Melville Goodwin, USA

by John P. Marquand

  “Sid,” he said, “do you mind if I ask you a personal question? Why didn’t you ever marry Dottie?”

  “I told you before,” I said, “that I haven’t got what it takes.”

  “Well, I’d have done it if I’d been you,” he said.

  “Maybe she wouldn’t have married you either,” I said.

  As I looked at him standing there in his worn, carefully pressed uniform, with its rows of ribbons and gold service stripes, I thought that he was safe as far as Dottie was concerned. After all, there were a good many major generals—but I had not expected him to follow my thoughts so closely.

  “I know what you mean,” he said. “I haven’t got brass enough, have I? Why not let’s go down to Dottie’s room and have a farewell drink?”

  “No thanks,” I said, “I’m pretty busy, sir.”

  “Well, then I’ll just say good-by,” he said. “You’re a nice guy. Good luck.”

  “Good-by and good luck, sir,” I told him.

  You were always meeting people and saying good-by and good luck in the ETO. I was reasonably sure that I would never see General Melville A. Goodwin again.

  When his hand was on the doorknob, he turned back to me for a moment and he had changed subtly and completely. He looked again like any other general officer, composed, assured and removed from the ordinary strain of human relationships. He had withdrawn to the dignity of his rank, and whether you liked to admit it or not, rank did have a dignity and commanded respect, for it was almost the only reality on which one could depend in an environment of change and uncertainty. Although he smiled agreeably, his whole mood and pattern of behavior had altered in those few seconds. He was like an actor with whom one chatted in the dressing room, who suddenly became the playwright’s character when told that he would go on in another minute.

  “So long, young feller,” he said. “I’ll see you in church sometime.”

  He did not intend to put me in my place, but I do believe that he felt some need to put himself into his own and that he needed the reassurance of a sense of position. I felt in that last glimpse of him that many of the ordinary ties of human relationship and of friendship were denied him. He could have enemies and faithful subordinates and obsequious bootlickers, but he could have no friends in the conventional sense. He had attained the category of power that made friendship and sympathy a weakness. He was a piece on the chessboard again, remote, insulated and alone.

  I saw Dottie for a moment the next morning outside the Ritz just before she took her place in one of the fine new automobiles supplied for the party. It was raining and nothing could be colder than French rain. She was dressed in a Wac uniform, because all the VIPs had been put into some sort of uniform for their forward journey. In addition she was wrapped in a trench coat that was too large for her and which I could guess the General had given her. If so, it was a useful going-away present. She had fixed things so that she could ride with Colonel Struthers at the head of the procession, and the colonel looked delighted. I don’t know how she had arranged this without seeming to push or be arrogant, but Dottie was always expert at getting where she wanted, gently and sweetly, but firmly, and she always managed to look surprised when she got there. Her face was already wet from the driving rain and she must have known that this might happen. She must have deliberately discarded powder and lipstick, depending on the foul weather to give her color.

  “Well,” she said when she saw me, “that’s that,” and she wrinkled her nose and shook her head, and with that shake she seemed to have shaken off the Ritz and everything. She was off on a new adventure, riding up front with the colonel, and she had become very military. Dottie was always quick in picking up mannerisms from people around her, and I could see at once that she had learned a lot from General Goodwin. They used to say the way to learn a language was to have a sleeping dictionary, but I did not tell her that. She was looking at the row of automobiles, with an expert and disapproving eye, and then she glanced at her wrist watch. It was a new waterproof timepiece which I had never before seen on Dottie, though I had noticed the General wearing one like it.

  “Why can’t we get rolling?” she asked. “Why don’t we put the show on the road?”

  These expressions, none of which Dottie had ever employed before, sounded crisp and convincing.

  “Why don’t you blow a whistle—” I told her—“two sharp blasts?”

  “God damn it,” Dottie said, “why don’t you blow a whistle? That’s what you’re here for, isn’t it?”

  Her voice had a new ring of authority, and even the colonel, who stood beside her, appeared to feel its contagion.

