Now Melville A. Goodwin was far from being a Corporal Snodgrass, but you could not see his virtues clearly when he did not have to employ them. You had to see him grinning and rubbing the mud off his uniform, as he had in Normandy when that mortar shell had exploded near us, or you had to see him in a jeep driving across a mine field in Normandy. It was not his fault that opportunity did not permit him to exhibit intestinal fortitude all the time. He would have been very glad to do so, as I endeavored to point out to Myra Fineholt and Phil Bentley before I said good night.
As I walked upstairs after putting out the downstairs lights, I was still thinking so intensely about heroes that I almost forgot that Melville Goodwin had wanted a word with me before I went to bed. I experienced a short sense of anticlimax when I saw him in the main guest room in his undershirt and trousers with his shoes off, but he still looked as though he could slip back into everything if a whistle blew. His shoes were in perfect alignment at the foot of his bed. His coat was on its hanger in the clothes closet. His military brushes were in the exact center of the tall bureau and through the half-opened door of the bathroom I could see his shaving brush, shaving stick, toothbrush, toothpaste and safety razor all in a meticulous row on the glass shelf below the medicine chest. There was only one detail that I found disconcerting. He was wearing steel-rimmed glasses, and it had never occurred to me that he might need glasses for reading. He wore them, I saw, because he was examining a pile of photographs.
“Sit down and look them over, Sid,” he said. “This bunch has just been rushed up from Washington. I think the boys did a real job on me. What do you think?”
He watched me anxiously when I sat down and examined the pictures.
“News services do better than the Army Pictorial Service,” he said. “Don’t you think so? I had a lot taken of me in Normandy and a lot up with the Silver Leaf, but these are better.”
There were candid shots of Melville Goodwin from every angle, Melville Goodwin gazing straight ahead, a stern Goodwin, a smiling and a laughing Goodwin, a sad Goodwin, a Goodwin looking slyly from the corners of his eyes and even a bored and yawning Goodwin.
“They were crawling around and snapping me all afternoon here, too,” he said. “I never had time to brace myself because I never knew when they were going to push the button.”
They had to be good photographs. Most of this series would be used, I supposed, as aids for the artist who did the magazine cover picture.
“They are certainly giving you the works,” I said.
The photographers had obviously struggled for informality, but the strange thing was that not one of them showed him in a grotesque or ungainly pose or off balance. Smiling, frowning or smoking a cigarette, talking or tight-lipped, he was easily as photogenic as a Hollywood star. The uniform may have helped and the instinctive correctness with which he wore it, but still there must have been some sort of subconscious watchfulness inside him that not even a candid photographer could penetrate.
“You certainly look sharp,” I said.
He accepted it as a fact.
“You learn to,” he said, “with troops looking at you all the time. I’m used to having the privacy of a goldfish. I’m trying to pick out the best one to pass around.”
I knew what he meant by passing one around. They always made a specialty of signed photographs in the service. I thought of the rows of them I had seen on walls or bookshelves in officers’ quarters.
“Muriel collects them like postage stamps,” he said. “She always carries a gallery with her. Maybe it’s not artistic but it’s good to look around and see your friends.… I think I’ll use this one.”
“That one looks fine,” I said.
“You don’t think it looks too much as though I were going to chew off somebody’s rear, do you? It doesn’t look too much like old Vinegar Joe?”
“You don’t look like Vinegar Joe,” I said.
“Muriel said to be sure to get one of you, Sid,” he said, “preferably a picture of you and Helen together. We want you in the gallery.”
“That’s where we want to be,” I said, “permanently in the gallery.”
He took off his glasses and put them in their small black case, and I was curiously relieved to see him without them.
“Sid,” he said, “I can’t tell you what your seeing me through this has meant to Muriel and me. Muriel said she liked you as soon as she saw you. She knows a lot of people, but she doesn’t like so many.”
“Well, I liked Mrs. Goodwin, too,” I said.
“God damn it,” he said, “she’s Muriel. Get used to calling her Muriel.”
It was obviously the time to make a formal and graceful speech in acknowledgment of the General’s tribute.
“Helen and I have enjoyed having you here tremendously,” I said. “Helen loves company, and this has been quite a build-up for me. They always like it at the studio when I associate with Very Important People.” I laughed to show that this was partly a joke, though basically serious. “I feel I’ve come to know you as I never would have otherwise—what with all this personal history and reminiscence. I’ve always thought a lot of you, just seeing you around, the way you do see people, and it’s nice to know I had sound judgment.”
It sounded a little laid on, but then, high-ranking officers usually were like artists, actors or writers, who depended, whether they admitted it or not, on a certain amount of adulation, and the flattery did not have to be so gentle either. They had all built up a tolerance for it, and undoubtedly a lot of people had dished out this sort of thing to Melville A. Goodwin, because I could see him reviewing my little statement like a connoisseur, winnowing the chaff from the grain. I was glad when he accepted it at its face value, because I had felt it genuinely.
