The Huntress

by Alice Arlen

  Copublishers in wartime: while Lieutenant Commander Guggenheim was running things at Mercer Field, Alicia was running things at Newsday.

  For a while, with Harry off fighting the war from New Jersey, she considered that she now had two responsibilities, the newly arrived Koenigswarter children, and of course Newsday. At first, she tried hard to be if not a mother, at least a mother figure (whatever that might mean), to little Patrick and Janka. True, Alicia’s notions of mothering derived from her own cool, minimalist mother, but it wasn’t as if Alice Higinbotham Patterson had never read her children a story, tried to chat with them over bowls of macaroni. However, whenever Alicia entered the new “nursery,” in what was now the “children’s wing,” uncertainly clutching a copy of Kipling’s Just-So Stories, prepared to do what surely mother figures did, to read aloud from Kipling, magically appearing from nowhere, or somewhere, was the inevitable, impassable presence of Miss Davenport, neither large or physically imposing, in fact short, slight, with a burry Scots accent, seemingly determined to stop mother figures in their tracks. The children were either napping or about to “go down” for their naps; the books proposed were unsuitable, the board games too old, too young. With the growing fatalism of a native in one of Kipling’s “lesser tribes,” repeatedly throwing himself on the lances of the occupying power, Alicia eventually gave up trying to get around Nanny Davenport, trying to be someone she probably wasn’t. Besides, the children seemed happy enough, whenever she glimpsed them, usually at a distance, trotting behind Miss Davenport on their way to or from mysterious errands, briefly between naps; also, as the butler, Moulton, sagely observed, they had arrived with perfect manners, Madam. Why spoil a good thing?

  —

  THUS CIRCUMSTANCES SEEMED to be pointing Alicia toward taking a firmer, or at least a more focused, role at her little Hempstead paper, something she should probably have been doing sooner; in its second year of publication, circulation hadn’t moved much above fifteen thousand, advertising remained scrawny, editorial content was still noticeably amateurish, produced mostly by inexperienced young women hired to replace not-very-experienced young men disappearing into military conscription. Newsday wasn’t exactly sinking, but it certainly wasn’t swimming, at least not with sufficient vigor to offer much contrast to local competitors, even the stodgy Nassau Review-Star. Alicia didn’t think she could do much to improve the quality of her young staff, in fact she knew she was lucky to have them. But she felt stymied by her managing editor, a man named Al Davis, a fiftyish, low-key, old-style newsman (who literally wore a green eyeshade to work) and who had been recommended to her by none other than Max Annenberg, Joe Patterson’s old friend, her mentor in the business, so to speak. Davis was pale, expressionless, aloof, carried himself with what might be termed a scholarly air, did his work but no more than his work, then went home to Queens where he wrote pulp-fiction crime stories in his spare time.

  By outward appearances she and Davis got on well enough, but in fact she and he didn’t really get on at all; whenever she dropped by his desk he was usually too busy, or pretended she wasn’t there until she went away. For a time the tactic worked; Alicia was conscious of being an owner, privileged, a woman in a man’s world; she had absorbed what she thought were the lessons of her father: respect the professionals, the men on the floor, pay attention to the guys who do the work. While it wasn’t her nature to accept brush-offs, she could almost accept one from her managing editor if it were part of some personal learning curve; what increasingly frustrated her was Davis’s habit of equal-opportunity disengagement, not merely with his boss and with the newspaper’s staff, but perhaps especially with the community on the other side of the plate-glass windows: Hempstead, Nassau County, Newsday’s potential readers.