  “Major,” he said, “get these people into the cars. Let’s get cracking. We’re due to take off at o-eight-hundred. Will you come with me please, Mrs. Peale?”

  It was a rough, hard day, even in the new cars. The road had been churned up by truck convoys and the rain came down steadily, so that, in spite of getting cracking, the show stayed on the road two hours longer than scheduled. It was pitch dark and still raining when we arrived at a mediocre northern-France hotel in a provincial town on one of the main supply routes. As usual the red carpet was out for the VIPs.

  We were met by officers of the Quartermaster Corps, who had everything taped up and rooms assigned, and there was even a Chemical Warfare general to greet us. The dining room was decorated with streamers—red, white and blue. There were cold-storage turkeys for dinner, and there was a Quartermaster colonel to give a talk with diagrams on the complications of moving supplies forward. I had no chance to talk to Dottie, and there would have been no opportunity later that evening what with the Chemical general and three doctors, if one of the lady novelists had not objected to her accommodations. She said that all of her windows leaked and she was not mollified until I offered to change rooms with her. I had not realized, though the colonel took it up playfully with me in the morning and several times later, that this room adjoined Dottie’s and had a connecting door. As it was, the colonel only took it up playfully, saying I was pretty quick on my feet, what with one thing and another—but at any rate it was something which seemed unnecessary to explain to Helen at Savin Hill. I actually had no idea that Dottie was in the adjoining room until she knocked on the connecting door at eleven o’clock that night. I had hung up some clothes to dry near a radiator that did not work, and I was sitting in a sway-backed chair under a single electric light bulb suspended from the ceiling, reading the essays of Montaigne.

  “Sid?” she said. “Sid?”

  “Yes,” I answered, “what is it?”

  “After all that maneuvering of yours downstairs,” Dottie said, “don’t you think you might at least open this damn door?” The door was not hard to open. In my experience French hotel room doors seldom were, especially in northern provincial towns.

  Dottie’s room also was lighted by a single electric bulb. Her Wac uniform was carefully folded on another sway-backed armchair. Her trench coat was suspended on a hanger. She was heating some hot water in a canteen cup over a canned-alcohol burner, and there were two glasses and a bottle of whisky on the table beside it. Dottie was in a belted Jaeger dressing gown and slippers, and her hair was freshly brushed, and her gold-backed brush and tortoise-shell comb and traveling clock were on the bedside table. The alcohol flame gave a warm, pleasant glow, and the whole place smelled of Chanel Five.

  “I wasn’t maneuvering downstairs,” I said. “I didn’t know where they’d put you.”

  “Well, at least you might pretend you were,” Dottie said. “My God, that colonel was maneuvering.”

  “Which colonel?” I asked.

  “Any colonel,” Dottie said. “Frankly, I’m getting a little tired of all these men without women. They have such one-track minds. Darling, I never seem to see you on this junket, and I’m awfully tired of coping with the unknown.” She gave her head a quick shake and she sighed. “God, it’s cold in here, and I feel awfully by myself tonight. I don’t seem to know what I’m
doing or why I’ve ever done anything or what I’m for. Do you ever feel that way?”

  “Yes,” I said, “a lot of people do, particularly around here.”

  “Well, you never seem to show it,” Dottie said. “You never seem to struggle or try to get anywhere. You’re so damn self-sufficient. What’s that book in your hand?”

  “Montaigne,” I said.

  “Jesus,” Dottie said. “Montaigne in the rain. Well, anyway it’s like you. You used to read that to me, remember?”

  “Yes,” I said, “I remember.”

  “Was that why you were reading it tonight?”

  “Why, no,” I said. “I’ve always liked Montaigne.”

  “Well, Sid,” she began.

  “Yes?” I said.

  “I wish you’d put that damn book down, and would you mind kissing me, at least in a friendly way? I wouldn’t feel so much alone.”

  I was very glad to kiss her in a friendly way, although it did not seem necessary to tell Helen about this either at Savin Hill.

