Melville Goodwin, USA

by John P. Marquand

  “Mel’s told me all about you, Major Skelton,” she said. She might have still been at the airport, greeting me as a part of a committee, and I admired the brisk way she managed me.

  “How do you do, my dear?” Mrs. Goodwin said to Helen. “And what a sweet little girl, all dressed up for the occasion just like me. I hope you haven’t felt that you had to make an effort about the General and me, my dear. Please don’t. We’re used to taking things as they come.” Her duty was to put anxious people at their ease, and she was doing it well and quickly, and next she turned her attention to Farouche.

  “What is that dog holding in his mouth?” she asked.

  “It’s a rubber ring. He wants to play,” I said.

  “The General will play with him. I won’t,” she said. “Mel, here’s another dog for you to play with.”

  It was obviously the sort of small talk that she had learned to use gracefully before she climbed to the stand with the General to watch army post reviews. Another entourage had gathered behind her—the General, and a stout, genial-looking officer who was undoubtedly Colonel Flax of Public Relations, and behind them at a respectful distance, Gilbert Frary, Phil Bentley and the research girl and a photographer.

  “Well, well,” General Goodwin said, “so he wants to play, does he? And what’s your name, sister? I remember Daddy told me that he had a little girl.”

  “Mel adores children,” Mrs. Goodwin said. “You must excuse him for speaking to her first, my dear. Mel forgets everything when he sees a child.”

  “Just a moment,” Gilbert Frary said. “Burt, come over here. How about a picture of the General kissing Camilla?”

  I was the only one who was disturbed by the suggestion. All the brass in the ETO had learned to expect photographs.

  “No,” I said, “let’s go inside.”

  “Yes,” Helen said, “let’s go in, and perhaps you and the General would like to go up to your room before we have tea, Mrs. Goodwin.” The ladies moved into the hall, but everyone else held back.

  “Go ahead, all the rest of you,” the General said. “I’m going to stay out here a minute and talk to Sid. So this is Camilla, is it?”

  “And this is Miss Otts,” I said. “They’re going to a party. Williams can drive you now that he’s here, Miss Otts.”

  The General stood beside me, examining the house and the beech trees.

  “This is quite an installation you have here,” he said. “Are those the stables?”

  “Yes, sir,” I told him, “but we haven’t any horses yet. I’m afraid Helen’s going to do something about them in the spring. You must be tired. Wouldn’t you like to come in and have a drink?”

  Although he had been doing a lot of plane travel, he hardly showed it.

  “It’s nice to see you, son,” he said. “God damn, all of a sudden having this thing blow up in my face. You should have seen what I’ve been through today, not to mention being given only about four hours to turn things over in Frankfurt. I don’t even know whether I’m to go back. I don’t know what the hell anything’s about. I suppose maybe I would like a drink.” He took me by the arm, and we walked into the hall. “This all confuses the hell out of me,” he went on. “Nobody said anything when I was cracking the line at Saint-Lô. This is a hell of a thing for my record. Just because I was walking down a street in Berlin …” He paused and laughed shortly. “… And now I’m under orders to do what these reporters want. I don’t know how to answer these questions. Maybe we’d better have a drink. Oh, there you are, Flax.”

  “Let me take your hat and coat, sir,” Colonel Flax said.

  The General would not have to think himself of such things as his overcoat and his garrison cap now that someone in uniform was around. He was secure in his knowledge that they were now the colonel’s responsibility, and I seemed to be following him into a new headquarters with his chief of staff. The General raised his arm quickly to look at his wrist watch. So did the colonel and so did I, instinctively, to be sure that we checked with the General’s time.

  “Sixteen hours thirty-five,” the General said. “What’s the program now, Flax?”

  The General had not asked me what the program was, because he had been running around with the colonel all day, but he picked himself up immediately and patted my shoulder. “Excuse me, Sid,” he said. “It’s just the old man trying to take over. Next time, slap my ears back, will you?”

