Aurora Dawn

by Herman Wouk

  Older readers know the natural tempo of misfortune: long peace, followed by a brisk series of increasingly heavy blows. When Andrew returned to the table the head waiter was there with a note. It was a telephoned summons from Van Win to abandon lunch and come to the office of Talmadge Marquis at once, a desperate crisis having arisen concerning the Father Stanfield program. Silently cursing his error in having told his secretary where he would be for lunch, Andrew bade adieu to the object of his desires, who accepted the note as very sufficient excuse for his departure, and said sympathetically, “Watch out for Dad. When he’s bad he’s ghastly.”

  With the burning question of his life still unanswered, with no food in his stomach, with a sick fear in his breast of the legendary terror of a Marquis rage, Andrew Reale rushed to his apartment, changed his clothes and set his course into the teeth of the gathering storm.

  CHAPTER 18

  In which the Marquis office undergoes

  a Christopher Situation,

  and Andrew Reale flies forth to save the day.

  TALMADGE MARQUIS WAS BELLOWING, and the buildings of New York skipped like rams. He roared; the foundations of the city were moved. At least, such was the impression of the people who gained their livelihood by a capacity for staying in proximity to Mr. Marquis throughout his tantrums. Given the choice, they would probably have endured a bad earthquake rather than one of his frenzies. Indeed, an office wit had performed an immortal prank (a few months before the nervous breakdown which ended his business life) by telephoning Fordham University after Mr. Marquis’s paroxysm brought on by a poor comedy program, and inquiring whether any disturbance had registered on the seismograph.

  From his inner office the muffled shouts and imprecations of Mr. Marquis could be heard this afternoon. Pending the arrival of Messrs. Grovill and Leach, who had been hurriedly sent for, the soap manufacturer was releasing his high energy on the nearest handy human being, a girl secretary who had brought him a letter with a typing error in it. Meantime a hissing whisper went through the whole Aurora Dawn floor of the Empire State Building–“Christopher Situation!”

  The employees of Talmadge Marquis, like any other group isolated from the rest of mankind by a peculiar destiny, had evolved a folklore, which taught that in their master’s rages, known as “situations,” there were three ascending orders of magnitude: Albert, Boris, and Christopher. The reader will notice that the initials of these three names are the first three letters of the alphabet. The nomenclature of the situations was essentially a warning code, containing a wealth of information that could be passed in one word, and so indissolubly united were Mr. Marquis’s unphilosophical employees in hatred of their master, that none had ever been recreant enough to betray the secret. Many a time had one subordinate, leaving the Presence, said to another in low tones as he entered, “Albert” or “Boris,” thus giving at least a slight chance of preparation for the onslaught that was almost certain to follow. Superstitions had arisen; it was commonly said that nobody could confront the soap man during a Christopher Situation without being at least dismissed from his post, and probably proscribed from connection with any Aurora Dawn activity until the day of his death. Most of the present employees had been through several Alberts and a Boris or two, but the Christopher Situation was a natural catastrophe that only a few of the grayer heads in the office had witnessed until this day and, with the passage of the warning word, a nervous, grim hilarity gripped the office as it might the passengers in an airplane lost amid crashing thunderclouds.

  When the elevator door opened at the Aurora Dawn floor and Messrs. Grovill and Leach stepped out, they knew immediately that matters stood very ill. Marquis’s noise had subsided, to be followed by an abnormal hush throughout the usually thrumming offices; and standing by the receptionist’s desk which faced the elevators was one Martin Rousseau, a pink-cheeked, neat young blade, newly minted into manhood by Princeton University, and clinging to the job of personal secretary to Mr. Marquis like a caterpillar to a violently shaking stalk. His presence in this unsanctified outer space, and the superfluous heartiness with which he ushered them toward his master, disclosed clearly what he strove to hide: that a hot eruption was in progress, and that he was remaining, as well as he could, far outside the path of lava flow.

