“Yes, sir,” Melville said.
The Old Man’s cigar was out, and he asked Melville for another light.
“When you’re choosing personnel,” the Old Man said, “select a good sound poker player or a golfer or someone who likes fishing, and you know where you are, because those types have stability. Put the prima donnas in Intelligence but keep them out of Operations.”
Of course, parenthetically, this prejudice about singing was somewhat personal with old Tweaker Beardsley. For over ten years the Infantry School had a glee club which put on two musical comedies yearly and two concerts also. He once bet Muriel that he could pick at least fifty generals who had sung in glee clubs between the wars, and what about the glee club in the Command and General Staff School? There was even a male quartet in London with a Catholic priest, a Protestant chaplain and a brigadier general in it. Nevertheless, Muriel always stuck to her guns. It might be all right, she had said, that evening when he told her about Soo, if officers sang in groups and choirs. She still did not think it helped if an officer was too funny alone with a ukulele or a piano, and she was very glad that Melville never sang with a uke. She would have been worried.
“But, Melly, dear,” she said, “it might be a nice thing to ask Plugger Hume and Betsy over for Sunday lunch and we’ll ask the Beebes, too, and Soo can bring his uke.”
It was great to hear Soo singing that Sunday under the coconut palms with the trade wind blowing, but Plugger Hume walked right across the lanai and all the way around the living room and back on his hands. He was sound and he made a good assistant in Operations.
Those years had been like the moving belt on a production line, and Melville Goodwin and his contemporaries had taken their places on the belt by the numbers. Some had left to go into business in the twenties. Others had met with death, accident and illness, and one or two had been pulled off by the high command. The rest of the crowd had stayed on the belt until the very end, to be so shined, tightened and tested that they stepped off as logical candidates for a star, and even some of these end products broke down when a more than theoretical strain was placed on them. No matter how effective the simulation, combat was the final test.
Melville Goodwin, as he once said himself, was basically a competent military mechanic. He might not have the global approach of a planner in the Pentagon but he could look at the road and guess what lay around the curves. There was a lot that was wrong with the army. It had its deadwood and its paper-passers, but still it was a pretty good army to have turned out Bradleys and Pattons and MacArthurs just when they were needed. He did not mean to place himself in any of these echelons, because at some point or other every officer’s professional clock struck twelve. Everybody could not be a Napoleon, and an armored division was just about his dish. That was a show he had really learned how to handle—but, without boasting, he could handle a corps or something larger. At any rate he had graduated from the Command and General Staff School at Leavenworth with a recommendation to command a corps in wartime.
Besides the Command and General Staff School, he had attended the Army War College, and he had done his share of staff work in Washington. He had sweated it out for years in the old Munitions Building, and he had not been bad at a desk. He couldn’t be, with his rank, but somehow active service in the field had spoiled his taste for desks and for sitting around conference tables or reclining in map rooms, talking to a lot of Fancy Dans. Of course he had been at a desk in Frankfurt, but frankly, he did not want to be chair-borne again if he could help it. He could take the Pentagon, if he had to, but frankly that building gave him a mild sort of claustrophobia. Sometimes he wished that Muriel would stop thinking about three and four stars. There just weren’t many stars being passed around on platters now, not even in the Air Force. A lot of his colleagues were also shaking around loose like him, looking for stars—who had a lot more jokers up their sleeves and a lot more horseshoes in their pants than he had. Competition was pretty stiff around the Pentagon, but maybe someone would take a look at him in Washington and give him a job of work to do.
Actually he had been over the whole subject with Muriel last night, and he had pointed out one pretty good fact to her. The country had made use of him. He had been the doctor who had been allowed to practice, and just exactly where would they have been if there had not been a war? He was still a major back in 1940 and only a lieutenant colonel at the time of the maneuvers in ’41. That was something for Muriel to think about. She had raised her boys to be soldiers, he had told her, and maybe in a year or two her oldest boy ought to put his sword and gun away so that she could give a little more thought to Robert, and to Charley at the Point.