  In spite of his hours of travel and all the wear and tear of his day in Washington, he did not look his age. His short crew cut concealed the gray of his hair. His body was still tough and resilient, and he had a quick, hard smile.

  “Anything Colonel Flax suggests will be fine,” I said. “Put the General’s hat and coat on a chair, Colonel. Oscar will hang them up.”

  I saw Oscar out of the corner of my eye, moving toward us with three highballs on the Paul Revere tray.

  “Thanks, son,” the General said to Oscar. “This certainly looks good.” The General glanced at the curving staircase and at the hall’s tropical wallpaper and smiled again. “It’s nice to see one of my old boys doing so well outside,” he went on. “I didn’t tell you, did I, Colonel, that Skelton was with me at Saint-Lô?”

  “Why, no, sir, I didn’t know that Mr. Skelton was with you,” the colonel said.

  There was no mention of the shortness of the time I had been with him in Normandy. Perhaps he had forgotten this, and I, myself, was beginning to believe that I had been with him quite a while. I was almost positive of it when he patted my shoulder again.

  “I don’t need to tell you, do I, Sid,” he said, “what it means to me, your taking Muriel and me into your home here? It gives a kick to everything. It’s like old times, being back with one of my old boys.”

  Colonel Flax cleared his throat in a tentative way, as though he hesitated to break up a reunion of comrades in arms.

  “Perhaps if the General would like a few minutes to himself,” he said, “Mr. Skelton and I might run over the arrangements for this interview. I’m afraid we’ve had the General jumping through a good many hoops today.”

  “Now that you mention it, it occurs to me that I have been traveling,” the General said. “I might go upstairs and take a shower and put on a clean shirt while you boys collect my wits for me, provided you can find them. When does that man in the horn-rimmed glasses want to start asking me questions?”

  “There isn’t any hurry, sir,” I said. “I don’t see how any of us can do much until after dinner. Don’t worry. You’ll get along all right with Phil Bentley.”

  “I’m not worried,” the General said. “If I put my foot in my mouth, you boys are the ones who will have to pull it out.”

  When Colonel Flax and I were alone in the library, we were like doctors in consultation, fresh from the bedside of our patient.

  “Now my idea of presenting him,” the colonel said briskly, “has been roughly this—and I hope you will agree with me: to show. General Goodwin as a salty character with a lot of guts. I let him have his head all day, and I think he’s come across. He’s got the human touch, and these general officers all have to have something of the actor in them, don’t you think? I’ve never seen one yet who was bad in front of cameras. He makes a good impression, but I wish we could locate something individual in him with a memory value that we could play up. I wish he had more of the Patton quality—pearl-handled pistols, something that would raise him above the norm—but I wasn’t able to find anything. Of course he’s got guts, but then they all have.”

  “Yes, they all have,” I said. “I know what you mean about individuality, but I don’t believe that people expect too much. The main point about General Goodwin is that he answers everyone’s preconceived idea of what he ought to be.”

  Colonel Flax nodded.

  “That registers in the newsreels,” he said, “and that thing you said last night about his being a GI’s general isn’t bad at all. I was able to find one or two enlisted men who had served with him,
and we had them talking together. He was good with them, too. He ribbed one of the boys about cleaning up in a crap game at Algiers. I don’t know how he remembered.”

  “General Goodwin has a fine memory,” I said. “He understands troops.”

  Colonel Flax looked at me questioningly and nodded.

  “Do you know him well?”

  “Not very,” I answered. “Does anybody know a major general well?”

  “That’s the problem, isn’t it?” the colonel said. “You can’t translate them into ordinary terms. Did you ever meet Mrs. Goodwin before?”

  “Not until right now,” I said.

  The colonel looked at me again and nodded.

  “She fitted right into the picture,” he said. “The General was hard to handle at first. He was against all the fuss that was being made, and he wanted to make it clear that the whole incident in Berlin was blown up out of all proportion, but Mrs. Goodwin enjoyed the show. Wives always do, don’t they? They like to christen battleships and put wreaths around race horses.”

