Aurora Dawn

by Herman Wouk

“Mr. English.” He turned eyes of genial inquiry upon her. “Why did you ask me to bring you up to meet my mother?”

  English smiled at her, a pleasant smile conveying no information at all. “I don’t know,” he said. Then, as he saw her look vexed: “I liked her very much, and I like you. I’m delighted that we’re having dinner together.” And he looked at her in such an entirely friendly manner that Honey’s mistrust subsided. She nestled back in the cushions and gave herself up to the beauty of the drive. The vision of Andy flashed upon her mind, but she was not tuned to a mood of self-reproach. She argued impatiently to herself that it was inconceivable for her to do anything untrue to Andy; and since she was doing this, it followed that there was nothing wrong with it. The vision of Andy did not look particularly satisfied with the line of reasoning, but nevertheless faded quickly.

  Philosophers, ancient and modern, unite in disparagement of the character of woman. This has not materially lessened the popularity of the sex through the ages. Women, on the other hand, have had very little to say against philosophers–or for them, to be sure. In fact, except in rare instances beyond the aid of the cosmetic art, women under forty generally pay no attention whatever to philosophers. This may shed some small light on the nature of philosophic opinion concerning them. Be that as it may, the author recounts with a heavy heart the spectacle of a girl like Laura, really a heroine of rare simplicity and virtue in a modern novel, beginning to behave in consonance with all the wry apothegms on womankind. Let us quickly return to our hero, and see if he is doing anything that may retrieve the situation.

  CHAPTER 4

  Satisfying the reader’s curiosity in some respects

  but provoking it in others, and introducing

  that remarkable character,

  Father Calvin Stanfield, the Faithful Shepherd.

  AURORA DAWN!

  The time has come, reader, for you to know the meaning of the title of this true and moral tale, and at the same time to learn the secret of Andrew Reale’s mission to the Fold of the Faithful Shepherd. Learn, then, that “Aurora Dawn” was the name of a soap; a pink, pleasant-smelling article distributed throughout the land and modestly advertised as the “fastest-selling” soap in America. Whether this meant that sales were transacted more rapidly with Aurora Dawn soap than with any other, the customer snatching it out of the druggist’s hand with impolite haste, flinging down a coin and dashing from the store, or whether the slogan was trying to say that its sales were increasing more quickly than the sales of any other cleansing bar; this is not known. Advertising has restored an Elizabethan elasticity to our drying English prose, often sacrificing explicitness for rich color.

  Andrew’s purpose was nothing less than to bring Father Stanfield and his Fold of the Faithful Shepherd on a nationwide radio program to make the fastest-selling soap in America sell even faster, Andrew was not employed by the soap company, but by the Republic Broadcasting Company, a vast free enterprise rivaled only by the United States Broadcasting System, another private property. These two huge corporations monopolized the radio facilities of the land in a state of healthy competition with each other, and drew their lifeblood from rich advertising fees which assured the public an uninterrupted flow of entertainment by the highest priced comedians, jazz singers, musicians, news analysts, and vaudeville novelties in the land–a gratifying contrast to the dreary round of classical music and educational programs which gave government-owned radio chains such a dowdy reputation in other countries. This is not to imply that the ingredient of culture was lacking in the American radio brew; for, in addition to exquisite opera and symphonic music broadcast on weekend afternoons–surveys having proved that more people listened at night, this time was naturally reserved for paying customers like coffee and toothpaste companies–there were numerous programs engendered and paid for by the radio companies themselves, called “sustainers,” and having no other purpose than the uplifting of the nation’s cultural tone. These bore such titles as “The American Forum,” “You Can Love Music,” “The Half Hour of Immortals,” “Philosopher’s Round Table,” “God Behind the News,” and so forth; occasionally, to everyone’s surprise, one of these items gathered such a popular following that it attained commercial sponsorship, thus making culture useful as well as cultural.

  Andrew was in the sales department of the Republic Broadcasting Company, and his job was to see that cordiality was maintained between the sponsors who paid such large sums for radio time, the network which gave them its gargantuan technical facilities in return, and the advertising agencies which acted as middlemen. He was assigned the supervision of several programs and kept a watchful eye on the hothouse blossom of personal relations in each of them, moistening and fertilizing as necessary. The requirements of his task were nine parts likableness to one part intelligence; if a young man began to exceed the proportion in favor of intelligence he was on his way to dismissal or an executive post, depending on how well his superiors enjoyed his company.

