The Celebrity

by Laura Z. Hobson

  Thorn watched him run down the typed schedule sheets, checking off one, then another, then another entry. After nine check marks, Zoring Smith looked up. “Do you think you’d be ready to tackle a New York City audience by the end of August? In, let’s say, the Waldorf-Astoria?”

  Thorn jumped. “Good Lord, the Waldorf!”

  “The Grand Ballroom, about a thousand people. It’s a special function and it’s hard to book speakers out of season like that.”

  “A thousand people?” Thorn quailed. But hadn’t he proved he could face an audience anywhere? A thousand people applauding at once—

  “It would be a shame to waste Miss Goodwyn on Kingston,” Zoring Smith said gently.

  Early that same morning, when Thorn had phoned Cindy about being kept in town all weekend, damn it, on important business, he had also informed her of Gregory’s and Abby’s sudden choice of Wyoming for their vacation. Both pieces of information had made Cindy snap with annoyance. It was turning into a terrible summer.

  It’s all right for Thorn, she had thought. He’s busy every second; he doesn’t have to sit around this awful beach and talk to these awful middle-class people and wish something would happen. Something does happen to him all the time; everything that happens to Gregory’s book Thorn takes over bodily and makes it happen to him too. And it’s only right that he should. I suppose Gregory and Abby never admit how much of The Good World’s success is due to Thorn. If he hadn’t sold it to pictures and there hadn’t been all those months of exciting movie publicity all over the country, publication day might have been a mighty different affair.

  This wifely defense of Thorn, coming on the heels of wifely resentment, confused Cindy. She looked around at the beach, then at the two women who had plopped down beside her the moment she had arrived, and she thought of the month she had spent with the greatest movie stars in the world. Pain pierced her and though she had barely been out doors for twenty minutes, she made vague excuses and returned to the house.

  The house was more awful and middle-class than the beach. Three years ago when they had first come out to Quogue for the summer, the rented Cape Cod cottage had seemed colorful and charming; now the varnished rattan furniture and glassy cretonnes chilled her blood. Their apartment in New York was inane too. Gloria’s apartment, Georgia’s, Gracia’s, the house in Freeton—how different they were, how dismally, sadly remote from the great dramatic places of Beverly Hills and Brentwood!

  A heavy thump-thump slapped at her ears and she glanced toward the kitchen. She had screamed at Hulda about those bare feet; Hulda would listen stolidly and slide into the broken-down sandals she had stepped out of in the middle of the kitchen floor. Two minutes after Cindy left, the naked, thump-thump would start once more.

  This was the last summer for Quogue.

  Other summers, Thorn always came out on Thursday evenings for long weekends. Now that was unheard of, and every other Friday the phone would ring and before she picked it; up she would know. Next week Jill Goodwyn was arriving—a preliminary anguish squeezed Cindy’s vitals. She went outside once more and sank onto a weather-beaten canvas hassock.

  The heat, the implacable heat! Right on the beach, ten o’clock in the morning, and there was no stir of air, nothing but this stationary choking heat. If only she were going to Wyoming too! The boys were still asleep; they might as well stay asleep around the clock for all the companionship she got out of them this summer. Beachcombers by day, the town beaus by night, they had become as impossible as their father.

  I need a facial, Cindy thought, or a new dress.

  She was suddenly seeing Magnin’s and Saks in Beverly Hills. “Mrs. Thornton Johns, isn’t it?” Again an anguish gripped her. In New York, it hadn’t been so galling a comedown; at places like the Stork, it still meant something to be Mrs. Thornton Johns. She was perfectly sure she could get in at the Stork now even if she went without Thorn.

  She glanced at her watch. With that endless drive, lunch in town was out, but she could shop in air-conditioned stores during the afternoon, go to the Stork with Thorn or somebody for cocktails, and spend the night at the apartment. A new dress would help; just getting away from this blaze of hot sand would help.

  She went inside to the telephone and called Thorn back. His reply merely stiffened her resolution; let him have business appointments right through the afternoon and evening, if that’s what he really had. Men were so naive; they expected their wives to believe every single thing they told them, never, realizing that even wives who weren’t taken-in at all might decide on compromise rather than showdown, provided enough was at stake. What fool would give up everything Thorn had won for himself this year, and the larger things Thorn was moving toward?

