“Boy,” he said, “suppose we forget my last few remarks, just on general security principles, but if you knew what I know.”
“Well, I don’t,” I told him. “It’s all right, I can’t put any of it together.”
He was pouring out the Scotch and putting ice in the glasses.
“That’s so,” he said. “It’s all right as long as you don’t know who Frizell is,” and it did not seem to occur to him that he might have made me anxious to find out about the mysterious stranger named Frizell. It was often that way with security. “But, boy, I’ll tell you this—it’s just about time they had an activator in that setup, but picking me out ahead of all that South Pacific crowd … I’m on record to say that’s something. Of course some damn fools might say it was a demotion after Plans, but not for me it isn’t. They wouldn’t give it to anybody without a top combat record, and boy, I’m here to say I’m proud.”
He sat down on the edge of his chair again. He was lost in the glow of that unknown new assignment, and he had the shining morning face of Shakespeare’s schoolboy.
“Well, here’s to you, Mel,” I said. “Here’s luck.”
“Thanks,” he said, “maybe I’ll need it, but at the same time, I think I’ve got what it’s going to take to handle this one. God, I wish I could give you the whole blueprint—and you ought to have seen Goochy when he got the word, and you ought to have seen Muriel.… All this talk about an apartment in Washington … you ought to have seen her when she got the word. She was just as surprised as I was. She’s acting just the way she did when we started off for Bailey. You wouldn’t have thought any of us were grown-up.”
“I wish I could have seen her,” I said.
Melville Goodwin shook the ice softly in his glass.
“You know,” he said, “it reminds me of that poem.”
“You mean the one about Ulysses?” I asked.
“That’s it,” he said, “exactly. ‘Push off and sitting well in order smite’—and it’s a nice thing from Muriel’s point of view. There’s quite a little dog connected with it, not that I give a damn, but Muriel has a weakness for putting on the dog. Do you know what?”
“What?” I asked.
“Well, just confidentially, we’re moving into Frizell’s quarters, and I’ve got the word on them today. He has one of those houses in Tokyo that belonged to the Mitsuis—you know, part European and part Japanese—with dwarf gardens and all the old servants in kimonos and all paid for by the occupation. It will be something for Muriel to get her teeth into. Muriel’s really going to get something, and maybe it’s about time.”
I was familiar with the sort of real estate in Tokyo to which he was referring, half grotesque and half beautiful. I had a vision of miniature rock gardens, of stunted pines and azaleas and little pools—a setting for the usually ludicrous and unsuccessful effort of a wealthy Japanese to reconcile the East and West. Part of the house would be an overelaborated London villa stuffed with heavy carpets and velvet hangings and furnished with contorted imitations of European period pieces upholstered in suffocating velvet, and then, like an austere rebuke, would come the traditional Japanese dwelling in back, chaste and exquisite, with its scrolls, its matting, its sliding partitions and its rice-paper windows.
“Yes, maybe it’s about time that Muriel had something,” I said.
It was a strange world, I was thinking, and it was moving so fast that it was impossible to keep up with it any longer—for me, but not for Melville Goodwin, who had the service right behind him and his own simple lexicon of belief. He was safe again, safer than I would ever be in this changing world. There had been a stormy moment of maladjustment, but it was gone. He was off again, behaving exactly as he should, able to shed experience, but still some thought made him stare solemnly at his glass.
“You know,” he said, “it’s queer how a thing like this clarifies your thinking and changes your point of view. I don’t seem to be the same person I was before I got the word. I don’t know what’s been the matter with me lately.” He looked at me with cold deceptive innocence. “You follow what I mean, don’t you?”
“Yes,” I said carefully, “I guess I do, partly.”
He could see things without intermediate shadows. I knew he was facing an awkward moment of confession, but his frankness saved the awkwardness.
“All right,” he said, “let’s lay it on the line. I had never thought of myself as being humanly inexperienced, but by God, I must have been. Let’s lay it on the line. Maybe I don’t understand about women, Sid. Let’s leave it at that, shall we?”
He had almost said all that was necessary. The clear truth of his innocence explained his aberration. He was not the sort of person who understood women, and this was almost enough to close the incident.
“Say,” he said, “did you ever hear the story about the southern gentleman of the old school who felt that he ought to give his son a little briefing on sex?”
“No, I don’t think I ever have,” I answered.
He was about to push off on another of his stories, and he smiled in anticipation.
“Well, it goes this way. When he was face to face with the boy, there didn’t seem to be a damned thing to say. That’s the point, not one damned thing, and that’s the way I feel about sex right now. All he could say was, ‘Listen, son, you’re getting to be a big boy now and you’re going out and around, and all I can tell you is this: Never put sweetening in your liquor, and try to tell the truth.’”
Melville Goodwin looked at me expectantly, as though he had told one of his best stories, and he was disappointed when I made no comment.
“Well, maybe that’s all there is to it,” he said. “Maybe I did sort of sweeten up my liquor.… All right, I know now what that gentleman of the old school meant. Take Dottie Peale. Maybe I ought to have run around some when I was younger. I don’t know what I was thinking of. Isn’t that the damnedest thing?”
He looked at me curiously, but I did not answer.
“You always knew I was being a damn fool, didn’t you?”
“Well, I wouldn’t put it quite that way,” I said.
“Horsefeathers,” he said. “I had never faced up to it, that’s all—not that she isn’t a nice girl. She’s a very remarkable person.”
“That’s so,” I answered, “she’s remarkable.”
“It’s sort of rugged, isn’t it,” he said, “to go to someone and just say you’ve been a damn fool, but I like to think I tell the truth.”
“You mean you’ve seen Dottie?” I asked.
“Hell, yes,” he said. “You didn’t think I’d write her a ‘Dear John’ letter, did you? Hell, yes, I saw Dottie at five this afternoon.”