  Through the big main office with its silent typewriters and averted faces walked the two advertising men; through the inner executives’ offices; through Rousseau’s anteroom, and up to the polished ebony door behind which abode their lord; Rousseau all the while issuing a series of remarks about the weather, not more comforting than the squeals of the wheels of a tumbrel. At the last door he assured them that they were expected and left with a hasty muttering about some important files. Grovill and Leach exchanged wan glances. “Let’s go, Walter,” said Leach, and opened the door, his ring rotating jerkily on his left hand.

  Marquis sat slumped at his desk, confronting them. All the color was out of his usually red face, leaving it bluish-gray. One hand clutched a paper cutter; the other lay loosely on the desk, with the fingers shaking. He looked at them from under his brows without lifting his head.

  “Gentlemen,” he said in a strained high voice, “be good enough to inform me whether you are familiar with the contents of this envelope which has just been sent to me from your office, and which both of you have initialed.” He indicated a thin brown packet which they both instantly recognized with sickness of heart; it contained the advance copy of Father Stanfield’s forthcoming sermon, which, after many weeks of innocuousness following the blast against New York women, they had recently ceased troubling themselves to read. Although they had signified on the outside, as a matter of routine, that the envelope had passed through their hands, they knew no more of its contents than if it had been Aristotle’s lost book on comedy. With some stammering, and a trembling giggle from Grovill, they conveyed as much to their interrogator.

  The author hastily drops an opaque, soundproof curtain, to spare his audience the five tedious minutes that follow. Once at a military camp I heard a pallid young chaplain preaching against Harshness to Inferiors. He grew very warm and shouted that on the Day of Judgment bullies would be counted with murderers, for, he declared, “Humiliation is murder reversed–the spirit is killed, but the body must live on in pain.” This oversensitive reverend would have found the present proceedings behind our curtain dreadful instead of merely repetitious and noisy, and he might even have fallen into the error of pitying the two advertisers instead of Marquis, who was surely much the worst off of the three, suffering so very acutely as he was at this time from an absence of Being where Being should be. In our era of scanty philosophy such sentimental mistakes are inevitable. At any rate, the curtain rises again. The soap man must have concluded his reproof.

  The ivory paper cutter lay snapped into fragments on the desk. Grovill was muddy-faced and shivering, and Leach was staring straight ahead out of sunken eyes, his lips drawn so tightly as to be invisible. Marquis was picking up his telephone.

  “Get me Father Stanfield,” he shouted, and hung up. The telephone rang at once, and he snatched it up with an oath. Evidently the puzzled operator asked him to repeat his order, for he ground his teeth audibly, slammed down the receiver and turned the key on his little interoffice talking box. “Rousseau!” he said, and, after waiting three seconds without receiving an answer, be picked the box off the desk, smashed it on the floor, ran to the door, opened it and shrieked, “Rousseau!” The pink Princeton boy seemed to spring up through the floor. Marquis desired the presence of the telephone operator in his office. Rousseau scurried off to obey, and Marquis, going back to his desk, threw the envelope toward the advertising men and suggested that they do what they were paid to do and had pretended to do. Leach picked up the packet silently and examined the contents, Grovill reading over his shoulder. Meanwhile, Rousseau reappeared followed by a white-faced, skinny girl with a set of headphones clutched in two rigid hands. Marquis began a vivid lecture on the uselessn
ess of stupidity in the business world, which should have improved the young lady’s character; but his colorful diction unluckily persuaded her into a fit of hysterics, so that the moral point was obscured, and she was led off from the interview by Rousseau, very little edified, in tears, and unemployed. While this interesting incident was going forward, the advertising men finished reading the fatal manuscript, with drawn faces. The weeping operator on her way out stumbled into Van Wirt, who entered with a cheery briskness that congealed into gloom under the chill greetings of Grovill and Leach. Marquis slouched silently, not looking at anyone for perhaps two minutes, then snapped over his shoulder at the fidgeting Van Wirt, “Where’s young Reale?” To this propitious cue, our hero himself walked bravely upon the scene.

  At his appearance Marquis brightened so visibly that the Situation promised to lapse into an Albert. He asked everybody to sit down so that they might work out the crisis calmly (for the three men had been standing like aged schoolboys since their arrival) and then he proceeded to tell Andrew of the dreadful thing that had happened.

