Melville Goodwin, USA

by John P. Marquand

  “Will the General see Mr. Skelton now?” he asked.

  Then I heard Mel Goodwin’s voice.

  “Hell, yes,” I heard him say. “Don’t keep him waiting outside.”

  “You can go right in, sir,” Captain Rattisbone said, and he walked behind me as though I might turn and escape.

  The offices were very comfortable in that part of the Pentagon. I have never heard who was responsible for the interior decoration, but whoever it was understood the value of setting. I was in a fine room carpeted in crimson. A massive mahogany desk stood in front of three broad windows that looked out over the Potomac. There was the inevitable leather couch that one seldom sat upon and the heavy chairs that one seldom used and the lighter ones which could be arranged in hasty groups around the desk. An oil portrait of a very antiquated soldier in a chokingly high-necked uniform hung upon the wall. Melville Goodwin was standing near the desk with the cold light from the windows upon him. In fact I was sure that he had been sitting on the corner of the desk gazing at the river when the captain had first opened the door. He was in his “A” uniform and he looked very well.

  “Well, well, Sid,” he said. “So you got him, did you, Captain? Did he come without making trouble?”

  Captain Rattisbone laughed appreciatively.

  “There wasn’t any fuss, sir,” he said.

  Melville Goodwin smiled.

  “You know, Sid,” he said, “you can send this Rattisbone for anything, and by God, he always gets it.” He smiled at the captain graciously. “And he’s been very kind to the old man. Just a minute now before you duck out and leave us here, Captain. I’ve never asked—are you married, son?”

  “Yes, sir,” Captain Rattisbone said.

  “Well,” the General said, “Saint Paul said it’s a fine institution, but I don’t see where he found the time to learn about it. We’re frying steaks at home tonight. Why don’t you and Mrs. Rattisbone come over if you haven’t anything else to do?”

  “Thank you very much, sir,” the captain said.

  “And when you go out, see if you can find General Gooch and tell him I’m hungry, will you? Tell him Mr. Skelton’s here, and it’s time for lunch.”

  “Yes, sir,” the captain said.

  The General and I stood watching the door as it closed noiselessly behind Captain Rattisbone.

  “You know, that’s a very nice lad,” he said, “when you get to know him.”

  “He looks as though he might be,” I said.

  “And he’s got a sense of humor,” the General said, “when you get to know him.”

  “I wouldn’t put it beyond him,” I said. “He started to go through the whole Pentagon joke book.”

  “Oh boy,” Melville Goodwin said, and the corners of his mouth twisted, “wait until I tell Goochy that Rattisbone was trying to tell you Pentagon stories. God damn, it’s nice to see you, Sid. I was just telling Goochy this morning that he can have this whole place if he wants it, even this portrait here.” He nodded in a friendly way toward the picture on the wall and took a step toward it. “Do you know who that’s a picture of?”

  “No,” I answered, “unless it’s Zachary Taylor.”

  “No, no, no,” Melville Goodwin said. “You ought to bone up on your history, Sid. I’ve been reading some lately. It puts me to sleep if I wake up in the middle of the night. That’s one thing about being here—I’m getting time to catch up on my reading.… No, no, of course it isn’t Zachary Taylor. It’s General Winfield Scott—old ‘Fuss and Feathers.’”

  “Oh,” I said, “well, it’s quite a picture.”

  “Goochy always goes for old portraits,” the General said. “He snaked this one out of the Secretary’s office. It was sent down originally from the Point. Goochy had the choice of that or the Peach Orchard at Gettysburg. He picked out Scott. He says it’s more inspirational.”

  “It certainly is an interesting portrait,” I said.

  Melville Goodwin cleared his throat.

  “I’ve been in two meetings this morning,” he said, “or I’d have gone over to get you myself. They’re going to decide what to do with me any day now. It’s been sort of tense here this morning. I wonder what’s happened to Goochy.”