He set his drink on the table and smoothed the wrinkles in his blouse. Perhaps he should have left his story at that. Whatever had happened belonged to no one but him and Dottie Peale.
“I don’t know much about these things, but she was wonderful,” he said. “I don’t know how she ever managed it, but she made it seem all right. She never let me feel for a minute that I was ducking out. In fact she made it all seem like something to be proud of. I’ll never forget her, Sid.”
For some reason or other, nothing in that confession sounded tawdry or shopworn, when every element in it should have. Something in Melville Goodwin prevented it. There was always a quality in him of simple fact that raised him above the obvious. There was a metal in him that life had never tarnished, though it possessed a confusing luster for people like Dottie Peale and me. He was a stranger from a strange world which we could never touch.
“Yes, by God, I am proud of it,” he said. He shook his glass slowly, watching the ice cubes carefully. “Of course,” he went on, “I took this up with Muriel last night. It all just came over me. I had to tell her I’d been a God-damned fool, and she was wonderful. She said it was only decent to clear it as quickly as possible with Dottie. She even helped me plan what to say.”
He was watching me, and sometimes
he had a way of seeing everything, and he must have read something in my expression.
“You would have done that, wouldn’t you,” he asked, “if you had been in my shoes?”
“No,” I said, “I don’t think so. I don’t believe I’d have had the guts. No, I wouldn’t have done it in just that way.”
He shook his head slowly.
“That isn’t guts,” he said. “It’s only truth. There are some things you have to lay on the line—some things. For instance.…” He picked up his drink again. “There’s the flag, for instance.”
“What?” I said.
I could not see why Old Glory should enter into it, but then he had always been an Old Glory Boy.
“There’s the flag,” he said again, “and there’s taking care of the men and never telling them to do anything that you won’t do yourself. That has nothing to do with guts.” His eyes narrowed slightly. He could always see more than you thought he was going to. “You think I’m a pretty simple guy, don’t you?”
“No, sir,” I said, “I wouldn’t call you simple.”
“Well, it doesn’t make a damned bit of difference,” he said. “I don’t know how it is but I feel like a good boy who has done the right thing. Say, Sid, do you know what I’d like to do tonight?”
“No,” I answered.
“Well, it’s just a whim,” he said, and he looked at me doubtfully. “I don’t know when we’ll get the chance again. How about our staying here tonight and polishing off some of this liquor in a serious way?”
It was a curious sort of ending and yet somehow it seemed appropriate. It meant that he was human after all, and it was a way of bridging a gap that divided us.
“… Just because we’ve seen a hell of a lot together,” he said, “just because—oh, hell, there isn’t any reason.”
“Well, I don’t mind,” I said.
“Boy,” he said, “I knew you’d be right with me.” When he smiled, he looked like young Mel Goodwin from the Point.
“There used to be a bugler at Bailey,” Melville Goodwin was saying. “His last name was Lowther—funny that this should come back to me now. He was always getting into trouble, but he could really blow the calls. Even when he was in the pen, the Old Man used to order him out under guard to play taps. By God, when you heard that man do taps, it would hit you in the heels. It always eased you down and made everything clear—all the answers in the book. I remember what the Old Man said one night when taps was over—that was old Jupiter Jones. I’ll tell you some good ones about him later. He was sitting on his veranda with a bottle of Old Home Elixir for his cough, when Lowther marched by on his way back to the pen—the guard behind him, bayonet and everything. The Old Man had a real sense of humor.…
“‘Lieutenant,’ he said to me, ‘go down, will you, and see that that son-of-a-bitching bugler is locked in tight. I want him where you can get at him so he can blow taps over me when I die.’
“It’s funny I should remember a thing like that, but you really should have heard him.… It really was the answer.… I sort of wish we had that son-of-a-bitching bugler here now.…”
About the Author
John P. Marquand (1893–1960) was a Pulitzer Prize–winning author, proclaimed “the most successful novelist in the United States” by Life magazine in 1944. A descendant of governors of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, shipping magnates Daniel Marquand and Samuel Curzon, and famed nineteenth-century writer Margaret Fuller, Marquand always had one foot inside the blue-blooded New England establishment, the focus of his social satire. But he grew up on the outside, sent to live with maiden aunts in Newburyport, Massachusetts, the setting of many of his novels, after his father lost the once-considerable family fortune in the crash of 1907. From this dual perspective, Marquand crafted stories and novels that were applauded for their keen observation of cultural detail and social mores.
By the 1930s, Marquand was a regular contributor to the Saturday Evening Post, where he debuted the character of Mr. Moto, a Japanese secret agent. No Hero, the first in a series of bestselling spy novels featuring Mr. Moto, was published in 1935. Three years later, Marquand won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Late George Apley, a subtle lampoon of Boston’s upper classes. The novels that followed, including H.M. Pulham, Esquire (1941), So Little Time (1943), B.F.’s Daughter (1946), Point of No Return (1949), Melvin Goodwin, USA (1952), Sincerely, Willis Wayde (1955), and Women and Thomas Harrow (1959), cemented his reputation as the preeminent chronicler of contemporary New England society and one of America’s finest writers.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
The lines from “If” are from Rewards and Fairies by Rudyard Kipling. Copyright 1910 by Rudyard Kipling, reprinted by permission of Mrs. George Bambridge and Doubleday & Company, Inc.
The lines from “The Highwayman” are from Collected Poems in One Volume by Alfred Noyes. Copyright 1906, 1934, 1947, by Alfred Noyes. Reprinted by permission of the publishers, J. B. Lippincott Company.
Copyright © 1951 by John P. Marquand and Adelaide H. Marquand
Cover design by Andy Ross
ISBN: 978-1-5040-1575-2
This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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Melville Goodwin, USA Page 66
