Youngblood hawke, p.108
Youngblood Hawke, page 108
Rivkin said, "Save your breath, Arthur."
Hawke rolled his head from side to side, looking from Jeanne to his mother. His fiery face wrinkled in a pathetic simulacrum of his old boyish smile. "So help me mama, Jeanne isn't Jewish," he said. "Not that it would matter, you know—Ah!" All his features contorted. "God, Doctor, that hurts when I breathe. It's like a knife stuck in my side."
"All right, Arthur. It's better not to talk. Let's let your ma and Jeanne go for a while."
Hawke tightened his hold on their hands. "I love you both. God, I have so much work to do! I've just gotten started."
"You'll do all the work God means you to do, Art," his mother said.
Hawke looked at Jeanne. "More time. That's all I ask for. Nothing else. I hope God will give me more time. More time! I have so much to do."
Dr. Rivkin gently broke Hawke's grip on her hand. "Rest now, Arthur. Go outside, Jeanne. Go outside, mother."
"Jeanne!" Hawke called as she was walking out. She came back to the foot of the bed. He stared straight at her with glittering eyes. "Are you there? I can't see you."
"I'm here, darling."
"Jeanne, I'm sorry about Frieda."
She pushed past the doctors, put her arms around his shoulders in the sweat-soaked gown, and kissed his cracking wet lips. "I love you, Arthur, I've never loved another man, and I'll love you until I die," she said. "Now do what they tell you and get well. We have a life to start living."
He nodded, smiled, and closed his eyes.
His big powerful frame fought on for a day and a night, long after he had passed into a coma, long after the doctors had showed in their faces and their actions, though they never spoke the words, that hope was gone. The two women did not leave the hospital for thirty hours. When the last day was dawning, the terrible huge breaths began to come further and further apart; his face took on the green of death; a trickle of bloody spittle came from his mouth, but still he fought. When he was quite still, and Dr. Rivkin turned to the mother and said that it was over, Hawke gasped in one more tremendous gulp of air. Then the big body lay inert and the head lolled to one side, the eyes shut.
"Is he truly gone?" Mrs. Hawke said to Rivkin. Her face was bathed in tears but she was calm. She was utterly exhausted.
The doctor, embarrassed by the last unexpected gasp of Hawke, checked the body here and there. "Yes, I'm terribly sorry. Your son is gone. He fought magnificently right to the last, but there was too much against him."
Mrs. Hawke got slowly out of her chair, went to the bed, sat beside her son, and took the heavy lifeless head in her arms. She rocked him against her bosom. "All right, Art," she said. "I'll take you home now. It's all over, and I can take you home. You worked so hard, and now you can rest. Home, Art, home, son. I'll take you home."
Jeanne was bowed in an armchair. She had been crying for a long time, but new grief welled up in her, seeing the lover whom she had never embraced, and now never would, dead in his mother's arms. He was the same Arthur, he did not look worse than he had many times in the past awful year, but he was gone. His body belonged to his mother. It had never belonged to her. She had no right to fall on it like a wife, and to cry her heart out. They had never even been formally engaged. She had no ring.
Jeanne rose and went to the bedside table, where a nurse was beginning to clear away bottles, needles and instruments. "Excuse me," she said. She opened a lower drawer, and there were the black gloves on top of the red-leather box, and the envelope containing Hawke's will. Jeanne had surmised at her first glimpse that the box was Frieda Winter's parting gift to Hawke. She looked at the dead man's face, resting against his mother's gray print dress, and she had no desire to open the box. She took the gloves and shut the drawer.
"Mother," she said, "I have to go home to my boy for a while. Can I come to Hovey with you? With Arthur?"
Mrs. Hawke, clutching her huge lifeless son to her breast as though he were an infant, said, "We'll all go home together. Art loved you and you would have made him happy. We're going home, Art, home."
Jeanne nodded, and dashed the last tears from her eyes with a handkerchief. She kissed Mrs. Hawke, and then she kissed the warm, still perspiring face of the dead man once on the lips. She drew on the black gloves, and walked out of the room of death.