  I laughed, and the colonel laughed.

  “He was all right after he got to the Pentagon. We had him meet the press there, and he gave a good account of the Berlin street scene—straightforward, from the shoulder. He even got a few laughs, intentional ones, I mean. He said, ‘You boys have made me what I am today, and I hope you’re satisfied,’ and it wasn’t a bad line. He did all right, but I’m worried about this definitive cover story.”

  “Why are you worried?” I asked.

  Colonel Flax leaned back in his chair and looked at me again very carefully.

  “Well, frankly,” he said, “he’s so damned simple—not that simplicity isn’t all right in its place.”

  At last we were getting down to cases, and it proved that great minds thought alike. As I nodded without replying, I remembered I had said almost the same thing to Dottie Peale back in Paris.

  “Don’t misunderstand me. I don’t mean this in a derogatory sense,” the colonel said. “I’ve never seen General Goodwin until this morning, although I have read his record, but you get to know someone pretty fast under these circumstances. Now in these cover stories, the news magazines always start digging and they want to get an angle, and the public’s pretty tired of generals now. I don’t want them to make a monkey out of Goodwin. Now I know Bentley, and he worries me. He’s got to turn out a line of goods. It’s the way he earns his living.”

  “Phil Bentley’s pretty serious-minded,” I said.

  “He’s not so serious that he didn’t write for the New Yorker,” the colonel answered. “I wish there were some way of protecting Goodwin. Do you think it would do any good to give Bentley a briefing on the General’s background? I’ve got his service record here, but it hasn’t much appeal.”

  Public Relations officers, even when they were as good as Colonel Flax, constantly toyed with the idea that you could influence writers. They seldom seemed to realize that this was the worst possible tactic. When you were dealing with someone in Phil Bentley’s class, it was never even wise to hover around too much or to be overhelpful. The only thing to do was to give him everything there was, on and off the record, because in any event, he would get it by himself. No doubt an investigative crew was out already, asking the General’s friends and enemies what they thought of him.

  “I know,” Colonel Flax said. “You’re perfectly right, of course. These boys are always looking for odd bits, mild pieces of dirt that look bad out of context.” Colonel Flax lowered his voice. “Did you ever hear about General Goodwin going overboard over an American girl in Paris, a writer or a publisher or someone?”

  The story would attach itself like a burr to someone of Mel Goodwin’s reputation, and Colonel Flax was only repeating it. You could never get rid of such a thing once it got started.

  “Yes,” I said, “I know all about it. As a matter of fact, I was there at the time.”

  I was glad that the colonel did not ask me what I knew, and I had no intention of asking him what he knew. We sat silently for a moment, and then the colonel moved uneasily in his chair.

  “I don’t like monkeying with anyone’s private life,” he said, “but I’ve got General Goodwin on my hands. This sort of thing, if it’s used in a certain way …”

  He left the sentence unfinished, but both of us knew how maliciously the material could be used, seemingly without libelous intent.

  “Phil’s all right,” I said. “I’ll tell him the whole story off the record. Phil and I know each other pretty well.”

  “That takes quite a weight off my mind,” Colonel Flax told me. “I’d be much obliged if you don’t mind carrying the ball on that one.”

  That evening had its peculiar aspects. For one thing we were none of us entirely at home in our surroundings, not even Helen, which afforded me some amusement since she had created them. I do not mean by this that the persons seated around our beautiful double-pedestal dining table, on the austerely graceful Chippendale chairs that matched it, did not know which fork to use. I do not even mean to imply that anyone present was rendered uneasy by the atmosphere. None of us had been reared in this environment—that was all. Helen knew all about silver and glass and linen and place plates, and the loved those things, but she had not entertained with them herself until very recently. In the old days—and they were not so old after all—Helen and I had allowed our friends to eat off their laps or off anything that came handy in our old apartment in the West Fifties, but you couldn’t eat that way in our new dining room. We had given only two parties that might have been called dinners at Savin Hill. One was a dinner of eight for some people by the name of Bishop, who owned some sort of factory in Waterbury, Connecticut, and who had been kind to us. The other had been for the Gormans, who lived about a mile away and who had a daughter Camilla’s age. Neither of these occasions had taught us all it should have. As we were preparing for the evening, Helen did not seem exactly nervous, but she did have an air of facing something, as I could tell from the way she was going over her dresses.

