Youngblood hawke, p.4
Youngblood Hawke, page 4
"These calls cost money, ma. Goodbye. Give my love to Nancy."
"Son, I'm so proud of you. One second. Are you coming home?"
"I don't know. This is a big new development, I'll be busy."
"Don't ever be too busy for your old mother, son. No really great man ever was. Don't let fame go to your head."
"Mama, I'm not famous, for Christ's sake, I've just been lucky enough to sell a book, and—"
"You ought to come home, Art. We ought to celebrate. It'll be Christmas, and all. Anyway, dear, the business on Frenchman's Ridge is serious. I was out walking on the land last week, and there was this big tunnel, see—"
"Look, ma, you're always seeing big tunnels when somebody digs a hole on a piece of land of yours and takes a little coal that's worth no more than the labor to haul it away—"
"It's your land, too. This was a big hole, I tell you."
"Goodbye, ma."
"Will you call Judge Crain?"
"When I get a chance."
"When will I see you?"
"Goodbye, ma. I'll let you know."
"I'm proud of you, son. My, what fine news! Thanks for thinking of your old mother."
"Goodbye, ma. Goodbye." He hung up and thrust the telephone at the wine waiter, who shrank from the profane thing. The man in black darted forward and took it.
Fipps said, covering his mouth with hand and cigarette, "It's very thoughtful of you to want to share your good news with your mother. Old-fashioned, and decidedly pleasant."
"Don't give me any credit for it," Hawke said, glaring around at the people who had been eavesdropping. "Just allow me my mean little triumph. The one thing that impresses my mother is the five thousand. Money is serious. Mind you, mama isn't avaricious, not what you'd call avaricious. Mama just knows that money is all that matters. Most of the world agrees with her, so as between us she's nearer normal, I guess."
"Ah, on our brief acquaintance, Mr. Hawke, I'd say you had a healthy regard for money."
Hawke drank coffee, narrowing his eyes at the editor. "Look, Mr. Fipps—and say, how long does the mister business go on? They call me Art back home."
"Good. And they call me Waldo. I'm glad you have a nickname, Art. Youngblood would be rather a jawbreaker, all the time."
"Well, there I'm imitating Somerset Maugham again, using my middle name. What do people call him—Bill?"
"Willie. Your name happens to be superb. You'd have to write very bad novels not to sell them, with a name like Youngblood Hawke."
Hawke became very red again. Brandy came, and he took a gulp that emptied the glass. He said, "A high regard for money? Yes indeed! I intend to make money and I know I will, but not for my mother's reasons. I want to be living on interest at the age of thirty-five, Waldo, when I expect my serious work to start. I want an adequate amount of invested money, a quarter million, a half million, a million dollars, whatever it takes"—Fipps opened his eyes very wide, and stared—"judiciously selected and balanced across the face of the economy, so that nothing after that can ever interfere with my work. Living on interest is the big open secret of the rich, Waldo. A writer who spends his income as he makes it is eating out his own bowels. I know all that. I've made a study of these things. I'm going to live on interest, and in the not too distant future."
Fipps said, his eyes still showing white all around the pupils, "Isn't that a curious goal for—well, for an artist?"
"It's not my goal, don't you see that? It's the start toward my goal."
"Well, it's a dream that most people have and few reach."
"I'll reach it."
5
Checkroom attendants were helping them into their coats when Hawke noticed Jock Maas regarding him from an armchair. Maas smiled the disturbing smile, stood, and came toward them. He needed a haircut worse than Hawke did; little dark whorls of hair disappeared down the back of his neck into his shirt collar. "Well, well, the editor and his gifted prey. Where are you gentlemen heading?"
The editor glanced at his watch. "Unfortunately, I have a sales conference now, Art. Can you come in tomorrow morning about ten? That is, if it won't interfere with your work on your new novel." The three men went through doors held open for them by attendants, out into a whirling snowfall that was faintly violet-colored.
"I'll have my day's quota done by then," Hawke said, his breath smoking. "I get up late at night and work straight through."