The reporters in the lobby startled her, pouncing on her as she emerged from the elevator. There seemed to be a dozen of them, and they crowded around her with questions. She passed through them like a sleepwalker, out into a busy street, a hot cloudy day, out among pedestrians and grimy brick buildings and noisy automobiles. The death of the famous author had made no change in the look or the pace of New York.
A reporter put his face to the window of the taxicab door as she pulled it shut. "Mrs. Fry, do you think his works will live?"
The question somehow penetrated to her. "Yes," she said. "I think the books will live. But he's gone, and there will never be another Youngblood Hawke."
EPILOGUE
1
FERDIE LAX missed the funeral, being detained at his desk in Hollywood in a tense three-way bidding contest for the film rights of the new fiction success about sex misconduct in an Ohio town; a battle of wits so complex, and involving so much rumor, welshing, and playing off of rich suspicious men against each other, that it strained even Ferdie's remarkable ability to talk on several telephones at once. He wired a gigantic offering of flowers to Hovey.
After that he had no further occasion to see Jeanne for several years. Now and then he talked to her on the telephone or corresponded with her about subsidiary rights to the Hawke works, and about new authors whose books she edited.
When he heard of her marriage to the lawyer Adam, about a year after Youngblood Hawke's death, he was not surprised. The lawyer and the pretty though somewhat acerb editor had always struck Lax as a congenial and intimate pair. On the whole Lax thought Jeanne was much better off with that tough, smart, solid lawyer than she would have been with a wild man like Hawke, who had killed himself by a senseless sudden dash to South America when he was gravely ill. That was the version of Hawke's death which had passed into general acceptance; though Dr. Rivkin had told Jeanne, for whatever comfort there was in it, that Hawke might well have died when he did, no matter what kind of life he had led. With the brain injury, he had always dwelled on a brink of peril.
His reason for going to Peru had never become public knowledge. Lax himself was not aware of it. As for Honor Hauptmann, she shunned the topic of Youngblood Hawke forever after. Even when she visited Hollywood nobody could get her to talk about the author. In the public mind, then—and even in the poor and tasteless biography of Hawke that appeared six years after his death, written by a publisher's hack who appeared not to like Hawke much, but to be enamored of Mrs. Winter—the verdict was that the author, in the climax of an insensate drive to make money, had gone clean out of his mind and had in effect committed suicide by roaring off on an exhausting purposeless trip while suffering from a dangerous brain condition.
Though Hawke was dead, he continued to be one of Lax's most important clients. The negotiation for the film rights to Boone County was one of the most spectacular of the agent's career, and the price paid at last was enough to make little Jim Fry independent for life, quite aside from the other large revenues of the book; for Hawke's will, scribbled in the mountain cabin, had left all his property and all his works to his mother, except the copyright of Boone County, which he had willed in trust, in its entirety, to Jeanne's son.
New ways of exploiting the Hawke copyrights kept cropping up. Television opened a fresh market. Lax managed to get twenty thousand dollars for a TV performance of The Lady from Letchworth, which won Irene Perry a broadcasting award; whereupon Lax dug out all of the author's early plays and began selling them to television, one by one. The author's name on any property meant a major negotiation, as the popularity of his books continued, and they began passing to the stable audience generated by high school and college reading lists. Boone County soon took a place as required reading, though there was no agreement among critics as to Hawke's rank in serious literature, and a few denied him any at all. The posthumous novel was an enormous document of the struggle between capital and labor as it was fought in Kentucky in the 1930s. For high school and college purposes, its main virtue was that the most indifferent and sluggish student was likely to get caught up in the story, and to read through a seven-hundred-page novel of American life which had little to do with sex in its natural or aberrant forms, and teachers did not have many books of this kind to choose from. Chain of Command was also widely read in schools, the other books less so.
But a new and growing academic coterie began to assert, some years after he died, that the only good book Youngblood Hawke had ever written was Evelyn Biggers. It was this late-blooming vogue for Hawke's one failure that caused Lax to pay a visit to Jeanne Adam, late in October of 1961.
