Youngblood hawke, p.51
Youngblood Hawke, page 51
"As wealth increases," said the Preacher, "so do its devourers." That was the point of information Hawke was now picking up.
"My dear Hawke, it's marvellous," Feydal said, opening the door of his hotel suite to disclose his hairy naked belly ill-concealed by drooping pajama bottoms. His smile was fat and radiant. He seized the author's hand and pulled him inside. The sight of the striped silk-upholstered couch, the pervading lemon smell of Feydal's pomade, overwhelmed Hawke with remembrance of his early love-making with Frieda. Ye gods, how much time had passed! He felt as though he were growing old by decades while other people aged by years.
Feydal babbled happily about the play, flourishing the orange-bound script in one hand, and drinking a vast martini with the other.
Hawke said, "You do think it'll work?"
"Work! Work! It will work like a Rolls-Royce, that's all. You'll never spend the last dollar you'll make from it. Just the death! I told you, didn't I? I did hope you'd do a little more with Uncle Theodore. You know I'm not a part-fattener, I detest such foolishness, dear Arthur, only the dramatist knows whether a part deserves two sides or two hundred, but I'd really look a little silly in a walk-on like that. But it doesn't matter, we'll do the play and we'll roll in money, we'll bathe in it."
Hawke accepted a martini, though he had never become used to the lunchtime alcohol of New York. He was chilly, despite the sultriness of the day. The cough that had been troubling him since his return from Hovey—he believed he had caught it in the mine—was growing worse. He thought the drink might warm him up. But what it did was to deepen his odd detachment. He was neither surprised nor upset when Feydal, after a long speech on the uncertainties of an actor's existence, revealed that he had, while Hawke was in Hovey, accepted a contract to play Pontius Pilate in what he called, "some silly rot about the Crucifixion," a Technicolor movie that would take a year to film. So he could not direct Hawke's play until the season after next, though he was dying to do it and bitterly regretted that he had gotten himself into the Crucifixion. "My dear Hawke, how could I have dreamed that you would take me at my word and write off this brilliant theatre piece in a month? You are an absolute superman."
It never occurred to Hawke to reproach him. In his trance-like state a resigned pessimism filled his spirit. Of course Feydal was not going to put on his play, and probably was too polite to say that he really didn't like it. He left, accompanied to the door by the actor's rhapsodies and regrets. Feydal remarked in farewell that Hawke looked a bit peaked, and he hoped he had not been overworking.
Next Hawke roused himself enough to telephone the man who was so eager in Hovey to press a million dollars on him tax-free. Givney begged him to come over at once, greeted Hawke in his office with joy, ordered in coffee, and issued strict orders to his secretary to leave them undisturbed. The paperback publisher quickly elicited from him that he was in need of money. Their conversation was long and, at least to Hawke, confusing. When the coffee was all drunk up and he disentangled Givney's position about money from the ecstatic talk about literature, it seemed to come to this: Givney was ready to go ahead with the corporate venture at once and to advance something very sizable in the way of cash. It happened that his wife was ill and anxious for something to read, and could Hawke let her see some of his new novel? Hawke explained that the book was an unfinished, mixed-up mass of scrawls on yellow paper, but Givney said that was just fine, Mrs. Givney derived wonderful excitement from reading handwritten scripts however rough and illegible.
Hawke left, allowing Givney to think that he might consider putting together a portion of his book for Mrs. Givney to read. It was too much trouble to argue. But bemused as he was, he had not the slightest intention of exposing his unfinished work to anybody but Jeanne Fry; not for a whole million, let alone an unspecified fraction of it. Money problems were important, they had to be attended to, but they were not a really serious matter, like letting some fool woman read a manuscript in progress.
He walked back to the wrecked house in mid-afternoon, went to the library and lay down on the black leather couch. He was wet with perspiration, yet he felt cold, and he had a pain in his side which he attributed to walking too fast. As he was drifting off to sleep it occurred to him that he ought to call Scotty Hoag and find out whether he could withdraw his money from Scott's various enterprises, for otherwise it was beginning to seem that he was in rather a pickle. He forced his big body off the couch to the desk, and put in a call to Lexington.
