Youngblood hawke, p.104
Youngblood Hawke, page 104
All of his time in Peru was a wild whirling phantasmagoria in his memory: the parties at the huge house of the Hauptmanns in a Lima suburb, and the huger hacienda in the north, the weird brown deserts through which they had driven, the queer chill drizzle that had never stopped falling in Lima, the heavy low gray sky that had never let through a bar of sunlight all the time he was there; the amazing steep gorges of the Andes that they had either flown over, sucking oxygen from tubes, or rode through on rickety trains crawling along breath-stopping chasms; the museums full of monstrosities of solid gold, the extravagant Spanish churches, the awesome Inca ruins built of stone blocks each as big as a railroad car, fitted together without plaster like mosaic work; the strange little sweetmeats individually wrapped in gold foil, which were the favored dessert; none of these impressions were sorted out in his mind, he could not have said which day he had driven up the coastal desert and which day he had flown to Cuzco, but at least he remembered that he had experienced these things. About his fall he could recollect absolutely nothing. He did remember leaving the hotel and walking to the ruins. The next thing he could recall was sitting in the hotel bar about an hour later drinking a highball and arguing mulishly against being put to bed. Honor had described all the circumstances of his seizure, but his mind remained blank about that stretch of time. Honor's physician in Lima had examined him and had tried hard to make him enter a hospital for brain tests. Hawke had insisted, with loud stubbornness not far from panic, that he was going home; and he had sent off the cabled request for Dr. Eversill.
Then had come Honor's peculiar last-minute decision to travel with him. That too, had dismayed him. Honor's behavior throughout his visit had been baffling, and very wearing on his already spent nerves. She had never once mentioned the question of the money, until he had said he was returning to New York; then in a few quick dry sentences she had offered to come with him so as to arrange the loan with her New York lawyers. Until then she had turned in an exasperating performance of the merry widow, flirtatious and coy, hot and cold, by turns. The only clear thing about her conduct was that she revelled in having Youngblood Hawke trailing around after her. She had exhibited him to as many Peruvians and foreign diplomats as possible in a series of dinner parties. None of this had been good for Hawke's mental or physical well-being, though he had worked hard at being the gracious and amusing American author, in order to please her. After all, he wanted money from her!
He dreaded the effect on Jeanne of his returning in Honor's company, but what could he do? There was no discerning Honor Hauptmann's intentions. Was she planning to have an affair with him as the price of the loan—his skin crawled at the idea—or did she have some notion of developing their relationship into a marriage, or was she merely following caprice without any long thoughts? Her ways of thinking were utterly foreign to him. She had too much money. He had put himself in her power and he had to ride out the event. On the information he had, she was saving him from a scandalous lawsuit, and perhaps a bankruptcy.
The most frightening thing of all happened on the plane a few hours before they reached New York. Just when dawn began to show pink in the east, making rosy gleams on the plane's wing, he had a muscular attack. First he noticed that the thumb of the hand with which he was holding his paperback detective story began to twitch. This was not new, fatigue or nerves sometimes brought it on. But the twitching was stronger than ever before, and soon spread to his whole hand, so that he had to drop the book. Then the convulsive jerking marched up his wrist, to his forearm and then to his elbow while he watched with horror his own body going more and more out of control. All this time Honor was beside him sleeping off nembutal, which he had also taken, but without effect. By some desperate instinct Hawke seized his shaking left arm in the firm grip of his right hand and held it rigid for several minutes, arresting the motion. After a while he felt the jerks in the muscles subside, and when he cautiously let the arm go he found it was obeying him again, though it was shaky and somewhat numbed.
He did not mention the experience to Honor when she awoke much later, all cheery, refreshed and ready to polish off the scrambled eggs brought by the stewardess. Hawke did not eat, and he was hard put to it to respond to Honor's affectionate good humor. The nearer they got to New York the more intimate she became. He found her blandishments oppressive; he much preferred her in her hard-boiled moods; but he had made the trip to get seventy-five thousand dollars from her, and the mission now was about to succeed. He was already falling into a sense of obligation and subservience. What could he do but be pleasant to the woman?