  By coincidence, as it were, not far from Al Davis’s office, in the back of Newsday’s makeshift newsroom, was the desk of a man who might well be described as Davis’s opposite. This was Alan Hathway, the paper’s city editor, younger at thirty-five, also recommended by Max Annenberg; but where Davis was aggravatingly withdrawn, noncommunicative, the man who wasn’t there, Hathway was decidedly, often obnoxiously, present. He had trained, if that was the word for it, on Chicago tabloids, with their rough-and-tumble approach to news as well as newsrooms; he was blunt, profane with everyone, drank too much (though as people pointed out, he didn’t have to be drunk to get in a fight), and persisted in what was even then a retrograde habit of pinching women, literally pinching them, coming up on female staffers of all ages and administering a sharp squeeze to their behinds. On the other hand, as Alicia observed, he was shrewd, energetic, and involved in the community to the point where Harry’s business manager had more than once wondered aloud to her if Alan now and then might not be crossing a few lines, blurring some professional distinctions, as in his habit, for instance, of assigning favorable write-ups to restaurants or businesses in which he had a little interest on the side. Unsurprisingly Harry Guggenheim had pretty much detested Hathway from the start; the man dressed as if he’d slept in his clothes (which was sometimes the case), smelled of liquor in the middle of the day, and addressed the copublisher, on the happily few occasions when the copublisher and the city editor found themselves in the same room, with a slangy languor bordering on lèse-majesté.

  But Harry Guggenheim was no longer around, he was off imposing his punctilious sense of order on Avenger fighter-bombers at Mercer Field. However, Alicia Patterson Guggenheim was much around; and while it took her a few months to stare down the ghost of Max Annenberg, and any other all-knowledgeable male figures who took up space in her cerebellum, the day came when she decided, if she was to mind the store, she’d better mind it her own way, and sent Al Davis, with his green eyeshade and bloodless manner, back to writing pulp fiction in Queens. She thought of calling in Hathway to her office to tell him of his promotion, but there wasn’t really room for two in her office; and so she went to find him, guessing right (it being four in the afternoon), at the Anchor Inn down the street. When Hathway saw her, five feet three, in her trim little Hattie Carnegie suit, coming across the floor toward him, he cussed her loudly, picturesquely, for disturbing his peace; but she knew all the same words, knew how to use them, cussed him right back; they sealed the new arrangement with old-fashioneds, it being by then the cocktail hour.

  · 45 ·

  THERE’S A SAYING, possibly Irish (though it would sound as true in Persian) that there is no good season for old men; not that Joseph Patterson, in his early sixties, was truly old, even by the actuarial tables of the day; nonetheless, the war years for him were a terrible season, the proverbial downward spiral; doubtless his own fault, too, which surely made it worse. Long gone from the premises was the Renegade Heir of yesteryear, “Joe Pat,” that all-too-spirited lad, friend (or at least passing acquaintance) of Butch Cassidy, youthful news gatherer at the Boxer Rebellion, the 1905 uprising in St. Petersburg, the Great Battle for Veracruz, at so many other excitements of the passing parade.

  Vanished, too, in the mists of time, or as some would say in the fumes of bourbon, was the original Captain Patterson, doughty commander of Battery D, resolute warrior of the western front, sometime novelist, would-be playwright, impresario of New York tabloid journalism, truly an action figure (like the comics he popularized) of protean grasp and reach, above all a man on the right side of history, now supplanted (if you could call it that) in the early 1940s by this dark, despondent, hollowed-out, shadow of his former self, still referred to (even by his numerous detractors) as Captain Patterson, but so much sadder, madder too, seemingly no wiser, and with the passing of each day ever more on the wrong side of history. Still in command of a hugely successful paper, he had money, heft, certain kinds of power, he remained a Big Cheese. But most days he seldom left his once-moderne, now merely strange, house up on the Hudson, which he had painted in army camouflage colors after Pearl Harbor, and in whose basement he now maintained an up-to-date “war room,” its walls covered with maps of m
ilitary theaters, and a table (painted blue) on which he kept his eye on sea battles in the Pacific.

