by John Dunning
“I’d like to change Friday’s show.”
“Change it to what?”
“Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Regiment at Battery Wagner.”
Waldo said, “Jesus.” Then, after a moment: “I got no prototype for that.”
“I’d like to fictionalize it anyway. Put everything into two colored foot soldiers from the North. All the prejudice that still exists in our military. I want this story to go beyond what happened and tell what is.”
He knew Waldo understood this concept, they had discussed it often enough. Truth is not always accurate. Accuracy can be a shield to hide from the truth. The best fiction is always truer than fact. You learn more about being on the road in the Depression by reading Steinbeck than from any dull compilation of facts. But Waldo had been raised in the shadow of Jim Crow and he was still afraid of his own best material.
“We can stay on the safe path if that’s what you really want,” Jordan said. “But Kidd has given us his air and I don’t think he expects us to soft-soap anyone. We’ve got an opportunity here to say something that’s never been said, and we can be as militant as we dare to be.”
“I guess I’d better come down there. I do have some stuff you might could use. I’ll be down in the morning.”
By ten o’clock he had a script roughed out. Becky Hart came through and he gave her the six chapters of his Dark Silver serial.
At noon he called down and told Kidd they were changing the story for Friday. “I’ve just read your serial,” Kidd said. “A wonderful piece of work, Jordan, just outstanding. Can you keep it going with all the other stuff you’re doing?”
“The serial’s going by itself now. It doesn’t feel like work at all.”
“All right, if you say so. When can I see the new colored show?”
“I’ll have the first part by the end of the day.”
He worked through the lunch hour and finished at two. Sent the draft up to mimeo. There would probably be a full rewrite when Waldo arrived but for now he needed three copies that caught his concept.
By four o’clock the word was out: he had delivered a full-blown serial with choice parts soon to be cast. Two of the salesmen had had partial mimeos made for potential sponsors, and Kidd wanted an early start, perhaps as soon as a week from Sunday.
His phone began to ring. Rue called: Becky had just read her the last half of chapter one and she was on fire with the daughter. “I’ve got to have her, Jordan, she’s all I can think about.”
Hazel called, wanting the same role. But he had written that for Rue, and he wanted Pauline for the mother. She flew into a rage. “Goddammit, Jordan, this is not fair. You know you’re supposed to hold open auditions. You’ve got no right to play favorites with these continuing roles, they’re too important to us all. What is Rue giving you? Is she good in bed? Christ, you’re just like everybody else. I know you all hate me, I’ve always known that.”
“Nobody hates you, Hazel,” he said, but she had hung up.
This is what a producer does, he thought. Makes a few people happy, breaks a few hearts, makes a few enemies, all in the hopes of coming up with the best mix on the air.
At five o’clock Livia called. “Hey, what are you doing up there? People are talking about you all over the building.”
Suddenly it struck him that he was writing his own ticket at Harford.
At quarter to six he retrieved his Fort Wagner mimeos, left one for Kidd and the others for Zylla and Livia, wrote notes to each about the changes that might yet come and what he thought the script would need in music and sound. He went out to eat alone and was back by seven, sitting in his cubicle in the darkening bullpen. The day ended as it had begun, with a vision of the Doi family. He rolled a sheet of newsprint into his typewriter and put down some thoughts, but it was still not working; it somehow lacked the spontaneous combustion of his other stories. This one’s got two purposes, he thought. Maybe tomorrow his vision would clear.
Behind him the floor creaked. The Woodsman’s ghost, he thought, looking back. The room was black now in all those places where it had just been gray, and the building was virtually empty. His own lamp cast a hazy corona in the middle of the room, and beyond it was the faintest hint of the far hallway. Suddenly he was afraid. He reached over to turn off his lamp—Then we can both be in the dark, he thought—but before he did he saw a movement, and the shadow of a man came into the room.
“Hello, Jack,” said the shadow.
( ( ( 10 ) ) )
THE gaunt figure moved toward the light, then stopped at the edge as if waiting to be invited in. As if I’m the boss and he’s the hand, Dulaney thought. He nodded his greeting and Harford stepped out of the gloom.
