Aurora Dawn

by Herman Wouk

  “I realize, however,” went on our hero, with vigorous assurance, “that this is a radical selling approach, based on an opinion of mine. I don’t propose, gentlemen, to induce you to accept the idea on such a flimsy basis. Despite the paper which Mr. Leach is holding–” as this was said, Leach dropped the paper to the desk as though it had suddenly developed a voltage–“we will tie an old-fashioned, double-barreled, two-and-a-half-minute straight commercial into Father Stanfield’s broadcast; and he will never object to it, and probably never even know it!”

  Van Wirt ran his tongue around his lips and said, “Now wait, Andy, you’re talking about the impossible–”

  “Hear me out, Mr. Van Wirt,” said Andy. “Mr. Marquis, you have, in the Bob Steele comedy show on USBS, one of the most popular half hours on the air. The time in which we of RBC propose to place Father Stanfield is 8:30 to 9:00 Sunday evening–the best spot of the week. We know as well as you the prestige value of this religious marvel, and we intend to enhance our network’s standing with it.

  “Now, here’s the crux of the matter. It happens that in the 8 to 8:30 Sunday evening spot on our network, Durfee’s Yeast Cake Jamboree does not intend to renew. That hour will be free on April the first. My idea is this, Mr. Marquis: shift the Bob Steele show to our network in the 8 to 8:30 spot. At the end of that program–at the time when every follower of Father Stanfield will be tuning to our station–put in the longest, strongest commercial that the brilliant staff of Grovill and Leach can produce. You will then have a solid Aurora Dawn hour in the best spot of the week–the second half will be a terrific good-will stroke that will take America by storm–and, for insurance, you will cash in on the entire religious audience, by slipping in your straight commercial at the end of the preceding show.

  “If that is not the only way to handle Father Stanfield–and if it is not an effective sales idea–then I’ll willingly give up my position with you, Mr. Van Wirt, because my judgment in these matters is meaningless.”

  Andy sank into his chair and sat poised, his eyes on Marquis. Grovill, Leach, and Van Wirt seemed hypnotized. Not a sound, not a flicker or a gesture indicating approval or disapproval escaped any of them. Even Leach’s ring ceased its rotation, lest it seem in some obscure way to suggest an opinion. Marquis leaned back in his chair and gazed intently for perhaps a full minute at the end of his cigar. Then he looked around at the waiting faces and said, in deliberate tones: “Gentlemen, that is the greatest idea for radio promotion that I have ever heard.”

  This statement acted upon Van Wirt, Grovill, and Leach like a starting gun. They jumped up, dashed at Andy with shouts of joy and praise, shook his hand, pounded his back, shook each other by the hand, pounded each other on the back, laughed, cried, capered, and generally conducted themselves as though a war had just ended. Marquis observed this demonstration with a calm smile, while Mike Wilde’s eyes widened like a child’s at a zoo when he comes upon a dancing bear. Van Wirt twined his arm affectionately around Reale’s waist and refused to remove it. “He’s my boy, my boy,” he kept repeating. Grovill observed with many happy giggles that he would steal this young genius from RBC; Van Wirt defied him to try it. Leach’s ring spun furiously, and Leach himself made several centrifugal tours of the room in the manner of a dervish, thus releasing the energy which the others expended in laughter, a form of activity of which he had apparently lost the muscular pattern.

  When the jubilation had abated, Marquis said to Leach, “Tom, will we be able to shift the Steele show? USBS can plaster us with lawsuits. The contract gives us another year on that half hour.”

  Leach’s face tightened into its accustomed lines. “I don’t think they’ll struggle too hard,” he said through his teeth. “Not with four daytime and one other evening show still on their nets. I’ll talk to Wolver. It’ll be all right.” His manner of saying this left no doubt that it would be, and indicated that his “talking” to the unlucky Wolver would be in the tradition of persuasion followed by antique monarchs with the aid of quaint machines.

  “Even so,” mused Marquis, “it’s obviously vital that no word of this deal get out until it’s all arranged. I hope, Reale, that you warned Father Stanfield to be discreet.”

