Aurora Dawn
Page 24
Dear Laura,
How good it is to hear from you! Of course, call him Stephen English if he arrives a He, and I’ll come to stand godfather, if you’ll have me. All goes well. I am immersed in trivial business, as always– the millionaire stopped again, gazed out of the window for several minutes, and then absently put the writing materials aside. His right hand reached to the shelf beside him and took down a worn copy of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations. As he placed the book on his lap it fell open to a much-thumbed page, in the middle of which a sentence was underlined in ink: “It is possible to be happy, even in a palace.” English took up his pen and wrote in the broad margin beside it, “5/27/45. Perhaps. Time appears to be running short.”
* * *
It is a literary custom today to leave one’s characters on the last page still breathing hard from the climactic action, with no hint of what becomes of them thereafter, the reader being free to fill in the aftermath on the principle of aesthetic inevitability; but since the author has already talked along into an epilogue, he may as well tell exactly what has happened to the people of his story, giving it the merit of completeness to atone a little for its deficiencies.
Talmadge Marquis emerged from the directors’ meeting chastened and humbled, but not deposed. By the time the soap man faced the fire of criticism the situation had a tone of anticlimax, for celebrated causes evaporate quickly in our land; and, after undergoing the disagreeable experience of having all his personal policies discussed in his presence as though they were the vicious habits of an animal that might have to be destroyed, he escaped with no more serious damage than the appointment of one of the managers as supervisor of advertising policy, with the understanding that Marquis was never more to exercise authority in such matters. The burden was given to the oldest manager, who died within a year, whereupon Marquis quietly restored himself into his old ways, unopposed by English, who was preoccupied with a crisis of another corporation. To this day, therefore, the many Aurora Dawn programs enjoy his unique administration, and those who observe him with scholastic detachment have despaired of his acquiring, at least in this incarnation, sufficient Being to overcome the phenomenal deficiency with which he began.
As for Father Stanfield, after “The Hog in the House” he desired to give up radio broadcasting, but Chester Legrand induced him to continue without commercial sponsorship as a matter of public service. The Shepherd’s popularity soon brought on a number of imitators, who were not finicky about merchandising the gospel; none of them, in fact, was far above the level of coarse fraud. In their efforts to gain his audience they all had recourse to synthetic confessions spiced with sensational sins, because the radio production experts had eventually analyzed Stanfield’s success in the formula, “Sex, sugar-coated with religion.” The breaches of good taste began to border on the scandalous. Stanfield left the air in disgust, and the Federal Communications Commission finally issued a ban on “confession” programs, to the general relief, but causing anguished concern for the future of free speech in America on the part of several advertising executives. Stanfield, united with Gracie and a strapping Cockney-speaking son, lives on at the Fold in great peace, in an Indian Summer of life that brings increasing abundance about him each year.
To the author’s knowledge, Mr. and Mrs. Michael Wilde abide in wedded harmony, although Milton Jaeckel and other gentlemen of his trade have lately reported their appearance in different places, each with a partner other than the one contracted for by ritual. Mrs. Wilde’s name in particular is linked, with a frequency almost passing coincidence, to that of the leader of an eminent jazz band; but if gossip were truth, whose marriage could be called happy? The Wildes are an up-to-date couple, and have surely extended latitude of companionship to each other in the enlightened manner of our better levels of society.
No such tales are told about Andrew and Laura, possibly because they have disappeared into the obscurity of ordinary people, beyond the focus of Mr. Jaeckel’s art. Shortly after their marriage, Laura’s ailing uncle, Tom Wilson, passed on, leaving his prosperous ranch to his niece. The blissful couple, holding their happiness more dear because they had so nearly lost it through their errors, went to New Mexico with Mrs. Beaton for a holiday on the ranch, in the common impulse to withdrawal from the world that animates the first months of a true union. They stayed on as Andrew, with all his radio plans temporarily at a standstill, turned his attention to the finances of the ranch, an enterprise mainly devoted to the raising of the Hereford variety of cattle. A year passed in this way, then another, and the return to New York became less and less an imminent reality, and finally ceased to be even a project; country existence proving increasingly satisfying and comfortable to the Reales as well as to the repatriated Mrs. Beaton.
