembered Melville at all—in fact Mr. Garrity at first had thought he was a member of th
e New Hampshire National Guard, and the recollection was still painful to Melville. He finally had to remind Mr. Garrity of the appointment to West Point, and then Mr. Garrity did remember. He was always proud of His Boys, he said. It was one of his greatest pleasures as well as his gravest responsibility to see that the right boys in his district should have the privilege of attending those fine institutions, West Point and Annapolis. He always knew that Melville Goodwin would turn into the fine man that he was, and he was going to attend a little party that evening, given in his honor by the Lions Club, and he would like Captain Goodwin to come along with him.

  Melville had gone with Mr. Garrity to the Lions Club banquet out of a sense of loyalty, but it had been a cloying experience to stand up before that crowd with Mr. Garrity’s hand upon his shoulder—especially since, by now, Mr. Garrity had refreshed his memory.

  “And I have with me tonight,” Mr. Garrity had said, “a dear young friend of mine, Captain Melville A. Goodwin, from Hallowell. Melly, stand beside me so that your friends and mine can see you. Look at him and at the well-earned ribbons on his chest, won in the crusade for democracy.” At this point Mr. Garrity had referred to some notes in the palm of his hand. “He is wearing, as we all here know, the Crux de gerry awarded him by those Frenchmen we won the war for, and our own Distinguished Service Cross, and the Purple Heart for the wound he suffered—where was it they hit you, Melly?—up near the Moose River? Take a step forward so they can see you, Melly, and don’t mind if your friends here give you some applause. They are as proud of you as I am, Melly.

  “Now, friends, it was back in 1914—but I remember as though it were yesterday—when I first laid eyes on Melly here. He came walking into my office, the same plain little office whose doors are still open to one and all, with his high school sweetheart—don’t blush, Melly!—(she’s Mrs. Goodwin now!) and he asked me simply and honestly for an appointment to the United States Military Academy. My dear niece, Patricia Flynn, who is now my valued assistant down in Washington, was typing in the front office then. ‘Uncle Francie,’ she said, ‘it’s just as well he brought his sweetheart in with him or I would have fallen for him myself.…’ But seriously, why should I have given Melly Goodwin here his opportunity to attend West Point? I knew he was the son of my dear old friend, Bob Goodwin, who, God bless him, still runs Goodwin’s Drugstore in Hallowell, and who, fine citizen that he is, has one little failing. He voted and he still votes, God bless him, a straight Republican ticket. Why did I give Melly that appointment instead of giving it to the son of some more enlightened voter? I know as well as you that a small-minded minority say that Francie Garrity is always looking for where his bread is buttered, but I am ready now as then, to stand or fall by my record. There was nothing to be gained from doing a favor for young Melly Goodwin. I knew this when I looked into the eyes of this fine young man in March, 1914. Then why did I give him the appointment instead of just a few kind words? I’ll tell you why, good friends. I believed then as I do now that the nation’s good rises above all local patronage! I wanted my friends and enemies to be aware of this belief, and so, regardless of the advice of many fine, well-meaning friends, I selected Melly Goodwin here instead of some other fine young boy with Democratic connections, because he was the best boy applying. I took his hand in mine then as I take it now, and I said these simple words to him which I now repeat, ‘Good luck and God bless you, Melly Goodwin, God bless the Stars and Stripes and our great country, which you and I in our own ways serve.’”