by John Dunning
Harford brought up the surf effect and smiled at her over the table. “Just talk about who you are. What you love. There’s no way you can mess this up. All right . . . coming up now.”
Later she would tell them she couldn’t remember half of it. Harford began asking questions, and the answers she gave were the real ones, out of her life. She was a farm girl from California. Her dad owned a bee ranch. She had six brothers and all of them had come of age in the late twenties on their father’s bee farm near Bakersfield.
They talked radio but Harford steered her clear of her own involvement and let her speak as a listener. She thought radio was mostly junk, with flashes of quality and moments of unquestionable brilliance. Like any other art ruled by popular culture, Harford said, and she agreed. She thought the best show on the air was Vic and Sade, a quiet little quarter hour hidden away among the daytime soap shows. She listened to One Man’s Family because it reminded her so much of her own people. Her father fussed like old Barbour and her big brother had frequent battles of authority with the old man on questions of discipline and faith. The concept of a large family would soon pass out of favor, Harford said—“After all, there are a hundred and thirty million of us now”—and she agreed that the postwar world would come upon them with a rapidly expanding and increasingly unruly populace. A terrifying thought, Harford said, and she nodded soberly. “Gloria nods,” he said for her, grinning broadly. “She forgets where she is. The specter of the future leaves her speechless.”
But the specifics of the bee culture were still at her fingertips, fourteen years after she’d left home. She remembered it all—the chores, the hours that never seemed to end when she’d been living them but now seemed so essential to the woman she had become. The image of that farm infused her dreams with color and gave her an almost mythic sense of loss. But you couldn’t go back. No, Harford offered: Wolfe had it right. “I’ve never read him,” Livia said, “but he does sound like a wise man. If you try to go home, you see that what you went back for isn’t there anymore. It left when you did.”
“Were you afraid of the bees? Did they scare you?”
She laughed and blushed. “Not half as much as you do with your microphone and your questions. I’ve had bees all over me and never got stung.”
Her first job in the East had been in an amusement park. “I was the one in the fun house who went into the revolving drum to help all the clumsy people who couldn’t get out by themselves. Then they put me on the air jets that blew the women’s dresses up. I was good at that, much better than the boys. They were always too eager to turn on the air.”
Lots of laughs. She was easier now about being on.
“How many children are you and Gloria going to have, Jack?”
“Oh, maybe a dozen.”
“Dream on, cowboy,” she said, and they all laughed.
He asked her opinion of Steinbeck but she had never read him. “Mostly what I read are the Victorians.”
Victor Hugo was her favorite writer; The Man Who Laughs her best-loved book. Harford was touched. “That’s a book I’ve loved as well. But I’ll bet you won’t find one person in ten thousand who’s read it.”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. The hero’s predicament has always appealed to me. Something about the hideous face and the tender heart never fails to move me to tears.”
( ( ( 18 ) ) )
HARFORD disappeared at once as the hour ended. He shook Livia’s hand, then Jordan’s, and hurried to the stairwell.
“What on earth do you make of that?” she said.
“I don’t know. I guess we’re radio stars now.”
They walked along the hall together. He asked if she’d be free for lunch. “There’s something I’d like to talk to you about.”
“Can’t today. I’m juggling my kids all day, and Maurice has me hopping this afternoon and tomorrow. Look, you’re coming to my house tomorrow—come early and we can talk then.”
Back in his cubicle he tried to work, but Harford’s voice lingered in his mind and the question was always the same.
At noon Becky Hart called, summoning him downstairs. When he arrived he found Holly sitting in her office.
“Jordan, do you know Miss O’Hara? I’m this close to having her convinced about our war bond show next week. We’re all going to lunch and I need you to come up with the final irrefutable argument.”
Jordan could get no sense of what Holly wanted. He wavered.
“I think I’d better pass. Got way too much work to do.”
“The station’s buying. You won’t hear that every day of the week.”
“I guess I’m doubly cursed.”