  “Darling,” she said, “I wish we didn’t know so much about each other.”

  “I thought you were tired of the unknown,” I said.

  “Darling,” she said, “I don’t know what I’m tired of. Let’s have some whisky and hot water. God, it’s cold.”

  Then she told me to sit down on the bed or on the chair, but to wait until she had taken the clothes off the chair and hung them up. She said that I was always so untidy she could not see how Helen stood me, but then maybe Helen was untidy herself in a wild, attractive way that absolutely suited her.

  “At least we don’t have to worry about what we’re saying when we talk to each other,” she said. “Sid, maybe you were right.”

  When I asked what I’d been right about, she took a swallow of her whisky and hot water and sighed again.

  “You said he was pretty simple. Maybe you’re right. It was all pretty damn simple,” she said, and she sat on the bed and curled her feet under her. “Henry was simple in a way, but he wasn’t in that way.”

  Of course I knew she would talk about Mel Goodwin, and curiously there was nothing indelicate about it, especially in that bare, ugly room with the sound of the trucks outside rolling steadily through the night.

  “In what way?” I asked.

  “Darling, he knows all the answers in his book of rules,” she said. “He merely has to look in the index. He’s so sure of himself—but maybe his book is wrong. Most of mine has been. It would be awful for him if his book let him down.”

  It was not a bad way of describing Mel Goodwin’s certainty.

  “He would still be right in there,” I said, “smiting the furrows.”

  “Yes,” she said, “and that’s something. Right or wrong he would go right on smiting, wouldn’t he? He was awfully sweet. He couldn’t have been sweeter.”

  I winced at that old phrase of hers when she applied it to Mel Goodwin.

  “I wonder why it is,” I said, “that you always expect too much of everybody.”

  “I know, dear, I know,” she answered, “but it isn’t really expecting. I begin thinking how much I could do for a man if I had the chance. You know that, Sid. It isn’t expecting. It’s only wanting someone to be the way I want him.”

  She never had wanted anyone the way he was.

  “Did you notice that he was all wound up?” she said. “Maybe you didn’t because I didn’t think so at first. God, darling, he simply couldn’t unwind … and it was always out of the book. Do you know what he kept saying the answer to everything was?”

  “Git thar fastest with the mostest men,” I said.

  “No, no,” she said, “but of course that came in, too. The answer to everything, he said, is to estimate a situation and then take action. Even if the something you do is wrong, it’s better than doing nothing. Darling, he said it at least five times. I don’t mean that it got on my nerves but I can’t stop thinking of it, because it isn’t so. I’m always doing something, but actually I’m doing nothing. What’s the use in positive action?”

  “It’s pretty useful for him,” I said. “Why can’t you accept people for what they are?”

  “Because I want them to be better,” she said. “Darling, if I were to put my mind on it, I could do a lot for him. He kept saying he’d like to be a corps commander. Do you think he could ever command a Group?”

  That restive energy of Dottie’s was always disconcerting, or at least it had always disconcerted me. In any situation and in any place, however unfamiliar, Dottie was congenitally unable to leave things as they were. Weary though she may have been from coping with the unknown, she was still trying to find the pivots and the balances. She always liked to understand people, as she said. It made no difference that she did not know definitely what a Group meant in tables of organization. She had already acquired a smattering of knowledge from Melville Goodwin, and now she was devising some way to move him upward and onward. She had tried to move me upward once, and even the memory made me uncomfortable.

  “Listen, Dot,” I told her, “why don’t you relax and stop trying to be a Joan of Arc?”

  “God damn it,” Dottie said, and her voice had a snap which sounded exactly like Mel Goodwin’s, “what’s Joan of Arc got to do with it?”

  “Well,” I said, “she tried to win a war.”

  “Darling,” Dottie said, and she helped herself to more whisky and water, “I know perfectly well that war is a man’s business. From my experience it’s the most completely, utterly male pursuit I’ve ever seen, and I’m awfully tired of hearing about relaxing. I’m asking you a perfectly simple, intelligent question, and you do have brains if you want to use them. Or perhaps you don’t think I’m intelligent enough for this sort of conversation?”

