Melville Goodwin, USA

by John P. Marquand

  “It’s so nice to be driving to New York,” she said, “instead of taking a train, and you’ve been so generous, looking after Melville, Sid. I hope you don’t mind my calling you Sid. I can’t help thinking of you as one of the General’s officers. I wish I could have been with you when the General was being interviewed. He seemed a little tired last night.”

  “I should think he would have been,” I said.

  “No one would notice it except me. I can always tell when he’s tense, and he seemed worried about something last night.”

  “Worried?” I repeated.

  Mrs. Goodwin glanced up. Though I looked carefully ahead at Williams’s back, I could feel that she was watching me.

  “Melville says you are going to have lunch today with a mutual friend, a Mrs. Peale. He wrote to me about her from France. She’s a writer or a publisher or something, isn’t she? She sounds very interesting.”

  “Yes, she’s pretty interesting,” I said. “We used to work on the same newspaper together once. That was before Dottie became a figure.”

  I could detect no change in her voice, no sharpness, no undue curiosity, but I could still feel that she was watching me and not her washcloth.

  “It’s queer how seldom Melville gets on, really gets on, with people outside the service,” she said.

  “I suppose it’s because he leads a specialized sort of life,” I answered. “Now personally I often find it hard to get on with people in the service.”

  For some reason she seemed astonished and her voice grew warmer, and at least we were off the subject of Dottie Peale.

  “Why, you don’t act that way at all,” she said. “I always keep thinking you are in the service, and you get on so beautifully with Mel, but then of course you were an officer.”

  “Only by courtesy,” I said, “but I did have to play around with the brass.”

  At least, I thought again, we were off the subject of Dottie Peale.

  “I hate that expression ‘brass,’” she said. “Sidney, don’t you see we’re really like everybody else?”

  Of course I could not tell her that they were not like everybody else—they could not be or else they would not have been big brass.

  “Back in World War I,” I said—how small and antiquated that war had become, no longer the Great War, but simply World War I—“we were asking the General what he did when he landed in New York. He said he called you up in Hallowell.”

  She remembered all of it very clearly. We were going down the Merritt Parkway, but Mrs. Melville Goodwin was leaving Hallowell for New York to become an army wife, and, watching her expression, I could imagine how she must have looked. She must have looked both very competent and very pretty.

  “I wish you could have seen Mel,” she said. “Of course I had his photograph. I could shut my eyes any time and see the picture of him, but it wasn’t the same as Mel. No matter how much you love someone, you begin to forget about him after he’s been away for a long time. Finally he half turns into a stranger and you wonder what he’ll really be like and how much he may have changed. Then there was all that fighting and the wound and all that talk you heard everywhere about Paris and girls in France … it would make anyone afraid and unsure.

  “He looked taller to me, and of course all his class at the Point had been promoted to first lieutenants. He was in his overseas cap and his Sam Brown belt, and he had those ribbons and he had his hair cut short, just the way he wears it now. He looked a whole lot more like a soldier than anyone else in the Grand Central Station, but of course he had to, coming from the Point. As soon as I saw him I knew Mel was just the same. He always has been the same. We could always pick up things where we left them. He just said, ‘Hi, Muriel,’ and I said, ‘Hi, Mel.’ Then he told me we were going to have a month’s leave and that then we were going to Fort Bailey. That was because of the medal. Everybody doesn’t get to Bailey.”

  “Where’s Bailey?” I asked.

  “What?” she said. “Seriously, haven’t you ever heard of Bailey? Why, whatever were you doing in the army, Sid?”

  “Not much,” I said.

  “Well, that shows you weren’t a line officer,” she said. “Any line officer knows Bailey. It’s where they used to have the small-arms school, out in Kansas.”

  That was where the Goodwins started housekeeping, down toward the end of officers’ row, because they did not rank much else. Officers’ row looked over the parade ground, and there was a flower bed of begonias in front of the colonel’s quarters, then came the officers’ club with a star of elephant ears and salvia, and then the barracks. It was scorching hot in summer and miles away from anywhere. You could hear the machine guns going every afternoon out on the range. Their quarters were in a double house with the Murphys next door—the “Slugger” Murphys. Slugger was in the class below Melville at the Point. He was the same Slugger Murphy I must have heard of in the Airborne. Lieutenant Colonel Crosby’s wife had the rank because the post commandant was old Colonel Jones—“Jupiter” Jones, and he was a bachelor. Jupiter was his army nickname and I must have heard of him. Sometimes they called him “Arapaho” Jones because he had served in one of those last Indian wars when he was fresh out of the Point.

  I had never heard of Fort Bailey or of Slugger Murphy or of Colonel Jupiter Jones, but I was at Bailey with Muriel Goodwin on the way to New York and the Pennsylvania Station. Robert, their elder son, had been born there at Bailey, and then somehow we were back in Hallowell and she might have been telling me about that Sunday school picnic and everything else.

  I left her with a porter on the Pennsylvania side.

  “Good-by, Sid, dear,” she said, and though I was startled when she called me “dear,” I felt that I had known her for a long, long time.

  “Where to now, sir?” Williams asked me.