  “What’s the matter? Do you feel shy?” I asked her.

  “Of course I’m not shy, but I do like everything to be right, and nothing’s quite broken in yet,” she answered.

  “Well, everybody else here will be in the same boat,” I told her. “Nobody’s broken in.”

  “I know,” Helen said, “but I don’t want them to know that we’re in the same boat with them, and that Mr. Bentley is so observant. He was walking around downstairs just a little while ago, looking at everything and whistling pointedly.”

  “You can’t blame him,” I told her. “I whistle sometimes myself.”

  “But, Sid,” she said, “you know it’s fun entertaining in our own house. Sid, I think you’d better put on a dinner coat.”

  “Why?” I asked. “No one else will.”

  “Because Mrs. Goodwin will expect it,” she said, “with the General and everything. Have you a piece of paper and a pencil in your pocket? I’d better draw a seating diagram. I’d like to put Gilbert Frary next to Mrs. Goodwin. He can talk to her about Hollywood.”

  If I had to wear a dinner coat I wished that mine might have had a well-worn appearance, giving the impression that I customarily dressed for dinner, instead of looking new and glossy. But Helen was right, I think. Mrs. Goodwin expected to see me in a black tie. Her manner was approving when we all met downstairs in the living room. I only hoped that Phil Bentley would manage not to whistle.

  “I didn’t know you’d be dressing, Sid,” he said, “or I’d have done something about it.”

  It was hard to think of an easy answer, because Phil knew all about me.

  “It’s a simple reflex,” I said, “my old respect for rank.”

  Phil took off his glasses, pulled a little packet of polishing papers from his waistcoat pocket, rubbed the lenses carefully and blinked at General Goodwin, who was standing in front of the living room fireplace talking to Helen.

  “Now I see w
hy Sid behaved himself in Paris,” I heard the General saying. “Did Sid ever tell you about Saint-Lô, Mrs. Skelton?”

  Phil Bentley looked like a connoisseur peering across a gallery at a canvas.

  “How much did you see of him at Saint-Lô?” he asked.

  “Oh, not very much,” I answered.

  “Why do you respect him,” he asked, “enough to put on a black tie? I never think of you as respecting anybody.”

  It was one of those disagreeable questions which people like Phil learned how to ask when they began writing profiles.

  “Maybe you and I ought to respect a few more abstractions,” I said, “such as courage and honor and duty.”

  “Do you think he respects those things?” Phil asked.

  “He has to,” I said, “and maybe you and I ought to.”

  “That’s right,” Phil said. “Maybe we ought to. Maybe I will later in the evening. He doesn’t look too bad, does he? But then, none of them do. You’ll get us alone right after dinner, won’t you? I haven’t got much time to horse around.”

  “Right after dinner,” I said.

  “Is there anything special you want to say about him?”

  “Not right now,” I said. “He’s all yours. I don’t want to influence you, Phil.”

  There was a slight atmosphere of tenseness as we talked and a trace of professional jealousy between us, but Phil Bentley was to do the work, not me.

  “That Public Relations colonel looks pretty nervous, doesn’t he?” Phil asked. “Why should he be so jittery?”

  “Wouldn’t you?” I asked. “He wants you to do a good piece about him.”

  “I’ll do a good piece about him. We have quite a lot of material on him already, haven’t we, Myra?”

  “Yes,” Miss Fineholt said brightly. “The fun of this work is seeing what material comes in. You saw something of General Goodwin in Paris, didn’t you, Mr. Skelton?”

  “Yes, when I was in Paris I heard him give a lecture on the Battle of the Bulge,” I said. “I wouldn’t press the Paris angle if I were you, Phil.”