“I had a hunch I’d find you here, Jack. You’re always so hard at work, it shames me to think what I’m paying you. How would you like a raise?”
“If you’d like to give me one, sure.”
“I would like that. How does a hundred a week sound to you?”
“Like a helluva generous raise.”
Harford took the final step into the light and sat on a chair in the opposite cubicle. He took off his glasses and his hand shook . . . as if, perhaps beginning that other morning in the studio, he was forcing himself to do something he had always dreaded. Show his face.
“A man should always make what he’s worth, Jack. What you’ve done this month has amazed us all.”
“My name is Jordan. You’ve forgotten, Jack’s just an air name.”
“Still, Jack’s the name I think of when I think of you. Habits can be hard to break.”
“It can’t be too much of a habit. We hardly know each other.”
“Actually, I know quite a bit about you. I’ve even read your book.”
Dulaney kept his face impassive, giving up nothing.
“What I should really do is leave you alone. Let you do your work under any pretext you want to take on. I’m violating one of my deepest beliefs by coming here tonight.”
“What belief is that?”
“Don’t mess with the goose that lays the golden eggs.”
Dulaney faked a laugh.
“You should never tamper with anything that’s going well. But I liked your book, and when you started producing such powerful radio stories . . . well, it became difficult for me not to approach you.”
Dulaney sat stone still, watching. Harford reared back into the shadow and said, “You strike me as a man who’s uncomfortable with gushing praise, and I’m not normally one who gushes. Maybe we should just leave it at that.”
“I’m not sure what it is or where we’re leaving it.”
“It’s whatever you want it to be and we’ll leave it back in your own lap, where it belongs. You can be Jordan for whatever reason and for as long as you like. I’ll shut up and pay the bills.”
An awkward moment passed. Then Harford said, “I had another motive for tracking you down tonight. Would you like to hear it?”
“Sure.”
“It has to do with your friend Miss Carnahan.”
Dulaney felt a prickly sensation in his scalp and along his spine.
“Perhaps we should call her Miss O’Hara, for consistency’s sake.”
Cautiously, Dulaney said, “I do know Miss O’Hara.”
“Don’t get angry when I say this, but I’d hate to have you leave us on her account.”
“Why would I do that?”
“She thinks I’ve harmed her father. Surely you know this. Even if you were not Jack Dulaney you would know it, what with your recent attachment to her. I’m sure she’s told you what she suspects about me. I want you to help me convince her she’s wrong.”
Dulaney said nothing.
“Six months ago she thrust herself into my life. Everywhere I went, she was there. I could have had her arrested, that’s how intense she was. But there was something about her . . .”
They looked at each other.
“I still can’t put my finger on it. But at times she reminds me
. . .”
Harford blinked and shook his head. “Actually there’s no resemblance at all between her and anyone I ever knew. Call it a bad case of my own foolishness. And yet . . . something about her touched me. I can’t explain it, she just got to me. And one thing led to another.”
“What does that mean?”
“Suddenly I wanted to know more about her. Then one morning, I decided that I would find her father.”
His face was far back in the darkness now. His voice floated across the aisle. “My wife always wanted a daughter. Maybe that explains something.”
But if it did, Harford didn’t elaborate. He took a deep breath and went on as if he’d never broken his thought. “I figured if I could find her father, she and I could be friends. Nothing lecherous, I assure you. I’m not quite that foolish.”
He leaned forward into the light. “I thought it would be easy. If you’ve got money you can find anyone, right? So I hired an agency and took the first step. A preliminary report, a list of his old friends that went back several years. Who he might turn to in a time of trouble. One of the people on that list was you, Jack. They even found me a picture. You were standing with a horse at a Florida racetrack.”
Dulaney remembered the picture. He had held the horse for the winner’s circle picture, and the next day it was in the Coral Gables Gazette.
“So that was the agency’s preliminary report,” Harford said. “The next step was obvious: send out investigators and talk to the people on the list.”
“Is that what you did?”
