“Darling,” Dottie said, “I don’t even see why you like him.”
“Leave him alone,” I told her. “Go to work on someone else. Forget about him, Dot.”
“I’m awfully sorry I’ve been so dull, dear,” Dottie said. “I didn’t mean to be boring, just talking about myself. Let’s talk about you and Helen and Camilla.”
It was a ridiculous suggestion, and she must have known it was.
“Sid,” she said, “you’re not angry with me, are you? Or are you just disappointed?”
“Oh, no,” I said, “I’m not disappointed.”
“Oh, hell,” Dottie said, and she stood up. “Here we are and we’re not getting anywhere, and we never could. God, he was awfully dull once the brass wore off. They’re all so damned dull and they have such fixed ideas. Well, you’d better kiss me good night now in a friendly way, and leave the door open. I feel so terribly alone.”
“Well, good night, Dot,” I said.
“Sid,” she asked, “you aren’t jealous about Mel Goodwin, are you?”
“No, not especially,” I said.
“Oh, the hell with it and the hell with him and the hell with you,” Dottie said, “but you might at least kiss me good night again.”
I was very glad to kiss her good night again. It made the evening less boring than many I’d spent in the European Theater of Operations.
Every experience comprises both a loss and gain. This, you may say, is a hysterical discovery of the obvious, but this resounding fact was first brought home to me when I returned from an eight months’ stay in China shortly before the incident at the Marco Polo Bridge which precipitated the Japanese-Chinese War. When I boarded one of the Empress ships bound for Vancouver, and when we began moving in the dark down the Hwang Pu River to the sea, I left many intangibles behind me on the Shanghai Bund, among them a glittering assortment of enthusiasms and illusions. I had gone to China for a news syndicate, imbued with the idea so prevalent among newspapermen that some day I would write fiction and that all I required was experience with exotic backgrounds. I was leaving this idea behind me and carrying away in its place the disturbing discovery that the more I saw of the Orient the less equipped I was to reach conclusions. You could not simply board somewhere. You had to have a permanent stake in a land before you really knew any part of that land’s meaning. An observer could have no stake in anything.
I faced much the same series of reactions when I left the European Theater of Operations a few months after the German collapse, except that these were more acute because, when I left it, the ETO was already ceasing to be an entity. The pressures that had formed it had been removed, so that it was dissipating like bubbles in champagne. To those of us who had joined the army from civil life, its breaking up was not unlike the ending of a generation. We were all returning to the void of peace, and the regulations which had held us together, and even the friendships we had made, were losing most of their validity. Most of us would never meet again after leaving the ETO, and if we did, we would never remember what our relationships had been. We used to say, we uniformed civilians, that we could not wait for the time when we might encounter some of those Regular Army bastards who had arrogated superiority to themselves simply because they were part of the regular service and graduates of West Point. Yet oddly enough, when the occasion arrived, as it did now and then, for you to tell that so-and-so who had pushed you around exactly what you thought of him, you could scarcely remember what it was that had eaten at you so over there in Europe.
I remember, for instance, that there was a Public Relations colonel in SHAEF who impressed me back there as the most arrogant and disagreeable person I had ever known. Though I never cared much for picking quarrels, I frequently used to fall asleep toying with the idea of picking a fight with him as soon as the war was over. Then suddenly in the summer of 1946, I met him at the bar at “21” in New York, and he bought me a drink and called me Sid and asked me if I didn’t wish we were back there again in SHAEF. We certainly did have good times in SHAEF, and I found myself calling him Earl—Earl G. Roberts was his name. He seemed to have forgotten that he had threatened to prefer charges against me the last time we had met in Frankfurt. The cork had been pulled, and the champagne was very flat there in “21.” Instead of feeling resentful, I was sorry for poor old Earl. He had been restored to line duty in the infantry and was on his way to Fort Benning down one rank. He no longer had anyone like me to push around. The ninety-day wonders were gone. I felt sorry for poor old Earl.
The tumult and the shouting was dying, and the captains and the kings, all trained and postured at West Point, were departing to the dull routine that had made them—back to Bragg, back to Benning or the Presidio or Schofield or to any of those other places where they led their insulated lives, watching their rank, living on their base pay, or whatever it was they were always talking about, and being sure to dance with the CO’s wife at the officers’ club on Saturday night. They were gone, and a very good thing it was unless there was World War III, when assuredly they, or others like them, would come popping up again. They had performed a very necessary specialized function, but, thank heaven, the rest of us whom they had tried to mold in their schools and by their lectures did not have to play at being soldiers any more. We did not have to try to strike their attitudes any more, or give them smart salutes right up from the heel. We did not have to remember all those complacent axioms from Army Regulations any more. We did not have to read and digest their windy mimeographed orders or stand at attention on the carpet taking their artistic bawlings out. They could not chew our rear ends off us any longer. We had tried but we could never be like them. You had to be caught young, or you had to be a boy at heart, to acquire the military mind. Heaven knows, most of us had sat up nights trying to acquire it, and heaven knows, in Public Relations we had tried to interpret it. It was curious how fast we were forgetting these people already. The regulars had left their imprint on us, but the main outlines were growing dim.