“At least keep Miss O’Hara company while I go find Dedrick.”
They were suddenly alone. Holly looked back at the door and her eyes moved around the room.
“So . . . Jordan . . . what kind of writing do you do here?”
He told her again what he’d told her yesterday.
“Will you be writing Mr. Maitland’s show?”
“I’ll probably work on it. Nobody’s said anything yet. But it doesn’t take long to put something like this together.”
“You sound like an old hand at it. I suppose it takes years to learn.”
“It’s not very complicated. All I write is, ‘Miss O’Hara sings the national anthem,’ and you do the rest.”
He sat with his back to the wall and opened his notebook as if writing the sketch now. What he wrote was the note CALL ME EXT. 13. He put the open notebook on the desk facing her and waited while she read what he’d written. Then he snapped it shut.
Becky appeared in the doorway with Maitland at her side. There was a warm exchange of courtesies. Maitland said, “It’s so good of you to reconsider,” and Holly said, “Becky is relentless . . . but let’s see how I sound in the audition.” This afternoon she would sing to a recorded backdrop in Studio B. Stoner would cut a disc, then they’d all sit around and talk it over. But her success was a foregone conclusion. “You are going to be sensational in this,” Maitland said.
Jordan walked them to the outer door and Maitland told him to be thinking of other pieces Holly could sing within the hour. “Real Americana, stuff from the heartland. She’s going to be the voice of this show, she’s going to carry it, so see what you can come up with. In your spare time.”
Becky laughed. “No rest for the weary, Jordan.”
And on that note they left.
( ( ( 19 ) ) )
HE was early the next afternoon for the party at Livia’s. Her house was far up at the north end of the island, beyond the end of the road. He parked in a little circle of trees and followed a path down to the beach. The only house in sight was a rambling cabin of uncertain age with add-on rooms that looked to have been built by different hands at different times. The house was ringed by a sun-bleached slatboard fence and was brought to life by the smoke coming from the chimney pipe in the roof. Livia’s dilapidated car was parked to one side and he could still see the tracks in the sand where she’d driven up the beach on the outgoing tide. In the distance he saw two boys running along the edge of the surf in a futile effort to get a tiny kite airborne.
He walked up to the porch and she swept him into a room smelling of glorious food cooking. It was indeed a rustic place, with a few small rooms gathered around the original one-room cabin and a partition separating the living and eating areas. In the kitchen, Evie Overdier was minding an ancient wood-burning stove. “Laura Leaf is cooking for us,” Livia said.
“Just don’t think of touching anything,” Evie said. “In fact, why don’t you two take a hike up the beach?”
So they walked, following her boys up the wild beach toward the windswept point. At last they were alone and the thing had to be said. He couldn’t let her get the wrong idea, but almost at once she began making small talk, as if they’d found themselves in a lull on a first date. She probed cautiously—where have you been, where are you going, who were your people?—then asked the
first big question. “Ever been married?”
This was not going well. Now he felt obliged to inquire politely about her own ill-fated marriage.
“Blame it on the ignorance of youth,” she said. “But two great things came out of it. I’ve got the world’s most wonderful children.”
“Then you’re lucky it happened, no matter how it turned out.”
“Don’t worry, I know that. He was the bum of the year, but look what we made together. Someday you’ll experience that—only the good part, I hope—and then you’ll know.”
“I won’t count on it. I never had much luck with women.”
“Luck’s got nothing to do with it. All it is is chemistry.”
“But chemistry’s got to work both ways, so we’re back to luck again.”
She sighed. “Yeah, you’re right. I can’t tell you how many times I thought the chemistry was wonderful. But in the end the luck wasn’t there.”
He cleared his throat. “Listen, I’ve got to tell you something. I’ve been hoping we could talk.”
She didn’t know if she should be playful or wary. He pushed ahead, hoping for the best. “I heard you knew a man named Carnahan.”
She stopped and looked at him coolly.
