Melville Goodwin, USA

by John P. Marquand

  One day in the latter part of October at four in the afternoon I was sitting in the elaborate office which the company had supplied for me, going over Art’s revised notes, and I had asked Miss Maynard, the secretary whom the company had supplied for me, to get me some foreign dispatches from the newsroom so that I could check some of Art Hertz’s statements. I had just decided that a lead on the situation in the Orient sounded better than Art’s beginning, which dealt with a Washington investigation, when suddenly the door from Miss Maynard’s office opened, and a tall, youngish man, whom I did not know, peered in. This would not have happened if Miss Maynard had been at her desk but she had just come in to me with the teletype copy.

  Strangers were not supposed to pop in at the studio unless there was a visitors’ tour, and I could not say that I was pleased. I had never seen this youngish man around, but something in the careful cut of his double-breasted suit and in the neat fold of the handkerchief protruding from his breast pocket gave me an idea that he knew his way about studios.

  “Oh,” he said, and he had a fine sincere voice that reminded me of my own when I heard a broadcast played back to me, “excuse me. I didn’t know anyone was here,” and then he was gone.

  “Who was that?” I asked Miss Maynard, and I thought Miss Maynard colored slightly.

  “Why, don’t you know him, Mr. Skelton?” Miss Maynard asked.

  “No,” I said, “but he’s got a voice and a presence, hasn’t he?”

  I should have known right then that Miss Maynard knew something that I did not, but at the time such a thought never crossed my mind.

  “Why,” Miss Maynard said, “it’s Mr. Alan Featherbee. You know, he has the nine-o’clock-in-the-morning spot at Acme, the one that’s called ‘Alan Featherbee and the News.’”

  I felt a twinge of the unreasoning professional jealousy that is unavoidable in the show business, particularly when I remembered that in my latest conversation with Gilbert Frary he had mentioned that Featherbee was the one who spoke his own commercials.

  “Well, what’s he doing here?” I asked.

  “I really don’t know, Mr. Skelton,” Miss Maynard said. She looked unusually beautiful against the background of the green carpet and the gay upholstered chairs, but it seemed to me that she was speaking especially carefully and sweetly. “Mr. Featherbee has been around here a good deal during the last few days. Just visiting, I suppose.”

  “Oh,” I said, “are we going to take him away from Acme?”

  “I really wouldn’t know, I’m sure, Mr. Skelton,” Miss Maynard said, “but he has been around frequently.”

  I wanted to ask Miss Maynard some further questions, but I had learned that with studio secretaries there was seldom that loyalty from the bottom up to which Mel Goodwin had so often alluded. At least I had the common sense then to suspect the possible shadow of a coming event.

  “Oh,” I said. I wanted very much to ask Miss Maynard to try to find me a record of one of the Featherbee broadcasts, but I thought better of it because of the loyalty angle. “Maybe you’d better go out front and keep out visitors, Miss Maynard. I’m pretty busy now,” but before Miss Maynard could reach her office the door was opened again by one of those nice boys in the Civil-War-gray, military-academy uniforms with all the braid.

  “Forgive me, Mr. Skelton,” he said. It must have been a part of the briefing those boys received that made them always ask to be forgiven and not excused. “A gentleman at the floor reception desk would like to see you personally, and your secretary’s telephone did not answer.”

  “Oh dear,” Miss Maynard said, “I’m dreadfully sorry, Mr. Skelton.”

  I smiled as sweetly as I could at Miss Maynard.

  “All right,” I said, “who is it?”

  “Captain Robert Goodwin, sir,” the page boy said.

  “I can see him and find out what he wants, Mr. Skelton,” Miss Maynard said, “and I’ll really see this doesn’t happen again.”

  “Oh, never mind,” I told her. “Tell him to come in as long as he’s here.”

  First it had been Art Hertz’s script, and now I would have to let it go as it stood, and then it had been Alan Featherbee and the News, and now I was back again in the life and times of Melville A. Goodwin. I had never imagined that I might see his older son nor could I understand why he wanted to call. When Miss Maynard showed him in and left us and closed the door, it occurred to me that I had never received a guest of my own in my new private office. I was not at ease with all those blown-up publicity photographs lining the wall, and it did not help to observe that Robert Goodwin began to eye them immediately after we shook hands.

  “Don’t blame any of that on me,” I said. “It’s all a part of the show. How did you find I was here?”

  Robert Goodwin smiled, and it was the Melville Goodwin smile on a younger face.

  “It was really tough tracking you down, Major Skelton,” he said, “but I called up your home in Connecticut and was able to reach Mrs. Skelton. I hope you’ll forgive the intrusion. I’m only in New York for a few hours.”

  He was in a civilian suit that was too reddish-brown and tweedy. No West Pointer had ever looked right to me in a business suit. They always went hog-wild in men’s clothing or haberdashery shops. They always come out, even from a reliable tailor, with some garment that was slightly out of line or that jarred the notes of convention. Robert Goodwin stood as if he were entering an office in the Pentagon. He was Regular Army from his manner and in spite of his garish costume he almost made me feel like a colonel.