He shook his head. “Suddenly the idea seemed arrogant, intrusive. As if I were investigating her. You can see how she might think that. So I left it alone for the moment, and the moment became weeks. And Miss O’Hara still thinks I’m some kind of monster.”
“If that’s what she thinks, why would you put her on your air?”
“Are you serious? Of course I put her on, I can’t not put her on. Even if there wasn’t this . . . thing about her, I would put her on. The simple answer is, she’s good radio. I’d put Hitler on if he could sing like that.”
He made an impatient gesture with his hands. “Come on, Jack, I know you understand this. You’ve discovered the magic of the air, now you’ve had a taste of it. Sometimes I think I’d barter my soul in pieces for a few perfect hours. My curse is that I have no talent. When I was young I thought I might write. But I soon discovered how bad I was.”
“We’re all bad when we’re young.”
“And some of us will get no better.”
“That’s hard to say. Sometimes it seems like you’re stuck on first base forever. Then you take what the scientists call a quantum jump.”
“So Edison was right, is that what you’re saying?—genius is all work and no play?”
“I don’t think about genius. But there may be something to the notion that a genius is just someone who works harder than the next fellow.”
“No, it’s more than that. You’ve got to have vision, and mine was always out to lunch. My role is to provide the playhouse for those like yourself, who have both the talent and the drive.”
Dulaney smiled. “It’s a great playhouse.”
“It was. And will be again.”
Abruptly Harford stopped rocking in his chair. “Radio is the greatest invention of the past four centuries. It ranks right up there with Gutenberg’s movable type as an earthshaking force. But it’s being trivialized in its frenzy to sell deodorant soap and milk of magnesia.”
“That’s the last thing I’d expect an owner to say.”
“Is it? What if I told you I don’t care if we make money or not?”
“I’d be surprised again.”
“I don’t expect to make any money, not if we do it right. Mr. Kidd despairs when I talk like that. He’s a programming idealist like myself, but he’s still a hard-nosed radio man who thinks we should turn a profit. I know he’ll do his best for me, even though he knows I can lose no end of money and still keep us afloat. I’ve got all the money I’ll ever need, and the life span of my family tends to be short.”
“I guess that’s good, isn’t it?”
Harford laughed. “Goddammit, Jack, I like you. Right away I sensed a kindred spirit, though you yourself may not feel that yet. You were a good novelist but you’re a born radio man. Do you feel that yet?”
“Yes I do. But my name’s not Jack.”
Harford smiled indulgently and didn’t pursue it. “One of the first things Gutenberg did with his movable type was print a magnificent Bible. The first thing radio did was argue how much selling would be permitted and how ridiculous it would be allowed to get. If it keeps on the way it’s going, there won’t be anything worth listening to. Right now it’s full of sacred cows. The agencies are running everything at the network level and it’s getting worse every year. I have this almost morbid fear of the future—not that radio’s greatest days will fade away but that its greatest day will never come. Fifty years from now it could be just a medium of hucksters and fools, a whorehouse in the sky. But what if I can be the one who changes that direction?”
He put on his glasses, as if this speech had made him vulnerable in some vital way. “Why do you think I’m here after all these years? Do you think I enjoy haggling with stupid government bureaucrats in order to justify what I do? Does it begin to get a little clearer now, why I put Miss Carnahan on? She is simply the best thing that’s been heard on my air in years. Never mind why, reasons don’t matter. What Miss Carnahan thinks of me doesn’t matter. Her talent is all that counts. It’s a thrill to present her, her voice is like a bugle call, a wakeup, every time I hear it. How could I not put her on? I’m honored to put her on, for as long as she’ll come sing for me.”
He looked at Dulaney over the glasses. “The same goes for you, Jack. I’ve read your serial. It’s marvelous, I’m sure you know damned well how good it is. It’s the kind of script I hoped to attract, if we’re lucky, two or three years from now. I can’t imagine anyone not listening to it once they’ve heard the first chapter.”
In the light he flushed self-consciously. “I said I wouldn’t gush and here I am gushing. It left me trembling as I read it. Nothing’s really happened yet, the story’s just beginning, but I found myself quaking in its realism. Then Kidd brought me your Civil War Negro script, and nothing you’ve done could have prepared me for that. It’s the strongest thing I’ve ever seen for radio. When I read it I knew I had to come see you.”
