During the next hour, Thorn found it all too easy to stop talking about himself; Diana scarcely allotted him time for a syllable. In her low voice, still the caressing voice that had for so long assured him he was her one concern, she began her story all the way back at the precise moment when a pivoting needle swept around a radio dial and stopped over a voice singing a love song. For a while Thorn listened intently, but as she proceeded unhurriedly through her growing conviction that the unseen, still unmet Roy Tribble was addressing himself directly to her, Thorn began to discover within himself an ability he had heretofore suspected only with his wife. He could listen intently to each word and pay no attention.
His mind was on more speculative matters. He had never been egotist enough to ascribe Diana’s sadness to his absence, but he should have known long ago that it was abnormal for a girl to remain so cool, so aloof. So free of guile was he that even when he had seen her go all shiny at his first mention of Tribble, he had done nothing but accept, humbly accept, the dictum that girls like Diana wanted a man more glamorous than a salesman in a city of salesmen. Not once had it occurred to him that she merely wanted Roy Tribble.
Diana the Unreachable, he had called her. Diana the Un-huntress. Her pride in his first successes, her wide eyes looking up at him in awe—she had been playing The Perfect Secretary all the while. Her readiness to go out to dinner with him whenever he asked her was a secretarial readiness too, or a marking-time readiness. He had always been square with Diana while she—
He had to get away alone as soon as possible, to cope with , this debacle. Cindy wasn’t expecting him this weekend, but now his farsighted alibis for remaining in town jeered at him. In her discreet haunting dress, Diana shifted position and he looked directly at her. She was assuring him that hers was a virtuous love still, unspoiled by yielding to. what could only corrode its inner purity. Quite suddenly Thorn prayed God to speed the day when Diana Bates would bitterly regret having thrown away, for a minor celebrity like Roy Tribble, her one chance at somebody really famous.
“Thank you for telling me,” he said, “for trusting me enough.” He slipped his hand over hers and this time, as if accepting the open expression of a sympathy she had sensed in secret all along, Diana curled her fingers inside his. Thorn spoke to her of courage and the long view; he praised her for her strength and wisdom in eschewing compromise. Eschewing struck the membrane of his ear with a dull archaic thud but he ignored it.
“I’m going to take you home now,” he said at last, “and then drive out to the beach tonight.”
“Oh, Mr. Johns.” She spoke in the same gentle astonishment he had heard when she had first seen his name in print.
“Not all that way tonight? You’ll never get there before two or three in the morning.”
“I know it.” He met her glance, but only briefly. “Seeing you so unhappy, realizing there’s no easy out for you and Roy—it’s just flattened me, Diana. I’ll feel better after a quiet weekend with my family.”
Like the new self-sealing inner tubes on the latest cars, Thornton Johns’ nervous system was usually able to heal its own wounds almost instantaneously. This time, however, there had been no sharp clean puncture but an untidy sprawling rawness, and it took longer for large protective layers to form over it.
Nevertheless, aided by sun and wind and many neighborly martinis, as well as by Cindy’s, young Thorn’s, and Fred’s obvious delight at his sudden availability, Thorn’s unscheduled visit to Quogue gradually restored most of his self-confidence and by Sunday morning he was glad he had come. He had tried not to think about Diana, and when he failed, he found his thoughts had at last veered to a larger, more philosophical plane. What Diana did not yet know, in her poor dreams that a Roy Tribble could one day make her happy, was that in this day and age, a minor celebrity was almost as dismal as an absolute nobody. Once you were a cut above the mob, you wanted to be several cuts above, and after that there was no satisfying you until you got clear to the top.
He suddenly remembered a painting he had seen years ago; since he hadn’t been to a museum since college, he must have seen it in Life. Perhaps it was an etching or drawing; anyway it was by Breughel and though there were people in it, what he remembered most vividly were all sorts of swimming fish, curving, swooping, mouths open, eyes as uncovered as marbles. It was called “The Big Fish Eat the Little Fish,” and it was so ugly you could scarcely call it a masterpiece, but it had certainly stayed with him for a long time though he couldn’t explain why he had thought of it now.
