Melville Goodwin, USA

by John P. Marquand

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  Melville Goodwin, USA

  A Novel

  John P. Marquand

  To Cousin Lucy, with love

  Contents

  Author’s Note

  I You Will Love Its Full, Exciting Flavor … and Now, Mr. Sidney Skelton

  II So Jolly Boys Now … Here’s God Speed the Plough … Long Life and Success to the Farmer

  III And Mr. Gilbert Frary Has Another Good Suggestion

  IV If Necessary, She Would Have Done Very Well in Iceland

  V The Army Couldn’t Have Been Sweeter

  VI Sid, Here, Knows What I Mean …

  VII Always More Brass Where He Came From

  VIII It’s Just the Old Man Taking Over

  IX It Must Have Been Those Decoration Day Parades

  X Time to Call Him “Mel”

  XI Clausewitz Would Have Concurred

  XII “If You Can Dream and Not Make Dreams Your Master …”

  XIII Don’t Say You Didn’t Mean It, Mel

  XIV Your Congressman Always Knows Best

  XV A West Pointer Looks at Hallowell

  XVI The Color’s Getting Lighter Every Year

  XVII “Nor Certitude, nor Peace, nor Help for Pain”

  XVIII Who Pants for Glory Finds but Short Repose

  XIX His Neck Was Out a Mile

  XX Just a Little Dutch Girl—with Her Finger in the Dike

  XXI No Mothers to Guide Them

  XXII Brave Days on Officers’ Row

  XXIII Right Under “H” in the Dictionary

  XXIV A Short Quote from Kipling

  XXV War Is Hell—in Alexandria or Anywhere Else

  XXVI Once More the Sirens Sing

  XXVII There Could Always Be a Palace Revolution

  XXVIII But Don’t Quote the General Personally

  XXIX Time to Meet the Gang

  XXX It Was a Lot of Fun with Goochy

  XXXI It Was Almost a Celebration

  XXXII The Service Takes Care of Its Own

  XXXIII She Had to Say “Poor Sidney”

  XXXIV And She Never Dropped a Stitch

  XXXV “Generals Are Human. I Know of None Immune to Error.” —Omar N. Bradley

  About the Author

  Author’s Note

  Anyone who has ever written a novel hopes that his work will convey an illusion of reality to anyone who may read it, and I am no exception. In attempting to achieve this purpose, I have, naturally, drawn on my memories of two world wars, but all characters appearing in these pages are imaginary creations. With whatever degree of success they may live in print, not one of them represents any person I have ever known or heard of, either living or dead.

  I

  You Will Love Its Full, Exciting Flavor … and Now, Mr. Sidney Skelton

  I knew nothing about what General Melville A. Goodwin had done in Berlin until I read of his feat in my own script shortly before going on the air one evening in October 1949.

  Because of a luncheon engagement in New York that day, I broadcasted from the New York studio instead of from my library in Connecticut. I entered the building at approximately six and while waiting for the elevator, I noticed that a personally conducted group of tourists had gathered behind me. They had all bought tickets for a quick trip through the works, and they were being guided by one of the studio ushers, a nice fresh-faced boy dressed in a tailless coat of Confederate gray and gold.

  “Just about to enter the car ahead of us,” I heard the boy say, “is Mr. Sidney Skelton, the commentator. He goes on the air at seven o’clock.”

  There was a low excited murmur, and I still had perspective enough to be confused and embarrassed by this sort of thing.

  At the thirty-seventh floor there was another boy in gray and gold who also knew me.

  “Good evening, Mr. Skelton,” he said.

  “Good evening, son,” I answered.

  Then I remembered a statement by the gamekeeper in Lady Chatterley’s Lover—that males would be more emancipated and prouder, too, if a universal law could be passed obliging them all to wear coats that did not conceal their buttocks. I have forgotten why D. H. Lawrence’s character felt so strongly on this subject, but the boy certainly looked very happy and very proud in his gray monkey jacket. He must have been given a good briefing on his responsibilities and his bright future when he got his studio job, and he still believed so obviously all they had told him that he made me wish that I, too, were his age, dressed up like a Roxy usher, instead of the synthetic personality I had become.