Scott answered, and he was all gay jokes until Hawke mentioned money; then the cheerful voice took a decided turn to sobriety. "Art, I'd sure like to oblige you, but this time it's real rough. I'm stretched good and thin myself, between Skytop Lodge and that job in Frankfort, I reckon I bit off a little more than I can chew, damn near. Mortgage money is really murder down here now. Everything's gonna be just fine, boy, we gonna make a potful, but I don't think I can take cash out of one of these things. How urgent is it, boy?"
Hawke said it wasn't urgent at all, he was just asking.
"Well, that's good, Art. Listen, I thought what you were investing was surplus funds. I mean the idea of venture capital is that you tie it up for a while, Art, in order to borrow a hell of a lot more dough from a bank or an insurance company, and build something big and rack up a profit. If you want to be able to call in your dough any time like this, the answer is guvment bonds, boy."
"I know, Scott."
"If you stuck for ten thousand or so temporarily, Art, I can probably fix it to get you a loan."
"Thanks, Scott, it won't be necessary." He stumbled back to the couch.
Next thing he knew, the ringing of the telephone came like a knife-thrust. He groaned and rose and dragged himself to the desk. It was still light outside.
"Darling, I just wanted to remind you to wear a dinner jacket," Frieda's voice was high, merry, and busy.
"For what?"
"Ye gods, for what? The African dancers, and then Phil York's party! It's a good thing I telephoned. Were you up all night writing, or something? It's Thursday, my love."
Hawke dimly remembered now. He noticed with a little curiosity that sweat was dripping from his face to the desk. His side hurt each time he breathed. "Frieda, I'm not sure I can come."
She asked him questions, became alarmed and said she would send her doctor up to look at him. Hawke hated doctors, he knew none in New York; ordinarily he would have resisted her—he often had in the past—but this time he did not.
It was a good thing he did not. He had an advanced pneumonia in both lungs. The doctor said he had probably been walking around with it for ten days. A big grayheaded man with a paunch, a little beard, and a severe permanent knot in his eyebrows, the doctor also volunteered that Hawke seemed on the brink of a nervous breakdown. "You're a fine author, I admire your books and I think a man like you should take better care of himself," the doctor said, brandishing a hypodermic needle full of penicillin, and neatly sliding it into Hawke's arm. "From what Frieda tells me, you lead a disorderly life. Penicillin usually knocks out pneumonia. Otherwise you'd have been a dead man in two days. I'm putting you in a hospital, you can't stay in this messy tomb of a house by yourself."
Hawke had a horror of hospitals, and was certain that if he entered one as a patient he would never leave it alive. Painful as it was to breathe, he argued forcibly until the doctor said, "Well, I'm sending a nurse here to take care of you, at least. Though I don't know how long a nurse will stay in this place. You're damned sick. I don't think you're the most sensible young man I've ever met. If you want to write many more books, you'd better reorganize your thinking and your living."
When the doctor was gone Hawke wandered here and there in the broken house like a solid coughing ghost. He knew he was very sick, but he didn't want to believe it. He trusted nobody in the huge city; he would have trusted Jeanne, but she had Karl Fry to take care of. After a while he made another long distance call. He sat at the desk with his head down on his arms, and he was dozing when the ring came. He groped for the phone. "Hello? Hello, mama? How's Nancy, mama? And the baby? That's good. Look, mom, do you suppose you could come up here and do for me for a spell? I'm not feeling good."
7
Hawke lay in his bed in the garret room running a high fever, his large frame racked with shivering and sharp coughing, his teeth chattering quite out of control. He remembered little of the events of that night, the day that followed, or the night after that. There was a nurse, and the doctor came and went, and—unless he dreamed it—Frieda in a black dinner dress and pearl choker put an icy hand on his forehead and said "Jesus Christ," and it seemed to him that he had a long acrid fight with Jeanne about his latest chapters, though that probably was pure delirium. He slept, and woke, and slept, submitting half-consciously to the jabs of needles. The pain in his side faded. When he came fully awake again the slant red light of a New York morning lay across his bed, the nurse was gone, and his mother was pottering around the room in a familiar faded purple apron, dusting his books and picking up his scattered clothes. The ceiling of the room sloped like his attic room in the old house in Hovey, and for a moment or two he had the strongest possible delusion that he was back in his Kentucky home, a high school boy recuperating from a grippe, and that his entire career as the author, Youngblood Hawke—the encounters with Frieda and Jeanne, the great successes, the Hollywood adventures, the Pulitzer Prize, the shower of money, the house disaster, the tax troubles—had all been the fever dream of a night.