  We both were unnatural in the formality of the office, with Winfield Scott staring at us. Melville Goodwin cleared his throat again. I could see that he was waiting to introduce me to General Gooch and that he was rather reluctant to start talking when we would be interrupted at any moment.

  “Come to think of it,” Melville Goodwin said, “Muriel was pretty tense this morning, too. I wonder whether she knows something I don’t or whether it’s just this steak fry. I’m glad we’re throwing a party, now you’re here, Sid.”

  General Goodwin was an old hand in dealing with tensions. He knew only too well how to handle hours and minutes of suspense, each of which had its own peculiar agony. He had built up an immunity to tension until he could handle it as a heavy drinker handled whisky, and he was not abnormally gay or calm. Still he was talking more than usual, for example about that portrait of General Winfield Scott, and his voice sounded as it had at Saint-Lô after all the final orders had been given and the watches had been synchronized. I even began to feel tense myself.

  “To go back to pictures,” he was saying, “I’ve never had much to do with them but I did buy one in Tientsin once. A curio dealer brought it around to the quarters wrapped in a piece of cloth, the way people carry things in China—one of those pictures wound on a stick.” He swayed from his toes to his heels with his hands clasped behind him. “It was a painting of an old man in a blue robe. He had a poker face, if you ever saw one, and long thin white mustaches—what they call an ancestor portrait—and I’ll tell you why I bought it.”

  He was growing interested in his own train of thought. The infantry barracks of that crowded treaty port and the bare, sharply defined landscape of North China were all undoubtedly filed away in his memory for future reference.

  “I bought it because no one, not even a Chinaman, could have looked so disciplined. I paid thirty dollars for it—that is, thirty dollars Mex. It was an idealized picture. I used to look at it and wish that I could develop that discipline. Now I don’t believe in unreality as a rule, but I grew to believe in that old boy in blue. He had more guts than old Winfield Scott here because he wasn’t real.”

  “Mel,” I said. He turned his head toward me quickly and he must have suspected that I was going to say something that was out of line with convention. I was verging on a familiarity that I would never have ventured on a few weeks before.

  “Mel,” I said, “has anything happened to you?”

  It was the bluntest and most personal question I had ever asked him, and when he listened he looked like the old man in blue.

  “What makes you think so, son?” he asked.

  I was too old for him to call me son, but there was still that ten-year gap in our ages. There was no implied rebuke in the way he called me “son.” On the contrary, it was more like an acceptance of a closeness in our relationship and an invitation to me to continue.

  “Because I think you’re pretty wound up this morning,” I told him.

  I could see him thinking it over, but something inside him had relaxed.

  “Right,” he said, “you’re right on that one, son.”

  He walked over to the windows behind the desk and stared out at the river. Then he walked back to where I was standing, slowly, softly on that soundproof red carpet.

  “I’ve been going through a lot lately, emotionally, I mean. I can handle it, but at the same time … Do you ever get hunches, son?”

  “Yes,” I said, “occasionally.”

  “Well, it isn’t a bad idea to respect them,” he said. “I’ve noticed the further along a man gets, the more he’s got to live with himself and with a few hunches that come to him out of the air. There gets to be less and less to lean on except yourself and whatever it is that makes you go, and the hell of it is
you don’t know what that something is, except that it’s a combination of everything that’s behind you, and you’d better not get too analytical or you’ll lose your grip. Do you think I’m talking sense?”

  I nodded, and his glance moved slowly over the office and the woodwork and the leather upholstery.

  “I don’t usually run on this way,” he said, and he squared his shoulders in a movement that was almost imperceptible, because his shoulders were always squared. “But this is all pretty new to me—all the setting around here, I mean—not the facts. This is up pretty close to the throne, a lot too close for comfort, and the air is Goddamned rarefied, but hunches are hunches anywhere and I still know a hunch when I meet one. It begins in the stomach and travels through the liver and then gets up into the head. It runs all through you finally. Right now I feel the way I felt at Maule, for instance, when no information was coming in. There’s something inside me that keeps talking from my guts. Something is saying, ‘Listen, Mel, you’re going to get it one way or the other. Be ready to take it, Mel.’”