A limousine long and black as a hearse took them into the city. Hawke felt a brief pulse of good cheer when he saw the towers of Manhattan rising beyond the flat square apartment houses of Queens, beyond the twisting highway and the rivers of snorting automobiles. It was one of the rare days that can come in July after a night of wild electric storms, when the New York air is clear and springlike, and there is even a tang of the sea in it; though within a few hours the hot summer miasma of smoke, dust and steam darkens all once more. Honor chattered like a bird. This was the only city in the world! She intended to spend six months a year here at the very least, it was the one place for clothes, for talk, for people, for gaiety, for food, for fun, for the latest word. All the big European cities were soft overripe fruits compared to this enchanted tough spiky town; and she and Hawke were going to have the time of their lives for a few weeks!
The limousine stopped at the side street entrance of Imperial House on Fifth Avenue, near the plaza, a huge apartment-hotel that had been prominent in the view from Feydal's apartment, with a tower that rose higher than the others nearby, capped with an incongruous mansard roof sheathed in green copper. "Come along," said Honor. "I want you to see my place. It's kind of nice."
Hawke followed her into the lobby, done in black marble and tarnished gilding, giving the effect, he thought, of an Italian tomb; the effect being heightened by the grave hush after the noise of the street. There were a few silent old ladies in costly black clothes sitting here and there in the lobby, and one startling huge African man in brilliant robes. The elevator went up and up and up. "Do you have the penthouse?" he said.
"One of them. Actually Manuel's brothers shared the cost. Whoever happens to be in New York uses it. And our business friends sometimes. The President of Peru once stayed here. It's quite comfortable."
She let herself in, opening a black door set with a circular Chinese ornament of green stone. "The hotel sometimes rents it out by the week. People pay incredible prices. Diplomats, Hollywood stars, and such. It ends up costing us surprisingly little."
The height-horror that had often overcome him in the Andes prickled in Hawke's nerves as he walked into the living room. One wall was nothing but glass, looking past a narrow railed terrace across empty space to the downtown skyscraper clusters. The wrought-iron rails of the terrace were a comforting break in the view.
Honor said, "I think this Chinese modern was a mistake, to me the whole place looks like an oversize powder room, but Manuel saw an apartment like this in Rome and was mad for it."
With an effort, Hawke pulled his gaze away from the abysmal downtown view and looked dizzily around the room. It was a rectangular expanse of black and white, with white walls and black mirrors, an improbably rich white carpet like the massed pelts of a thousand ermines, a black couch as long as the side of a subway car, big black armchairs, and Chinese screens, jars, Buddhas, and dragons blooming here and there in blotches of wild color.
"Well, it's quite a place," he managed to say. "Quite a view."
"Oh, the view is in the bedroom. Come here."
The bed was circular, covered in purple, and big enough for six people. There was little else in the room beside more of the furry white carpeting and one gigantic black urn streaked with purple. Picture windows opened north, west, and south, with no rails to bar the view. It was a sight of New York such as an airplane pilot might enjoy. To the left the downtown windows glittered in the towers; to the right the rich green trees of the park stretched off to the distance, lined by the opulent broken wall of Fifth Avenue; straight ahead were the high hotels of Central Park South, and beyond them the Hudson and the Palisades, and the unseen three thousand miles of a more prosaic United States.
"As views of New York go, I call this a view," said Honor. "This room was what sold Manuel on the apartment. Until then he was muttering about owning a brownstone in the east sixties. Well? What do you think of it?"
"Beats anything I've ever seen." To quell his vertigo he was staring at The Park Tower, trying to pick out the window where he had often stood with his naked mistress, looking at Central Park.
"Well, good, I'll have them bring up your luggage," Honor said, and she picked up a white telephone on a bedside table.
"What? What the devil are you talking about, Honor?"
"Hello? This is Mrs. Hauptmann. Will you please get Mr. Hawke's luggage from the black Lincoln at the side entrance? The chauffeur knows which is which. Yes, and deliver it to P 3, please. Thank you."
