Aurora Dawn

by Herman Wouk

  Andrew stopped talking. A warm, languid breeze fought its way past innumerable buildings into the garden, and stirred the roses so that they shed their sweetness tremulously upon the air. The moon was moving all too quickly from one side of the canyon overhead to the other; already one wall was black while the other gleamed with moonshine. A slant ray slipped through the tangle of a trellised bush and haloed the dark head of the girl. Turning her eyes away from his face, she looked modestly at her hands and said in a small, distant voice, “Teeth, old boy, shall I tell you what I think?”

  “Please do,” said Andrew.

  “I think,” said the young lady, with dainty deliberateness, “that he was talking at you all the time.”

  Startled, Andrew said, “I felt that, too. But what on earth was his purpose?”

  “I think,” went on Carol, her eyes still downcast, her face shadowed by her hair, which fell forward as she slightly bent her head, “that all he was doing was making fun of you for my benefit … because Mike Wilde likes me … and …” her voice was little more than a whisper “… because he thinks I like you.”

  A perfume came to Andrew’s nostrils, clear and poignant through the scent of the roses, like the trill of a piano over violins. And this odor reminded him of a train speeding south at four o’clock in the morning, and a white small hand in black hair; it reminded him of fur and warm breath and twining arms in a silent universe of falling snow, and the muffled sound of a horse’s hoofs on thick snow– He caught Carol’s hands. “What a baby you are!” he said with difficulty. “Mike Wilde is just about twice your age.”

  “A girl can have an opinion,” came faintly from the hidden face.

  Andrew put his hand under her chin, and turned her head so that she was looking into his eyes once more.

  “Do you like me, Carol?” he said.

  The eighteen-year-old miss held her breath for an instant, and then spoke very softly. “Teeth,” quoth she, “I think Honey Beaton looks very beautiful this evening. What do you think?”

  The answer of our hero was to gather Carol Marquis in his arms, a deed eased by the fact that she merged into his bosom the moment he touched her. There followed a kiss: for details of the duration, intensity, and nature of which the reader is referred to his or her single sharpest and most heartrending memory of the April years.

  “Carol, dearest,” said Andrew Reale, as his mouth parted from hers, “I want to marry you.”

  The girl’s eyes opened to an unnatural wideness, then her lids drooped until they were nearly closed, and she smiled a slow smile in which the future advertising king could see her small, regular teeth. “Andy, darling,” she murmured happily, “you don’t really want that,” and forestalled immediate remonstrance with the effective seal of her mouth on his.

  As we pass into the late years we incline to remember the kisses of youth as blinding blazes of feeling wherein all movement of mind was blotted out, and “the lips sucked forth the soul.” My young readers will back me up, however, in an assertion that this is far from true, and that, on the other hand, a kissing man is not unlike a drowning man in this respect, if no other: in that an indescribably clear and rapid succession of images and ideas may flash through his consciousness in the few moments that the honied pressure of a maiden’s mouth is wafting him to Paradise. (I speak of the man only, having stated earlier in this consistent work that I make no pretense of describing the activities of young ladies’ minds.) Andrew Reale was in precisely such a case. As Carol lipped him and clung to him, the warmth of her thin arms coming through the cloth of his dinner jacket, he found himself reviewing his situation swiftly in all its aspects, for all the world as though he were about to make a daring bid at contract bridge. Foremost in his thoughts was the looming loss of Laura Beaton; insistent, too, was the echo of Michael Wilde’s invectives against advertising and the odd sickness of heart he had felt to hear them; with almost a physician’s detachment he savored the lips of Carol Marquis and realized that irrevocably he preferred those of his first love; and meanwhile the clever voice that had suggested the alliance with the Marquis girl months ago whispered to him that he had won, won, won, and that with a little firmness of nerve in this hour, a little resolve to remain unswayed by sentiment, he was a millionaire. A clever hand that went with the voice flashed a colorful image on the screen of his mind: Laura, happily married to Stephen English, attired and jeweled as she could never be with him. She would fare better, severed from his fortunes, he silently averred. He would supplant Grovill and Leach, he promised himself, in a set of offices he would open in one of the high towers of Radio City–“Andrew Reale, Advertising”–ARA, flashing on and off in a smart blue neon monogram–ARA, ARA …

  Carol Marquis stirred in his arms and rested her cheek against his.

  “Teeth,” she murmured, “what about Honey?”

  “She’s the sweetest girl I’ll ever know,” said Andrew, adding hastily, “except one. She’ll be happier with someone who deserves her more. When will you marry me, Carol?”

  The moon had vanished behind the westernmost of the two apartment-cliffs, and the garden had only the faint illumination of starlight and diffused moonshine. Andrew could not see the girl’s face as she leaned back on the bench, took his hand in hers, and spoke. “I’m so young! I’ve never thought of getting married. I like you, Teeth, you’re sweet and darling and good and I don’t know, maybe I love you, but all this is roses and moonlight, it isn’t real. You’ll take Honey Beaton home tonight and laugh at me in the morning.”