It was interesting to remember how things started to chirk up in the service when there began to be a little distant gunfire in the world. Henry L. Stimson seemed to want us to do something about Manchuria, though nothing happened. Then, after Hitler’s march to the Rhineland, and the blowoff at the Marco Polo Bridge, and Munich, you began to feel that maybe you hadn’t missed the boat being in the army. Still, after Dunkirk it looked as though the whole show were folding up. It made him very restless and he found himself short of sleep. They were at Benning—he was on the Infantry School staff as Tank Instructor at the time—and there were new ideas every minute, and there was also the tactical aircraft angle.
“Melly,” Muriel asked him, there at Benning, “have you heard from Foghorn Grimshaw lately?”
Of course, as everyone knew, General Grimshaw was in the office of the Chief of Staff in Washington.
“I suppose he’s still living in Georgetown, isn’t he?” Muriel said. “I haven’t written Ellen Grimshaw a letter for a long while, and they sent us a Christmas card. I don’t believe they even know that Robert has entered the Point.”
When he got orders to go to Washington to attend a conference of observers back from Europe, he was sure that Muriel’s letter had nothing to do with it. He was certain that Foghorn Grimshaw would have thought of him anyway, and the General was very glad to see him and asked him to come to Georgetown for the night. The truth was that things were chirking up. The General said he might be wrong, but confidentially he did not see how we could keep out of that show in Europe indefinitely. There were going to be a lot of chances for bright young men. The General was not as young as he had been back in Bailey, and neither was Melville, though he hadn’t a gray hair in his head, but he was still a bright young man to Foghorn Grimshaw, and everybody began to see that this was the sort of war that demanded younger men in the higher ranks, instead of Papa Joffres.
XXIII
Right Under “H” in the Dictionary
Somehow I found myself examining Melville Goodwin not as a friend but as a useful piece of material—as Foghorn Grimshaw must have, not to mention other members of the hierarchy in Washington. It was after eleven o’clock when he had reached those prewar months in Washington. He stopped after mentioning Papa Joffre and looked slowly around the room as though he were trying to gauge the effect of everything he had said. Then he smiled at Phil Bentley. It was not his sour smile, but that appealing smile that always made him look so young.
“Say, Bentley,” he said, “right out of the horse’s mouth—have I made a God-damned fool of myself up to date or haven’t I?”
I could see that Phil Bentley liked it. The General had learned how to handle Phil.
“No, sir,” Phil said. “On the contrary, you’ve made a lot of sense.”
Obviously Mel Goodwin was pleased, but his glance did not leave Phil Bentley’s face.
“In the army,” he said, “you’ve always got to take loyalty for granted from the top down and from the bottom up. There’s no reason why you should be loyal to me, but I’m trusting you, son, and I’ve got my neck way out. You can raise hell with me if you want to, and maybe there are some people around who would enjoy it if you did.”
“You’re going to see everything I write,” Phil Bentley said, “and if you think any of it raises hell,
I’ll change it.”
Coming from Phil Bentley, this meant a great deal, and I wondered if the General realized it. His eyes were still on Phil.
“You see, I’m just a simple guy,” he said. His using that expression surprised me, because I had applied it to him so often myself. “You’ve got to be a pretty damn simple guy if you lead troops in combat, because combat’s God-damned elemental.”
“You’re not as simple as all that, sir,” Phil Bentley said. “You’re complicated sometimes.”
“Listen,” the General said, “I know where I stand. I’m a pretty simple guy, Phil.”
It was the first time in all those interviews that Mel Goodwin had called him “Phil.” As I have said before, calling you by your first name was one of the beguiling habits of big brass. I remembered that he had called me “Sid” much sooner. He had shown perspicacity in waiting so long with Phil.
“Just the same,” Phil said, “I’d hate to meet you in a poker game.”
Phil Bentley knew something about the brass himself. Nothing ever pleased them more than being told they were good at poker, and Mel Goodwin laughed as though Phil had said something very funny.
“Phil,” he said, “we’ll really have to try it some day.”