"Honor, don't be absurd. This is your apartment, I can't stay here and I don't want to."
A sly grin animated her chubby face. "If you're worried about the proprieties, dear, my suite is already reserved at the Waldorf. It's the suite my mother always used. Remember?"
"It isn't that. I mean—well, it's terrifically kind of you, but—it's out of the question, really it is." He was stammering because he could not utter his real objections: first, that the height sickened him, and second and more important, that the situation was taking on a nightmare resemblance to his early sparring with Frieda Winter.
While they were arguing, the ministerial elevator man brought in Hawke's bags. "Good heavens, you can use it till you find something more permanent, can't you?" Honor was saying. "I want you to have it. I can't stay here, don't you realize that! Manuel pops out at me wherever I look."
"Honor, I'm not used to living like this, that's all, I feel uncomfortable and silly here, an impostor—"
Honor's face hardened, and she said in her bank manager tone, "Arthur, is there any substantial reason why you can't accept my hospitality for a few days? Or why you don't want to? If there is out with it, and stop all this talk."
This was a slice of the knife to the bone of the problem, which was Jeanne. Hawke hesitated. Fatigue, lassitude, mortal defeat and depression dropped over him, a mantle of smothering sackcloth. "Well, for a few days, till I get myself a place, I guess I can stay," he said. "I seem to be in at this point, bag and baggage, don't I? Thank you, Honor, it's very gracious of you."
She put her hand on his arm and gave him a slithering lipstick kiss on the mouth. "Now I'm getting out of here. You look tired and I think you should sleep. I have a couple of appointments scheduled. That loan should be all lined up by tonight. Suppose you come and have dinner with me at the Waldorf about seven, okay? And I'll tell you how things stand."
"All right, Honor."
"What I would really like," she said, "is for it to be snowing like all hell outside tonight, and for you to fall in with bloodshot eyes and a three-day beard, in a greasy sheepskin coat with snowflakes still on the collar. I'd pour Scotch for you by the glassful, and we could turn back the clock and start there again, and cancel whatever has happened in between."
He said with a pallid, exhausted smile, "There are four books I'd rather not write all over."
She laughed. "No, no, and there are three children I'd rather not bear all over. We'll keep the books and the children, okay? And blot out the rest. Get some sleep, my dear. Pull the shades and sleep. You're done in."
When she was gone Hawke paced the elegant penthouse like a prisoner in a cell, trying not to look out of the windows, trying to fight off a growing sense that he was coming to his end. The smell of Frieda Winter's perfume pervaded the place. When he threw open a window and it streamed in thickly on the breeze, he realized he was having an exceptionally strong hallucination. He strode around senselessly. The place had a luxurious kitchen, four luxurious baths with golden fixtures, each with a luxurious dressing room. He saw his haunted face everywhere in elegant dark mirrors. The penthouse was in every touch the dream of shopgirls and mountain boys come true, and it was probably his for the asking if he could bring himself to woo Mrs. Hauptmann. It was the America that Hollywood had been portraying to the world for decades, it was the most spectacular possible view of New York, it was the very top of the world. It filled him with loathing. Why had he not defied Honor? How could he call Jeanne now and tell her he was staying in Honor Hauptmann's apartment? Yet he wanted to call Jeanne, he was desperate to see her, he needed help badly and quickly and aside from his mother she was the one person in the world he could lean on. And Dr. Eversill, he wanted to see him but to do that he had to call Gus Adam, and he could not call Gus before he called Jeanne, the implications were too wounding. As his panic mounted and his mind misted, one thing only seemed to come into focus clearly—that his suspicion of Jeanne, his notion that she was in love with Gus Adam, had been a self-destroying mad lapse. He was at the end of his rope. He had to call her at once and put himself in her hands.
He could not help looking out of the windows as he paced wildly, and each time he looked at the gulf of air and the park and the towers his giddiness and illness increased. He began to wonder whether he could make a coherent telephone call.