  “Take any color chair you like and sit down,” I said. “I thought you were a lieutenant. I didn’t know you were a captain.”

  “It just came through the other day, sir,” he answered.

  He looked young for the rank until I looked at his eyes. His eyes were older than the rest of his face.

  “Help yourself to a cigarette,” I told him. “There ought to be some in the box on the fake Chinese coffee table.”

  “Thanks,” he said, “is there an ash tray handy, sir?”

  I could think of Muriel Goodwin telling him to be careful about cigarettes. When he saw a mushroomlike ash receiver in a corner, he started up to bring it nearer.

  “Sit down,” I said, “and drop your ashes on the carpet. The management cleans it every day.”

  “This really is quite a place you have here, sir,” he said.

  “That’s right,” I said. “I wish your father could have seen it. It might have built me up with him.”

  If I had been young Robert Goodwin with a few hours of my own in New York, I would not have consumed one minute of it looking up one of my father’s civilian friends, unless I had called for a purpose. When he smiled, his eyes narrowed exactly like Mel Goodwin’s. I could see that he was trying to size me up, and that he had probably never seen anything like me or the broadcasting studio. I found myself anxious to make the right impression on him, and I was curious about him, too, because just seeing him put Mel Goodwin in a different light.

  He was taller than his father, yet he looked very much as Mel Goodwin must have looked when he was fresh from the Point. He still had a few rough edges but I was thinking that perhaps he had used his father as a model, because his hair was done in the same crew cut and he had the same way of sitting, relaxed and yet not relaxed. His youth still concealed many of the qualities which would later give him the authentic stamp of the professional soldier, though I could tell from previous experiences with other younger officers that he had been in action many times. Action always left an indefinable mark on any face. Though they were not deep as yet, lines were already apparent around the corners of his mouth.

  “It was nice seeing your father,” I said. “We had quite a time up at my place with those magazine people.”

  Robert Goodwin flicked his cigarette ash on the impeccable office carpet and looked longingly at the ash receiver.

  “We’re looking forward to seeing that piece about him,” Robert Goodwin
said. “Mother can hardly wait. We all hope the old man didn’t put his foot in his mouth.”

  “Don’t worry, he did fine,” I told him. “I suppose he’s right in the groove now and settling down in Washington.”

  Captain Goodwin looked straight at me, with the same cool, searching look his father could assume.

  “I wouldn’t say the boss was quite settled down yet, sir,” he said. “He’s got some leave and he and Mother are still sort of camping out with some old friends in Alexandria, Colonel and Mrs. Joyce. Maybe you heard the old man speak of them.”

  “Yes, I have,” I said. “Your mother and Mrs. Joyce work on picture puzzles, don’t they?”

  “That’s right,” he said. “… I’ve just got orders to go to Benning—instructor in recoilless weapons.”

  The ice was breaking slightly, and he looked more at ease. He seemed to expect me to make some intelligent comment about recoilless weapons, but when I did not, he went right on, still formally but more confidently.

  “We played with those things some in the Pacific,” he said. “The word is they’re better now, but I sort of wish I could stick around Washington. I’d sort of like to get to know the old man again. I haven’t seen him for quite a while.”

  Obviously he was planning to talk about the old man, now that the ground was cleared.

  “Maybe you’ve noticed, sir,” he said, “or maybe it’s only my own impression, that the old man is sort of restless.”

  When our eyes met, I saw that he was watching me carefully, and I thought he handled himself very well. He did not fidget, as a civilian his age might have, but then he was an officer with a record.

  “Everyone’s restless sometimes,” I told him.

  “Yes, I know,” he said, “I’m that way myself—but then I’m under thirty, if you get my point.”

  In the army you took more things for granted than you ever could on the outside. Now and then you had to put all the cards on the table with someone after a few minutes’ acquaintance, and you got to know and to trust people quickly. I must have fitted some of his own standards, and I could not help being pleased.

  “Yes, I get your point,” I said.

  He glanced at the electric clock on the office wall with its moving second hand, and I wondered whether it gave him the same inevitable sense of pressure that it had always given me.

  “Maybe I’d better lay it on the line,” he said. “The old man was saying the other night that you were the only noncombat civilian officer he knew who ever made full sense to him in a service way. Of course the old man’s pretty naïve at some points, but I saw a lot of civilians out in the Pacific myself.” He smiled at me again. “Now if the old man said that about you, I guess that means you sort of like my old man. Jesus, I’m making a long speech!”

  Robert Goodwin crossed the room and dropped his cigarette in the ash receptacle, although he had just lighted one, and then he immediately lighted another.

  “Perhaps you’d like a little Scotch,” I said. “I have some right here.”

  “Thanks, I really would, sir,” Robert Goodwin said.

  I fetched a bottle and some glasses out of the cellaret and then I called Miss Maynard and asked her if she would please get a little ice and some soda from the small refrigerator that was in Mr. Frary’s changing room. We talked about the Pacific until Miss Maynard left the room.