Fipps said, "Splendid work habits. We'd better talk some more tomorrow about revisions, since you seem reluctant to make them." Fipps smiled and walked off a step or two. Then he stopped and turned. "Oh—once again—congratulations." He went off in a lurching stiff gait, like a walking skeleton, hands jammed in pockets, chin sunken.
Maas took Hawke's arm. He smiled at the young author, uncovering his separated stained teeth, and wrinkling his whole face upward. The corners of his mouth seemed to move near his eyes. "Hawke, have you been to the top of the Empire State Building?"
"Not yet. I've been meaning to go, but—"
"Everybody means, nobody goes. Come along."
"Sure."
They trudged in slush to Fifth Avenue, and turned downtown. Neither spoke for a long time. Hawke found it more than a little odd to be walking silently arm in arm in a snowfall with this queer celebrity, but he waited for what would happen next. Maas said very abruptly, snatching his arm away from Hawke's elbow, "I have a feeling that I suggested the completely wrong thing, that you're bored, that the last thing you want to do on your day of triumph is to go with a stranger on a hayseed excursion to the top of the Empire State Building."
"Ye gods no," Hawke said. "Come on. I'm too excited to do anything more sensible. Am I wrong, or does New York really have the most beautiful women in the world? And they all seem to pour into this street, this one street, Fifth Avenue, between Fifty-ninth and Forty-second, and walk it in the daytime. Look at the way they walk. You'd think they were all movie stars."
Maas looked up—he was much shorter than Hawke—and the pale yellow light of a street lamp fell on his smiling face, the heavy black brows flecked with snow. He was hatless, like Hawke; snow was caking on his thin black hair. "Are you married?"
"It doesn't even occur to me. I have too much work."
"Do you have a girl?"
"No."
"Don't you get, well, hungry now and then?"
"Damned hungry."
"What do you do?"
"Hunger, mostly."
Maas uttered a short barking laugh. "My dear lad. Big and strong, and if I may say so, winning as you are?"
"I'd rather be hungry than involved. My trouble is I don't know how to be casual. Even if it's a waitress, I have to make a goddess of her in my own mind, I don't know why."
"Because you propose to mate her with a god," Maas said in his velvety voice, that somehow penetrated through the street noise.
Hawke halted in his tracks, stared at Maas, threw back his head and bellowed with laughter. He took the producer's arm and started striding along so fast that Maas had to trot a little. "By the Christ, Mr. Maas, I'm enjoying this. Where are those carols coming from, anyway? They seem to be floating in the air, like the music on Prospero's island. I swear this goddamn avenue is a Christmas card come to life, these lamps burning in the middle of the day and the air sort of purplish and full of snow, and these big windows like fairy houses, with gorgeous immovable creatures in them smiling and flirting and wearing Arabian Nights clothes. Good God, will you look at that diamond necklace? Is that real? Just lying there behind a pane of glass? It must be worth half a million dollars."
"It's real," said the producer. "That's thick glass, and if it breaks it shrieks like an air raid siren. Do you mind telling me the plot of your novel?"
"Gosh, no." Hawke was still pretty drunk, and the flattering interest of a Broadway producer dissolved his usual caution. He spilled the story while they walked down Fifth Avenue, hurrying the plot to its climax as the Empire State Building loomed near, vague in the snowfall, its top disappearing into purple mist. Maas made no comment when the author finished.
The two men shot skyward in an elevator crowded with damp bundled-up tourists, most of whom stayed in the steam-heated glass observation room. Maas led Hawke out on a terrace bounded by a shoulder-high parapet of stone. The wind was screeching, and snowflakes stung Hawke's cheek, but there were only a few. The main body of the storm was rolling in a white cloud across the Hudson, uncovering the downtown skyscrapers and the black river. "See that? The view's opening up just for you. Good omen!" shouted Maas.
Hawke was staring out at the city, tears standing in his eyes from the force of the wind. He shook his head in wonder.
"Think you can lick it?" yelled Maas. And when Hawke did not reply he went on, "Just remember this. Franklin Roosevelt wasn't as tall as you are. This town can be had. This country can be had. Men are just men, even the best ones. Balzac wouldn't have come up to your shoulder, Hawke. Just a little fat Frenchman with thick lips and a garlic breath."