As always, on those rare occasions when Thornton Johns discovered the joys of reflective thought, particularly if these were coupled with the joys of artistic appreciation, he was reluctant to sip them too briefly. But at this moment guests began to arrive for lunch; he rose to greet them, and the rest of the weekend sped by. Whenever his pain threatened to throb again, Thorn made himself think either of his Zoring Smith future or his date to meet Jill Goodwyn at the airport tomorrow night. Had all gone well with Diana, his appearance at the airport would have had to be a perfunctory gesture of helpful friendliness. Now it might be anything.
Back at the office on Monday morning, Diana’s greetings were flustered and her glance uncertain. Obscurely this pleased Thornton Johns, helped him achieve his habitual manner with her, and seemed to release an effervescence of energy within him. This pleased him too; it always meant new action was in the offing, in what direction, toward what specific goal, he did not yet know. Obeying an impulse without examining it, he dialed Roy Tribble, found him free for lunch, and promptly invited him to the Premium Club.
There, though he would never betray Diana’s confidences, Thorn was so persuasive in his argument that everybody’s future was unpredictable, and so eloquent in his defense of a periodic re-examination of one’s long-view savings program, that Roy Tribble was deeply impressed. “Give me the dope again, Thorn,” he said eagerly, “on an extra twenty-year endowment policy.” A pencil was immediately forthcoming from Thorn’s breast pocket, and a Premium Club tablecloth, from which scribbled premiums and maturity dates were scoured out at each laundering, forthwith acquired its new batch.
That evening, with Jill Goodwyn not due at La Guardia Airport until nearly midnight, Thorn dined, with Jim Hathaway and Maude Denkin, going to Le Persiflage, a small French restaurant Miss Denkin had specified and of which Thorn had never heard.
This dinner was one of a series Jim had arranged with all of his three-thousand-dollar clients, to sound them out, one by one, on the subject of Hathaway-Johns, Incorporated. Thorn was automatically invited each time and he admired the way Jim kept everything perfectly hypothetical, perfectly candid, and absolutely confidential from the members of his old firm. All he was doing, Jim made it clear, was canvassing the exciting possibilities with his own clients—would they be interested in making a change, as soon as any existing contract with other literary agencies expired or was otherwise disposed of? Gregory Johns, for instance, was only too eager to come along, actually regretful that he had to wait until October or November for such unified service. “Hathaway-Johns,” Jim would say to each of them, “is not going to be any weak little premature infant, I promise you, with clients like that already signed up. We wanted to see how you feel about our new baby.”
Jim didn’t phrase it just that way to Maude Denkin, and Thorn was relieved. He had admired this already legendary old lady the night the Hathaways had taken him and Cindy along to her party of Broadway stars, and he had pumped Hathaway about her in preparation for this evening. She was indeed an eccentric, with her diatribes against jeweled fingers, costly furs, and what she called “the rubberneck restaurant, with everybody craning to see who’s four tables down.”
Now, sitting here with her and Jim, over a gourmet’s dinner and important wines, Thorn was doubly fascinated by her; with her shabby clothes, her indefatigable play-a-year for twenty years, her movie-a-year for the past ten or twelve, and her old-maid passion for six nephews, four nieces, and seven Persian
cats. Whenever Miss Denkin stopped talking about her newest play or her last play or what would be next year’s play, she began enthusiastically on the cats and nephews and nieces, all of whom she appeared to adore with indiscriminate fervor.
And soon Thornton Johns found himself wondering about her generosity. Having started her big-time successes so long before taxes jumped through the ceiling, Miss Denkin must have a million or so tucked away. Could he take her out to lunch alone one day, and interest her in securing endowment insurance for each of the ten kids, to provide them with certain sums of cash at the milestone moments of their lives—at graduation, marriage, the launching of business careers?
The effervescent energy that had moved him to talk insurance to Roy Tribble suddenly bubbled higher than ever. How odd that, at the moment when final deliverance from insurance was at hand, he was finding himself so keen to beat all his previous records for new business.