“It turns out I knew the same fellow,” he said quickly. “At first I wasn’t sure, but the more I heard about him . . . I knew him a long time ago in New York. We were good friends. Talked, shot a lot of pool, read the same books. Then lost track. But he was one of those special people in my life and I always wondered where he went.”
“I thought you came here looking for Kendall.”
“I did. That’s what surprised me, that another old friend had been here too. Worked at the same radio station and one day left without telling anybody anything. Just like Kendall.”
“Not quite like Kendall. Carnahan didn’t drink.”
She was clearly unhappy with this line of talk. He had expected that. People wouldn’t all open up like Mrs. Flack.
She began to walk again. Far ahead, her boys had given up the kite and were coming back toward them.
“So. What brought you to me?”
“Just that I heard you were friends.”
“Who’d you hear that from?”
“Just here and there. You know how people talk.”
“What do you want to know? . . . was I sleeping with him, that kind of thing?”
He gave her a long look that said she should know better.
“But what else can I tell you? I don’t know where he is.”
“Let’s forget it. I can see you don’t want to talk about it.”
“I just get so goddamned mad when people gossip. We went to great lengths to keep it quiet. But they find out and talk about us anyway.”
“I shouldn’t’ve brought it up.”
“It’s not you, it’s everyone in this screwed-up world. I don’t find it easy to talk about. It was the very same experience we were just discussing—great chemistry, rotten luck. So much for me as a romantic philosopher.”
He waited but what came next was a turnabout. She wanted to hear about the Carnahan he had known, so he told her about the long talks, the book hunting on Fourth Avenue, and Carnahan’s gradual transformation to a father figure. Occasionally she’d smile and he knew he’d touched something true; or she’d laugh softly and say, “Yup, that’s him all over.” She stared at the surf swirling at their feet, as if she could see the faint outline of a picture in the soup: the battered hat and the easy way, the hard hands, the gentle spirit, and in the sea those bottomless eyes that had seen a thousand years of hardship.
Her kids arrived, ending the talk. There was a year between them, though Jason, the younger, was as tall as Jeremy and apparently had been born with an inexhaustible supply of energy. Jordan suggested a lighter tail for their kite, some paper-thin cotton rag with just enough body to steady the stern, and suddenly they were off again, racing toward the house to see what they could find. “Stay out of that storeroom!” Livia yelled, but they ran on. “They’re fascinated with that room,” she told Jordan. “They’ll use almost any excuse to go in there because it’s the one place I don’t let them play. I throw everything in there, but there are some things they shouldn’t see. Messy stuff from my divorce. It’s bad enough they had to lose their father, they don’t need to know what a bad man he was. I guess I should throw that stuff out. Someday I will. What’s the use of having it—except that it’s part of your life.”
By then Brinker and Rue had arrived, driving up the beach to the front gate. Rue was taking some things out of the car, and in the distance he saw Stoner’s truck just turning onto the beach. The subject of Carnahan was for the moment dropped. “There are only three commandments at these things,” Livia said. “Eat, drink, and be merry.”
They called themselves the Goodfellows because, as Livia explained it, they were all on the right side in the battle between money and art. Tonight, he knew, there would be intense discussions on possible ideas for the air, but it began with gossip and socializing. Stoner had brought the week’s Beachcomber, just off the press. The editor had taken notice of Peter Schroeder with a short piece, boxed in the lower right corner of page one. The headline was provocative—SECOND GERMAN YOUTH GONE WITHOUT TRACE FROM WHAR— and there was a fleeting reference to the German angle in the text. The links between Peter and George Schroeder were told in a line. They were first cousins: Peter had come here in the mid-thirties with the Schroeders as his sponsors.
“He was like George, only more outgoing,” Stoner said. “Not as good an engineer but okay. He got his work done.”
“It doesn’t say here if he’d gotten his papers,” Jordan said.
“He told me he’d taken the oath in thirty-eight. I never had any reason to doubt him.”