  Andy said the Faithful Shepherd had himself observed that he desired secrecy to be maintained, if possible, until all was ready for him to go on the air.

  “And I presume,” went on Marquis, “that you have discussed the matter with no one?”

  Van Wirt, his arm still around the small waist of his protégé, broke in with: “Why, he never even told me about it! Andy’s the deepest boy in our organization. He’s a Sphinx, a silent tomb!” He gave the silent tomb a heavy paternal squeeze.

  A small box on Marquis’s desk came to life with a woman’s voice and said, “Mr. Marquis, Carol is here.” Marquis touched a button on the box and said, “Tell her to come in.” “Yes, sir,” said the box. This bit of Oriental fantasy went totally unregarded. Electricity is ending all mystery. How can we impress children any longer with Aladdin’s djinn? He was simply televised, and worked by remote control.

  The door opened and a young lady entered. Andrew’s heart bounded and his head swam so that he all but collapsed in his chair; he stared at the girl with dropping jaw as Marquis said, “This is my daughter, Carol, gentlemen.”

  It was impossible to mistake the sweater, the hair, the face, the paint, the hands. Carol Marquis was no other person than the Beautiful Brahmin of the train; the inquisitive stranger to whom Andrew Reale had disclosed, with many disparaging comments on the peculiarities of Talmadge Marquis, his entire scheme for the capture of the Faithful Shepherd!

  CHAPTER 9

  Containing the story of Bezalel,

  with some of Stephen English’s ideas about life

  and people—and a little more plot.

  AT THIS EXACT MOMENT in time–no, that is not correct, for late research indicates that there is no such thing as an exact moment in time; but it is very hard for the clay feet of history to keep up with the winged sandals of science–at this inexact moment, then, Laura Beaton and Stephen English were standing in a gallery of the Museum of New Art on Fifty-third Street, gazing at a painting by Michael Wilde. It was a beautifully executed honor of arms, legs, breasts, and faces disposed in a circular pattern. The color was subtle and rich, and the design, could it have been voided of its charnel-house content, would have been entirely pleasing. The title of the painting was: “He Looked Again, And Saw It Was A Letter From His Wife.”

  “I hope,” said Laura, laughing, “that he isn’t going to make me appear like that.”

  “Have no fear,” said the millionaire. “Mike is guilty of many apish tricks like this one, but he knows exactly what he’s doing all the time, and, as you must see just from his work on these walls, he’s a good painter.”

  “He Looked Again, And Saw It Was A Letter From His Wife”

  Said Laura, with puzzlement putting a charming furrow between her brows, “But why does he take so many silly or nasty themes? And why the elongated titles?”

  “I can explain all that, but it would require a little time,” said English, taking her arm and starting to walk down the gallery, “and you must have work to do this afternoon.”

  “All I have to do is check in at Pandar Agency, and I can attend to that by telephone. Do tell me about him.”

  “There is nothing I would enjoy more,” said English, with just the ghost of a smile. “Come.”

  With this he turned abruptly to the right, and Laura found herself stepping into a small automatic elevator. The banker pressed a button marked “Roof,” whereupon the doors closed, the little elevator sighed its way up three stories, and the doors opened again on cold air and blazing white sunshine. English led Laura through a garden crowded with curious statues, some all curves, some all angles, some all planes, none particularly resembling any sublunary object. At the other end of the garden was a penthouse, the door of which, as they approached it, was opene
d by a smiling little gray-haired lady in a very starched, very green apron.

  “Good afternoon, Mr. English; good afternoon, Miss,” she said, as though she had been expecting them for half an hour. “There’s a nice fire, Mr. English. Will you be having some tea?”

  “Later, thank you, Mrs. Brennan,” said English, as he and Laura stepped inside. They were in a small vestibule, with doors opening to the right and left. The beaming Mrs. Brennan went to the right, and following her with her eye, the girl caught a glimpse of a committee room decorated in the modern style and furnished with a long table and many chairs, and beyond it a swinging door leading to a kitchen, into which the old lady vanished. English led Laura to the left, and together they walked into a sunlit, old-fashioned library which might have been transported detail by detail from a cinema setting for a story of rich Tories in the American Revolution. It was, in fact, a replica of one of the replicas in the Williamsburg restoration of colonial homes; the wraith of a wraith, its quality of other-worldliness heightened by its forlorn setting atop a building full of fearfully New things. A real fire burned in a real stone chimney, and a wisp of real smoke even brought a sting to the eyes, due to a really faulty draft.