  Father Stanfield, it developed, proposed to deliver as his weekly radio address, in his own version, nothing else than Michael Wilde’s libelous Oration Against Advertising! Every word of that tirade had evidently gone down into the crucible of the preacher’s mind, there to be rendered molten by indignation and recast in his own mold–so Andrew surmised as be leafed rapidly through the manuscript. There, couched in Stanfield’s shrewdly affected bumpkin style, were all the heterodox impertinences which the painter had inflicted on Marquis’s dinner guests, simmered down to a ten-minute sermon and entitled “The Hog in the House.” The stoutest champions know discouraged moments: Hercules must have felt, when he saw the Hydra merrily grow two heads where he had just sliced off one, much as Andy Reale did when his eye first fell on “The Hog in the House.”

  “Now then,” exclaimed Mr. Marquis, glancing imperiously at his four partisans, “I want action, and I want plenty of it and I want it now.” He emphasized the word “now” by slamming down his palm as though time were a beetle scuttling across the desk which he meant to squash in its tracks. His hearers at once assumed the appearance of men planning plenty of instantaneous action. Grovill voiced a suggestion which came swiftly, whatever its defects. “I’m sure,” he said with a hopeful rising giggle, “that Father Stanfield can be persuaded to tone down his remarks. I’ll be happy to make the necessary representations–”

  “Tone down?” bawled Marquis, breaking in half a cigar he was preparing to light. “Am I entirely surrounded by stupid idiots? Do you suppose I will permit a word of that communistic subversion to be uttered on my program? Do you suppose that the Republic Broadcasting Company will permit it to go out over their facilities? Hey, Van Wirt?” he demanded, turning on the network’s man, “Would your company countenance such a thing?”

  Mr. Van Wirt replied, with the exploring hesitancy of a man on fresh ice, that he was reasonably certain that in view of established company policies which he did not make but which he fully endorsed, his personal opinion was that he could not see how Chet could be made to see it. All present knew that by “Chet” Mr. Van Wirt referred to Chester Legrand, the remote and ultimate luminary of the RBC galaxy of executives. The sales manager, being of the correct pay grade to do so, referred to him by his first name with pious scrupulousness. If Chet could not be made to see a thing, it ceased to exist for all the souls in the Republic Broadcasting Company; in much the same way, most educated men will reject the existence of what the highest scientific authorities declare they cannot observe.

  “— – - ——,” cried Mr. Marquis (no matter how the veracity of this scene is lessened, the author will not expose his readers to the rigors of the Marquis vocabulary; even though the United States Supreme Court has ruled that impolite words under certain conditions may become Art). “— – - ——, do I have to wait for Chet Legrand to tell me how to run my programs?” He plunged at the telephone. “Get me Father Stanfield–Father Stanfield!” he blasted into the instrument, and hung it up.

  “Mr. Marquis.” The voice was the voice of Andrew Reale, dulcet as the hum of heavy honey bees amid orange blossoms. “I should like to make a suggestion, if a youngster may.” Marquis consented with something like graciousness. “I have often wished,” proceeded our hero, “that I had your forcefulness of manner and your direct way of speaking. It’s the mark of an executive. It gets things done. What a pity that we’re dealing with a religious fanatic who doesn’t understand or appreciate a business man who talks business! I hate to say it, but I really think that an easygoing underling like myself is the best kind of person to approach Stanfield, because I have the patience to put up with enough of his nonsense to get my point across, while a real man of business tends to break off a conversation if it isn’t conducted a certain way. I can be the velvet glove, conveying but concealing the iron hand of your policy. It’s merely a suggestion. I may be all wrong.”

  “You’re much too modest, Reale,” spoke up Leach, his face twitching. “T.M., I urge you to do as he says. He did a brilliant job of selling Stanfield originally. He can handle him.” The other men made vague approving noises. Marquis grumbled that as long as he got action, plenty of it, and now, he did not care how it was gotten, and if Reale wanted to talk to Stanfield he would not object, as it was certainly no pleasure to his taste. The telephone rang. Andrew Reale looked at Marquis, who nodded at him, whereupon he slid his chair to the desk and picked up the receiver.

