Melville Goodwin, USA

by John P. Marquand

  I was relieved that Phil Bentley and the General both laughed.

  “Yes, let’s put the show on the road,” Phil Bentley said. “Go ahead and get your notebook, Myra.”

  We waited for the ladies to go first, and as the General followed them, Phil Bentley shook his head.

  “Don’t be so God-damned jumpy, boys,” he said to Colonel Flax and me. “He’s starting out all right.”

  “We’re not jumpy,” Colonel Flax said. “You see what he is—sincere.”

  I wished that the colonel would not explain. It never did any good to interfere with anyone like Phil Bentley.

  I told Phil Bentley to take the whole thing over himself, once we were in the library, and he did it very well. He asked the General to sit down near the fire and he asked us all to relax and be comfortable, and everyone did look comfortable except Miss Fineholt, who sat at the desk with her notebooks.

  “Now that we’re all here,” the General said, “I’ve said I’d be cooperative, but I don’t like this sort of thing.”

  I had to admit that Phil Bentley was adroit and reassuring.

  “That’s the way everyone feels when we start,” he said. “It does look rather like being interrogated, doesn’t it? But you won’t mind it after we get going, General. Just think of us all being here talking, and anytime you say anything you don’t want on the record, let me know.”

  “All right,” the General said, “let’s get going.”

  “All right,” Phil Bentley said, “it doesn’t much matter where we start. Let’s begin with your walking along that street in Berlin.”

  “I wish to God I’d never walked along that street,” the General said. “It was just another street in a bombed-out town.”

  He glanced about the library without much curiosity, but at the same time with approval. The books were in good order, their leather backs well oiled. Helen had been augmenting the library by frequent visits to auction rooms and in the last analysis it was her idea of what a man’s library should be, based on the best conservative tradition and approved by a dealer in definitive editions. If Miss Fineholt had been interested in the appraisal, she would have found that the books and furnishings amounted to more than the General’s yearly pay. The mahogany book ladders on squeaking casters, the terrestrial and celestial globes, the so-called cockfighting chairs, were all Helen’s idea, not mine, and so were the other chairs, which, I am glad to say, proved that some thought had been given to physical comfort in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. My sole contributions to the room consisted of two refusals. I had asked Helen to remove a rug made out of the hide of some African animal from in front of the fireplace, and I had not allowed her to put above the mantel an ornate map of the world showing my travels.

  Miss Fineholt, Phil Bentley, Colonel Flax and I sat there listening to the General, all of us as unaccustomed to the library as the library was to us. We were not scions of old county families. As far as the General was concerned, circumstances had made him oblivious long ago to material surroundings, but still he did give the room a moment’s thought.

  “One of the things I like least about bombings,” the General said, “is the way home furnishings get scattered. I don’t like seeing chewed-up pages of books in the rubble, but then, Berlin is pretty well picked up, and paper sells for something.”

  “Why did you happen to be walking down the street?” Phil Bentley asked.

  “Because this AP correspondent said he’d take me to see the sights,” the General said, and he went on from there easily if not brilliantly. He was completely at home giving an account of any concrete action, and I imagine Phil Bentley had understood this. As the novelty wore off, General Goodwin’s words became less stilted and less considered. By degrees his personality began to dominate the room, so that in a little while it made no difference that all of us were entirely familiar with the Berlin incident. Melville Goodwin’s reaction to it was all that was important. He was a book, if the pages could be turned properly and if we could interpret his self-revelations.

  “You see it was all nothing to make a fuss about,” he was saying. “It doesn’t make any difference what language they talk, troops are troops.”

  I watched Miss Fineholt’s hand moving smoothly across the pages of her notebook. The General was becoming more interested in his own words, more absorbed in himself and less conscious of effect. You had to pay attention to him. In the end he was like the Ancient Mariner. You could not choose but hear.

  “Now that we’ve broken the ice,” Phil Bentley said, “how about telling us where you were born and about your family. Just tell us anything you want, as though you were trying to remember it all for yourself.”

