Melville Goodwin, USA

by John P. Marquand

  Melville Goodwin could not recall that Mr. Garrity had said any of those simple words to him in his simple Nashua office, but he did remember people in Hallowell saying that Garrity could not be as bad as he was painted if he sent a Republican boy to West Point. It all went to prove that you could seldom put your finger on the motives of a congressman.

  Mr. Garrity’s office was on the second floor of a business block on the main street. It consisted of an outer waiting room with a typist’s desk and a single golden oak bench, and there was a small private room in back. The only decoration in the outer room was a campaign poster displaying an extraordinarily youthful and vigorous photograph of a square-jawed, determined man, beneath which was the simple bold device, “Garrity for Congress.” There was nothing about the office to make anyone feel out of place or ill at ease, yet Melville’s hands were clammy when he and Muriel entered it. He was offering himself for the first time to a waiting world and he was already alone with his own misgivings.

  As they stood in the corridor in front of the ground glass door marked “Francis J. Garrity, Attorney at Law,” it had suddenly occurred to him that he had not thought of any way of explaining Muriel.

  “Well,” Muriel whispered, “aren’t you going to knock?”

  “Maybe you’d better wait outside,” he said.

  “What would people think,” she asked, “if they saw me waiting there alone?”

  He wanted to ask her what people would think if they went in together, but he could not very well argue there with Muriel. He turned the knob of the door without knocking and walked in ahead of her, forgetting that it would have been politer to let her go first. At the end of the outer room, beneath a green-shaded electric light, a redheaded, freckle-faced girl was pounding on a typewriter.

  “Is Mr. Garrity home?” Melville asked. With a slight sensation of nausea he realized that he had meant to say “in” instead of “home.”

  “He’s not home; he’s inside,” the redheaded girl said. “Did you want to see him?”

  He nodded without speaking.

  “Well then,” the girl said, “why don’t you take off your hat and coat and stay a while?”

  “Oh,” he said, “excuse me.”

  “I guess you don’t live in Nashua, do you?” the girl said. “What do you want to see Mr. Garrity for?”

  His mind was a perfect blank as he struggled for an answer.

  “I want to ask him about getting into West Point,” he said.

  “Well, all right,” the girl said. “Take off your coat and sit down. Is this your sister with you?”

  Melville felt his face turn beet red and he wriggled out of his overcoat.

  “I’m not his sister,” Muriel said. “I just rode up with him on the trolley to keep him company—from Hallowell. He’s going to take me to the moving-picture show when he gets through with this.”

  “Oh,” the girl said, “they don’t have pictures down there in Hallowell, do they?”

  “No,” Muriel answered, “they don’t have anything in Hallowell,” and she giggled. “His name is Melville Goodwin. He reads about history and battles and he’s very good at algebra and geometry. His father owns the drugstore. My name is Muriel Reece. My father is vice-president of the hat factory. It isn’t much. There are three vice-presidents.”

  Then Melville finally found his voice, although he hardly recognized it when he began speaking.

  “Say,” he said, “can I see Mr. Garrity?”

  “Oh,” the girl said, and she and Muriel both began to laugh, “another county heard from.”

  Melville drew a deep breath.

  “I asked you,” he said, “can I see him or can’t I?”

  “Well, don’t get mad,” the girl said. “Mr. Garrity will have to ask you questions. So your name’s Melville Goodwin.”

  “Melville A. Goodwin,” Melville answered.

  “What does the A stand for?” the redheaded girl asked.

  “If I told you what it stood for,” Melville said, “what difference would it make?”

  “Oh my,” the girl said, “another county heard from.”

  “You said that before,” Melville told her.

  “Well, anyway,” the redheaded girl said, “you’d look kind of cute in a uniform, all over buttons. If I see you get one of those uniforms, will you give me a button?”

  “I’ll see he gives you one,” Muriel said. “I guess I didn’t get your name.”

  “It’s Flynn,” the redheaded girl said, “Patricia Flynn.”

  She rose and opened a door beside her.

  “There’s the cutest young couple outside, Uncle Francie,” he could hear her saying. “They come from Hallowell, and the boy wants you to send him to West Point.”

  Thirty-five years had passed and a curtain had fallen between him and the indisciplines of his boyhood, but the interview with Patricia Flynn and with Mr. Francis J. Garrity remained in his consciousness uneroded by time.

  Mr. Garrity wore a conservative dark gray suit and he was smoking a long thin Pittsburgh stogie. The rank cigar smoke in the small office almost made Melville choke, and Mr. Garrity’s whole appearance was an anticlimax after the campaign poster. His hair was thinner. His jaw was not as firm and his mouth was more mobile. Instead of looking like a leader of men, he looked like one of the older clerks in Osgood’s Haberdashery.

  “Well, young man,” he said, “so you come from Hallowell. It’s a fine place, and I have many fine friends there. What did you say your name was?”

  His name was still Melville A. Goodwin.