Was it Jill’s impending arrival tonight, and the memory of her chatter last spring about untransacted business on an extra policy, that had turned his mind so sharply again to insurance? Or Maude Denkin’s present chatter about six nephews and four nieces?
Hip-deep in prospects. Not Tribble-sized prospects either. At the outside Tribble might be good for another twenty thousand; Roy’s annual premium on that would be a thousand dollars; commissions on it only four hundred the first year, and fifty a year for the next nine. No longer would that make a Thornton Johns reach, stretch, put his full powers to work. But a hundred-thousand-dollar deal, spread among Miss Denkin’s beloveds? Or an additional policy of a hundred thousand to Jill Goodwyn? If the assured were age thirty-five, the annual premium on a hundred thousand was about five thousand and the broker’s commission would come to two thousand the first year and two hundred and fifty dollars per year the next nine.
Thornton Johns smiled into Miss Denkin’s watery old eyes and thought, I wonder how old Jill really is. Suddenly he longed to see her once again. At this very moment, she was in the skies above Illinois or Ohio, lying back in her adjustable chair, resting, thinking ahead. Just before dinner, he had wired the plane, “THE NEW LEASE IS READY, IF YOU’LL SKIP THE SMALL TYPE,” and though he was not certain what he had meant by the last phrase, it set his pulse racing to imagine Jill trying to interpret it. Sentimental young girls, after all, were not his style. To a mature and gifted man, the spoiled imperious demanding woman offered more of a challenge. And in many ways more of a reward.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
IF HARRY VON BRANN were a man for an ulcer or high blood pressure, the summer of 1949 would have seen him felled by one and terrified by the other. Two-other studios were rushing out films with world government themes, and Harry Von Brann was no man to trail anybody. Thus, weekends were abandoned for the entire summer by everybody with what Von Brann now called “a civilized employment contract,” and even the Fourth of July was no official holiday for Hy Bernstein, Dick Morosky, or himself.
Instead of “in the cans by October and on Broadway by Christmas,” the new schedule called for “sneaks by Labor Day, and goddam it Broadway right after that.”
The news of the early release date reached Gregory Johns and his family a few days after their arrival at the H Bar C Ranch, the official name for the large, untidy, prosperous Chisholm place, and, immediately, Gregory’s inner seismograph began again to register his old tremulous fear about the movie. Hy’s last letter had said nothing of this speedup, but that was back in June, and it would have been in character for Hy not to mention it even if he had known it at that time. Hy had written only of the script, of the new opening he was suggesting to Von Brann and Morosky—“a moody device,” Hy had called it, “to establish the mood, I mean, not moody. If it plays right, it ought to be larger than moodiness, and when the delayed dialogue begins, Barlowe’s lighthearted first speech, the one we agreed on, should have redoubled impact.”
Abby and Gwen and Howie were delighted at the comparative nearness of the picture and Hat was sent into a spin of excitement, as if she could see it next week. Gregory warned Hat that even Von Brann could be frustrated, that there was still, an excellent chance the picture could not be ready until October, by which time she would be at Vassar, and not present, for the official opening.
Hat took this warning lightly and dashed out to the corral to tell all her Chisholm cousins. The Chisholms raised horses; a couple of hundred were off in the hills and about thirty in the corral. Along with two hired hands, the three older Chisholm children were responsible for them, and Hat pitched in on all the heavy work they did. She was up at six every morning; in a week she could ride as well as they. She did not limit herself to pleasure rides, like the occasional tourists the Chisholms put up in the two dude cabins they had built a year ago; she quickly got tough enough to go along on a full day’s roundup.
In levis and plaid shirts, Hat no longer bore a resemblance to the pages of Vogue; since her cousins showed no interest in what dormitory she was to live in at Vassar, she soon dropped all references to Strong, Lathrop, and Cushing; she even forgot cashmere sweaters and the desperate necessity for a fur coat. Watching her, her parents sometimes wished they need not return East for a long time.