  “All right,” the General said, “I don’t mind, if you don’t. I was born and raised in Hallowell, New Hampshire, about ten miles away from the town of Nashua, New Hampshire, in the Merrimack River Valley. The town of Hallowell is at the falls of a small stream called Blind River, which flows into the Merrimack. The Hallowell hat factory is there, still using water power. Maybe you have heard of Hallowell hats.”

  He waited expectantly, but no one had heard of them.

  “It’s a town of about three thousand population, a small mill town. There have always been Goodwins in Hallowell, I guess, but I haven’t been around there much since I left for the Point. I sometimes think when I retire I might go back, but you have to keep living in a place like Hallowell in order to stay with it. It’s a specialty in itself, living in a place like Hallowell.”

  Our paths must have come very near to crossing at some point in Nashua. I remembered the town of Hallowell very well, one of those half-forgotten towns off the main highway with a single small industry to give it an excuse for existing.

  IX

  It Must Have Been Those Decoration Day Parades

  There were always Goodwins in Hallowell, General Goodwin was saying, above ground and in the cemetery. There had been Goodwins in Hallowell in the French and Indians wars, and the Indians had burned down a Goodwin farm on one of their raids down the Merrimack. You still can find their arrowheads and the wigwam sites along Blind River where they camped when the salmon and alewives were running. There was no history of Hallowell that he knew anything about except for word-of-mouth history and the records on the stones in the cemetery. His great-great-grandfather, Amos Goodwin, had been in the Revolutionary War, and there was always a flag by his slate headstone on Decoration Day. His grandfather on his mother’s side had been in the Civil War, but he was buried in Nashua. That was about all there was to say about his family, except that his own father, Robert Goodwin, had owned the drugstore, and when Melville Goodwin attended the Hallowell grammar school, there must have been ten other Goodwins there, including his two elder brothers and his sister Celia. His elder brother George ran the drugstore now, and his brother Harry was settled in Michigan. Celia was married and in California, which went to show that Hallowell had been pretty much a place to move away from.

  Without wishing in any way to criticize West Point, which was the greatest school of its kind in the world, nevertheless a kind of iron curtain did fall, when you entered there. Many a time in his plebe year at the Point he had longed to return to Hallowell in a violent, homesick way. Many a time he had put himself to sleep recalling the fishing and the skating on Blind River, and even the chores that had been assigned him before and after school. He had been able, in those unhappy periods when discipline had been kicked into him, to close his eyes and walk down every street in Hallowell, in the same way an expert could play chess without looking at the board. Yet frankly, by now Hallowell and his days there had begun to lie in a region which people in the service sometimes referred to as “outside,” a disagreeable term which he knew was also employed by Sing Sing convicts.

  You might as well face the fact that you saw civilian life through different lenses after you had been to the Point. You were constantly being disturbed by its lavishness and laxness, though he did not w
ant to imply for a moment that army people did not have human weaknesses. Take the Hallowell high school, for instance. The school committee, of which his uncle had been a member, had never thought of giving Hallowell boys close-order drill and good setting-up exercises. These would have been more of a help to them in later life than Caesar’s Gallic wars and Virgil, and there might also have been a course in map reading. Yet he could see, because he certainly was not a martinet, that innovations like these would never have been accepted in Hallowell. The disciplines of Hallowell were of a milder sort.

  “Robert,” he could remember his mother saying, “don’t call the boys in yet. Supper can wait for ten minutes. Remember, children are only children once.”

  That was why he loved his mother and her memory. She had never exhibited maternal worries about her children. She always seemed completely certain that the future would look out for itself as long as one received a good education and went to church on Sunday. It was amazing how you were let alone to work things out for yourself in Hallowell.