  English and the girl seated themselves on the deep-cushioned sofa that faced the fire. Neither spoke. English contemplated the dancing flames, pale in the sunlight, and Laura contemplated the millionaire, waiting for him to begin his explanation of the work of Michael Wilde, and wondering not a little at his curious manner with her, particularly his custom of long, placid silences. Perhaps for five minutes they sat so, then English looked up at her, and smiled the baffling smile that made her feel an absurd, pitying kindness toward him.

  “Take your hat off, Laura,” he said.

  After a moment’s hesitation, Laura in a quick movement unpinned the nonsensical little bonnet from her yellow hair and laid it on the arm of the sofa, saying, “Well, but what does my hat have to do with Michael Wilde’s painting?”

  “Nothing at all,” said Stephen English, leaning back comfortably in the sofa. “It’s surely no secret to you that I enjoy looking at you. The hat is becoming, but I find the unadorned hair more so. Now, about Mike. You have seen him referred to as Bezalel, haven’t you?”

  “Yes, many times,” said Laura. “The columnists are very fond of the name. I’ve seen his illustrated Bible, and I know the reason for that.”

  “That incident,” said the millionaire, “is Wilde’s career in miniature. But be sure that you are quite comfortable, because, like Scheherazade, I intend to spin out my tale, to postpone the cutting off, not of my head but of this agreeable scene into which I tricked you and which I should like to last as long as possible. This then, is

  THE STORY OF BEZALEL.

  It has always entertained me (said Stephen English) to listen to a furious discussion among aesthetes, with one side maintaining that Michael Wilde is a poser and a charlatan, against an equally heated assertion that he’s a brilliant artist. The reason for such disputes, of course, lies in the assumption that the two descriptions are contradictory. In Mike’s case it’s obvious that they’re both true.

  Mike was born in the Irish slums that used to exist around Ninety-sixth Street and Columbus Avenue in New York. He has, therefore, the poignant love of money that’s reserved only for people who’ve known poverty. Rich people respect money because it’s their safety, but to poor people money is freedom. Never forget that when you analyze the behavior of someone who used to be poor; there’s a friskiness about such persons which is only the lightness of limb that comes from taking off chains. Mike’s antics, of course, have further, more self-conscious motives.

  Really, Mike carries on the way he does because it helps to sell his paintings. It’s true, of course, that he’s enormously conceited and that he has a natural taste for being the life of the party, but such characteristics are commonplace. In most careers they must be severely repressed, because the aim of a man is to give an impression of reliability, steadiness, and a sense of propriety. Artists–in all the arts–are exempt. Successful artists today must be crowd pleasers, and its the opinion of the crowd that artists are a little crazy, so a man of talent who plays up to that opinion will unquestionably make more money than one who doesn’t. He’ll be talked about and he’ll gain stature. Mike stumbled on this open secret in Paris when he was nineteen. Have you ever seen the ballet he designed, “Chanson de MoiMême”?

  (Laura said that she had not; and, shifting a little in her corner of the sofa, she tucked her famous legs under her skirt, folded her hands in her lap, and regarded English with the clear, serious eyes of a listening child.)

  Well, at the time, he was in the thick of the impecunious artistic set that you used to find sitting around in front of the Dôme in the evenings, drinking fines and arguing about everything. He fell into the hands of a celebrated première danseuse, who was well on the nostalgic side of thirty, and he became a pet of the ballet people. The choreographer of the company was inspired to do a ballet based on Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”; and, thanks to the intervention of the danseuse, Mike was commissioned to try his hand at the décor.