  “I will never see Honey Beaton after tonight,” said Andy, and his heart pounded so that he could hardly breathe as the words passed his lips. “Whatever happens, I owe her that much decency.” He put his hand to his face in a quite classic gesture of shame. “I must say I feel swinish about that part of it.”

  Swiftly, Carol Marquis had her arms around him again, pressing him affectionately. “Andy, don’t say any more about it. I think I do love you. If you still feel tomorrow morning the way you do now with the smell of roses all around us in the darkness, come and have breakfast with me. If you don’t come I’ll understand and eventually I’ll forget you. I’m just a kid, luckily for me…. I’m going inside,” she broke off in a different tone. “Don’t forget–lipstick.” She ran her fingers in a light caress over his mouth, and disappeared into the blackness.

  These, then, were the various opinions passed on the important oration of Michael Wilde against advertising, the sole purpose of this chapter being to illustrate the proposition in its first sentence, that there are as many opinions as there are people in every event. Did we linger a disproportionately long time in the rose garden lighted by the lamp of Cynthia? Good friend, was it not a pleasant place–perhaps even a little nostalgically familiar to you?

  CHAPTER 15

  The Dinner Party: IV—The aftermath,

  in which three books are closed.

  THE DITHYRAMBS OF all the imitators of Walt Whitman notwithstanding, there is something unheroic about our times. Samson went down in the temple of Dagon; Hector was destroyed before the walls of windy Troy; Hamlet died in the presence of the Danish royal court; and must our hero fall in no statelier setting than the back seat of a yellow taxicab? Well, this is a true story, and the author will not stray one hair from the facts on the plea of poet’s license. Let not the most trivial detail of this terrible event go unrecorded, but let us not attempt to rhapsodize over dreariness, but simply say: it was in Yellow Cab 774, license 606-683-41 New York 1937, driver Morton J. Kupelsky of 1422 Brenner Avenue, Queens, that Andrew Reale was predestined on the day of his birth to inform his one true love, Laura Beaton, that they must forever part. (That this predestination in no wise altered his free will, ergo his culpability in the matter, is a scholastic commonplace that we have touched on before but that cannot too frequently be emphasized.)

  The dreadful thing, which the girl had anticipated no more than a collision of the earth with a comet, and which her faithless
lover had been half-consciously planning for weeks, had just happened. The taxicab was speeding through the deserted Sixty-sixth Street underpass from the east to the west side of the park. Honey Beaton cringed in a corner of the back seat as though she had been struck, her face tear-stained and bowed, her left hand tightly gripping a metal bracket, her whole body shrinking against the side of the car as though she feared nothing so much as that Andrew Reale might touch her. Indeed, this gallant had endeavored to quiet her grief with a caress, only to be repulsed with a vehemence that startled his very soul. Now he sat in confusion, gazing at the appalling havoc he had wrought. There was little in the girl’s appearance to recommend her to the buyers of beauty now, as she wailed, clutched her tumbled yellow hair, gnashed her teeth and contorted her face in the fury of a death-wounded heart. In vain did Andrew attempt to interject words of comfort or apology; she seized on every phrase as it came from his mouth, twisted it into a bitter denunciation and made it an occasion for a fresh paroxysm of misery. The taxi swung around corners, stopped like a trained metal beast at the flash of red lights, and moved again with a grinding whine of old gears as the lights snapped to green. The broad back, round head, and wide ears of the driver might have been made of the dead substance of the automobile, for all the acknowledgement he made of the horrid scene behind him, and for all the attention that the agonized lovers paid him.

  The girl’s passion, after raging for twenty minutes in mounting crescendos, began to spend itself; her sobs subsided, her wild and incoherent utterances ceased and she fell to quiet weeping, her face averted from Andrew. He, still stunned by the force and surprise of her outburst, dared not speak. The sight of the balanced, placid Laura as a maddened female had been a disturbing one, and (as he thought), he felt immense tenderness, sympathy, and regret for her, but he had no doubt of the wisdom of his course, and no intention of being diverted from it by the over-praised power of a woman’s tears. Not only had Honey Beaton’s luster been dimmed by her lapse into hysterics, but he even felt a strange, obscure glow of satisfaction, of which the storm he had raised in this desirable breast was somehow the cause. When the taxicab drew up before the girl’s apartment building and she automatically moved to get out, Andrew suddenly felt that he did not want the exchange to end. He had to persuade Honey that he had done well, for her as well as for himself, and sensed a confidence in the reasonings that quickly gathered to the portals of his tongue. Gently he detained her in her seat, and began to talk. Drying her eyes, Laura listened with wan attentiveness in an otherwise immobile face.