  Andrew’s affability and discretion, his expert golf game (which he had acquired, together with a high regard for the privileges of wealth, in years of caddying at the Colorado Springs course), his engaging smile, and a lucky capacity for swallowing large amounts of hard liquor without visible change in his manner, had endeared him to the powerful head of his department, the sales manager, Wilhelm Van Wirt. This chunkily built, hard-drinking gentleman, who spent his waking hours in alternation between gracious submission to the eccentricities of sponsors and heavy tyranny over his office force, suddenly conceived a deep, sentimental liking for Andy and took every means to be close with him. Starting with occasional lunches together, their intimacy broadened to include weekends at Van Wirt’s home in Nutley, New Jersey, in company with his nervous, overdressed wife and a bulbously unattractive daughter of thirteen. Gradually dropping caution, the sales manager admitted Andy to the inner recesses of his life by making him a companion at the expensive and extremely private parties he occasionally arranged for the pleasure of certain clients who expected such hospitality as an informal rebate on large contracts.

  The author, who is concealing nothing in this truthful narrative except the operation of his hero’s stream of consciousness, is forced to admit that Andrew did not hold himself aloof from the questionable merriment, and indeed derived an extraordinary excitement and pleasure from this first encounter with the snaring luxuries of this world. I groan to tell you of the pretty but careless girls with whom he formed passing connections entirely unredeemed by spiritual values, and of the gallons of European wines and mellow whiskies which passed down his healthy throat with ease. There must be among my readers well-reared young men in their early twenties who have not despised instruction, who have avoided these pitfalls, and who have the sense to he horrified at these revelations. Let them close the book at once and pick up something more advanced and profitable–Pascal’s Pensées, or the poetry of Milton–they have no need of the simple moral which this story will teach.

  –An informal rebate on large contracts–

  Things were at this stage when Mr. Talmadge Marquis, president of the company which manufactured Aurora Dawn toilet products and easily the most peculiar curmudgeon of all Van Wirt’s whimsical clients, conceived the brilliant notion of putting Father Calvin Stanfield on a commercial program. Stanfield was just then acquiring notoriety in professional radio circles by dint of having cut down the popularity of the colossal Ziff Soup Jamboree four and five-tenths percent in the West Virginia area. The Jamboree, including among its stars a movie hero, a stage heroine, a Metropolitan opera singer, and a burlesque comedian, as well as two miscellaneous guest stars each week, had so blanketed the hour from nine to ten on Saturday night for USBS, that the rival RBC had been unable to sell the time to any sponsor, and had given the hour back to its chain stations to fill in as best they could with cultural sustainers. Many of these local broadcasters, obliged to maintain a steady flow of intelligible sound during the hour at their own expen
se, had turned in their difficulty to religion, enhancing their credit in the community and padding the hour full of talk and music fairly cheaply–not very sparkling stuff, to be sure, but then they were reasonably certain that nobody was listening.

  Father Stanfield had surprised everyone in the radio business. The managers of the RBC station in Wheeling knew little about him except that he was a lay preacher who ran a sort of community farm in the back hills of West Virginia and held revival meetings every Saturday night. After a brief survey of the field they offered him the time, and he accepted it willingly. They counted on an innocuous hour of revival singing and preaching, but they were unaware of the main feature of Father Stanfield’s personal brand of religion, which was regular public confession by the sinners of the community. These were not necessarily members of the Fold: anybody who felt the need of cleansing his soul could come to Father Stanfield, tell his story, and request the privilege of standing up at his revival meeting to unburden his sins. A colorful ceremony attended the confession period which took up the last half hour of Stanfield’s broadcast. On the left side of the raised platform of the Tabernacle sat the penitent sinners on low wooden stools, clad in gray sackcloth robes. One by one they came to the microphone and narrated their transgressions, and when they had concluded with the proper words of repentance Father Stanfield pronounced them pardoned and exchanged the sackcloth robes for snowy silken ones, whereupon they seated themselves on the right side of the stage on a gilt, plush-upholstered pew, while the congregation burst into a hymn of praise and joy.