“All that time I was thinking maybe it’s too strong.”
“Don’t ever think that. Don’t let the thought ever cross your mind.”
“Hell, it’s always there. We won’t make any friends with that colored show. It’s easy to offend people these days.”
“Then go ahead and offend them. Anyone who takes offense at a play like that ought to be offended. If they complain we’ll offend them again next week. If they challenge my license I’ll fight them.”
He coughed and sat tall in the chair. “Listen to me, Jack. Someday the networks will try to lure you away from me. Then you can start worrying over every word you write. Then you can fret about who might be offended if you’ve got a colored boy being lynched or a good Christian minister cheating on his wife with a teenage girl in the choir. Then you can haggle with the men in the booth, who will always represent the sponsor and will win every battle. But not now. Not here.”
He stood abruptly. Said, “I’ve taken up enough of your time.” As if I’m the boss and he’s the hand, Dulaney thought again. Again Harford became a shadow in the corner of the room. He stood groping with the spirits of the air, a complicated man, wounded and sad. A man who could tremble at a piece of work that would disappear forever the moment it came to life, just as Jack Dulaney had trembled when he’d written it. From the shadows Harford said, “I want to shake the world, Jack,” and Dulaney thought, Damn, so do I. In another moment he might have said as much, but by then the shadow man had gone.
( ( ( 11 )
) )
HIS sleep that night was deep and unbroken, a stretch of more than seven hours filled with dreams. He knew he had dreamed, he always did, but in the first minutes of the new day he seldom remembered any of it. If he spoke to anyone, or engaged his mind with a piece of work, the dream would be lost forever. But if he allowed himself the luxury of a few quiet moments, it would all come back. Always the last dream first, the one closest to his conscious mind. He closed his eyes and there it was: Carnahan, armed only with his hat, leading a charge of Negroes up the blood-soaked sands of Morris Island. In the dream he himself had been black, one of the doomed men of the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts. Behind him, his buddies were charging around the point, forced hip deep into the bloody surf where the marsh pinched the beach tight. A hurricane of musket fire poured down from the fort and the boys began to drop into the water. What a surprise, he thought: our white officers thought they were all dead in there. How could anything live through the pounding we gave them? An artillery bombardment, incredible to watch, ten hours without letup, almost ten thousand shells lobbed into that little sand fort while our gunboats battered them from the sea. Nothing could live through that, they said, but I knew better. Them Rebs got the power of Satan, they eyes glows in the dark, an’ when we come for ’em, they ain’t gonna be dead.
Our white officer draws us together for the assault and I say the prayer. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death . . .
Carnahan gives a wave of his hat and we start up the beach, crowding around the point as the guns open up in our faces.
Suddenly everything stops, caught like a movie in freeze-frame. A woman’s voice cuts across the beach, so quiet now in the absence of gunfire. Livia walks out and stops where two men have just fallen on the wet sand. She looks down at what’s left of their faces and raises her own face in despair. Jesus Christ, I can’t reproduce this, there’s nothing in my sound room that’s big enough. How do you expect me to capture this in a studio? She is answered by the voice of Maitland, somewhere ahead of her: Goddammit, Livia, improvise! . . . Isn’t that what you’re getting paid all this big money to do? There is an outburst of laughter; Livia looks up at the fort and rolls her eyes, perhaps thinking of last week’s puny paycheck, then begins to walk that way. She stops where Carnahan has been frozen, just as he was turning to wave his men on with the hat in his hand. Of course he can’t move, but then he does . . . smiles out of his pillar of salt and his eyes cut away to the fort. But now there is no fort: in its place is a director’s booth, with Maitland and Stoner sitting behind glass. Suddenly she has the answer. We’ll bring a couple of big speakers right down on the soundstage. Flood the whole place with sound, so the actors hear the same battle noise I’m giving the men in the booth. They’ll have to scream to hear their own lines, and maybe that’ll give us some sense of the carnage I see here.