  The meter clicked on and the driver sat with the patience of an old priest, his eyes looking straight ahead at the dark, lonely avenue splashed here and there with the electric sign of a tavern or delicatessen, as the ambitious young man poured forth his apology. After all the declarations, proposals, jiltings, seductions, ruptures, reconciliations, and dénouements which the driver had heard in the rude confessional of the front seat, screened by the perfect anonymity of the back of his head, he was as wearily wise as Ecclesiastes, and he scarcely had an ironic sigh left for the pattern of words which Andrew Reale was earnestly improvising under the impression that it was the first time in history that a decamping lover had ever been so considerate and lucid.

  For the rest of Andrew’s life, the smell of a taxicab, mingled of the odors of gasoline and leather, would unfailingly bring before his mind’s eye this scene: the broad avenue, quiet in the night, with its far-stretching row of alternately red and green lights; the silent girl, her face marked by grief; the clicking of the meter, the persistent sound of his own voice, the shaken feeling within himself of rounding a tight corner in life, and–this to his dying hour–Laura’s figure under the green silk of her evening dress which was draped unheeded about her tired body, a sword-sharp loveliness entirely his own but two hours ago, already beyond reach and receding like a sun-shower rainbow with his every word.

  He spoke of the necessity of thinking of the future and of being practical. He exposed the illusion of there being but one man for each woman and vice versa in this crowded world. He pointed out how accidental their meeting had been, and how short and trivial the eight months they had known each other must eventually appear in the perspective of a lifetime. He assured her that they would have a laugh together over this absurdly tense scene some day in the near future. He did not fail with great tact to bring in the name of Stephen English, and to acknowledge humbly that that patrician was much more worthy of her charms and could give her more happiness than himself, a poor, struggling advertising man, and noting by a brief change in Honey’s expression that this point went home, he dwelt on it with considerable “selling power.” He concluded with a tribute, not far from poetry, to the beauty of the interlude they had shared and an assurance that it was graven on his heart forever. As he spoke, he had the relief of seeing the taut lines of grief completely fade from Laura’s face; and when he finished, she was looking at him intently with very bright eyes. He leaned back on the arm rest, conscious of a difficult task ably done, and waited for her words without fear.

  “Andy,” said Honey, after a pause in which she ascertained beyond a doubt that his peroration was done, “do you love Carol Marquis?”

  (For he had not said so. In the sad moment of disclosure he had told her only that he was going to marry the Marquis girl.)

  To this question our hero, peculiarly enough, found nothing to say immediately.

  … Come, Andy, speak up! To think on your feet, to answer on the spur of the moment–the ready reply, the quick and pleasant phrase–it’s the heart of the game, man, and you’re going to the top of the game! Speak, Andy, and meet the challenge of this sentimental question. You’ve parried thousands of harder thrusts before! What, not a word? Do you open your mouth and stupidly close it again without a sound? Do you stare helplessly at Laura as though she had knocked out your breath, and–oh, no, man–do your eyes drop before hers? You can’t lose countenance, man, or you lose the sale!

  Andy, Andy, look up and say something quickly! Tell her that love is just a word, that you can’t make lifelong decisions out of blind passion, that all women are alike in the dark, that there are things more important than love, that love dies but money remains, that you can’t live on love, that any two young people can come to love each other in time, or that sensible marriage will always outlast a love marriage. Or tell her that you love Carol Marquis! What is love? Who cares what love is, or whether it is anything? Honey is prettier than Carol, but Carol is richer than Honey. The older Honey gets the less pretty she will become. The older Carol gets the more rich she will become. Put it logically, Andy, and how can any reasonable person fail to see it, particularly with your selling power behind it?

  But man, whatever you’re going to say, say it quickly. That’s the game, you know, and you’re the most promising young man in the game. Talk! …

  Andrew’s eyes were still on his hands and his silence was still unbroken when he heard Laura say, in tones of a timbre unlike any he had ever heard issuing from her throat–as though she were addressing an unattractive strange man–“I think that what you’re doing is contemptible.” He heard a metallic click, and when he looked up the door was open and she was stepping out into the street.

  This chapter and this first volume do not end, as they might, with the picture of our hero, free at last of the burden of commitment to a moneyless girl, gazing, presumably with relief, at the high corner of the building where Laura’s apartment is, his eyes fixed on the yellow square of light in her remembered bedroom, glowing against the dusky violet dawn of the New York sky. Nor does it end with the snapping out of that bright square, leaving him looking at the gray face of a cliff full of sleeping people for a moment, and then turning and walking slowly up the brightening avenue, as the pallid street lamps go out unnoticed in the morning light.

  No. Our end comes the next evening when Laura Beaton stands with Stephen English on the green terrace of his majestic apartment overlooki
ng the East River, and when, with the most curiously positive sensation that her body is somebody else’s, she feels it quietly embraced, and feels the strange lips of the banker on a pair of strange lips which are, to outward appearances, her own. It is at this pleasant moment that the first book closes–in her life, in our hero’s life, and in this true and moral tale.

  PART 2

  The Hog in the House