  “Good afternoon, Father Stanfield, this is Andrew Reale,” he said. “I’m calling from Mr. Marquis’s office. Mr. Grovill, Mr. Leach and Mr. Van Wirt are here. We’re just talking about the sermon you sent us. … Yes, we certainly did enjoy it. All of us agree it’s the wittiest thing we’ve read in ages. It’s only a pity that it’s too good. I mean, too good for radio. Oh, there’s nothing we’d enjoy more than to put it over the air, but some things are impossible. You see, Mr. Marquis doesn’t own the microphones, the broadcasting people do, and they’re awfully humorless about criticism of advertising. They’d simply withdraw their facilities from Mr. Marquis’s use, even if he were to insist on the sermon. … Oh, I assure you he thinks it’s amusing and charming–”

  The telephone was snatched out of his hand by Marquis, whose face was now the color of ripe grapes. “Hello, Stanfield,” he said. “This is Marquis. That so-called sermon is impossible. I’d appreciate seeing another one on my desk at this time tomorrow. I’ll send young Reale down to get it. Any further discussion is ill advised. No new sermon, no Faithful Shepherd hour Sunday night. I’m a busy man, forgive me. Reale will handle the details. Good-by.”

  In the silent room, the jar of the receiver in its cradle sounded like the breaking of an expensive vase. Marquis looked around at his followers, his lips tight in a smile of self-appreciation. “Only way for me to get the kind of action I want, when I want it and how I want it is to get it myself,” he declared. “This meeting is over. Reale, you may have to charter a plane. Submit your expense account to Grovill and Leach. Bring the new sermon here at three P.M. tomorrow. I’d like you others here, too, at that time. Good day.”

  The four men availed themselves of theft dismissal quickly and without words. As they went out, the pink Mr. Rousseau went in with a sheaf of papers, passing them with a very white smile. He was much too young to be palsied, and the agitated rustling of his papers could only have been part of a general similitude of briskness which Mr. Marquis exacted of all his inferiors on pain of thunderbolt dismissal.

  Seldom had Andrew Reale looked with heavier heart out of the window of his high, handsome apartment on Central Park South than when he was hastily packing for this airplane trip to West Virginia. The green oblong of the park seemed filmed over with dust, and the air currents twenty-five stories above the streets brought no relief from the choking heat. New York was a stone oven, slowly baking its inhabitants. The one pleasant aspect of this dispiriting errand, it seemed to him, was that
he was leaving the city.

  He had hardly closed the door of his apartment, valise in hand, when he heard the telephone; but, having not a moment to spare, he stepped into the elevator and was gone. The bell jingled, and jingled, and jingled, and became discouraged and stopped. A few minutes later a page boy hung the operator’s message on the doorknob, as the custom was, and departed. Andrew had done well not to wait, for it was an unimportant message, requiring no briskness and promising neither advantage nor pleasure. The note read, “Laura Beaton called.”

  CHAPTER 19

  In which the reader will begin to suspect

  that the author is not quite so artless as he seems,

  and that the most minor characters in the history,

  such as Milton Jaeckel, are indispensable to it.

  CERVANTES, in his preface to the book of books (this side of Holy Writ, of course) heaps red coals of satire on pedantry that should scorch, to this day, the skins of some writers. Lest anyone think I have neither read nor taken to heart that lesson, I say here (being minded of it by the reference, in the last chapter, to Aristotle) that I do not expect the kindest critic to mistake such scraps of learning for scholarship. Every author is entitled to take his hobby-horse for a brief canter now and then; mine is a partiality toward the ancients among whose useless works I like to wander like an ignorant tourist in the Acropolis. My quotations are snapshots of ruins among which I have idled away too many hours. Excepting scholars, for whom it is a matter of bread and butter, no practical man should concern himself with a word written on any subject prior to seven years ago: or whatever date is prescribed in the statute of limitations on money agreements: and I mention this to warn away from the practice any young readers who may regard as an accomplishment what is nothing but a moony eccentricity.