“I’m glad if I’ve made a hit with you, Sid,” the General said. “I guess everybody likes to be regarded favorably in the right quarters, and I admire you personally. You’ve got a lot on the ball.”
“Not as much as you,” I said. “I’m superficial and you’re not. You see, you don’t need to be superficial.”
The General was not thinking of me or my problems at the moment, and I was just as glad he was not.
“Brother,” he said, “you certainly can lay it on with a trowel, but go ahead, I like it. Say, without pulling punches, how do I rate with Phil Bentley and that research girl?”
“You ought to know,” I said. “They admire you, Mel.”
“Well,” he said, “that’s fine. I thought it might pay off to hand it to them out of the horse’s mouth.… Say, Sid, get me my fountain pen, will you? It’s in my blouse pocket in the closet.”
It was an order but it was not out of place, because his asking me showed that he considered me a member of his group.
“Here you are, sir,” I said.
I had just called him “Mel” but now it was correct to call him “sir” and we both knew it. He picked up a photograph from the floor beside him, his favorite photograph, and wrote across it diagonally in a firm bold hand.
“Here,” he said, “from me to you.”
Across the photograph he had written, To Sid with admiration and affection, Mel.
“Thanks, sir,” I said. “I’ll value this always.”
Again, it was correct to call him “sir” because the moment had been formal, involving a presentation, an award of merit, like the pinning of a medal, and all our talk had led up to it, but now the ceremony was over and we were out of formation.
“Oh, hell,” he said, “forget it, Sid, but I mean every God-damned word of it.” He coughed and cleared his throat. “So you had lunch with Dot in New York, did you?”
The elaborately weary way he leaned back in his chair and his careful unconcern were faintly amusing because subtlety was not one of his strong points. For some reason I did not look forward to what was coming, now that he was, with admiration and affection, my old friend Mel.
“She called you up, didn’t she?” I said.
Without meaning to, I was adopting his own unconcern—talking casually about a girl we both knew slightly named Dottie Peale.
“That’s right,” he said, and he coughed again. “You didn’t suggest she call me, did you, just to cheer the old man up or anything like that?”
“No,” I said, “no, it was entirely her own idea.”
It was disturbing to see him lean forward and to see his whole face light up.
“You mean she thought of it all herself?” he asked.
“Yes, all herself,” I answered.
He was smiling his youngest smile. I was alarmed to see him look so happy.
“I’m having dinner with her tomorrow night,” he said. “It really will be nice to see Dot again. I sort of thought she’d forgotten all about me. She never answered my last two letters.”
There was no use warning anyone about things like that. Instead it was always advisable to get out from under, and the General was old enough to take care of himself, and I was probably overemphasizing the whole thing—but I felt that I had to say something.
“Oh, that’s the way she is,” I said. “It’s off with the old and on with the new. You don’t want to take Dot too seriously, Mel.” It was about all that I had any right to say.
“Thanks for the briefing, son,” he said. “I guess I wouldn’t have had that invitation if I hadn’t spanked that Russki in Berlin. I’m not taking Dot seriously, but all the same, it will be nice seeing her again.”
“Dot’s pretty good company,” I said, “and she has a whole suit of armor in the front hall.”
Melville Goodwin still looked very young.
“I certainly want to see it,” he said. “Maybe I need a little relaxation—off the record, Sid.”
“Well, don’t forget you have a record,” I said.
“Oh,” he said, “everything doesn’t get into a 201 file.”
“Perhaps not,” I said. “I was just thinking of Ulysses coming home from Troy.”
“What the hell has Ulysses got to do with it?” the General asked.
“You recited a poem about him once at the Ritz in Paris,” I said. “Remember?”
He looked at me hard, as though he wanted to pull his rank, but then he must have realized that he was out of the military zone.
“I’m still waiting to hear what Ulysses has to do with it,” he said.
“Well,” I said, “when he was sailing home to Ithaca to rejoin his wife Penelope, he put wax in his ears so he couldn’t hear the sirens sing.”
There was a moment’s tension, and Melville A. Goodwin’s face grew red, but suddenly he laughed. He was never as dumb as you thought he would be.
“God damn,” he said, “it hurts me to see an educated boy like you fall down on mythology. He put wax in his crew’s ears, son. He didn’t use any wax on himself. He had his men tie him to the mast.” Melville A. Goodwin had an almost flawless memory. “And anyway, there aren’t any Circes or Calypsos or sirens around, either, son. There’s only Dottie Peale, and I don’t take her seriously.”
Even in his undershirt surrounded by his photographs, Mel Goodwin possessed a quality in which I needed to believe. That must have been why I let myself go further.
“All right, you’re not exclusively Ulysses,” I said. “You’re Major General Melville A. Goodwin, USA, graduate of West Point, the Infantry School, the Tank School, Command and General Staff School and the War College, but what’s more, you’re a combat general. I’ve even heard the boys call you ‘Muddy Mel.’”
“Son,” he said, “you ought to write citations. Go right ahead and lay it on. Don’t let me stop you.”