  Cindy put in a call to Fran Hathaway; Fran was just as bored with Stamford as she was with Quogue and most certainly could meet her by four-thirty. They could have drinks, an early dinner, perhaps an early movie, and if Cindy did decide to drive back tonight, it wouldn’t be too awfully late for her. Cindy thought, If not a new dress, a new hat, and I’ll wear it to the Stork.

  A pumping energy sustained Lucinda Johns through the long slow trip; it carried her through eleven try-ons in Ready-to-Wear Millinery at Bergdorf Goodman and through six try-ons in Ready-to-Wear Millinery at Saks Fifth Avenue, at which point a click of recognition told her she had found a love of a hat. It was early for black velvet, but her rough caramel straw was poison. She adjusted the triple mirrors on the small table at which she sat, and studied her left and right profiles. The sweep of blue-green coq feathers at one side really was dashing. “I’ll wear it,” she said. “You can send my old one.”

  “Is it a charge?”

  Cindy nodded carelessly. She didn’t like this salesgirl, a mousy, studious old maid, with bifocals. “Mrs. Thornton Johns,” Cindy said to the pad in the girl’s hand. The hand went on nipping carbons between the sales checks, and a tiny geyser of anger erupted in Cindy’s heart. Obviously this creature never read Leonard Lyons or Danton Walker or even Winchell.

  “What was the name?” the salesgirl asked.

  Cindy paused. Had the last bill been corrected, as per written request, to Mrs. Thornton Johns, or had it still been addressed to Mrs. G. T. Johns?

  “Mrs. G. T.—” Cindy began. The pencil waited. Through the upper half of the bifocals, the enlarged eyes looked up bulbously. “Now please don’t get it confused with Mrs. Gregory Johns,” Cindy said. “It’s—”

  The pencil jerked away from the pad. “Gregory Johns? Are you related to Gregory Johns the author?”

  “He’s my brother-in-law.” Cindy glanced once more at her left profile under the iridescent sheen of the feathers. “And we are forever getting each other’s bills. Mrs. G. T. Johns; better put down Mrs. Thornton Johns too. The account is being changed over.”

  “Oh, Mrs. Johns, I’m a real bookworm, and I just can’t tell you what a thrill—”

  Cindy interrupted to give the address. The mousy one went on gabbling; Cindy signed the sales check, nodded in farewell, and left. As the elevator doors slid silkily open, she thought, A new hat always does set you up; no wonder I feel better.

  Gregory Johns’ suggestion about Wyoming, as a solution to the family vacillation between Canada and the Cape, had come one blistering afternoon after Abby had lost her temper at a watermelon.

  It was only half a watermelon, and even before she had tried to fit it into the icebox, a sense of impending disaster had threatened her all day. The mailman had brought nineteen more letters from readers and for the first time Gregory had looked at them with lackluster eyes. “Eight hours a day for me, and four hours a day for you, for over two months,” he had said. “We’re never going to get back to normal, and I’m never going to get back to my manuscript.” She had asked if the time had not come to call a halt on answering readers, and he had curtly replied it had not.

  For three weeks the temperature had never dropped below ninety except for a couple of hours before dawn. There were alm
ost daily scenes with Hat about extra money for clothes, about a larger allowance for everything, about why she couldn’t stay out as much as she liked in the evening, now that she had made all her grades at Hunter and was supposed to be having a vacation and some fun before starting Vassar.

  The search for an apartment also had precipitated two or three quarrels with Hat, the latest one that very morning. “I saw the most divine apartment yesterday,” Hat said, as Abby started wearily on the real estate ads once more. “Pat and I were passing this new building going up on Fifth Avenue and we stopped to look at the floor plans pasted on a window. The renting agent came out and I told him who I was and he took us right up in the workmen’s elevator. There’s only one apartment left—it has a terrace running around three sides of it—”

  “I suppose,” Abby said, “you didn’t ask what the rent was.”