  Patterson’s decline was both surprising and unsurprising. For a man who had been such a smart guy, not always but often, and about some of the more important, worldly matters of his day: one of the dismayingly few who wasn’t fooled by Hitler in the 1930s, who never thought (as did so many in the Anglo-American elite) that the German chancellor was someone one could “do business with”; a man who knew early that Joe Stalin was a bum, that the USSR was a bust, when once again so many of the knowing class—for instance, Franklin Roosevelt and his ambassador to Moscow, Joe Davies—seemed to be giving serious credence to the idea that Soviet “social justice” might represent the dawning of a new era. He had been on the whole a savvy, forward-looking fellow, who took a shine to aviation well before it became an industry, whose Daily News anticipated the discoveries of modern media (with its emphasis on visuals, its embrace of sports, its offhand, noir approach to crime, and its cheerful consumerism). And perhaps above all as someone who had both the nerve and common sense to strongly back FDR and his New Deal when so many in his own crowd were dead set against him; how very odd, how most unfortunate, how so strangely dumb it was that this same man couldn’t then see that, first, attacking Roosevelt for wanting to save Europe and fight the Nazis was an idea best let alone; and second, given the unwisdom of the first idea, that criticizing a wartime president, in the months and years after Pearl Harbor, for errors of omission and commission in the waging of the war, was bound to get a person absolutely nowhere, worse than nowhere: painted into a dark and lonely corner, in a camouflaged house above the Hudson.

  Patterson’s grown children, for the most part, didn’t know what to make of their once-charismatic, center-of-the-universe sire. Actually Elinor, transfigured into a fading country club beauty (gardening on her Greenwich estate after dark, to avoid the sun’s glare on her still-lovely face) remained fairly consistent; as her mother’s favorite, she long had avoided him, stayed away, and didn’t come any closer now. Josephine, the youngest, who as a child had “had” him least, was still in thrall to some extent; she visited Patterson in his Ossining house, brought her young children, was puzzled by his depressions, silences, random eruptions, on the whole found it all too easy to blame the ever-present Mary King for the negative changes. Alicia, his scrappy middle daughter, the un-Elinor, with the cuts, bruises, and hair falling all over her face, swung between a newfound grown-upness, someone finally with her place in the road, and the child who was never far beneath the surface. Though she was never someone who went in for diaries, journals, or saving things in general, three scraps of paper survived from this period, stuffed in a manila envelope, with “father” written on the front. One is a clipping of her Newsday editorial of June 12, 1942, apparently in response to yet-another hammering (this one by Connecticut Democratic congressman Hugo Mill) of her politically obdurate father: “Joseph Medill Patterson is my father,” she wrote. “I know him perhaps better than most daughters know their fathers. It is true that my father has from time to time criticized the Administration. Does that make him a traitor? Then anyone who criticizes policies laid down in Washington is likewise treasonous, and we have lost our democracy before we have begun to fight for it.”

  The second is the carbon copy of a letter, undated, but presumably written after the editorial: “Dear Father, First you cancel Neysa’s drawings without warning, then you won’t even acknowledge the editorial I sent you. I know it’s not much, but it’s meant well and a sight better than the kicks in the pants you have favored me with over the years. I still remember as a kid, when you and I had a bet that I’d never jump 5´6˝, and I worked and worked and made the jump, and you never noticed, never said a thing. And then making me marry Jim Simpson, when you knew it was the last thing I wanted. And that trip to Panama when you said I was a quitter but I was sick as a dog. I’ve never been a quitter. And when I married Harry you wouldn’t see him for a year and made those horrid mean jokes. And when I started Newsday I thought you’d finally be proud but you weren’t. I could barely get you to come and look at the plant, and when you finally did, you and MK wanted to leave the whole time. Now I guess after this you won’t want to see me again. Your affectionate daughter, Alicia. P.S. Please don’t show this to anyone.” The third is a note, handwritten on a Daily News memo page: “Dear Alicia, I think I am too old to quarrel with you and hope we may make up. Love, Father.”

  · 46 ·

  THE LONG YEARS OF WAR placed strains on many marriages, bringing loneliness in its various manifestations to those away and those at home. While he was at Mercer Field, Harry Guggenheim by several accounts had an ongoing liaison with a young woman at the base (some said she was his driver), Kathleen Sullivan; “someone to go out dancing with” was how people phrased it at the time. If Alicia likewise had someone to dance with, there is no record of it, though the opportunities were surely all around her; among her numerous public escorts, it seemed evident to friends that she was attracted to Marquis Childs, the handsome, articulate (and married) columnist for the Washington Post, and he to her; but nothing seems to have come of it, beyond the fact that they were often in each other’s company; years later he ruefully (and perhaps awkwardly) wrote her that, had he better known her interest, he might have “tried to do something about it.”