“What about his family in New York? Did anyone ever ask if they knew where he went?”
“I did, at the funeral,” Rue said. “They have no idea where he is.”
“Yeah, right,” said Evie, who had come to the door. “Like they’d tell any of us anything. I think something scared the hell out of him and made him run. Maybe he got a tip Hoover was after him.”
Livia shook her head. “You really think Peter was a spy?”
“Yeah, I do. I never trusted those boys, either one of ’em.”
“Well, I don’t believe it,” Rue said.
The subject changed. Everyone wanted to know about the broadcast Jordan had done with Harford. What was he like? Had he actually put the janitor on cold and had him read the news? How had he gotten Livia to talk, and did he seem addled or deranged? But what they really wanted to know, he couldn’t tell them—what Harford might do next.
“Maybe Becky can tell us,” Rue said. “If she ever gets here.”
“She had to pick up Maitland,” Livia said. “And Maitland asked if he could bring Pauline, so Becky had to stop for her too.”
Rue made a face. “Damn it, Liv, she knows the rules.”
“What was I supposed to do, tell her they aren’t welcome?”
Rue looked at Jordan. “We’re supposed to keep these monthly soirees confined to our own little band of Goodfellows. They are strictly secret—no bosses, no directors to inhibit what we say, no strangers except by acclamation. There was never any question about you, sweetie. You qualified at once, for heroism on the field of volleyball.”
Livia scoffed. “Honestly, Rue, you make us sound like a bunch of snobs. As if someone’s got to qualify for our precious company. She doesn’t mean any of this, Jordan.”
“Liv is right, don’t pay any attention to me, I’m just being difficult. I like Pauline. Maitland too. But let’s face it, this changes things. Maitland isn’t going to be honest with us; we still don’t know why he’s here, and that’s a damper. That’s one thing we all agreed we’d never let in among us. Secrets. Nobody holds back, nobody’s afraid to throw out any half-baked notion that might, with a bit of help from the others, make a decent piece of radio. No Ba
rnets, no holier-than-thou types like Eastman, no Stallworths . . . nobody who won’t answer an honest question when it smacks him right in the mouth.”
“No Poindexters,” Livia said. “I’d rather eat with Hitler.”
“And let’s not forget what happened when Hazel crashed us two months ago. The whole damn evening was ruined.”
“Somehow Hazel found out where we were,” Livia said to Jordan.
“And wandered in, drunk as a skunk,” said Rue. “If you haven’t figured it out by now, Hazel is a very mean drunk. Gus had to take her home and sit with her while she cried in her beer.”
“She really is a tragic character,” Stoner said. “She’s had a hard life and nobody ever asks her anywhere.”
“Hard to imagine, isn’t it?” Rue said. “She’s such a goddamn delight to have around.”
The others arrived twenty minutes later. Becky parked in the trees and they walked up the beach. Maitland ambled and the women walked on either side of him. Pauline looked almost young from a distance and Becky was elfin at Maitland’s right. There was a chorus of hellos as they came into the yard. Pauline embraced Jordan, and Maitland shook his hand warmly. Wine flowed and the early talk was uninhibited enough even for Rue.
At eight o’clock supper was served. Evie had made a rich seafood casserole, which they ate on the beach. Brinker had built a bonfire and they sat around it on folding chairs, talking about the news and what they’d read that month and what could be made of it for the air. Ideas ranged from current affairs to the classic short stories of Guy de Maupassant and Frank Stockton. Stoner thought a modern variation of the old “Lady or the Tiger?” story might work well today, if the theme could be political rather than romantic. “Which door do you choose at the end, and who’s behind it: Christ, or Hitler?” A brilliant idea, Maitland said—“We should really get something down on paper”— and at once Becky put down her plate and began scribbling furiously in a notebook. “It needs to be subtle, don’t you think? . . . until the very end, maybe the final minute, when suddenly you know what the choice is. This is wonderful, Gus!”