When Helen said that night at Savin Hill that she could not tell what General Goodwin was like from anything I had told her, I suddenly realized that I no longer knew, myself. You had to see him in a war. He belonged with its sights and smells, with its obsequiousnesses and its brutalities.
“But you say you liked him,” Helen said, “and he asked you to be his aide, didn’t he?”
“You don’t like anybody there,” I told her, “in the way you like people here.”
This was the truth. Liking in the ETO had an expendable sort of quality which you had to experience in order to comprehend.
Helen did not speak for a long while, and finally I thought she had gone to sleep as I lay awake in the dark. My own mind was moving too restlessly for sleep. I was thinking of the General’s plane and of the General sleeping in his reclining seat. Those people were like Napoleon. They could sleep anywhere at any time and wake up in a second.
“Sid,” Helen said, and I realized that I, too, was half asleep, “when he comes here, what are we going to do with him?”
I had no idea what you could do with anyone like Major General Melville Goodwin in a place like Savin Hill, and I really was asleep when Helen spoke again. For a second as I awakened it was a tossup whether I was in the ETO or at Savin Hill.
“Sid, I’ve been thinking,” Helen told me.
“Don’t think,” I told her. “Go to sleep.”
“You know, perhaps you could write something about General Goodwin.”
It was not unusual for Helen to get such an idea. Ever since she had first met me, she frequently suggested subjects on which I might write, and she still retained rather touching illusions as to my latent abilities.
The thought of doing such a thing had never seriously crossed my mind. I never dreamed that night that the preparation of the condensed biography of Melville Goodwin by the employees of a weekly news magazine would cause me to attempt to write about him. It was only later that I saw him as a quasi-Grecian figure
moving along lines of almost inevitable tragedy. There was something about his pattern that was classic. In spite of his lexicon of rules, his life was beyond his control like the lives of all the rest of us. He was a part of the tapestry that the Norns were always weaving. He was fallible and infallible, perfect in his own setting and imperfect in any other. As I think of him now, I still like best to remember him when he was there at Savin Hill, bewildered by a problem for which he was not trained. As he told me himself, he never knew what he had got himself in for when he had brushed that Russian tommy gun away from his stomach in Berlin.
VIII
It’s Just the Old Man Taking Over
When Phil Bentley reached me on the telephone the next morning and told me that he had been assigned the piece about the General, I thought he was a good one to do it and so did Art Hertz, who had come out to prepare my evening script. I had known Phil Bentley for a long while, in the half-close, half-casual way one does know people in newspaper work. I had met him first in Boston when he was a reporter on the Post, and later I saw something of him in Washington, where I had spent some time after I left the Paris Bureau. We had both helped out once at the same Senate hearing. I had seen him several times during the war, when he had gone out as a correspondent for the Digest. Like the rest of us, he had dropped by accident into his present position. He was an anomalous-looking person, thin, tall and dark, in his middle forties, wearing heavy tortoise-shell spectacles that indicated accurately his salary and editorial status. He had graduated from the catch-as-catch-can class and he deserved his promotion. He had a quick, concise narrative style and a flair for lighting on those personality trivia that weekly magazine editors love in profiles. He had been taken away from the New Yorker by his present employers, and he liked the change because he said the New Yorker style made him self-conscious. He was thorough and he was quick without the curse of too much facility. Without his ever having to get tight at press clubs, all the news crowd knew him and liked him, which was a good thing for an editor on a weekly magazine. Colonel Flax in Public Relations had told him to call me up.
“Well, I’m glad you know this Goodwin, Sid,” he said, “because I never heard of him. Frary wants me to bring out photographers, but I don’t see any point in it today. We’ve got two trailing him around in Washington. I’ll follow him out from the plane. Are you sure you’ve got room for me?”
Then he wanted to know if there was room for the research girl who was coming out with him and who would take the notes. Her name was Miss Myra Fineholt.
“And I gather from Flax that you’re going to be with Goodwin to hold his hand,” he said.
I told him that none of this was my idea, that I had only been asked to help out, and that we all had to do those things. He said it was one of those things that would have to be done fast before people forgot about the General. He said if it wasn’t one thing it was another but that it would be pleasant to be there in the country and that he would like to see me again, now that I was in the higher income brackets. We were playful with each other but polite. I told him that there was room for the research girl and everybody. When it came to photographers, the broadcasting company was sending some. I could see he did not like the idea of being tied up with radio, but then he was getting his board and lodging.
“Expect us at about four,” Phil said. “It’s going to be quite a cavalcade.”
It was not as large a party as I had been afraid it would be. Gilbert Frary was coming but he was not bringing his wife. There would only be the General and Mrs. Goodwin, Phil Bentley and the research girl, Gilbert and Colonel Flax and Helen and myself. Art Hertz and all the rest of them would dine somewhere else on their way home after the broadcast. It would really be a quiet evening, and now that all the arrangements were made, Helen was looking forward to it. All she would have to do was to be nice to Mrs. Goodwin, and probably Mrs. Goodwin would want to take a nap before dinner, and that would leave only Gilbert Frary.