  Hallowell was a long distance away, but Melville Goodwin could still give a ground plan of the place. An aptitude for analytical observation of contour, water courses and cover, degree of slope, and condition of roads and fences, was now part of his professional equipment, and full knowledge of terrain had often meant for him the difference between life and death, but his mind’s picture of Hallowell could never be objective. He never, for instance, fought an imaginary war in Hallowell. He never thought of the Rowell Memorial Library as a communications center or of the hat factory as a strong point or Carter’s Woods as offering suitable concealment from the air. Nevertheless, he still could do a sketch map of it if you would give him a pencil and paper.

  Most of the country was a sandy glacial moraine covered by a scrubby growth of pine and oak. No main motor highway ran through Hallowell even now. The railroad junction was two miles out of town, and only a freight spur ran to the hat factory. Once an hour in summer and once every two hours in winter a trolley would leave the square in front of the hat factory for Nashua. Shute’s General Store and Richards’s Meat Market and Gray’s Dry Goods and Notions Store and Goodwin’s Drugstore were all grouped around this open space. The houses along Prospect Street, where he had lived and where Muriel Reece’s family had lived, had mostly been built in the sixties, when the hat factory had enjoyed unusual prosperity because of the Civil War. They were comfortable houses with porches painted gray or white, and the largest of them, of an earlier period, was the one occupied by Mr. Oakes Hallowell, the owner of the hat factory. It stood behind a white picket fence just off the common, adjacent to the brownstone Romanesque building of the Rowell Memorial Library. The grammar school, a small yellow structure, stood at the end of Prospect Street just where it ran into the country.

  What he remembered best were the sounds and smells of Hallowell, the whistle of the hat factory at seven and noon and closing time, the constant sound of water over the dam, a clamor that rose to a roar in spring, the steamy smell of felt and dye by the river, the smell of wood smoke from the kitchen chimneys when the fires were being started in the morning, and the sound of sleigh bells in the winter. When he came home later on leave and when cars were parked along the common and along Prospect Street, he was still listening for the rattle of wagon wheels or for the ringing of sleigh bells. The whole place was on the “outside” but somehow, even down to the granite Civil War soldier in front of the town hall, it was different from any other place on the outside.

  That soldier, with his cape and little visor hat, gave Melville his first impression of his country’s wars, but there were other immediate wars in Hallowell. When he was a little boy, there was always the prospect of physical collision, beginning with the morning right after breakfast when his mother had packed his lunch box and kissed him and sent him off to school. His brothers were of no great help to him. George was eight years older and in high school already. Harry was three years older and did not want to be seen with a kid Mel’s age, and Celia was so much older that she often, in speaking of him to other girls, referred to him as her cute little brother. Perhaps he was a cute boy when he came to think of it. His round face and his wide, innocent eyes and the length of his yellow hair may have had more influence on his development than he ever imagined. He never dreamed of telling anyone that he dreaded the twenty-minute recess period when his contemporaries would gather around him and call him “baby face.”

  There must always be some scene when the curtain rises on anyone’s career, and a September morning in about 1903, when the family were having breakfast, may be as good a medium as any other for introducing the life and times of Melville A. Goodwin. It was the period when the mail-order house of Montgomery Ward and Company offered a free trip down the Mississippi to the boys who could sell the most Montgomery Ward buggies in their communities. George Goodwin had seen the advertisement two weeks before, and he was endeavoring to start his Mississippi trip that morning by inducing his father to buy a buggy, but Mr. Goodwin was in a hurry.

  “I’ve told you ‘no,’ George,” Mr. Goodwin said, “and I don’t want to have to tell you ‘no’ again. How do you know there’s any trip down the Mississippi River? Advertisements are only made to make a boy like you discontented.”

  “But you have advertisements in the store,” George said. “What about Old Home Elixir?”

  “Young man,” Mr. Goodwin said, “you’re too young to know about Old Home, even if this is a no-license town.”

  “Oh, it’s got booze in it, has it?” George asked.

  “It has an alcoholic content,” Mr. Goodwin said, “but it’s a medicine. Never mind about Old Home.”

  “Celia, dear,” Mrs. Goodwin said, “bring the coffeepot over to your father.”