  The lively quality of these confessions, which laid once for all the sentimental notion that sin is confined to the great steaming cities, gained for Father Stanfield’s hour, in two months, a popularity unequaled in the annals of religious broadcasting. The Father himself was no small asset to the program. After a twenty-minute opening of hymn singing and prayer he usually launched into a brief talk on some topic of the day in a style of rustic good humor and Godliness that occasionally took on a sharp edge of satire.

  As Andrew trudged with his bag across the wide, dark, dewy lawn between the Tabernacle and the building known as the Old House, he was aware of a tingling across his shoulders and down his arms, signs of tension and excitement which his easy disposition showed rarely. The prospect of meeting the fabled Stanfield was partly the cause; much more than that, however, was the consciousness of what these next hours might mean for him. Van Wirt was about to be promoted to a vice-presidency, and there were five assistant sales managers available for his place, among whom Andy was junior both in years and service. Van Wirt had deliberately given him this weighty mission with the intention of recommending him as his successor if he brought it off. There was more than the single program at stake. Talmadge Marquis had four of his six soap programs with the rival USBS, and only two relatively small daytime shows with RBC: “Meet Mother Murphy,” wherein homespun Irish charm furthered the cause of Aurora Dawn Energized Soap Beads; and “Doctor Morris’s Secret,” a serial which had successfully advocated the virtue of Aurora Dawn Dubl-Bubl Shampoo for four years without bringing its listeners one jot closer to the nature of the kindly old horse doctor’s secret. Now, Marquis had originally begun his radio advertising with RBC and had been won over to producing his major shows on the rival chain only by skulduggery, including relentless play on his weakness for tall, thin brunettes; there therefore lurked in the bosoms of Van Wirt and his superiors at RBC an unflagging desire to win him back, like the burning Irredentism of a Balkan state bereft of a border province.

  Their great chance was at hand with the Father Stanfield incident. Marquis had originally ordered USBS to get the Faithful Shepherd for him, and that unhappy corporation had met with a flat refusal from the preacher to appear under commercial sponsorship. His reply to their clumsy representative–“The Saviour ain’t for sale, Mister, not since Judas’s little transaction, he ain’t”–had circulated through radio circles with the speed of a sexy joke. Striking while the iron was hot, the executive director of RBC had ordered Van Wirt to devise a clever scheme which would bring the Fold of the Faithful Shepherd into the broader fold of Republic Broadcasting. (He had been vague on the details of the cleverness.) Van Wirt, equally vague, delegated the task to Andrew, giving him the alternative of a leap close to the top of RBC’s executive hierarchy, in the thin, intoxicating ozone of twenty-five thousand a year, or possible ignominy and dismissal. Andrew had a plan, perfect as plans could be; its chances depended entirely on the correctness of his estimate of the character of Father Stanfield.

  His heart quickening, Andrew mounted the steps of the broad farmhouse known as the Old House, and knocked loudly at the door. It was opened by a thin, meek-looking girl, innocent of the benefits of make-up and wearing a cheap gray cotton dress and a clean apron, who said, as Andrew stood blinking at the sudden rush of light, “You the young man from New York? Father expecting you,” and motioned him to enter. She took the bag awkwardly from his hand, ignoring his murmured protest, while a hearty voice boomed from within: “That the young feller, Esther? Bring him in, bring him in!” Andrew barely caught a glimpse of an old-fashioned hallway with a full-length mirror near the door and faded green flowery paper on the walls, before he found himself in the dining room. Ablaze with the light from a glass chandelier suspended over a long, laden table, a-clatter with the noise of a dinner in full swing, the room seemed overflowing with food, people, and good humor. At the far end of the table sat a broad man with fair, straight hair and protruding ears, dressed in black, who stood up as Andy entered and strode to him, waving huge meaty hands in greeting. Andy was almost six feet tall, but Father Stanfield loomed over and around him; he was built on a massive scale and the mass was working weight, as Andrew knew the moment he shook hands.