“And what’s more,” I said, “you’re Horatius at the bridge.”
“God damn,” Melville Goodwin said, “I thought you were just telling me I was Ulysses.”
“Well, you’re Horatius, too,” I said. “‘And how can man die better … Than facing fearful odds … For the ashes of his fathers … And the temples of his Gods?’”
He had been smiling, lapping it up, as he listened to me, but suddenly he stopped and raised his eyebrows.
“No kidding, Sid?” he asked.
“No,” I answered, “not in the strictest sense.”
His face was graver and sterner and sadder than it had been in any of those candid photographs. He looked entirely off his balance, not ready for any camera.
“That’s right,” he said, “it isn’t entirely kidding. Maybe I’ve got a little of that stuff. You need it in the show, and now the whole show’s over. There’s one trouble with acting in those shows. You get keyed up to them, and I’m not dead. That’s the trouble with it—I’m still alive. You’ve handed me a pretty fast line, son, and maybe old Horatius Ulysses Goodwin had better turn in now and get some sleep. Good night, Sid.”
“Good night, Mel,” I said.
“Here,” he called, “come back here. God damn it, you forgot your photograph.”
What was it that I had felt that night about Melville Goodwin? I still cannot exactly set it down. I had reacted toward him as he himself had reacted long ago to that Decoration Day parade in Nashua. If he was not great, he had great memories, and he knew how to throw the dice, win or lose, both for himself and for a lot of other people. He had his 201 file and his record and I may have recognized its value, having so slim a record of my own. For me there was no sense of achievement. There were no 201 files or service dossiers in civil life.
I thought of him at the Ritz in Paris, reciting Tennyson’s lines on pushing off and sitting well in order and smiting the sounding furrows. He was pushing off again, but he should have been in battle dress pushing off with the tanks. He had to keep on pushing because he had forgotten how to stay still. He had been in too many big parades to sit at home in Ithaca or Washington. A doctor might have said that he had developed an adrenal quality. He had drunk too long from the golden cup that held the wine of power and glory.
XXIV
A Short Quote from Kipling
I thought that Helen would have been asleep long ago, but she called me as soon as I was in our dressing room. She was sitting in bed wide awake reading Proust, a taste I had always found it impossible to share.
“I haven’t seen you all day,” she said, “except to look at you across the table at the officers’ mess.”
“Don’t be bitter,” I said, “we’ve got to World War II, and the circus ought to break up after lunch tomorrow.”
“I’m not bitter,” she answered, “but I didn’t know you could be so military. I’m beginning to feel like Mrs. Goodwin.”
“You couldn’t,” I said, “not really.”
“She wants him to settle down,” she said, “and I’d just as soon have you settle down, too. You look worried. Are you worried about Gilbert Frary?”
I had not been worried about Gilbert, and it was too late at night to start worrying about him now. I told her I could not keep my mind on both Gilbert Frary and the life and times of Melville Goodwin.
“Well, tell me I’ve been wonderful through it all,” she said. “I need a little encouragement.”
I told her of course that she had been wonderful through it all.
“All right,” she said. “Now open the window. Things don’t feel right this evening. The house doesn’t feel right.”
Our bedroom still seemed too large for us, and there was that country silence to which I was not accustomed, but the house felt to me just as it always had. It was too new to have atmosphere or ghosts except those of Mr. and Mrs. Winlock.
“You always start having premonitions whenever you read Proust,” I said.
“There’s nothing of Proust around at all,” she said. “Everything’s more like Shakespeare. I feel as though we were all in Julius Caesar with a lot of omens.”
I hesitated to tell her that I had begun to feel that way myself.
“You can’t have everything, Helen,” I said, “and there aren’t any omens in Connecticut.”
“What were you doing up s
o late?” she asked. “I heard everyone come upstairs.”
“Oh,” I told her, “just saying good night to ‘Julius Caesar’ Goodwin”—but certainly Melville Goodwin had never been offered a golden crown in any forum.
“Maybe Mark Antony comes nearer,” Helen said.
It was not so quiet outside as it had been. I could hear the wind in the bare branches of the ornamental beech trees. “Sid,” she went on, “what’s going to happen about him and Dottie Peale?”
Sometimes she was like Camilla and did not want to go to sleep.
“Now, Helen,” I said, “what makes you think anything is going to happen?” In such circumstances men always stuck together.
She looked at me for a moment and then she shrugged her bare shoulders. She had beautiful shoulders, and the whole scene was getting more and more like Shakespeare.
“Sometimes you’re awfully obtuse,” she said. “Don’t you know that Mrs. Goodwin knows all about it?”
“Now, Helen,” I said, “there isn’t any ‘it’ for her to know anything about. There was only Paris, and I told you about Paris.”
“Oh, Sid,” Helen said, “oh, Sid.”
“I don’t believe she heard anything about Paris anyway,” I said. “What did she say to you that makes you think so?”
Melville Goodwin, USA Page 40