  “And what does A stand for?” Mr. Garrity asked.

  “For Allen, sir,” Melville answered.

  “Well, well,” Mr. Garrity said, “don’t tell me that your grandfather was my dear old friend, Mel Allen. You couldn’t be the son of Robert Goodwin who owns Goodwin’s Drugstore in Hallowell Square?”

  “Yes, sir,” Melville answered.

  “Now let me see,” Mr. Garrity said, “didn’t your father have Orrin Curtain’s poster in his window last election time?”

  “Yes, sir,” Melville said, “my father is a friend of Mr. Curtain’s.”

  “Well, now,” Mr. Garrity said, “have a seat, Melville. There’s nothing I like better than seeing a fine boy who wants to enter the United States Military Academy, but this is election year. What will people say if they hear that Francis J. Garrity has sent a Republican boy to West Point?”

  Melville pushed back his chair and stood up.

  “Wait a minute,” Mr. Garrity said. “Do you love your country, Melville?”

  “Yes, sir,” Melville said.

  “And so do I,” Mr. Garrity said. “‘Breathes there the man, with soul so dead, Who never to himself hath said, This is my own, my native land!’… Stand up straight and let me look at you.”

  Melville braced himself, and Mr. Garrity walked around the desk and stood beside him.

  “Melville,” Mr. Garrity said, “you wouldn’t mind being in a picture with me in the papers, would you?”

  “No, sir,” Melville said.

  “I want to figure this,” Mr. Garrity said, and he pulled a pencil from his pocket and drew a pad of paper toward him.

  “Now let’s see,” he said, “the name is Melville Allen Goodwin and your grandfather served in the Civil War. Goodwin’s a fine old Yankee name. It couldn’t be that any of your family fought in the Revolutionary War?”

  “Yes, sir,” Melville said, “my great-great-grandfather. His name was Amos Goodwin.”

  Mr. Garrity wrote carefully on the pad.

  “That is a help, Melville,” he said gently. “What year are you in high school?”

  “The last year, sir,” Melville said.

  “And you wouldn’t mind if I asked the principal for your marks, would you?”

  “No, sir,” Melville said.

  “Well, now, Melville,” Mr. Garrity said, “you did the right thing coming here to see your representative. I’m not promising, but ma
ybe you’ll get a letter from me next week. I’m glad to have met you, Melville, very glad and very proud.”

  Mr. Garrity put his arm around Melville’s shoulder and walked with him into the waiting room.

  “Say, Patsy,” he said, “don’t you think Melville and I would go well together in a photograph?”

  “Why, yes,” Patricia Flynn said, “you’d look lovely, Uncle Francie.”

  It was never safe to discount luck because luck was an element that might intrude itself suddenly into any planning. You had to allow for it. You had to give it what you might call operational room. Luck was the unexpected that appeared almost invariably in some phase of battle. The best thing to do was to treat it like liquor, as something you could either take or leave alone.

  He was pretty hot that spring, as troops would have said about a crap shooter, and possibly he had never been quite so hot again. There was only one thing that remained on his conscience. He should have told his family, or at least his father, all about Mr. Garrity and West Point. He simply had a feeling that his dream was so fantastic that speaking of it might shatter it into a thousand pieces.

  “I guess I wanted to be sure it was so,” he said, when his father finally asked about it, but he was always sorry that he had not told his father.

  The letter arrived one afternoon while he was still at school, and it had been placed on the table in the front entry with his father’s correspondence. No one in the house except Mr. Goodwin ever received much mail, because the time was past when Melville, like other boys, clipped coupons and wrote for catalogues. For some reason he had not asked if there was any letter for him on that particular day. Probably he had concluded that it was not good luck to ask.

  It was six o’clock on an April evening, and they were having boiled corned beef for supper. Celia was dressed up because she was going to a euchre party at Emily Jacques’s but Melville had been splitting wood and raking trash in the yard and he came to table in a sweater. His father had said that he was getting old enough to wear a coat, even if they were having supper in the kitchen.

  “Now, Robert,” he remembered his mother had said, “Melville has been working hard all afternoon.”

  “That’s no reason,” Mr. Goodwin said. “Melville, go up and put on a coat and brush your hair, and, Celia, get me the mail and the paper.”

  When Melville came downstairs his father, wearing the nickel-rimmed reading spectacles that Dr. Byles had made him order that year, was opening catalogue envelopes with his penknife and laying them in a neat pile without removing their contents.

  “More stuff comes in the mail all the time,” he said. “I wish I had the money it takes to print and send it out. Oh, here’s a letter for you, Melville.” He was holding a long government-franked envelope. “It’s from Garrity. I guess he doesn’t know that Mel’s too young to vote.”

  Melville took the letter quickly and put it in his inside pocket.

  “Aren’t you going to read it, dear?” his mother asked.

  “I guess it isn’t anything much,” he said.

  “Why, Melville acts as though it were a love letter,” Celia said.

  “Well, it isn’t a love letter,” Melville told her.