  Hat looked at her mother pityingly. “None of the good buildings going up on Park or Fifth are for rent. They’re all co-operatives—you buy the apartment. This has six rooms and is just divine.”

  Abby’s irritation over this had revived her irritation over last night’s episode about the car. Hat had been learning to drive, and it was inevitable that sooner or later she would ask to go out in it alone, without Gregory. At dinner last night, with Patrick once more the family guest, Hat had suddenly said, “Look, I know won’t be allowed to drive this year, but Pat has a license.”

  “I’ve had one for eight years,” Pat said.

  “Couldn’t we go out for some air?”

  It was clear Hat was not suggesting a family drive. Refusal would have been so revealing, and so difficult for modern parents to defend; in the presence of Pat, discussion had been stilted and surface-thin. “Well, be home by ten, please.”

  And then, by ten-thirty, the resentment at disobedience; by eleven, the intrusive unwelcome visions of what they might be doing; by eleven-thirty, the terror of a smashup. To have the pair of them blandly explain, at midnight, how they had taken the wrong turn off the Speedway and driven for miles along the Belt Parkway—

  Abby had waked this morning, still roiled, and found herself remembering it off and on all day, angry each time. But it was the watermelon that pulped her remaining self-control. The fact that it was only half a watermelon, by some secret mathematical logic of her own, had quadrupled her rage. Properly iced in the market’s ceiling-high vault, it was guaranteed to remain cold until dinner, and she had carried it home eagerly at five o’clock, a magnificent coolness in her wilted arm. Thirty minutes later, she had looked at it suspiciously on the kitchen table, rolled back the cellophane over its pink flesh, touched it with a forefinger, and even spooned out and tasted a round chunk of it. Then she had taken it to the old icebox and opened the door.

  A strawberry couldn’t have been fitted in anywhere.

  Suddenly Abby wheeled, took the watermelon in both hands, and hurled it at the sink. Her aim was bad. The pink fruit splattered all over the wall. Whereupon Abby did something she had not done in ten years. She ran to her bed, threw herself down upon it, and sobbed.

  When Gregory came, she tried to joke about being an actress in a B production, with B production sobs, but she only wept the harder. Gregory had heard the squashy thump, and in a moment he left her to investigate. The watermelon had rolled halfway across the floor, leaving a slippery wet track; a good deal of its flesh clung to the rough plaster wall. He found a pancake turner, scraped off the wall, retrieved the watermelon, and dampened a kitchen towel, which he used indiscriminately on plaster and linoleum. Then he returned to his wife.

  “Three weeks at the Cape or in Canada in August always was a silly idea,” he said. “I want to go somewhere that’s too far away for mail, the telephone, the Sunday papers and visits from Patrick King. Let’s go out to Gwen and Howie.”

  Abby sat up. This time she did behave like the traditional wife. “You mean drive all the way out to Wyoming?”

  “And take Hat. If she won’t come, just make her come.”

  “She’d kill herself rather than miss another big trip. But I wrote Gwen and Howie we couldn’t possibly get anywhere this summer for more than a couple of weeks.”

  “We can write Gwen and Howie and say we can.”

  “But all that way in three weeks?”

  “We’ll make it six weeks.”

  “We just were out West.”

  The telephone rang and Gregory left her. He said, “Hello,” and then nothing for several minutes. “I’ll talk it over with your mother and we’ll see.” He listened once more, and finally said, “Of course you can; he’s always welcome here.”

  Gregory returned and sat on the edge of the bed. “A perfectly respectable weekend at Fire Island,” he said, “staying with somebody named Mike Kellerton, a best friend of Pat’s; Mike Kellerton is having a girl out too, so nobody could be alone very much.”

  Abby rose. “I think I’ll take a deep cool tub for a while.”

  “How soon could we pack, Abby? I’d like to have Hat back for a while, in old clothes, and no dates, and no Mr. King.”

  “Oh, Gregory, so would I.”

  “Let’s write Gwen and Howie now.”

  “Oh, darling, let’s be like Thorn and call them.”