  Miss Maynard, my studio secretary, was waiting for me in my office.

  “Good evening, Mr. Skelton,” she said. “It’s going to be in Studio A. Mr. Frary hopes you don’t mind.”

  Miss Maynard meant that I was to read the script in the studio into which the public could stare through soundproof glass. I might have told her, though I didn’t, that it made no difference where I read the thing. I had read it from the top of Pikes Peak and from the ballroom of the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo and from the press box of the Rose Bowl in Pasadena—a change of scene was all a part of the show. The success of the program lay in my voice and not my brains, and in an accepted tradition I was being turned into a world traveler who appeared in odd places gathering material. I was not even encouraged to give much thought to the preparation of the script myself, because it was my voice and personality that they wanted, and Art Hertz, who usually put the piece together for me, knew radio technique. I could trust him for the timing and I could trust his balance of language, too, but still I did like to read the whole thing over first instead of taking it on cold. After all, the latest sponsor was paying close to a million dollars for the program.

  “You sound a little hoarse tonight, Mr. Skelton,” Miss Maynard said.

  “Oh no,” I said, “I’m not, really, but I would like a little soda with a piece of ice in it.”

  Miss Maynard opened the door of a cellaret while I hung up my hat and coat. I glanced up at the electric clock with its relentlessly moving second hand, sharply conscious of precision and passing time, though all the rest of the office seemed designed to make one forget such things. The place had been redecorated after the new contract had been signed, and it now sported a hunter green carpet and green and chartreuse leather upholstered furniture. There was also a collection of blown-up photographs on the wall showing Sidney Skelton, the commentator, looking at the Pyramids, gazing raptly at the Taj and at the Forbidden City in Peking, boarding the battleship Missouri and shaking hands with General Eisenhower. I had personally been against this final touch and I had said so—but it was a million-dollar program. There had to be a proper office, a hideaway where Mr. Skelton prepared his broadcasts. It was twenty-three minutes after six.

  “If Mr. Hertz is anywhere around, I’d better see him,” I said.

  Of course Art was around because this was his business. If we were going on in Studio A, I would have to read without glasses, so I should go over the script carefully. I unbuttoned my vest and took a sip of the soda.

  “Hello, Sid,” Art said.

  “Hello, you big bastard,” I answered. “Let’s see what you have, and pour yourself a drink if you want one.”

  This was only a conventional greeting. Art weighed two hundred pounds and he was not a bastard. He was a very able script-writer. He was so good, in fact, that it had occurred to me recently that it might be wise, all things considered, if I spent a day in the newsroom myself.

  “I think it’s all right,” Art said, “and there’s a cute little snap at t
he end about a boy scout in Cedar Rapids in an iron lung.”

  “Don’t spoil it,” I said, “let it just come over me,” and I picked up the script. It began with the usual salutation, “Good evening, friends,” but the next words startled me.

  “What’s this?” I asked. “I didn’t know we were close to war today.”

  “Didn’t you?” Art said. “Haven’t you read the evening papers?”

  Time was moving on. There was no time to be ironical about being out of touch. It was six thirty-three.

  “Good evening, friends,” I read. “We were close to war this afternoon. The long-dreaded flare-up occurred today on the border of the Russian sector in Berlin. We know tonight that war was averted, or at least the incident that might have precipitated war, by the clear thinking of one American soldier. What is this soldier’s name? You will hear it everywhere tonight. The name is Melville A. Goodwin, the man of the hour and the minute. Major General Melville Goodwin, whom you might call a GI’s general …”

  “Oh no!” I said. “Not Mel Goodwin.”

  “Do you know him?” Art asked.