He was in the bedroom, facing down town, and the great spire of the Empire State Building made him think of the time he had stood with Jock Maas on the observation platform, an ignorant boor from Kentucky, shouting against the shriek of the wind that he would lick this city! And almost at the same instant he remembered everything about his fall at Machu Picchu—everything, the climb up the stairs to the terrace, the overwhelming terror at the green gulfs opening before him, the flash of religious exaltation, and he remembered going down and striking the cold stone with his forehead.
He stumbled to the telephone and seized it.
Jeanne's phone rang at her desk in the Hodge Hathaway offices. The sound of Hawke's voice, the ghastly tone of it, shocked her. "Jeanne, is it you?"
"Yes. Darling, where are you?"
"Jeanne, I'm not well. Is Dr. Eversill here?"
"Yes. He is at the Plaza. Where are you, Arthur?"
His shaky, sepulchral, hurried voice replied, "Look, I think I'll make it till you get here but if anything happens I don't want to go to a hospital, do you hear! Get my mother and she can take care of me."
"Arthur, for God's sake where are you? What's the matter?"
"I'm at Imperial House in the penthouse, I think P 3. Yes, P 3. I'm all alone. I'm just not well, Jeanne. Come right away. I'll try to call the hotel doctor meantime, maybe he can give me something. Are you coming?"
"This minute, darling."
"I love you, Jeanne. Hurry, please. I'm really not well."
She called Dr. Eversill at once. It was almost half an hour before she could get a taxi and it could crawl through the midday traffic to the hotel. Eversill was in the lobby when she arrived, bent, white-headed, red-eyed, carrying his doctor's bag. He said, "He didn't answer the door and he doesn't answer the telephone. They're getting a passkey."
She could not speak.
A pink jolly-looking clerk came out of an office with a bunch of keys. It seemed to Jeanne that the upward ride of the elevator took half an hour, and she thought that they might not be moving, there was no building in the world as tall as this. Then the car jolted to a stop, and the jolly pink clerk opened the black door to penthouse P 3.
"Arthur!" she shouted, her voice echoing as she dashed inside. "Arthur, are you all right?"
She halted so suddenly that Dr. Eversill ran into her. She drew her breath in sharply, with a loud grating sound, and screamed.
Youngblood Hawke lay in the middle of the glorious white carpet, his big arms and legs sprawled awkwardly as a corpse's. He was writhing feebly, and his blue face was covered with a bloody foam.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
1
THE news that the author of Chain of Command had been struck down by a possibly fatal illness made a wide public stir, almost as though he were a movie star or a baseball hero. It was an item on the evening radio and television news. The New York Times began the story next day in a small box on the front page, and carried it over to a whole column on the book page, in effect a discreet tentative obituary. Hawke had not fared too well in the reviews the Times had given his works one by one as they came out, but here he was acknowledged as a careless and coarse but powerful realistic storyteller who might eventually hold a place like Theodore Dreiser's. The worst thing the anonymous writer said of him was that he lacked the sombre poetry of Southern authors like Wolfe and Faulkner. In the other newspapers more was made of the gargantuan sums of money he had earned and dissipated, for by now it had become general New York gossip that Hawke was about to go bankrupt. The tabloids managed to mention his long friendship with the beautiful concert manager and theatrical producer, Mrs. Frieda Winter. On the whole, and except in the sober Times, it was clear that Hawke was newsworthy in good part because he had wielded his gifts like a conquistador to re-enact the American dream—log cabin to White House, Kentucky mountain boy to millionaire Pulitzer Prize author—and it added to his romance that he had plunged and lost his quick-won fortune. His career had height and depth, light and shadow, and it glittered with money, and it trailed the perfume of lovely conquered New York women.
Beyond all that he was newsworthy because so many people had read his stories. His trade sales in the hundreds of thousands, his paperback and book club distributions in the millions, had spread his name through the land; and every person who had closed a copy of Chain of Command or Will Horne with a satisfied sigh, and had studied his massive face on the dust jacket for a little while, to see what manner of man this was who had conjured up a bright non-existent world, had become in a sense his friend.