  In the candle-pierced darkness of the outdoor dining-room near the Sound, Thorn thought Diana more beautiful than ever. Driving out, when he had told her about his lecturing contract, she had looked almost happy, but now her eyes were dark and veiled. He wanted to stop talking about himself, but she made that difficult. She couldn’t abandon her new vision of him as a country-wide lecturer.

  “That’s off in the future,” he said. “For the rest of this year, I’ll be too tied to Gregory’s work to accept any big-time tour.”

  “There are plenty of places just overnight from New York.”

  “But it’s the national swings Zoring goes for. He says a real draw can get to clear ten, maybe twenty, thousand dollars on a three or four months’ tour. If I make good, why, maybe by this time next year when our second movie hits the screen, I’ll be trying out the big stuff.” He hadn’t told her a word about the Hathaway-Johns possibility; the time hadn’t come for that, any more than the time had come to tell Zoring Smith about it. Nor to tell Hathaway about Zoring Smith.

  Diana looked at the tablecloth. “Even this year, you’ll be gone from the office so much.”

  Here it is, Thornton Johns thought, the perfect opening, and I’m as tongue-tied as a kid. No light turn of phrase came to him; it never did any more with Diana. But he couldn’t go mawkish and heavy either. “You’re not pretending you’d miss me?”

  “Oh, I did miss you when you were on the Coast.”

  “You might have missed having a proper boss; you didn’t miss me.” She looked up at him and then away. “You’ve probably got some handsome young man in your life who keeps you from missing anybody. For all I know, you’ll be getting married one of these days.”

  “Oh, no, I’m not marrying anybody, ever.”

  “Di,” he said, and covered her hand with his. “You’re unhappy—you’ve been unhappy so long.”

  “Yes, I have.” She drew her hand back, and clasped it with her other.

  “Can’t you tell me? We’re friends, we’ve been friends.”

  She shook her head, and fumbled for a cigarette. She never smoked in the office; only when they had dined together or gone driving in the car had he ever seen her smoking. A dread of next week suddenly came into his heart; Jill was brilliant, glorious, a triumph of a woman, but she was spoiled, imperious. Diana was a girl, a soft lovely girl, who demanded nothing, who suffered in secret, a girl he could make happy.

  “There’s nothing wrong about confiding in a friend, Diana,” he said. “I can’t go on, day after day, seeing you so sad, trying to guess what it is.”

  “Seeing me?” She turned to him. “You’ve known it all along?”

  For answer he took her hand into both of his. “Of course. And now you’re going to
tell me about it.” He hesitated. “I think I have the right to know.”

  She glanced down and her lips parted. She was wearing green silk, so dark it was nearly black. It was cut into a deep V, closely fitted, discreet. Her throat was beautiful and suddenly Thorn wanted to be kissing it—he had never felt this about Diana before; for months and months he hadn’t felt this about anybody.

  “I am unhappy,” she said slowly, “and why wouldn’t I be?”

  He waited. In the flickering light from the hurricane lamp, shadows moved across her lips. They seemed to be trembling. He wanted to kiss them too. His heart began to pound.

  “Wouldn’t you be unhappy,” she went on, “if you were—”

  “Were?”

  “Were hopelessly in love with somebody who’s married and isn’t the kind to get a divorce?”

  Thorn’s breath caught. Hopelessly in love. Hopelessly, steadily, unchangingly in love, tormented by the secret of that love, brave with the secret, unwilling to reveal it until he had forced the revelation from her. A wild longing came, to be young, free, not to have the boys, not to have Cindy.

  “How long,” he said gently, “have you felt this way, Diana?”

  “Oh, forever.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” Perhaps, for a while, she could be content with his love alone; perhaps for a year or two more, until the boys were out of school, Diana and he could find in each other—“Why didn’t you tell me?” he repeated.

  “It seems like ‘forever,’ anyway,” she said. “Ever since the first day I met him in the office.”

  “Met him?”

  “Since before I met him,” she whispered. “When you told me he was a client, I nearly died. I’d always been in love with him, just listening to him on the air, and when he came in that day and. you said, ‘Diana, this is Roy Tribble—’ ” She squeezed her eyelids shut and tore her handkerchief out of her bag.

  For this brief respite from observation, Thornton Johns thanked God.