  It was ten minutes before twelve but Dottie Peale had asked me to meet her at the office early. It was always a part of Dottie’s stage effect to show off that office of hers at Peale House. Anyone going there was bound to realize that Dottie should be taken seriously.

  The Peale Publishing Company was what the book trade called “a fine old house” and sometimes “an old-line house.” It published a sound backlog of textbooks and also a book called Mrs. Gosling’s Cookery, which with occasional revisions had been a popular seller for fifty years—but the Peale money was only partially derived from this enterprise. It was a fine old house, but Henry Peale’s grandfather had also been fortunate enough to invest his savings in Mr. Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone and in Calumet and Hecla copper. Thus even by the time Henry Peale was seven years old there was no economic reason for the Peales to bother about printing books. Henry’s father had been content to let the business limp along under the management of an unimaginative but conscientious executive named Mr. Royal, whom Dottie had never seen but whose name and career she had encountered when she had edited a brochure entitled One Hundred Years of Peale House. She was the one who had thought of calling it “Peale House,” she told me once, shortly after she and Henry Peale were married.

  Henry’s father had never cared for books and authors. Instead he had collected pictures of the French school, and a part of the Peale collection was now in the Metropolitan, together with his portrait by Sargent. He had also been interested in yachting, and his forty-footer, the Alexandra, named after Henry’s mother, had done very well in ocean racing. The house on Seventy-second Street, as well as the house in the country, which Dottie had sold, had once been filled with the Alexandra’s silver trophies—mugs, cups and punch bowls, and, most spectacular of all, a two-foot figure of Neptune seated on a wave and blowing a conch horn—until Dottie had finally put them all away.

  Henry Peale, on the other hand, must always have been what was called “literary.” It had never been possible for me to reconstruct all the details of his early life, which had been led along the elaborate lines common to wealthy boys who lived out their early manhood around the turn of the century, a
nd I am reasonably sure that Dottie never understood much about Henry’s background either. He had been a shy, retiring, serious-minded boy, educated by private tutors until he went to Yale. His career at Yale must have been quiet, too, and he was always quiet when I knew him. As Dottie often said, it was very hard for Henry ever to get out of himself, and you had to know him a long while before you appreciated him. Personally I had not known him as long as that, having only seen him occasionally after he and Dottie were married.

  Though Henry Peale was in his fifties when he married Dottie, he looked much younger, and his face was unlined and youthful like the faces of other people who have led sheltered lives. In some ways, Dottie once told me, Henry had never grown up, but I had never asked her what those ways were. I only remembered him as being tall and rather frail, with a precise and gentle voice. I remember his laughing at Dottie’s jokes, though I had the impression that he was not easily amused. He was very kind to me the few times I saw him, not on my account, I imagine, but because Dottie and I were old friends and because he was completely devoted to Dottie. He called her “Dot” I remember and once he told me that Dot had made him unimaginably happy and that he had never known there could be a girl like Dot. I did not understand how true this was until I learned more about his carefully insulated life. He never could have known that there was any girl like Dot except by the merest accident.

  He offered me a job once because Dottie must have asked him to. When we talked it over in his library on Seventy-second Street, I gained the impression that I would not like to work for him, not because he was disagreeable or arrogant but because he had no fixed ideas. When I was with him I was always puzzled and uneasy, and always wondering why on earth he had ever married Dottie or rather how Dottie had ever arranged it, but I could see why he liked the family publishing business. It was a sort of ivory tower for him—a plaything with which he could do what he wanted without worrying over the financial angle—and books with the Peale imprint always had artistic distinction. His authors on the whole were devoted to him. He could afford to give them generous cash advances without a thought to manufacturing costs, and they must have loved dining with him at Seventy-second Street or spending week ends with him in the country. He had a reputation in the trade for sound editorial taste, though I imagine his assistant, Martin Dever, was the one who really picked the manuscripts—until Dottie finally took things over.

  When he met Dottie Peale, I was in Paris, and the whole thing was an accomplished fact when I came back to New York on leave from the Bureau. Consequently I never knew exactly how it happened, and I was never sure that Dottie wished to be completely accurate when she explained.

  “Darling,” she said, “I want you to be glad. I want you to understand that Henry needs me and I love him, and I want you to realize that money and everything like that had nothing whatsoever to do with it. I was just as surprised as you are right this minute when I encountered Henry’s background, and I want you to get this straight. He proposed to me before I ever saw Seventy-second Street. He proposed to me one afternoon at the office after lunch during Book Afternoon Week, and money had nothing whatsoever to do with it. I want you to know that I’m in love with Henry. Darling, I understand what love is now. It’s having things done for you and doing things in return for someone you love. Henry needs me, darling, and besides you never did seriously think I’d sit around waiting, did you? We were all clear on that, weren’t we, before you went to Paris?”

  I told her that of course we were all clear on it and that everything was wonderful and that I was just as glad as she was.

  “Besides,” she said, “I told you that the Paris Bureau was the kiss of death, and now Henry and I can get you out of it.”

  I told her again never to mind about the Paris Bureau and that I thought everything was wonderful.