  I was so completely captured by his stark eloquence that I was bracing myself for whatever it was that was coming.

  “The dice are coming out of the box, son,” he said. “I’m either going to get patted on the head or get kicked in the pants, and it’s about time, too. Jesus, the air’s thin here, and I don’t want to talk to Muriel about it any more either. By God, I wish there was a war.”

  He rubbed his hand over the back of his closely cropped head. It was one of his few indecisive gestures.

  “Have you seen Dottie lately?” he asked.

  He asked it abruptly, as though he were changing the subject, but his mood was not changed.

  “No,” I answered, “not since that night.”

  “I haven’t either,” he said. “Perhaps it’s just as well.”

  He stopped, seeming to hope that I would make some answer that would be reassuring.

  “This damn business,” he said slowly. “It’s funny how many times I’ve had to lecture other officers on woman trouble and now I don’t seem to have the build to handle it myself. New York’s too close to Washington.”

  He had passed me a memorandum for my comment and initials, and he was waiting.

  “I could say something pretty obvious,” I said, “but I don’t want to make you sore.”

  “Now, Sid,” Mel Goodwin said, “you won’t make me sore. I’ve stuck my neck out, haven’t I? It’s right out there a mile.”

  “All right,” I said. “It might be a good idea if you were to pass up Dottie Peale.”

  I thought he would be the old man in blue again and put on a poker face, but instead he waited anxiously for me to go on. Of course I could have given him reasons in chapter and verse, but he knew all the reasons as well as I did. When it came to woman trouble, he had a perfectly good academic knowledge.

  “Sid,” he said, “you’re a damn nice boy.”

  “I’m glad you still think so,” I answered. “You know I’m only talking sense, don’t you?”

  “You never did approve of this thing, did you?” he said. “Not right from the beginning.”

  “I wouldn’t take Dottie too seriously,” I said, “if I were you.”

  I was being disloyal to Dottie, and I knew how he felt about loyalty, but then he was having trouble with his own loyalties.

  “All right,” he said, “all right. I know how it all looks. Don’t tell me. But there’s only one trouble with your suggestion. I’m just not able to take it, son.”

  I had to admire his frankness. He had spent most of his life dealing in problems of fact and he could apply the principles to himself.

  “Doesn’t it occur to you that this is only a phase?” I began. “Nearly everyone goes through something like this sometime.”

  Melville Goodwin nodded and he stared at the floor as though it were a map.

  “Yes, I know,” he said. “You’ve got it all on your side. I’ve said that to other people and I’ve said it to myself, but I can only deal with the foreseeable future. I don’t know whether it’s a phase or not. The trouble is, I love her.”

  If he had only said it with more emotion, it would have been easier to discount. Instead he made the statement sound inescapable.

  “All right,” I said, “but do you think she loves you?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” he said. “She says so, and I hope she does.”

  For a second the picture was all there in black and white, without a bit of shading. Then an instant later it was gone, because the door opened just as Melville Goodwin finished speaking, and Dottie Peale and all his storm and stress were snapped away into the compartment reserved for his top secrets. His face cleared and the whole office became bare and impersonal.

  “Hello, Goochy,” Mel Goodwin said. “Where the hell have you been? Let’s go in to lunch, and I want you to meet my friend, Sid Skelton, General Gooch.”

  As soon as I saw General Gooch, I realized that I had met him before in Normandy but I had not placed him as the General’s chief of staff. That absurd army nickname, “Long John” Gooch, was the reason for my error. It was one of those heavily humorous army efforts. Instead of being tall, he would have been in the shortest squad at the Point, which was undoubtedly the reason they had called him “Long John,” unless they had given him the name because his face was long and concave.