  He was an entirely irresponsible kid then, spoiled both by his talents and his attractiveness. He had come to Paris after working in an advertising agency for a year, just long enough to accumulate the money to travel, and in that year, by the way, he acquired his single vicious prejudice: get him started on the subject of advertising, sometime, if you want a jeremiad. Anyway, in Paris he habitually followed only impulse in whatever he did. In designing the ballet he was seized with the whim of taking the title literally, and he proceeded with some pains to sketch out a weird, extravagant set consisting of nothing but reproductions of himself. The center piece was a colossal bust of Mike Wilde with the lower part formalized into a Greek temple; the trees were graceful, gnarled versions of himself; even the rocks were worked into profiles of him; and the dancers all wore masks in his likeness. Well, Freud was a fad then, ten years ago, so the choreographer was rapturous, and worked out a dance on the theme of Narcissus which really wasn’t bad. The ballet was a sensation in France and in America. It’s odd that you never saw it.

  (“I was twelve years old ten years ago,” said Laura demurely, “and the ballet didn’t stop in Albuquerque.”)

  At any rate Mike found himself and his work suddenly in demand. He had the pleasure of selling to dealers who had snubbed him, the very pieces they had dismissed. The newspapers also came after him, and Mike, realizing that they were looking for bizarre behavior and ideas, just gave rein to himself and furnished them with all the copy they could use.

  You’ve seen his Bible. He did most of it before the ballet, as an exercise in dramatic sketching and coloring, and I’ve always thought the pictures ordinary; they bear many traces of his advertising drudgery, in fact. When he came to America with the ballet, he was approached by one of those enterprising publishers who make a business of exploiting a new genius or a new word game each year. He promptly hauled out his portfolio of Bible pictures, to the ecstasy of the publisher. Mike won’t admit it, but I’m sure he put in the controversial pieces that brought all the bishops and ministers down on him–Ruth at Boaz’ feet, Judah and Tamar, that scandalous Magdalene, and so forth–after he’d sold the portfolio to the publisher. He did once tell me that he inserted the portrait of himself in Old Testament dress as Bezalel, the divine artist of the Tabernacle, because he thought “the excitement would make the book go better.” Of course, you know what happened. It sold more than half a million copies, and it still goes into a new edition each year–all at eight dollars a copy.

  (“My father preached a sermon in favor of the Wilde Bible and we had a copy at home,” said Laura. “Mother came after it with the scissors to cut out Judah and Tamar and some of the others, but Dad fought her off. They compromised by locking it up until I was seventeen.”)

  The very worst time to let you look at it, but you seem to have survived the expo
sure.–Well, there you have Mike Wilde, Laura. He does have a bent for perverse flamboyance, but instead of checking it, he exploits it. He takes horrid themes because they cause talk; he uses long, pointless titles for the same reason. He blathers about goodness and beauty and his own genius for the same reason. To bring the thing off as well as Mike has done requires address, I grant you, and a gift for mountebanking; but it must be great fun, once he overcomes the loss of face involved in making an ass of himself in public. Nobody can commit the impropriety of public self-praise without losing personal dignity and integrity, but, in the field of the arts, it’s a common sacrifice. You see the pattern repeat itself two or three times in each generation. A man of moderate talent proclaims, “I am a genius,” and backs his assertion with colorful social and artistic eccentricities. These have nothing to do with genius, but the crowd thinks they do, and so his claim is improved. Shakespeare, Bach, and Blake didn’t find it necessary to use the technique. Mike’s an excellent painter, and his work will last his time and keep him well-to-do, but his mouth long ago outsped his brush. I’ve said these things to him, so I’m not violating our friendship in telling you the truth about him. It’s nothing you wouldn’t have seen for yourself, anyway, in a year or two.

  * * *

  The fire was dying. Stephen English rose, poked it up, threw two small logs on it, and, as the flames snarled gratefully around the dry wood, he sat again near the girl and gazed at the brightening blaze in silence. The sunlight now slanted above the fireplace, and for the first time Laura noticed the painting hung there. It was a portrait of her companion. Beneath it was a medallion reading: “Stephen Allworth English, President of the New Art Foundation–Portrait by Michael Wilde.” The likeness was vital, and, as Laura looked at the face, she felt again an unaccountable, sympathetic condescension toward the subject. She glanced at him, sitting beside her, absorbed in the pleasant spell of the flames.