  “And, darling,” she said, “you mustn’t have an inferiority complex about anything. It hurts Henry, and it hurts me, too, when people think that money means a different way of life. God damn it, darling, I’m just the same as I always was. I’m just a working girl in Henry’s office, darling.”

  I told her again that I thought it was wonderful and then I asked her to tell me just how it happened, how she first met Henry Peale and a few things along that line, but she was always vague whenever I asked her.

  “You needn’t act so damned surprised,” she said. “It happened because it was meant to happen. We were always congenial. You’ll see why when you get to know Henry better. He’s a little like you, darling, except he’s more malleable and has more common sense.”

  I never did get to know Henry well enough to see in what way he resembled me, and I never knew what made them congenial except that Dottie wanted it to be that way, but I could see that she was happy and having a wonderful time. She was loyal, too, but then Dottie was always loyal.

  Martin Dever, after certain disagreements had caused him to leave Peale House, was the one who told me most about Dottie and Henry Peale, though in a prejudiced way, since he never had been partial to Dottie. Actually he was the one who introduced them, he said, and he was damned if he knew much after that. It had happened after I had gone abroad, when Dottie was on the book page of the paper, working for old Waldo Edgill. She was immensely valuable to Edgill because she did have a marvelous dexterity and she was superb at make-up. She could read enough of any new book in an hour or two to get the sense of it, and besides she liked writers. She was the one who helped Edgill spruce up the whole Sunday book section, and when it was suggested that the paper sponsor a series of book-and-author afternoons, Dottie was all prepared. This had not been old Edgill’s idea, but a brainstorm from the business office to increase publishers’ advertising. Edgill had hated it, so it was lucky for him that Dottie was on the page, because Dottie was the one who finally organized those teas. It was the beginning of the era of book fairs and book-and-author luncheons, and never having been to any of these gatherings I cannot imagine what the teas were like, but Dottie did everything, right down to helping the publishers drag authors to them. That was how she met Martin Dever. Then one morning when she was in Martin’s office, Henry Peale came in.

  “That was all there was to it,” Martin said. “He wanted to ask me about the design for a jacket, and Dottie said it ought to be plainer, and then he asked her into his office to look at alternate designs. They stayed alone in there for about half an hour and then they went out to lunch, and the next morning he asked me for Dottie’s telephone number, and next he asked her to the theater, and so they got married.”

  Martin did not know how it happened any more than I did. He could only say that directly after the honeymoon Dottie moved right in, taking over the office next to Henry’s, and by God in a year she had taken over the whole damned editorial and production department. He did not want to criticize Dottie, because she was a friend of mine, but perhaps I knew what Dottie was like when she got started. He wouldn’t say she was a bitch, because she was a friend of mine, and certainly she did not act like ordinary bitches. He could work for Peale—in fact he had run the whole editorial department for him and a good deal of everything else—but six months after Dottie showed up, there wasn’t anything left for him to run. She had her finger in every pie. She was terribly sorry when he finally resigned. She begged him to stay and she felt his leaving was all her fault.

  “Martin, darling,” she had said, “you can’t leave me all alone here with Henry. I’m just a little Dutch girl with my finger in the dike.”

  He had to admit she was nice about it, and she was the one who got him the job in Philadelphia, and she had not done too badly when she was left alone with Henry. In fact she was able to do more with Henry than he ever could. In fact she was a very smart cookie and some day she would take over the entire business. That was all that Martin could tell me. No one would ever know exactly how Dottie happened to marry Henry Peale, but I always did think that Dottie could do anything she wanted when she put her mind on it.

/>   After Henry Peale’s death, Dottie had moved the Peale House offices to a more modern building on Murray Hill, but she had not moved much of the accumulated décor with them. Dottie maintained that an office was a place in which you transacted business and not a place where you lounged and looked at antique furniture. After some of the offices I had seen lately, it was very agreeable to enter Peale House. The rooms were large, noiseproof and air-conditioned. The walls were painted in restful, unobtrusive tones. The equipment right down to the desk calendars was strictly functional and aggressively new. There were no comfortable libraries or directors’ rooms, no couches or overstuffed chairs and, curiously enough, very few books. The volumes on the current season’s list stood on three shelves in the reception office, but other publications by the Peale House press—Dottie had bought a printing and binding plant after Henry’s death—were efficiently locked in a storeroom. Dottie’s own office in a corner of the building was just as austere as that of the other executives, with a gray steel desk, a gray carpet, a bare oval table and six gray upholstered chairs. There was nothing on her desk except a clock, a calendar and a blotter. I could not help comparing the place very favorably with the offices of the home decoration magazine on which Helen had once worked.

  There was no funny business about Dottie’s secretary either. She was a plain girl with low heels and without any of the receptionist’s manner, and she obviously had been told to show me right in, because she appeared about thirty seconds after I had given my name at the front desk. As I looked around, she might have been ushering me into a tooth extractor’s instead of into the inner sanctum of Peale House. Dottie was dressed in a severe gray tailored suit, softened only by a ruffle at the neck, like a man’s neckcloth in an eighteenth-century portrait. She wore no rings or bracelets—no diverting ornaments. She smiled at me brightly but she did not shake hands.