  “Yes,” I said, “I know him. He was in the breakout at Saint-Lô, and I saw him later in Paris.”

  “I am sorry I didn’t know that,” Art said. “It would have warmed the whole thing up, but maybe we can wangle ten more seconds. You’d better get started—we haven’t got much time.”

  I should have been there earlier. As it was, there was only time for one excision in the script and a single insert: “This all fits my old friend, Mel Goodwin, to a T, the Mel Goodwin I met when he was commanding his armored division before the breakout at Saint-Lô—none of the stiffness, none of the protocol which one associates with big brass. It’s like him to want his friends to call him Mel.”

  Little warm bits like this, the statistical department had discovered, were apt to boost the Crosley rating.

  If you have seen one bombed city in the phony peace that has followed World War II, there is small need to see the others. All those cities—London, Tokyo, Berlin, and even Manila, which is as bad as the worst—have struggled to erect a façade of decency which is pathetic and not yet convincing. Tokyo, for instance, would like it to appear that its burnt-out area was always vacant land. London unconsciously tries to convince the visitor that nothing much ever went wrong there. The extent of ruin in all these places comes over you gradually, even the spectacular devastation of Berlin. Throughout Berlin, however, there has remained the indescribable scent of rubble, the dank, dusty smell of stone and brick and plaster and rotting wood and rust, and a stale antiseptic chemical explosive odor has mingled with all the rest of it.

  The Berlin street that marked the boundary between this particular part of the American and Russian sectors must still have had that smell when Mel Goodwin walked down it. I have forgotten its name or what it looks like, although I surely saw it when I was in the city last. Berlin architecture from Bismarck’s time through Hitler’s has always impressed me as grotesquely unimaginative, and anyway if you have traveled enough by air, all streets in cities have a disconcerting way of mingling in your memory.

  The trouble had started when a Russian patrol picked up a drunken American private who had wandered across the line and an American patrol had appeared a second later and grabbed a Russian sergeant. The Russians began readying their tommy guns. They were always fond of waving these weapons, and the American lieutenant got rattled. There had been a good chance that somebody would shoot, when Mel Goodwin walked around the corner with a correspondent from the Associated Press. Mel Goodwin had been ordered to Berlin from Frankfurt with an officers’ group, for information and instruction, but no one in Berlin seemed to have heard about the group, much less its purpose, when it reached there, and the incident would never have made the news if it had not been for the presence of the AP correspondent.

  When Mel Goodwin saw the trouble, as he told me later, he walked into the middle of the street and halted in front of the Russian officer, who pointed a tommy gun at his stomach. The Russian was a rawboned gangling boy who looked very nervous. In fact, everyone was very nervous. The thing to remember, Mel Goodwin said, was that troops are always troops in any army and that all troops act alike. The thing to remember was that no one wanted to start the shooting. He never knew whether or not the Russians recognized his rank, because quite often British troops did not know what stars on the shoulder meant. It may have been his age, he said, that influenced the outcome, or it may have only been his knowing that troops were troops; but anyway he stood in front of the Russian officer for a second or two, he said, looking at the tommy gun, and then he lighted a cigarette. He did not offer one to the officer because he was sick and tired of giving cigarettes to foreigners.

  “Then I pushed that gun away from my stomach,” he said, “and gave the boy a friendly slap on the tail.”

  That was all there was to the incident, Mel said. No one had wanted to start shooting, and the slap on the tail broke the tension. He laughed and the Russian laughed and then they shook hands and the Russian sergeant was swapped off for the American drunk. No one should have given it another thought, and the story should have been stopped at headquarters. There had been too many civilian-minded people mixed up with the army during the war and afterward, and too much public relations. Personally he was sick of public relations. He had gone to headquarters immediately and had reported the incident, first verbally, then in writing. He was particularly careful to say that a news correspondent was present and to suggest that any dispatch should be suppressed. He did not prevent any war, he said. He did not know anything about the publicity until orders came over the teletype for him to return immediately to Washington. Nobody outside the army until then had ever heard much of Major General Melville Goodwin.