"I love this city. I'll never leave it," roared Hawke. "And I'll lick it!"
Maas shrilled, in his weak voice that somehow carried through all noise, "That book of yours sounds like a play. In three weeks, maybe two, working with me, you could edit that book down into a hit. Why don't we do it? It'll be fun, sheer fun. We can go to Mexico, or Bermuda, wherever you want."
Hawke was breathless: from the wind, or the height, or the amazing sudden offer, or all those things. The rich lunch was not sitting well. He felt uneasy in his middle, and a little dizzy, and his heart was thumping, but he was wildly exhilarated. "Jesus, Mr. Maas, all you know is a plot I just told you on the sidewalk. Maybe I can't write plays at all. Maybe I can't write novels either. Who knows?"
Maas laughed wildly, and shook snow out of his hair and eyes. "Maybe ah cain't ra-a-at plays. Maybe ah cain't ra-a-at novels!" He mimicked Hawke's accent precisely. "My lad, Waldo Fipps does not make a habit of wining and dining boys with first novels at Number One. You're red hot, obviously. But you're innocent. Write this play, I tell you. Do you know how much money there is in a hit play? They just sold that wretched comedy The Rabbit Foot to the movies for a million dollars. One million dollars in cash, do you hear?" Maas screamed over the howls of the wind. "Fifty thousand a year for twenty years! Come on, boy! Tomorrow morning! The nine-eighteen plane to Mexico City, and come as you are, we'll buy shirts and toothbrushes as we go. Have you ever been to Cuernavaca? A friend of mine has a villa there, marvellous servants, a pool, there's fresh linen on the beds, and by God, young man, it's a divorce mill for the rich, you've never seen such luscious blonde lonesome women—"
"Look, it's wonderful that you're interested in me, but I have this other work to do. I've been paid an advance—"
A look of the blackest gloom came over the producer's face, and he darted off the terrace. Hawke followed him, very disconcerted. In the elevator the man's face suddenly cleared into a charming smile. "What are you doing tomorrow night? I know several very agreeable ways we can pass Christmas Eve."
"Well, I've been invited to the Princes', and—"
"Dear old Fanny, eh? Well, that's always a pleasant do. Maybe I'll see you there."
On the sidewalk Maas hailed a cab, and Hawke found himself handed inside it, not knowing where he was going next. Maas muttered an address and slouched in a corner of the seat, his face sulky. The cab stopped at a dirty little building in the west forties, tucked between theatres where hit shows boasted of their success in garishly painted quotations from the critics. Maas said suddenly, "Hawke, I'll give you an advance, too. I'll give you an advance of twenty-five hundred dollars if you'll start work on this play within the next three days. Otherwise forget it. I have to go into rehearsal with The Doctor's Dilemma in mid-January."
Hawke knew that he should not make any decision. He was hearing words. His senses were numb, his vitality was sagging. He had taken in too much in one day. He had gone from the total obscurity of a scribbling construction worker to a contract for three novels, and lunch at Number One, and now this weird man wanted to give him money to dramatize his book! Things didn't happen this way. He had a pounding headache, a vivid smell of sharpened pencils was haunting him—a warning sign of exhaustion—and Jock Maas was beginning to seem like a ghost in a dream.
"Mr. Maas, your confidence in me staggers me. I'm sort of dimming out, I haven't been to bed in thirty-six hours. Let me phone you tomorrow."
"Phone me tonight. Any time. Here's my private number." Maas wrote a scrawl on a slip of paper. "You work all night, don't you? Call me four in the morning, or whenever you please. I don't sleep. I read." With this the producer got out of the cab and walked off, making no gesture to pay the fare, and vanished into the building.
Hawke directed the driver to take him to the loft building in the wholesale furniture district where he had his lair. He stumbled up three flights of deeply gouged heavy stone stairs, unlocked his door, and all but fell inside. The bed was as he had left it, unmade, a mere mattress on the floor with tumbled sheets and blankets. The room, bare and unfurnished except for an old armchair and an older refrigerator, was a chaos of books and clothes and luggage and stacked papers. In the middle of the mess was the desk, cleared and waiting, and beside it the coffeepot on its little electric grill on the floor. Hawke took three aspirins. The pounding at his temples was making him wince, and the pencil smell scared him, it was so strong; this was a queer thing that had been happening to him off and on since his truck accident, whenever he went over the edge of total fatigue.