His mother saw that his eyes were open. "Well, hi there, my big money maker," she said. "I was beginning to think you'd sleep forever. Aha ha ha. Been a bit poorly, haven't you? I thought you looked awful when you left home last week, but I've given up telling you such things, you just get ornery."
"Where's the nurse?"
"Why, I packed her off. I asked her what she was getting and when she said five dollars an hour I said I reckon I'd do it for half-price. . . . You hungry at all?"
"Well, maybe I could eat a scrambled egg, mom. Mom, I'm glad to see you. Maybe two scrambled eggs. You couldn't make some biscuits, could you?"
Mrs. Hawke smiled, and felt his pulse. "Scrambled eggs and biscuits, hey? I reckon New York hasn't quite killed you off. Though from what that nurse said, it was sure close. Double pneumonia! It's this air, Art, I don't know how anybody's alive in this town. You'd think they'd all be walking around with gas masks. Why the soot lies along the windowsills here in little black piles. I declare I can feel a layer of soot in my lungs already. It tickles when I breathe. I bet when you start coughing up all that stuff in your lungs it'll be black as tar. And all those dollar cigars didn't do you any good either. Money can kill a man, you know, if he lets it."
Hawke said, "Let's see, I don't suppose there are any eggs down in the kitchen."
"There was nothing in that kitchen but some horrible moldy cheese, and cans and cans of beer. I'll say one thing for this crazy town. I went out half-past one in the morning looking for some food and do you know, I found three different groceries open? The men behind the counters looked as green as corpses but they were alive all right. Do you know what they wanted for eggs? A dollar and a quarter a dozen. That's more than ten cents an egg! Why, I went to all three stores just to make sure I was hearing right, and the last robber, he wanted a dollar-thirty. How can anybody but millionaires ever eat a square meal in this city?"
"Mom, I'm kind of hungry," Hawke said. "Can you fix those ten-cent eggs?"
She reappeared in short order with a tray of smoking food. "I don't know about the sausages, the doctor would probably have a fit, but I think at this point you need something that'll stick to your ribs. Say, you know that sprout of Nancy's has a head of hair like a man's! As though he was making up for his father. Aha ha ha."
Hawke devoured the food while his mother rattled on, watching him eat and wrinkling her nose each time he took a bite. The sweetest imaginable sensation of well-being flowed out through his whole body. It was better than getting drunk, it was better than making love, this feeling of coming back to life. The telephone rang downstairs. He said with a great yawn, "No matter who it is I don't want to talk to them. In fact you call the telephone company and tell them to disconnect that goddamned thing."
"No, I've got to talk to your doctor now and then. But don't worry, nobody's going to see you or talk to you till you're a whole lot stronger." Mrs. Hawke added as she went out, "It's going to kill me traipsing up and down these stairs. What a place to live, way up here under the roof. We've got to fix you a place below."
The mother did just that. She swept the mounds of rubbish out of the broken-walled space on the second floor that was supposed to become the master bedroom. She moved down the furniture and books from Hawke's garret lair herself, everything but the folding bed in which he lay, a relic of his loft room days. The next time the doctor came he was briskly commanded by the mother to "get aholt of t'other end of that bed, I cain't get it downstairs myself and Art's weak as a kitten." He dumbly obeyed, and Hawke watched with amusement as the bearded Park Avenue physician tottered into the hall after the mother, carrying the bed, and panting, "Not so fast, madam."
She said, "It's all right, I'm used to this and I reckon you're not, I'll take the downstairs end, only mind you don't let go your end, I can't afford to pay a New York doctor, aha ha ha."
The doctor said after examining him, "Very dramatic response to penicillin. You can thank God for it. Your lungs still sound awful. You're damned sick and you will be for weeks. Don't let the normal temperature and the sense of good health fool you. No smoking, absolute bed rest, no writing for a month and I mean that. I've seldom seen a more exhausted man." Next he added to Mrs. Hawke, "This young fellow may be a genius, but I think he needs looking after by a woman."