  Small army men always looked sterner and tougher than their larger counterparts. Their faces were always more mobile and more deeply lined. They always had a staccato quality, perhaps to compensate for size, or perhaps all small officers who got anywhere possessed a high emotional quotient. At any rate General Gooch looked very tough. His dish face was leathery and hard and it contorted itself in an almost painful way when he smiled, and even his smile had a sour tinge that fitted the rasp in his voice.

  “Glad to meet you, sir,” he said.

  He did not look as though he were glad to meet me. He made me feel as though I were both an interruption and an unfortunate weakness of General Goodwin’s. He seemed to be trying to figure out why under the sun a first-rate officer like his old chief wanted to give anyone like me a minute of his time, but then there was the loyalty. If Goodwin wanted it that way, Gooch could take it, too, and his face contorted itself again in his effort to take it.

  “You got here all right, did you?” he asked.

  “Yes, thanks,” I answered, “I got here.”

  In the seconds of awkward silence that followed, I saw Mel watching us both affectionately, but at the same time professionally.

  “Let’s get lunch, Goochy,” he said.

  “Where do you want to go, sir?” General Gooch asked.

  Melville Goodwin smiled happily and spoke with a sort of artificial carelessness.

  “We’re going to have lunch in there in the Secretary’s Mess,” he said.

  “Jesus,” General Gooch said, “who’s shoving us into there? Why not the General and Flag Officers’ Mess, where boys can be boys?”

  Melville Goodwin laughed merrily.

  “Goochy always swallows the wrong way when he sees civilian Secretaries,” he said. “It’s all right, Goochy, I asked Snip to fix it. I told him that Sid here is a VIP and that he ought to see the works.”

  “How about going to the Army and Navy Club?” General Gooch asked.

  “No, no,” Mel Goodwin said, “we’re not dead on our feet yet, and I want Sid to see the top brass, too. Come on, Goochy.”

  I had never been to the Secretary’s Mess, although I had heard of it, and judging from General Gooch’s hesitation, he seemed to doubt whether I was up to it.

  “I don’t know whether we can get a small table, sir,” General Gooch said.

  “Then we can sit anywhere,” the General said. “Maybe ‘Sunny’ Minturn will be there.”

  General Gooch glanced at his wrist watch, and then his beady eyes met General Goodwin’s wordlessly. I did not know who Minturn was but his name appeared to convey somet
hing significant.

  “He might be,” General Gooch answered. “It’s about his usual time.”

  “I have a hunch Sunny may have some news for me,” the General said, and he and General Gooch exchanged another wordless glance.

  “Yes, he might, sir.”

  Melville Goodwin gave a pull at his blouse, although it did not need straightening. “Well, what are we waiting for?” he said. “Come on, Goochy.”

  “Yes, sir,” General Gooch said. “Has Mr. Skelton washed?”

  “Thanks,” I said, “I feel pretty clean.”

  Melville Goodwin laughed heartily, and so did General Gooch in a quieter and rather painful way.

  “Sid looks all right to me,” the General said, “but you inspect him, Goochy.”

  General Gooch laughed again, clearly in the line of duty.

  “I’ll pass him if you do, sir,” he said.

  Melville Goodwin slapped my back affectionately and opened the office door.

  “Goochy knows the ropes around here,” he said. “He is really settled into it. We’ll be all right if we stick with Goochy.”

  I followed Melville Goodwin through the outer office and out to the corridor with General Gooch walking close behind us. Everything we had said in the office was over and finished and filed for future reference. Melville Goodwin looked happy out in the corridor.

  “You know, this eating place is really something, Sid,” he said. “Sometimes when I see it I wonder who let me in.”

  It was amazing how completely he could throw himself into any present. His adroitness in repressing himself would have been abnormal in me, but of course it was not in him. The drives within him might lead him up or down, but the surface was serene.

  “Oh, by the way, Sid,” he was saying, “I didn’t tell you, did I, that I have a civilian outfit now?”

  Those civilian clothes he had bought had finally arrived, he was saying, and he looked pretty sharp in them too, if he did say so himself. He had a blue double-breasted suit and a tweed coat—Harris tweed with grids—and slacks like mine.