  “Well, if you won’t buy a buggy,” George said, “can I have fifty cents?”

  Mr. Goodwin put a little cream in his coffee and a spoonful of sugar before he answered.

  “Thank you for the coffee, Mother,” he said. He always called her Mother at breakfast. “What do you want fifty cents for, George?”

  “I want to send for an Indian snake’s-eye ring,” George said. “It’s a lucky charm.”

  “What do you need luck for?” Mr. Goodwin asked.

  “Why, any fella needs luck,” George said.

  Mr. Goodwin sighed. “You ought to stop reading advertisements, George.… I’ll have two eggs and one piece of bacon this morning, Mother, but I’m in sort of a hurry. I’ve got to make up a prescription for Dr. Byles.… Now when I was a boy I used to read good books. George, did you ever read The Last of the Mohicans, by James Fenimore Cooper?”

  “Who is the prescription for, dear?” Mrs. Goodwin asked.

  “For Mrs. Perkins,” Mr. Goodwin said.

  “Is it her stomach again?”

  “Yes,” Mr. Goodwin said, “it’s the digestive prescription—Dr. Byles’s bismuth one.” You could learn what was wrong with everyone if you listened to Father at home.

  The family were having breakfast in the kitchen, as they customarily did on school days. Celia and Harry had set the table, and in the chilly September morning the stove was warm and pleasant. Melville ate his oatmeal in steady silence. His mother had packed his lunch box already with a jam sandwich, a hard-boiled egg and an orange. Soon it would be time to go to school.

  “Mom,” he said, “I don’t feel very good this morning.”

  “Why, Mel,” his mother said, “where do you feel sick?”

  He tried to think of a good place to feel sick, but he actually felt very well all over.

  “Sort of everywhere,” he said, but he never was good at acting.

  “Come here, Mel,” his father said, “and stick out your tongue—’way out, and now say ‘ah.’ I thought so. It’s the old school complaint. I used to have it myself.” He smiled and rubbed his hands together. “And I know the cure for it. The cure is, go to school.”

  Melville returned to his chair at the kitchen
table and ate his soft-boiled egg. The cure was to go to school, and ten minutes later Harry and he and Celia started. The sun was bright on Prospect Street. It had been a dry summer, and the leaves were already falling from the elms. When you scuffled your feet in the dead leaves, they had a pungent, dusty smell.

  “Harry,” he asked, “can I walk with you?” If he went with Harry past the Stickney house, he knew that he would reach school safely. The main danger always came from the Stickney house, a hundred yards down the street.

  “What’s the matter?” Harry asked. “Do you need a nurse?”

  “No,” Mel said.

  “Then don’t keep tagging after me,” Harry said.

  “Go ahead, Mel,” Celia said when they reached the Jacques house. “I’m going to call for Emily. Please go on, Mel, and don’t hang around listening to us.”

  Mel Goodwin continued on his way, walking alone down Prospect Street, not alone technically, because there were grown-up people in the yards and there were dogs, but alone practically, from the point of view of childhood. He walked steadily and carefully toward the Stickney house, and each step brought him nearer. He could already see the gray mansard roof and the umbrella tree in the Stickney front yard and the iron fence and the drive leading to the gray barn. Every detail was assuming a painful distinctness as though he were looking through the focused lens of a spyglass. He never could be sure what might happen, perhaps nothing or perhaps nothing much, depending on whether Joe Stickney was waiting for him or not, and depending on Joe’s whim. For one bright second he thought that Joe Stickney had started off ahead of him, but just as he began feeling that everything was all right, Joe ran down the front steps, and Mel knew that Joe had been waiting. Mel could shut his eyes and still see the active nine-year-old Joe Stickney, the merry, volatile Joe Stickney in his corduroy trousers and his red jersey. He could see Joe Stickney’s short black hair and his brown eyes and his expectant smile. Joe was carrying a light switch with which he had been whipping at the elm leaves on the lawn.