"You all do," Mrs. Hawke said.
In his weak, euphoric state, Hawke told his money problems to his mother: the house mess, the tax troubles. His mother took it all cheerfully. The vast sums involved did not dismay her nearly as much as the idea of paying ten cents for an egg. "Well, Art, you can make the money all right, you have the gift, so there's nothing to worry about. Do you have the bills somewhere for what you've spent on the house?"
Hawke told her where the files were, an inconceivable thing for him to have done in a normal frame of mind. He had shut his mother out of his personal affairs since his seventeenth year.
That evening, when he was wolfing a huge bowl of her famous thick soup, which seemed inexpressibly delicious to him, she said, "What's wrong with you? Don't you know any girls?"
"Girls? I know thousands."
"Well none of them cares a rap about you, it seems. There's only two women keep calling and they're both married—Mrs. Winter and Mrs. Fry. A body would think they were both sweet on you."
Frieda and Jeanne seemed far away to Hawke, lying there in the gloomy room with the broken walls, in a snug bed under a floor lamp, talking to his mother over a bowl of her soup, as in childhood days. He was glad that his mother was there to answer the telephone and turn them off. He might have told her about his love life too, but her eyes were a shade too bright and eager as she put the questions. For the moment she came out of the character of the ministering mama and was another inquisitive woman, and that bored him. He said, handing her the empty soup bowl, "I'll have some more. You tell Jeanie Fry next time that I'm okay but I won't be working for a while. That's all she wants to know. As for Mrs. Winter, she can come and pay me a visit any time. She was nice to me when I got sick."
Mrs. Hawke said, "Nobody's visiting you."
"That suits me," Hawke yawned. "Mrs. Winter is a smart old bat, but she talks too much."
The mother brought him more soup. A letter lay on the tray beside the bowl. "Maybe this is from one of your girl friends," she said. "Most of your mail today was bills, but this one smells kind of interesting. Aha ha ha. Real foo-foo."
He picked up the letter languidly: an unknown feminine hand, a Rome postmark. He tossed the letter on the blanket. "I'm more interested in soup."
Mrs. Hawke said, wrinkling her nose as he put the spoon to his mouth, "I reckon you get bushels of fan mail, hey?"
"Not bushels, mama. I'm not a movie actor. I write books. Most people don't read books."
"Why, your books sell by the millions, I thought."
"I get a few letters a week. A lot more right after a book comes out."
He took up the letter when she left. There were six small sheets of airmail paper, of a curiously marbled texture, covered in an elegant hand, more nearly vertical than most feminine writing. The woman had a habit of leaving out letters, and when a word ended in "ing" there was a mere squiggle. He glanced at the signature; this was no mere fan letter; he knew someone named Honor Hauptmann. In his foggy condition it took him a moment or two to place her as the daughter of Anne Karen, the plump young woman who had married a Peruvian.
Dear Mr. Hawke:
I have just this minute closed Chain of Command. It is your second demonstration, and I think a superfluous one, that you stand above your contemporaries. It is a fine entertainment. I suppose entertainment is hard enough to come by in this terrifying time, so the book is probably its own excuse for being. My question is, Mr. Hawke, when are you going to get to work?
This is an impertinence, and I can't stop you from throwing my letter in the wastebasket, but I'm going to have my say anyway. I not only admire you—many do that—I understand you, and it seems to me I have understood you ever since I read the first pages of Alms for Oblivion. In fact, if you can possibly take the word in a totally disembodied and abstract sense, I love you. I'm a happily married woman with three children. The third is about four days old and is lying beside me in a hospital basket, fast asleep under gauze. Perhaps it was a bad time for me to read your book, but my husband knows how much I admire you and so he gave it to me. You must know, with your intuitive sympathy, that a woman after childbirth is melancholy, and sensitive, and vulnerable. I felt in reading your book that—for all its crowded excitements and competent love scenes—the author was suffering from the worst loneliness and incompleteness a young man could endure; and that whatever his random pleasures, he had never truly known a woman. Though I write to you across a bottomless gulf, I think I might have given you that knowledge, had our lives crossed in any significant way. But such things are not decided here below.