  I have often wondered why any thoughts of mine should have lingered on Mel Goodwin that evening after the broadcast was over. I had only met him briefly in Normandy, and then there had been one turbid and rather ridiculous interlude in Paris when he had made an off-the-record ass of himself with my old friend Dottie Peale. It was even difficult to separate his face or words or actions from those of other American generals who were under instructions to be affable with the press and who customarily referred to war as though it were a football game. From my observation professional generals looked alike, thought alike and reacted in an identical manner. It made no difference whether they were in the Pacific or in India or in the European theater. No matter how genial they might try to be—and personally I was inclined to respect the disagreeable more than the jovial ones—you could not evaluate them as you evaluated other people. You could not feel the same warmth or pity or liking for generals, because they had all dropped some factor in the human equation as soon as they had rated a car with one of those flags on it and a chauffeur and an aide to get them cigarettes. After the first flush of excitement which came from knowing them, the best thing to do, I always thought, was to keep as far away from them as possible and to drink and play cards with bird colonels or lower members of the staff. Attention! Here comes the general. We were just playing a little bridge, sir. Would the general care to take a hand?

  On the whole it was advisable not to play around with generals or to expect anything rewarding from generals’ jokes, unless by chance the generals were doctors. Nevertheless, something between the lines of Mel Goodwin’s story stayed with me, something I had half forgotten of that shifting, unnatural and regulated world in Africa and the ETO. I was thinking of this when Art Hertz and I went into Gilbert Frary’s office after the broadcast. Gilbert was in official charge of the program and he acted as liaison between the studio and the sponsor.

  “How do you think it went, Gilbert?” Art asked.

  It occurred to me that Art had been pushing himself around recently more than was necessary. It was up to me, not Art, to ask that question. Gilbert inserted a cigarette in an ivory holder and lighted the cigarette with a gold lighter. We both sat watching him resp
ectfully. After all, Gilbert was responsible for the program.

  “Frankly,” Gilbert said, “at first I was a little disappointed. That whole Berlin business seemed artificially exaggerated, though of course we were following the evening papers. I don’t see why that news took hold the way it did, but then you warmed it up very nicely, Sidney. You got enthusiasm into it, especially about his being a GI’s general and liking to be called Mel. That’s interesting that you knew him. What is he really like?”

  “He’s like all the rest of them,” I said. “Nobody ought to try to warm them up.”

  The telephone on Gilbert’s Italian refectory table rang and Gilbert reached for it eagerly. “Yes,” he said, “yes, George. I’m glad you liked it, George. I thought it was well balanced, and I thought Sidney put a lot in it.” He hung up the telephone. “Well,” he said, “George Burtheimer likes it, and George isn’t like other sponsors. He doesn’t often call up. Shall we go somewhere and eat?”

  “I’m just having a sandwich in the office, Gilbert,” I said. “I ought to start back home.”

  “You’ll be doing it from home tomorrow, will you?” Gilbert asked.

  “Yes,” I said, “if that’s all right with you, Gilbert.”

  “It’s all right,” Gilbert said, “if you don’t do it too often, Sidney. There’s value in the illusion of your moving around. I wish you’d think about going out to the West Coast again with me next month. People like to see you, and the customers always enjoy hearing something from Hollywood.”

  It had only come over me recently how ironic the relationship was that existed between Gilbert Frary and Art Hertz and me, though as far as Art went he was only on the edge of it. You could always get another writer. The town was full of writers—but between Gilbert and me the bond was closer. We were becoming more and more like two boys running a three-legged race at a Sunday school picnic, tied together, our arms about each other’s shoulders. No matter what we thought of each other—and I had been growing somewhat suspicious of Gilbert lately—we had to love each other, we had to stick together.