  “Oh, yes,” I said, “I think so.”

  “All right,” Dottie said, “then answer me. Do you or don’t you think Goodwin could command a Group?”

  “If you’re talking about an Army Corps, you might ask General Eisenhower,” I told her. “He’d have some idea.”

  “That’s a very thoughtful suggestion,” Dottie said, “and I’ll remember to ask him if I see him, but right now he isn’t here.”

  “Then why don’t you relax,” I told her, “or else try General Marshall?”

  “Darling,” Dottie said, “I don’t believe that Mel is a Marshall man.”

  It was always wiser not to underestimate Dottie’s capacities, but I had never realized until then that Melville Goodwin might interest her more than temporarily.

  “Now listen, Dot,” I said, “Mel Goodwin has troubles of his own. Don’t give him any more by asking questions about him. Things like that get around.”

  “Darling, I can’t help being interested,” Dottie said, “and you don’t mind my talking, do you? I’m just pretending. You know I love moving things around. Now if I had been his wife …”

  “But you’re not his wife,” I said. “You can’t be everything.”

  “If I had been his wife,” Dottie continued, “I would have seen that we saw a great deal of the Marshalls.”

  She sighed and stared ahead of her, lost in her own thoughts. She was Mrs. Melville Goodwin. She was undoubtedly arranging in her imagination a quiet little dinner with the Marshalls, prewar, preferably in Hawaii, and Colonel Marshall, or whatever rank he held in those days, was on her right, and she was telling him how brilliantly Mel had worked out his problem in the war games. She would not be pushing Mel too much. She would know exactly when to stop, but she would make George see Mel’s future as she saw it. She looked as though she were thinking of a Christmas tree as she sat there silently. Mel could have been Bradley or Eisenhower just as well as not, if she had been married to Mel. She did not know much about army wives, but she could have learned, and now she was an army wife. Perhaps it was Washington she was thinking about or the United States Embassy in Berlin before the war, and Mel was the attaché, and they were giving another small dinner. She sighed and looked u
p at me.

  “I wonder what his wife is like,” she said.

  “Now, Dot,” I said, “leave the poor guy alone.”

  “Darling,” she sighed, “he’s so easy to get on with and he does have a certain kind of ambition. I think he has some very good ideas about fire power. He knows a lot about tanks and new weapons.”

  “For God’s sake, Dot,” I said, “leave that poor guy alone.”

  The urgency of my tone made her stop. She had laid the General aside for the moment, and now I was the problem.

  “I don’t know why it is you’re completely lacking in ambition, darling,” she said. “You’ve been complaining about all this public relations thing you’re doing, and when I try to get you out of it, you refuse. Mel said he asked you to go up there with him. He said he could arrange it.”

  I pushed myself up out of the rickety armchair and took a step toward the bed where she was sitting with her feet curled under her.

  “Now, Dot,” I said, “I knew perfectly well why he asked me.”

  “Darling,” Dottie said, “don’t you like it when I try to do something for you?”

  “No,” I said, “it makes me very nervous, Dot.”

  “Oh dear,” Dottie said, “I wish you were a little different, just a very little different—and we could have done so much together, Sid.”

  “Well, I’m not different,” I said.

  “Oh, Sid,” Dottie said, “I don’t know why you’re so impossible. Sid, please don’t look at me in that critical way. Pour yourself another drink. I’m just thinking out loud. You don’t think I’m really serious about Mel Goodwin, do you? I know just as well as you do that he can handle a division, and that’s probably as far as he can go. He can run around end with his damn division, and I’m pretty tired of hearing about running around end. Darling, it was officious of me, interfering, but that’s because I’ve always been in love with you in a certain way. Sid, please don’t be cross. I’ve completely eliminated Mel Goodwin.”

  “Well, that’s something,” I told her. “I was getting sorry for that poor guy.”