The pacific way of life into which they settled suited Laura, who gradually acquired a charming roundness, quite different from the modish angularity into which she had disciplined herself during her photographic career. Her face was slightly furrowed in a few years by the care of an exceptionally spirited son, but her scar became hardly visible, and she soon ceased to limp at all. No observer of this blooming woman today can fail to notice a fullness of figure auguring the nativity of Stephen English Reale, and certainly the connoisseurs of salable beauty in the Pandar Model Agency would be horrified to see her in such a decline.
Andrew Reale has reformed less than one might hope, considering the change in his way of life. The advertisements of his prize bulls in the Hereford Journal still disturb orthodox cattlemen. He was the first client to order and pay for a back cover in four colors on that staid publication. He also confronts Laura, once every half year or so, with a scheme for raising a new kind of crop, or a new breed of beasts, which will make them millionaires in a few years. Laura’s quiet good sense has outweighed these explosive enthusiasms ever since an early disastrous venture into melons, and Andrew himself has acquired a sort of wry self-knowledge which enables him to wait a week for the fulmination of a new idea to die down before he regards it seriously. Nature, he finds, cannot be cajoled like a soap manufacturer. He has had the good sense, in the main, to leave the actual working of the ranch to Tom Wilson’s old overseers, confining himself to the work of sales, purchases and administration; thus, things go well. His first moral revulsion against his early career has passed away, and he sometimes even thinks nostalgically of the adventurous tension of his broadcasting work, although he could not be persuaded to leave the ranch. Literature has suffered a blow, in that he never wrote his book exposing radio, after all; in the process of gaining Laura, he mislaid the reforming urge. Of making such books, however, there is no end, and literature may be consoled with the reflection that it might have suffered a greater blow had he written it.
Into such domesticity do the heroes and heroines of comedy settle after the curtain falls. Shorn of the shining plumes with which they soared and swooped through their high adventures long ago, earthbound and undistinguishable among the mass of quiet folk, they move placidly through the chores of their days.–Are you disappointed, good friend? Would you have had the boy and girl of our fading fable preserved forever in the bright amber of a first nuptial kiss? Come, I will be faithless to the conspiracy of my craft long enough to tell you a tremendous secret: the sweet of life comes when the couple emerges from the church door into a true marriage, with its small troubles and joys, a thousand years of which would not yield enough stuff for one page of the storyteller. May you and I be granted no worse portion while we walk under the sun.
And Aurora Dawn? Why, reader, you know as well as I that the images of the pink, half-naked goddess decorate our land more prominently than ever at this writing. It is a pity, really, that they are all wrought in perishable paper or paint, and that sculpture is not useful in advertising; for it is amusing to consider that men of after-ages, digging up these multitudinous images among our ruins, might engage in a hundred-years’ controversy to decide what manner of deity this was that we worshiped.
>
“Delightfully fresh and funny….
A writer of extraordinary comic and satiric gifts.”
—Spencer Klaw, New York Herald Tribune
This wickedly amusing novel, which marked the literary debut of one of America’s most admired and acclaimed storytellers, recounts the riotous adventures of an ambitious young Manhattanite in the early days of radio. Andrew Reale, in headlong pursuit of fame and fortune, finds himself face-to-face with his own devil’s bargain—forced to choose between soul and salary, true love and a strategic romance—and learns a timeless lesson about the high cost of success in America’s most extravagant metropolis.
“The reader is being so continuously amused and entertained by the author’s blithe companionship and his engaging chatter that he is hardly aware of the ‘exposure of the inner workings of the advertising industry’ that is going on right under his nose…. A pleasant satire told within the framework of an idiom that gives it novelty and distinction—a rare combination in this day and age.” —Percy Atkinson, Saturday Review of Literature
“Mr. Wouk is naturally witty,” —Diana Trilling, Nation
Herman Wouk was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1952 for The Caine Mutiny, his third novel. His other internationally acclaimed and bestselling novels Include City Boy; Marjorie Morningstar; Youngblood Hawke; Don’t Stop the Carnival; The Winds of War; War and Remembrance; Inside, Outside; The Hope; The Clory; and, most recently, A Hole in Texas,