He arrived about four in the afternoon at the old apartment house on Riverside Drive near Columbia University where she lived, and rode to the top floor in a dilapidated and creaky elevator manned by a surly thug in shirtsleeves. She opened the door to him. The little fat agent stood and blinked at her, then said hesitantly, "Is this Jeanne?"
"It might be her mother, I know," she said, laughing. "But it's Jeanne. Come in."
"On the contrary, I was thinking you might have a younger sister staying with you. You've changed so little." But she had changed much, and he had actually been a little unsure when he first saw her. Different clothes—she was wearing slacks—and a short haircut made some of the difference, but the main alteration was in her face. The tense, bitter, brooding expression he had often seen in her was gone; also the girlish, incompleted look which had marked her even in the years of her marriage to Fry. This was a mature busy woman at home, a bit plump, a bit worn, a bit untidy. In the middle of the large living room, which had sweeping curved windows looking out on the Hudson River, a baby in a bright green sleeping bag sat in a play pen, tearing up a picture book with amused gurgles.
Jeanne said, "That's Arthur. It's a little silly having a new baby at my age, but Gus and I wanted a boy and it took four tries and three sisters. Arthur, this is Ferdie Lax, who lives off writers, like mama, only he makes a better thing of it."
The baby said something that sounded like violent language and threw scraps of the book at Lax, grinning charmingly all the while. He had shocking red hair. Jeanne went to a desk, put paper weights on piles of galleys, and took off her glasses. "Well," she said. "At your service, Ferdie. Too early for a drink?"
"For me, yes. I want to give you the pitch before we meet Bob Luzzatto, Jeanne. I have two more appointments between now and dinner time, so-"
"Okay. Let's talk. Arthur is the soul of discretion." Jeanne motioned Lax to sit with her on the couch.
"Good, because this is confidential. It's also big, and let me get right at it. One of the great Hollywood stars has been reading some of this literary magazine carrying on about Evelyn Biggers. She's got the message that Evelyn is the American female incarnate. She wants to play Evelyn in pictures. A commitment of this woman to appear in a movie, Jeanne—any movie—means an immediate million-dollar bank loan. Join her with a Youngblood Hawke book and you're talking about a two-million-dollar loan just to start production."
"Who is it?" said Jeanne.
"Sorry, I can't say. I'm not supposed to know. This is top secret hush hush firing-squad information, Jeanne. But it's the key to what's happening. Now is the time to sell Evelyn Biggers, if it's ever to be sold."
"It can only be Taylor, Monroe, or Hepburn," said Jeanne inquisitively. "Or is Garbo rising out of the sarcophagus for one more?"
"Don't pump me. I wrote to Mrs. Hawke, I've talked to her on the phone, and she doesn't or she won't understand. I can't disclose to her what I've told you. She says Hollywood ruined Boone County and Evelyn Biggers is really her own daughter Nancy and we can all go to hell."
"They did ruin Boone County."
"Eleven million domestic, Jeanne," said Lax solemnly.
"I don't care."
"Well, all right, they corned it up with that phony happy ending. Now the man who would write and direct Evelyn—you'll meet him tonight—would preserve the integrity of this book." He named a famous young director, whose films Jeanne had seen and admired.
She nodded. "He might at that. I'll tell you, Ferdie, if you mentioned a large enough sum of money to Mrs. Hawke she'd probably turn polite. She's quite a business woman."
Lax shook his head. "I tried it."
The front door opened and a boy and a girl entered with school books, wrangling. They dropped the satchels in the hallway and came tumbling into the living room demanding food, but they turned quiet when they saw Lax. Jim smiled very pleasantly, shaking hands with the agent. He was about eleven, weedy and clever-looking. The girl, a red-faced dumpling of six or so, began playing with the baby, glancing impishly at Lax. Jeanne ordered them off to have chocolate cake and milk, but they both busied themselves with Arthur, who was crowing with delight at seeing them. Meantime an elderly woman with an Irish accent came in leading two more small girls, both squealing and clutching lollypops. A burst of racing around and showing off ensued. It seemed to Lax that the apartment was boiling with children and that all further business talk was hopeless. But Jeanne got up, rapped out commands, and with the maid's help herded her five children out of sight, picking up Arthur herself. The noises died off as various far doors slammed shut. Jeanne returned, tidying her hair and grinning self-consciously at the agent.