  Then in May 1945, in the final months of the war, with Germany already defeated and the United States now well in control of the Pacific, newly promoted Captain Guggenheim prepared to leave Mercer Field. However, instead of heading directly home to Alicia at Falaise, in the spirit of Odysseus he apparently decided to take the long way back, pulling strings in Washington to have himself transferred as an “observer” to the aircraft carrier USS Nehenta Bay, at the time on patrol duty near the Japanese-held Ryukyu Islands, two hundred miles from the Japanese mainland. Aboard the Nehenta Bay he was allowed to fly several sorties in the machine-gun seat of one of his Mercer Field Avenger fighter-bombers, engaged in strafing runs on Japanese ground defenses, thereby becoming the only member of the U.S. Navy to fly combat missions in both world wars. With time on his hands, in the officers’ wardroom, Captain Harry wrote several letters back to Alicia from the far Pacific, still extant with their slanted, unexpectedly boyish pencil scrawl and little blacked-out deletions by the navy’s censors; often many pages long, they’re companionable, discursive, amiably impersonal, speaking to a relationship neither deep nor shallow, neither antagonistic nor especially affectionate, and written in that perhaps universal, dissociative language of men trying to talk to women about the stuff of war without seeming to like it too much. Thus: “Calisthenics on the deck this morning, officers and men. My back’s not too hot but I’m learning how to stretch and W/O Symonds says it will improve….Later on we had gunnery practice, with and without tracers. The racket from the .50s is amazing, terrible, I think I’d be deaf without earplugs. Our ‘wing’ scored highest with the towed targets….As for what happens on deck when the planes launch, you could not imagine the sheer noise from the catapults, plus the roaring of the engines….Frankly, it’s just something that has to be seen to be believed, and I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. Okay, general quarters has sounded, I don’t think it’s serious but I must sign off. Love, Harry.”

  Harry’s long road home didn’t appreciably speed up, even after Hiroshima and the rapid Japanese surrender; he meandered back across the Pacific on the Nehenta Bay to Hawaii, from where he presumably could have returned to New York fairly directly had he so wished; months seemed to go by, with a detour to San Francisco where important persons were buzzing about, putting the finishing touches (so to speak) on what would become the United Nations. Doubtless he enjoyed the company of important persons; doubtless too he liked being a U.S. Navy captain, with his dress uniform and war record; and perhaps (though there is no telling, from the mostly bland, sightseer’s letters he wrote to Alicia from California) he had a premonition that civilian life
might require adjustments from the relative harmony of being married to the U.S. Navy to being married (once more) to Alicia Patterson Guggenheim.

  On her side, if Alicia was in any greater hurry for Harry to come home than he was to get there, she seems to have kept it pretty much to herself. Across the country it was a time for hundreds of thousands of sundered and separated couples to see what happened when you put both parts back together again, and with the Guggenheims there was perhaps more than the usual disconnect. On the one hand Harry Guggenheim saw himself as a returning warrior, selflessly having given his time, even risking his life above the Ryukyu Islands, and if he didn’t actually expect a band to greet his return he probably expected something more than what he got. Not that she was exactly cool to him; on the contrary, he was her husband, she was his wife, there were pleasures and benefits to be had from his reappearance. All the same, while he had been happily off in what he never would have called his own world, rather the one of serving his country, Alicia had been in her world, also more or less happily, not merely minding the store at Newsday but in the process substantially improving it: The newspaper’s circulation, around fifteen thousand at Harry’s departure, was now close to seventy-five thousand; advertising had greatly increased, both in terms of linage as well as in better-quality accounts; and editorially, thanks to Alan Hathway and his young staff, the all-important “reading look” of the paper was finally getting somewhere, growing up, less and less relying on canned wire-service bulletins and circulation stunts, more and more generating its own professional, community-related stories.