Gregory and Abby rode clumsily, with no hint of carefree ease in the saddle, but they soon loved riding as much as Hat did. Occasionally, with Howie and Gwen, they would ride off directly after six o’clock supper and watch the sun go down in pure brilliance behind the jagged red rock skyline of the Big Horns. They could hear the roar of Shell Creek cutting down through Shell Canyon; the gradual night came down soft and hesitant; the dry heat of the day blew to nothingness in the wind from the mountains.
Sometimes they drove all the children twenty miles to Greybull to see an early movie; occasionally ranchers and their wives would come down from Lovell or all the way out from Cody, to visit the Chisholms and meet the Johnses.
“You didn’t think ranchers read books, did you, Greg?” Howie Chisholm asked Gregory after one such visit.
Gwen said, “Let him alone, Howie, and how many times do I have to tell you he hates to be called Greg?”
Gregory laughed. “Anything Howie calls me is fine.” In the ten years since the Chisholms’ last trip East, Gregory had forgotten how much he liked both of them. Howard bore no resemblance to the rangy, gimlet-eyed rancher in Westerns; he was mild in manner, short and squared-off in build. During the winter months he went back to his reading of Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles in the original; he had meant to teach Greek and the Attic tragedies at Missoula, and had done so for one year after getting his B. A.
“Damn my hide,” he liked to say, “if Uncle Bill didn’t die just in time and leave this place and twenty skinny cow-ponies, I might have stayed on forever and become a trustee.”
This gave Gwen her opportunity to say he might at least have made a good trustee. It was Gwendolyn who was the driving force behind the ranch. She was as easygoing and gay as a colt, but it was she who set the prices and did the trading on the horses, ordered the supplies, kept the books, ran the hired hands. It was she who had insisted on building the two cabins and who was planning two more in the fall. “It kills me,” she said, “to have tourists drive up when the sun’s going down, afraid to try the pass to Sheridan in the dark, and have to say no room.”
After a few days on the ranch, days of riding, fishing, chopping wood, Gregory rediscovered the solid good ache of forgotten muscles, the big muscles never used at a desk, the thigh and calf muscles, the chest and shoulder muscles; he swore they would return every summer as long as the Chisholms would have them.
If anybody had told Gregory Johns that he had been in a state of shock since publication day, he would have laughed. At most he might have conceded, “Well, a happy shock.” But now, a sense of strain, of watching, of waiting for Thorn’s news and bulletins and reports—all this began to die away, with the gradualness of the mountain-clinging daylight of Wyoming, and, in its dying, proclaimed its onetime existence
.
In the third week at the ranch Gregory began to write. Only the middle hours of the day went into working; after breakfast he would hang around with all the kids at the corral, or go riding with them, or alone with Abby. Toward ten he would go to his room, emerge for lunch at high noon, and then go back until four. Since the train trip to the Coast, he had worked on his new book only in bits and pieces, spurts of a few hours at a time, days apart, each stop a reckless throwing away of momentum, each new attempt a digging down within himself to recapture ideas, sequence, mood.
But now, day after day for most of August, he wrote, and the slow arduous pages once more began to pile up in a blessed yellow sheaf. The last chapter of The Good World had been completed nearly a year ago; a writer had at last to write forward steadily or feel part of himself die.
Thorn’s letter about the Waldorf shattered his calm.
It came on their last day at the ranch, and Thorn explained that he had decided to write rather than wait for their return, to give Gregory plenty of time to see what it had meant to him, in case they should later feel like reopening the question of his lecturing again. “I had put the whole idea behind me, of course,” Thorn wrote, “and the idea of speaking again took shape so slowly, it was scarcely an act of will at all.
Weeks ago Zoring Smith approached me on this plushy affair at the Waldorf, a centennial for the Carstairs Paper-Co. They wanted outside speakers, not just the usual vice-presidents, and since they supply half the book presses in the country, Zoring thought a talk about the No. 1 best seller would liven up the proceedings. Finally I gave in and now that I’ve tried the Big Time, I just can’t tell you what it’s done for me. And, in the damnedest unexpected way, for the boys. They were there that night—I’d never realized how big a lift kids get when it’s their own father earning all the applause.”
Gregory swore. “So now I’d be robbing young Thorn and Fred,” he said to Abby.
The Celebrity Page 24