"Now you know why we live in this grisly old house. Nine big rent-controlled rooms with thick walls. On the East Side a place like this would cost fifteen thousand a year. And of course Gus walks home from the law school in two minutes."
Lax said, "Makes sense."
"I don't have three dozen children, it just seems so when they all get in one room. Visitors stimulate them."
"I'm wondering how you also manage to hold down a big job at Hodge Hathaway."
"Well, as you see I do a lot at home. Ross got used to my irregular ways long ago." Jeanne sat at her desk and played with her glasses. "If Mrs. Hawke has turned you down, why this meeting tonight?"
"The last time I talked to her, I asked whether it would make any difference if Jeanne and Gus Adam were for it. That woman said if you were for it, she'd do it."
Jeanne slowly smiled. "That doesn't mean she would."
"Well, Jeanne, think about it this way." Lax leaned forward, elbows on his knees. "We're talking here about a transaction of maybe three or four hundred thousand dollars ahead of the line, with sliding percentages of the gross that could run up maybe to eight hundred thousand dollars. It's a brilliant deal for this property. And it all hangs on the whim of a star who might read some other goddamn novel next month and go stone cold on Evelyn Biggers, which between you and me is a difficult work with a limited audience. This vogue it's having is a temporary thing among the highbrows, and the fact that this actress has become infected is like lightning striking. It will never happen again to this book."
Jeanne said, "That may be."
Lax said, "I'm in the peculiar situation of having to persuade not the buyer but the seller. This sometimes happens to properties tied up in estates. I've failed to sell Mrs. Hawke myself. If you'll help me to sell her—and I don't want you to do so, of course, until you meet the director tonight and convince yourself that he can create a film of integrity that will befit Arthur's memory and stature—but if you will help me, I'll split my commission with you."
"I see." Jeanne lit a cigarette with an expert flip of a lighter, not taking her eyes from Lax's face.
"And to be absolutely frank with you," Lax said, "my chief interest here is to get this star what she wants, because I have other and bigger transactions that involve her. The business nowadays is totally at the feet of the stars. They call the tune. Now that's the pitch, Jeanne."
"Well, you're talking business," Jeanne said.
Lax appraised her through nearly closed eyes, slapped his knees with both hands and stood. "I know you'll want to talk it over with Gus. If you're willing I think the idea is for all of us—you and Gus and myself, with Luzzatto and the director—to make a flying trip over the weekend to Hovey. There's a jet to Lexington now so it's nothing to go and come in a day."
Jeanne walked with him to the door, and handed him his coat and hat. "I've got the pitch. We meet at Hadrian's Villa when—seven?"
"Right." Lax absently kissed Jeanne's hand—a newly evolved bit of Hollywood courtliness—and left.
2
Hadrian's Villa was the restaurant which had recently put Number One in the shade. Fancy restaurants in New York have runs like shows, lasting ten years or so. At the end they do not close but turn into tourist places and the cognoscenti, whom the tourists come to see, flee elsewhere. The hounds now occupied Number One, and the hares were in Hadrian's Villa. It was part of Jeanne's business to entertain best-selling authors at Hadrian's Villa, and she was not floored by the vistas of red and ivory velvet, the gilded scrollwork molding, the paintings of Roman ruins, and the Lucullan menu two feet high and two hundred epicurean items long. She knew that the old faces from Number One were all here, and that these faces mainly consumed steak, potatoes, and martinis, as always.
Lax and Adam had not seen each other since the time in Philadelphia when Hawke had gone nearly berserk with rage, after the call to Travis Jablock. They took each other in with equal sharpness, shaking hands. Adam noted how fat and bald Lax was getting, and Lax noted the academic gravity that was settling in strong lines in the lawyer's face. Roberto Luzzatto, Jeanne observed, had become extremely gross, and he was swarthily tanned as ever. This was a man who went through bankruptcies, she thought, as other men went through summer showers. One threatened bankruptcy had poisoned Arthur's last years.