  “That’s a really nicely stacked up secretary you have, sir,” he said.

  “They all are, in the front offices,” I told him. I was not old enough to call him “son” and he was too young to call me “Sid,” but it was remarkable how a little Scotch always eased a situation.

  “You know, I’ve seen a lot of generals, sir,” he said, looking up at the clock again, “because I was Priestley’s aide for a while on Saipan, and do you know when I looked my father over the other day in Washington, I was surprised?” He stopped and looked at his drink. “I may be prejudiced, but I think he’s got what it takes, all the way around. I have a hunch he can handle anything right through a four-star job.”

  As I waited for him to go on, I found myself beginning to think that he possibly might be right. In the beginning I had discounted Melville Goodwin’s capabilities, which were always getting lost behind his simplicities, but somehow Goodwin was always better than you thought he was going to be. He had always gained something from experience. He had always moved a little further forward and he was still young as generals went.

  “A lot of officers can only push beyond a certain level,” the captain was saying, and he moved his hands in a quick gesture to indicate a level. “You can get the feel of this when you meet them—but it’s different with him. I’m not referring to guts. The boss has a mental toughness that is more than guts, and he’s really got a future if he doesn’t stick his neck out.”

  He glanced at me, but I did not answer. It was curious to hear him implying what had been so often in my own thoughts.

  “There’s nothing in this world quite so naked as a general,” Robert Goodwin said. “He’s up there where everybody can see everything about him including his private life, from every angle, and he must be right; he can’t be wrong. Well, the old man’s up there just now, and they’re looking him over. Every one of them has his own crowd behind him.… All right, I’m naturally in the Goodwin crowd”—Robert Goodwin glanced straight at me again—“and I don’t want to see him fall flat on his face, Mr. Skelton.”

  The room, like all the studio offices, was carefully soundproofed, and the silence all around us was distinctly artificial.

  “What makes you think he’s going to fall on his face?” I asked.

  Robert Goodwin’s face framed itself in that mirthless service smile. It was, of course, a useless question, and of course we both knew it.

  “Listen,” he said, “what about this dame he keeps seeing in New York?”

  We were surrounded again by an artificial, antiseptic silence and I was conscious of blank helplessness. It was news to me that the General had seen Dottie Peale more than that once in New York.

  “Keeps seeing?” I repeated.

  “That’s right, sir,” Robert Goodwin said. “He’s commuting up here all the time from Washington.”

  “How do you happen to know about this?” I asked him.

  His lips twisted again into that mirthless service smile.

  “I wouldn’t say the old man was exactly a subtle character, would you, sir?” he said. “He’s talked to me about the dame. He’s one of those people who always has to talk to somebody. He says you introduced her to him in Paris.”

  It seemed to me that he was implying that, because of an introduction, I was the one who should do something about it.

  “That was quite a while ago,” I said.

  “All right,” he said, “that isn’t all.”

  “What isn’t all?” I asked.

  We were beginning to sound like characters in a soap opera, in that soundproof office.

  “Everybody’s beginning to talk,” he said. “They’ve been seen around. It makes a pretty good story. Everyone likes a good story when it’s on a general, sir.”

  “Now look,” I asked, and I sounded as cautious as a confidential family lawyer, “don’t you think you’re exaggerating?”

  “Maybe,” he answered, “but then, so is everybody else. That’s the way those things go, isn’t it?”

  I wished he would not act as though I were responsible, but I could feel his cool accusing glance.

  “Now look,” I began, “these things happen sometimes.”

  “Yes, sir, you’re damned well right they do,” he answered, “but they ought not to happen to the old man right now.”

  “These things happen,” I said again, “and nobody can do much about them, I guess.”

  “Well, the point is somebody ought to try. Don’t you agree, sir?” he said, and he looked at me. I wanted to tell him that I had tried in my own way, but there was that gap of age between us and I had my own loya
lties.

  “Have you tried speaking to your father?” I asked.

  “Yes, sir,” he said, “I brought it up last night and it only made the old man mad. Have you ever tried to argue with him?”

  “Yes,” I said, “I’ve tried.”

  We sat in silence for a while, both supporting a Leaning Tower of Pisa—the career of Major General Melville A. Goodwin.

  “Well,” he said, “somebody’s got to do something. I hope it isn’t as bad as we think.”

  “I didn’t say it was so bad,” I told him.

  “I know you didn’t say it, sir,” he said. “Well, what about this Mrs. Peale?”

  “Well,” I answered, “what about her?”

  He sat up straighter and gripped his knees with his heavy fingers.

  “Maybe she really likes the old man,” he said. “Maybe she doesn’t realize how this sort of thing might hurt him, from the service point of view, I mean. Maybe she doesn’t know that the old man’s slated for something big just now. I think I ought to meet her and have a talk with her myself.”

  It was exactly what someone of his age would have concluded, clear and logical and completely useless, and the worst of it was I knew that Dottie would love to see young Robert Goodwin and that anything he might say would only give Mel Goodwin a new value.

  “Listen,” I told him, “I don’t think these things are ever helped by sitting around a table.”