We had been sitting at breakfast in our dressing room when Phil Bentley telephoned. The morning was as clear as a bell and filled with the brooding calm of Indian summer, and I was still finding it incredible that Camilla was already nine and that Helen was still happy with me and liked having me around.
“Sid,” she said, “look out of the window. Isn’t it beautiful?” It was one of those days that made you say, without thinking that it had been said before, that October was the best month in the year. “I wish we could have it to ourselves, without extraneous things and people spoiling it. We always seem just to be starting having a life of our own and then something interrupts it. Perhaps we ought to have another baby.”
Helen had been talking quite a bit recently about having another baby, saying that we would have had one or two others by now if it had not been for the war, and Camilla herself had entered into the controversy, having just read an antiseptic little book entitled A Baby Is Born.
“We haven’t been here very long,” I said. “You’ve just finished doing the house over.”
“Yes, but it’s pretty well done over,” Helen said, “and now there’s got to be some reason for it.”
I did not object in principle. Helen was good at anything and she was a good mother. There was no reason why she should not have more children if she wanted them, but children were inescapable facts, as I knew from my experience with Camilla, and I could not see why Helen would want inescapable facts when they were connected with me. Her beauty still made everything seem impermanent. The illusion I had experienced the night before—that we were simply going through a passing infatuation—was with me again. I wished that I could fit into this environment as she did, but I was still unable to think of anything to do at Savin Hill. I had never had time to learn to play golf. The Winlocks had kept horses, and there were bridle paths everywhere, but neither Helen nor I could ride. It almost seemed as though there were nothing to do except to have a baby.
It was a long day at Savin Hill. I read the papers for an hour, and Helen read them, too. Then I went downstairs to the office and worked with Art Hertz on the script, and after lunch I met Helen in the loggia for a walk around the place.
“I wish you wouldn’t wear that double-breasted suit when you go for a walk,” Helen said. “Why don’t you go upstairs and put on a pullover and some gray slacks and crepe-soled shoes?”
“I can’t,” I said, “the General’s coming.”
The General’s impending visit had been on my mind all day, and I began talking to Helen about him again, as we walked through the garden by the empty swimming pool. I told her it was always queer meeting someone at home whom you had only known when you were in uniform, but at any rate the General would probably be in uniform. Farouche, I remember, was walking with us through the garden, carrying his rubber ring, and I had told Helen that Farouche was as good as in a double-breasted suit himself. Then Helen began to talk to Mr. Browning, the gardener, who was spreading salt hay over the flower beds. I could never talk sensibly to Mr. Browning and I very seldom tried, because I had never been able to tell one flower from another, but somehow Helen had learned all the names in Latin as well as English. Farouche and I stood there like strangers from the city, which was exactly what we were, while Helen and Mr. Browning began to discuss moving plants in an herbaceous border. The feeling of impermanence was beginning to rise again and with it my incredulity that I should ever have ended up at a place like this, and then I saw Camilla and Miss Otts. It was later than I had thought. Miss Otts had apparently given up her day off to take Camilla to that children’s party.
Somehow Camilla’s pleated party dress and her coat with its squirrel collar pulled everything together and proved that Helen had been right—Savin Hill was a nice place for Camilla.
“Daddy,” Camilla said, “you look funny standing there.”
“We’d better be starting now,” Miss Otts said.
Helen put her arm through mine, and we all walked back to the house and to the drive in front, where
the new station wagon was waiting. Just as we reached it, I saw the Cadillac and another car behind it coming up the avenue with the deceptively simple white fences. General Goodwin and all the satellites were arriving. We stood there waiting and all at once Savin Hill became quite a place. Helen was my wife and Camilla was my child, and I began to wish that everything were on an even larger scale. I had the rank for the moment. I felt gracious and benign. I would not have wanted anything to be changed.
“Just a little home in the country,” I said to Helen, “just a little home.”
When I saw Mel Goodwin’s expression as he observed the house and Helen and estimated the situation, I was increasingly delighted that everything was just the way it was.
“It’s been a long drive for you, I’m afraid,” I said to Mrs. Goodwin.
The photograph of Mrs. Goodwin had been put away that night at the Ritz, before I could see it, but she looked very much as I had often imagined her—a general’s wife in a newsreel, with a conventional expression of pride, and a sense of its being her day at last. She had the durable, well-traveled appearance that a general’s wife should have, combined with the assurance that came of knowing her rank exactly. She looked as though she had spent a lifetime packing and unpacking and arranging things on short notice. She wore gray gloves and a sensible black tailored coat on which a large corsage of orchids seemed elaborately out of place. She was about the General’s age, a more difficult time of life for a woman than for a man. Her hair, freshly waved, was frankly gray, with a beauty parlor’s light bluish tinge that matched her eyes very nicely. You could see that Mrs. Goodwin had been pretty once in a rather petite manner, and her expression was agreeable and, I imagined, more interesting than it had been earlier. She had gained in weight and character, and she had seen the world. Eventually the services left their mark on their women as they did on their men.
When I shook hands with her, I had the uncomfortable impression that she was mentally taking off my double-breasted coat and putting me back into uniform and that I was not receiving a high mark in the test.
Melville Goodwin, USA Page 13