He had called him Phil once more to show it was no mistake. I was looking at Mel Goodwin again, as Foghorn Grimshaw must have looked at him in Washington. He had no excess weight. He was trained down like all the good ones, with just the right facial lines and a cheerful, extrovert look that you often saw on a good competitive athlete. He was a very finished product. He would rate as a piece on any chessboard and not an advanced pawn. He might not be a rook or a queen, but he was surely a knight or a bishop. He was the sort of person whose name would be bound to come up for some big spot.
The General flicked up his wrist to look at his watch.
“Well,” he said, “just a few yarns about North Africa tomorrow morning and then you’ll have the old man pretty well squeezed out, Phil.”
Colonel Flax laughed at the General’s little joke, and General Goodwin stood up.
“Let’s plan to end this by lunch tomorrow if that’s all right with you, Phil,” he said. “Good night, bright-eyes.” He smiled at Miss Fineholt, and then he turned to me and punched me softly on the chest.
“Sid,” he said, “stay down here for a minute and explain me to them, will you, and you’d better come along with me, Flax. They might say something that will hurt our feelings, and, Sid …”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“Stop in and see me before you turn in, will you?”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
General Goodwin had taken over.
“There isn’t a thing to talk about, sir,” Phil Bentley said. “You’ve laid it all pretty well on the line. To use an old army expression that I seem to have heard somewhere, it’s only up to me to start carrying the ball.”
The General had done very well or Phil Bentley would never have been so informal.
“God damn it,” the General said, “cut out that ‘sir’ stuff, will you, son? You’re not in the army, and my name’s Mel. Come on, Flax, and let’s get the hell out of here.”
After they left, Phil Bentley took off his glasses and polished them carefully.
“Sid,” he said, “he really seems to like me, doesn’t he? Maybe I’m learning about the army.”
Perhaps we were all understanding the army better than we had previously. Phil had seen something of it before, as an overseas war correspondent, but he had been exposed to the products of that great organization more than to its way of life.
“Those anecdotes,” Phil Bentley said. “He pulls them out of a hat like rabbits. God, they are still running around the floor.”
I am sure that none of us were thinking of Melville Goodwin’s little stories individually as much as of the background that created them.
“There’s one thing that interests me,” Phil Bentley said. “Generals’ stories are almost interchangeable among generals. Have you ever noticed that?”
“Yes,” I said, “that’s right. They’re uniform.”
Phil Bentley swung his spectacles like a pendulum between his thumb and forefinger.
“Then why do you suppose they keep on telling them?” he asked.
He was obviously working out the structure of the profile.
“Sometimes I’ve thought it rests them,” I said. “They convey some private meaning that we don’t see. They’re a sort of narrative shorthand.”
“Maybe they haven’t got anything else to talk about,” Phil Bentley said. “Take someone like Goodwin. Take his humdrum stultifying little life, all that spit-and-polish and all that competition and all that existence by the numbers. Then suddenly he gets more power than anyone ought to have and an automobile and a plane and a permit to kill off people. I don’t see anything in the life he’s lived that makes him capable of using that power intelligently. There’s a gap somewhere. I wish I could find the gap.”
I could see it if he didn’t. I had gained some sort of glimpse of it behind Melville Goodwin, but it embarrassed me to point it out to realists like Phil Bentley and Myra Fineholt.
“Don’t you see, Phil?” I said. “You can’t put him into any ordinary category. Don’t you see he’s a hero? It’s the power and the glory. Now you and I wanted to be heroes once, and Myra wanted to be Joan of Arc, and we’ve all got over it, but Goodwin still has the virus. It’s catching around there at West Point. I don’t say that I approve of heroes. I don’t say that they look so well in peacetime, but he’s a hero and he can’t help it.”
I saw Miss Fineholt gazing at me tolerantly, but Phil Bentley looked startled.
“Listen, Sid,” he said. “Don’t you think you’re going off the deep end?”
“No,” I said, “the trouble is we don’t like to admit there are heroes any more, outside of an epic.”
“Any more than there are fairies in the bottom of my garden,” Miss Fineholt said.
“Just the same, Myra,” I told her, “you’ve been listening to a hero tonight, perhaps not grade A but grade B. They have to eat and get along and they have compulsions like you and me. If you take Goodwin that way, everything fits together. He wouldn’t have put up with what he went through if he hadn’t had the power-and-the-glory vision.”