He ranged on the desk the three bits of tangible evidence that this unbelievable day had not been a hallucination—the scrap of paper with Maas's telephone number, the box of cigars Prince had given him, which he had been carrying everywhere under his arm, and the orange Prince House check for five hundred dollars. The check seemed to have a hazy rainbow around it, like a street lamp in the rain. Hawke collapsed upon the bed with his clothes on, dragging the blanket over him. His eyes closed, then he forced them open. He reached for a tin alarm clock near his pillow, wound it, and set it to allow himself four hours of sleep.
CHAPTER TWO
1
Now Fanny Prince's eggnog party on Christmas Eve was not exactly the quiet little gathering she liked to call it. It was an institution that even the second World War had not shaken, a turbulent massive crush of celebrities and their satellites, powered by one of the most extravagant buffet dinners seen in New York from one year to the next.
It was a revel with a reason. Publishers are not socially important in New York unless their companies date well back into the nineteenth century, and unless they themselves have a reasonable pedigree. Picture then, the position of people like the Princes, both of whom were parvenus: Fanny a wealthy refugee from Hungary, Jay a Chicago book salesman who had pushed his way upward and eastward and had brashly started his own house shortly before the 1929 collapse. Where many of the staid old houses had gone under, Prince House had flourished, using loud jocular advertising hitherto unknown to the book trade, printing books of jokes and comic strips and picking up star authors cast adrift by sinking publishers. Hawke thought the Princes were exalted New York aristocrats, and they were (relatively speaking) nobody at all. But Fanny was energetic, and in ten years of strenuous entertainment, charity work, and cultivation of useful people, she had made a place in what might be called the open or second layer of upper-class New York. The circle of the elect was beyond her: the nearly invisible group into which one must be born, where talent gives one nothing more than a passport to amuse now and then, and enough new-gained money can earn one an invitation to work on a charity committee, and occasional formal entry into otherwise closed homes. Fanny was fond of referring to this innermost circle as stuffy and dowdy. Indeed it is, for the most part, though it can outdazzle people like Fanny without half trying when it chooses. It seldom so chooses. Brilliance and display in a democracy are mostly for those who are on the climb, not for those who hold the citadel. It was not likely that the defenders would ever see the whites of Fanny's eyes.
But what did she care? Fanny knew and entertained senators, governors, foreign ambassadors, artists, movie stars, writers, scientists, and even European nobility, who might have looked down on her in their home ground, but who—looking down on all Americans as they did—found our own intramural distinctions a little amusing. Anywhere in the world, you can go far with a good table; and when Fanny spread a feast, celebrated men and beautiful women came to eat it, and behaved like children at a birthday.
As soon as Youngblood Hawke walked into the crowded lobby of the Prince home, a four-story mansion on East Sixty-seventh Street, he realized that his dress was wrong, and he wondered angrily why Karl Fry had said nothing to him about it. The line of men giving their black overcoats and white scarves to a smiling Negro butler, were all dressed in dinner jackets, or else black or very dark gray suits; nothing else. Fry, a small bitter-faced lean man with bad teeth, was dressed in brown like himself; not only that, he wore a blue shirt and red tie. Even Hawke, knowing nothing of New York manners, had thought Fry was outlandishly gotten up. By contrast his own outfit had seemed to him suave and knowing. It was his "novelist's suit," bought in a fit of exaltation the day he finished Alms for Oblivion, with a sense when he wrote "The End" that he had licked the world. Brown tweed, heavy purplish-brown shoes, a white grainy button-down shirt, and a dark maroon tie with dark blue figures on it—and even a rough briar pipe, and a tobacco pouch and some tobacco—this was the costume Hawke had bought himself weeks ago out of a small hoard, for occasions of state. Tonight, obviously, he should have left it laid away, and had his blue suit cleaned and pressed; at least it was dark.