  “Saturday night’s a good night to come to the Old House, son,” cried the preacher, leading him by the hand to a vacant chair beside his own at the head of the table. “Esther, bring some hot soup. That food on trains don’t do a man no good. We don’t eat too bad here, son.” With this he pushed Andrew into the chair and sat down in his own, picking up a fork and spearing a wide slab of fried steak from a metal platter as he did so. A plate of thick soup manifested itself under Andrew’s nose, and its steam smote his nostrils like incense after the discouraging Pullman fish and the cold bus ride. Casting an appreciative eye around the board as he ate, he decided that in truth they “didn’t eat too bad.” There were plates heaped with corn, squashes, and baked potatoes; deep dishes filled with blocks of butter, halved lettuce heads, sliced tomatoes, peas, red beans, green beans, celery, applesauce, and stewed rhubarb; platters of steak, platters of pork chops, and platters of fried quarter chickens, all vanishing rapidly under the lunges of agile forks. Women rose from time to time with practiced dexterity to renew the supply and to refill the two tin pitchers of coffee that seemed never to stop in their rattling career around the table.

  Stanfield glanced with approval at the speed with which Andy fell to. “Young man is all right,” he commented, the comment somewhat muffled by steak. “Meet the folks, but don’t reach to shake no hands.” Starting at the head of the table, he introduced the men first, some as Elders, some simply by patronym, and, after he had made the round of male diners, he added, “The ladies alongside are the missus” which for some reason was greeted with a universal giggle. The men ranged in age from a white-haired farmer with seamed, blunt hands, seated at Stanfield’s right, to a stout, pale-faced young man with heavy black hair at the foot of the table, who had been introduced as “Chico–he handles the machinery, and knows more about it than Hennery Ford.” The men were all, it appeared, foremen or supervisors of various departments of the community farm, although the designation of Elder indicated that some were also religious functionaries in Stanfield’s peculiar prelacy. Andrew was introduced as “The young feller from Radio City, New York, who’s come down to see our meeting.” The dinner passed in lively conversation, incomprehensible to Andy, asi
de from the jests of Elder Billingsley at the head of the table, who was the accepted wit of the synod. These invariably took the form of broad flirtatious remarks addressed at various wives, and everybody invariably roared except the twitted husband who invariably looked mildly surprised and foolish. There was a long discussion of a revised plumbing system in the New House (which, Andy gathered, was a kind of dormitory where the eighty families of the Fold lived) and a heated attack on the merits of a scientific cattle feed by Elder Comer, a very old man with a bald pate, and a back bent like a resilient bow. As soon as the dessert was cleared, Stanfield led a prolonged prayer of thanks, at the conclusion of which he rose, saying “Them folks a-waiting.” Thereupon there was a great stir and bustle as everyone filed into the hall, donned hats and coats, and walked out across the dank lawn in the frosty March night to the Tabernacle.

  The revival meeting was an unforgettable experience for Andy, tired and sleepy though he was. From his vantage point on the stage in the row of the Elders he watched with growing wonder the strange mixture of tent-show and religious service that was Stanfield’s way of worship. As he listened to him deliver a sharp, rustically humorous diatribe against the growing tendency in the Fold to read popular magazines instead of the Bible–“Seems as how lately the Good Book is running a poor second to Red Book: I reckon the main trouble with the Gospel is, they ain’t no part in it you can illustrate with a girl with her laigs up in the air”–Andrew felt an accession of confidence in his sincerity. This lessened considerably when, after the community singing and just before the confessions, Elder Pennington, a slight, gray man with a large fleshy nose and deep folds in the skin of his face, who had said nothing at all during dinner except “Pass the beans” or “More coffee,” got up and made a desk-thumping appeal in a shrill, emotional voice for money to continue “the Fold’s great work,” and ordered baskets passed among the hundreds of tourists who crowded the Tabernacle to the last row of its narrow wooden-pillared balcony. The singing was real, and the confessions were real: the music was sung with uninhibited heartiness by the mountain folk of the Fold as well as by many of the visitors, the confessions came pouring straightforward from the people with directness of narrative, quaint turn of local speech, and touches of unexpected detail almost impossible to contrive. Father Stanfield absolved them, sometimes with gravity, sometimes with a rough jocular comment on their misdeeds, and evidently derived much pleasure from the showmanship of the ritual with the robes.