Phil Bentley put on his glasses.
“Now wait a minute,” he said, “are you trying to make me believe that every officer in the Regular Army is a hero? Let’s get down to facts.”
“All right,” I said, “the fact is that a lot of them have never got over that early fantasy. A lot of them think they may be heroes someday, and that’s why they like the life. Why not face it instead of gagging over a word?”
There was something behind all that Melville Goodwin had said that was dedicated and magnificent and undemanding of justification. Perhaps a psychiatrist would call it immaturity, but whatever the attribute was, it had its own splendor.
“Let’s get it straight,” Phil Bentley said, “instead of kicking it around. Just what is a hero?”
I walked to the bookshelf and looked for the Shorter Oxford Dictionary, which Helen had given me the first Christmas after we were married, and I handed down the first volume to Phil Bentley.
“Look it up. In case you don’t know it, it’s under ‘H,’” I said.
Phil turned the pages over slowly. I heard the tall clock in the hall—the clock that Helen had bought when she began to like Chippendale—strike the half-hour, but the sound was aloof in the silence of the house. I had the ridiculous illusion that General Goodwin was back there with us again, in his chair, actually leaning forward and waiting for what might be read.
“Well,” Phil Bentley said, “well, well. Take this down, will you, Myra, on a separate sheet, and put it ahead of the notes? Here’s an Oxford definition of a hero. Quote: ‘A man who exhibits extraordinary bravery comma, firmness comma or greatness of soul comma, in connection with any pursui
t comma, work comma, or enterprise.…’ Close quotes.”
“You can’t use that about Goodwin, can you?” Myra Fineholt asked.
Phil Bentley closed the dictionary and took off his glasses.
“Why not?” he said. “Anyway I’d like to think it over. I think I might use it in the lead.”
“You know better than to do that, sweetheart,” Miss Fineholt said.
Phil Bentley sighed and looked at the empty armchair where Melville Goodwin had been sitting.
“Well,” he said, “maybe all this has put me a little off the beam. I don’t go with it all the way, but still the definition almost fits him, doesn’t it?”
Of course I had seen some heroes in the last conflict and although I respected what they had done, I had not always admired them or wished to be like them myself. The press was always looking for new ones, and there was a lot of hero competition between the Air Force and the Navy, and there was frequently considerable pressure on Public Relations from higher echelons to do something about Ground Force heroes. In fact I had once been assigned as a sort of valet to one of these—a Congressional Medal of Honor hero. He was twenty-two years old, from Ohio, and his name was Corporal Jacob Snodgrass—no relation to the former ball player.
It had been my duty to take him about the country for two weeks, arranging appearances before various civic groups so that they could see a hero. It was a pretty tough assignment for me but not for Corporal Snodgrass. He did not like being exhibited but he enjoyed the trip. When he was not drinking bourbon, usually supplied by me, he was taking money out of me at gin rummy or becoming emotionally involved with uninteresting women. When he was not doing any of these things, he was reading comics very slowly. It generally took him two days of cerebration to finish a book of comics, and he always needed to get drunk before he started on another. I have an idea that he modeled himself on Flash Gordon, Dick Tracy and Superman, and he may even have won his Congressional Medal because he could not let the comics down. He had killed almost a platoon of Japanese in a jungle, and he had walked back to the lines with a live Japanese major under one arm and his wounded patrol leader under the other, but he cost me nearly three hundred dollars for liquor, girls and gin rummy, for which I was never reimbursed by the government. I admired what he had done in the jungle, but to him it was only a slightly hilarious episode, and sometimes after he had polished off a pint of bourbon he would say, Hell, that I could have done it myself. I could not have done it myself. I did not possess his physical build, or his physical courage, or his lack of imagination. Perhaps it was not fair to use the corporal as a unit of measure, because the corporal did not answer the dictionary hero definition very well, but he did have one thing in common with other heroes I have known. He did not thrive in an ordinary environment. Take heroes away from their proper time and place and they became awkward and maladjusted.
Melville Goodwin, USA Page 39