  “I guess it isn’t,” Mr. Goodwin said. “It’s garden time. Be sure to tell him you want radish seeds, Melville.”

  Melville ate slowly. He said he was not going anywhere that evening because he had to study his geometry, and he remembered that his father had said that he did not see what good geometry could do for anyone who was going to be a doctor. Melville could feel the envelope crinkle in his inside pocket as he leaned over his plate of corned beef and cabbage, and even now when Melville smelled boiled cabbage he could feel the excitement all over again.

  “Now here’s a chance to order a window display on spring bitters,” Mr. Goodwin said. “… That reminds me, it’s time to start pushing tonic.”

  Melville helped his mother with the dishes, and when she asked him if he was going to do his geometry in the parlor, he said he would take a lamp upstairs to his bedroom because it was quieter up there. He could still remember the crackling sound of the envelope when he opened the letter. If he shut his eyes now, he could still see its two terse typewritten paragraphs.

  DEAR MR. GOODWIN:

  It gives me great pleasure to inform you that I am nominating you for my principal appointment to the United States Military Academy. As the Hallowell High School is not on the accredited list, you must take examinations at Fort Banks in Boston in the early part of February of next year.

  Would you please call on me at my office at ten o’clock next Saturday, when I wish you to meet the representative of our local newspaper.

  Very truly yours,

  FRANCIS J. GARRITY

  Naturally he had experienced other triumphs later, because his career, though not spectacular, had not been a complete bust either. For example, there had been his decorations, and of course there was the time at Casablanca when he was told that he would be a part of the Salerno show and that his two stars were coming up. Admittedly there were plenty of other good brigade and divisional commanders, and he hoped he had acquired enough stability never to allow promotion to go to his head, though on such an occasion you could not help but feel lightness and elation and a sense of gratitude to whatever had kept you alive and in the groove. Yet none of those later triumphs compared with his feeling as he read the congressman’s letter. It was a kid-stuff moment, but then he was no better or no worse than the juvenile character in A Plebe at West Point, and maybe his development was still arrested here and there. As Kipling wrote in his poem entitled “If”—“If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat those two impostors just the same …” The beauty of it was that he did not know that triumph was an impostor then, or that you had to pay for triumph. His thoughts became luminous. He was in gray, parading with the Corps. He was young Lieutenant Goodwin with his company, charging into cannon smoke. He was General Melville A. Goodwin, mounted on a horse not unlike Robert E. Lee’s Traveller, and Old Glory flew above him and the bands were playing. A kid was only a kid once, and he still felt a little that way sometimes, when troops passed by him in review.

  He wanted to run downstairs and shout the news, but some shadowy suspicion that there might be a catch to it must have stopped him. Instead, he finished all his solid geometry—you had to be good at math and history and geography to pass the exams for West Point—though all the time he was reasoning an original problem point by point, he knew that he must tell Muriel before he went to sleep.

  He remembered walking softly down the creaking stairs to the narrow front entry, and he seemed to arrive on the Reeces’ porch by some sort of levitation. It was lucky for him, in his condition, that Muriel opened the door herself.

  “How about going for a walk?” he asked.

  “Oh, I couldn’t,” she said, “at this hour of night.”

  It could not have been more than nine-thirty, but that was an hour of night for Hallowell.

  “I’ve got to tell you something that’s happened,” he said, and he said he could not tell her unless she came outside.

  She put on her mother’s coat with the squirrel collar, and neither of them said a word as they walked down the path to Prospect Street.

  “Mel,” she said, “don’t walk so fast. I can’t keep up,” and he told her he was sorry, he did not mean to walk so fast. It was dark because there were no street lights then on Prospect Street.

  “Mel,” she said, “what is it?”

  “I’ve got the letter,” he told her. “I’m going to West Point.”

  “Oh, Melly,” she said, and then she linked her arm through his and pressed his arm against her.

  “Muriel …” he began.

  “Yes,” she said, “what is it, Melly?”

  “Muriel,” he said, “will you marry me if I get through West Point?”

  It had come over him all of a sudden when he heard that he was going to West Point
—he had fallen in love with Muriel Reece.

  “Why, Mel,” she said, “I’d like to very much.” She sounded exactly as though he had asked her to go for a ride in the Ford or to go to the pictures in Nashua. It was going to be a long, long ride, but after all, there was no way for kids to know about anything like that.

  XV

  A West Pointer Looks at Hallowell

  Once when he was in Baguio during his second tour of duty in the Philippines, Mel Goodwin had come across a book by an author named Harry Leon Wilson. He had gone up to Baguio for a week end to join Muriel and the two children, who were spending the summer in the hills away from the heat, and he must have picked up the book at the club or somewhere. At any rate, this Wilson was quite a writer. The book was called Merton of the Movies. Most of it was comedy, but in one part young Merton knelt down and prayed that he would be a great Hollywood actor and Melville had done almost the same thing in Hallowell after he returned home that night.