Youngblood hawke, p.54
Youngblood Hawke, page 54
Had he won or lost his yokel's battle with it? Hawke smiled wryly in the clean sunlight on the high rock, and gave himself a shaded draw. He was retreating, all bloodied up and barely escaping death by exhaustion. He had made clumsy slips. The tremendous flailing machine had caught and tumbled and beaten him, marking him for life. With all that, he had become Youngblood Hawke. That had been the stake of the game and he had won it. New York was not impressed with Youngblood Hawke, to be sure. But it was not impressed with royalty or presidents or conquering heroes either. Its idea of a supreme tribute was to empty its wastebaskets from its high towers, and heap a hero's head with shreds of its discarded paperwork. But New York with its hard-bitten arithmetical measures had printed his name for many months at the top of its best-seller lists—and there, as he left the field, his name stood:
"1. Chain of Command—Youngblood Hawke."
It was the one test of an author that New York cared about, despite the lofty chatter in its literary magazines. It left appreciation of a writer's art to the unborn, and wanted to know only whether his books sold. That was all Hovey wanted to know, too; as Frieda had said, New York was just America distilled.
If he wanted to see Gus Adam today, Hawke thought, he had to go and telephone him at once. There was no time for meditation; there seldom was, in New York. Hawke stood, intending to climb down the rock, and then paused irresolute. He did not want to leave this spot, so peopled by the phantoms of Chain of Command and Will Horne. He hesitated too because he had little desire to unravel for Professor Adam, who had seemed to admire him so much, his tangled stupidities and miscalculations. But he had decided in his sickbed self-analysis that he was a money-waster, a true artist in this if in nothing else, and he needed a steadying hand. Adam had seemed a genius at the university, and he had turned into a most sober-sided tax expert; the very man for him, and he would feel easier with a fellow from Letchworth County than with any New Yorker.
He started down the rock, and he saw on the walk far below him the gross figure of Georges Feydal strolling along in a ludicrous striped seersucker suit like a carnival balloon, in earnest conversation with Pierce Carmian. Hawke wondered whether he should not dodge the encounter, having last seen the dandy flopping around in Ferdie Lax's swimming pool. But Feydal looked up and exclaimed, "My dear Arthur!" in the voice that could roll across a football stadium without a loudspeaker, and Hawke was caught.
Carmian said with a flash of white teeth, holding out his hand, "Hello. I earned that ducking, I was rude and bitchy, and here's my apology, if you remember the incident." Hawke shook hands clumsily, and Carmian continued, "I hope you don't mind, but Georges let me read your play and I'm on the ceiling about it."
Feydal said, "I must have telephoned you forty times. Are you all better? You haven't given the play to anyone else, have you? I've been sick with worry about you."
Hawke said he had done nothing about the play.
"Marvellous," Feydal said. "Pierce wants to do it. Pierce has been doing some remarkable work in production out of town. That's his métier, you know, not writing. We've decided that."
Carmian said, "I leave the writing to you, Mr. Hawke. I think your play is sensational, I know just how it should be done, and I'm ready to give you a very substantial advance and go into production at once."
This was a strange turn for Hawke. He stared at Carmian, handsome as ever and turned out like a male mannequin, to the last thick sweeps of his black wavy hair. Had anybody thrown him into a pool, he would have wanted the man's blood to his dying day and somehow sometime he would have had it. These New York people seemed to have no continuity in their lives. They were all like Frieda, they lived from situation to situation, from yesterday's gossip to today's gossip. A fresh chance to make love, or to make money, seemed to wipe out all prior commitments and experiences.
He said something about Feydal's being unavailable to direct the play. Feydal quickly replied, "My dear fellow, I believe I will be. They're having an awful time casting the Christ. The whole thing may be put off. Do you know that ridiculous cowboy star Bill Blaydes wanted to do it and almost got it? Imagine Jesus saying shucks and yep and bashfully kicking pebbles! Sheer sacrilege! Those people don't know what taste is, they'd cast a dog as Saint Peter if the dog were box office, and change the part to St. Bernard. You will tell your man of business to get in touch with Pierce, and let him have the play? Ferdie Lax, isn't it? These curious Hollywood names, that one is rather like an impolite patent medicine. But he's a dear chap."
2
Gus Adam's manner was polite, cool, even nonchalant when the author called for him at his law school office. But in the hallway he introduced Hawke to a couple of his colleagues, and it was obvious that he felt good about having a best-selling novelist in tow. Adam took him to the Columbia Faculty Club, and here too Hawke sensed that he made a stir among the graying, wise-looking men who filled the dining room. This deeply flattered him. His cup ran over when an English professor whose name he recognized, because he wrote leading book reviews in the New York newspapers, came and shook his hand, and told him he was probably America's most promising young author.
Hawke found it awkward to talk to Adam at first, though they had university reminiscences and Letchworth County gossip to exchange. It turned out that they both kept up subscriptions to their home town newspapers. They laughed over the continuing mélange of church news, shootings, and local politics that the papers reported. "Do you suppose eastern Kentucky will ever get civilized?" Hawke said.
"Well, I don't know whether I want it to," Adam said. "Of course the conditions in the back hills are impossible in this day and age. But then again, some of the finest people I've ever known are those old-timers up in the hills around Brightstar. When I read of one of them dying I feel terrible, and they're going fast now. Letchworth will be all full of four-lane highways and deep freezers one of these days, no doubt. I wish the people could get the hospitals and education and services without changing too much, but I suppose that's absurd."
They ate without talking for a while. This was more comfortable than making chatter. The lawyer resembled many people Hawke had known back home. "Adam" was one of the widespread family names in that part of Kentucky, like Combs and Horne, and Adam's oval red face and sandy hair appeared with slight variations all through the Cumberland mountains. Hawke was used to the Letchworth manner of sitting or standing or squatting around and not saying much of anything. Adam broke the silence, "How's Mr. Fry? Last I heard he was in the hospital."
"They've moved him home, but he'll be in bed for weeks."
Adam shook his head. "He didn't look good the day we met."
Hawke said, "Jeanne Fry more than half blames you for Karl's attack, you know."
The lawyer's eyes narrowed, his shoulders sank, and he all at once had a wily, watchful look. "Really? It was a very unfortunate business, but I gave the best advice I could."
"Jeanne thought you were brutal to Karl, and she still doesn't understand why you were against his going to Washington."
Adam took out his pipe and the red, white, and blue pouch, and stuffed the bowl automatically as he spoke. "Well! I wish she had called me later and asked me, I think I could have made my reasoning clear. But events have justified my advice, haven't they? If Fry had gone back to Washington, he might now be dead."
Hawke said, "You accused him of shielding his communist activities behind his wife's skirt."
Adam lit his pipe, and squinted at Hawke through a cloud of blue smoke. "You depend a lot on Mrs. Fry's editorial services."
"Quite true."
The lawyer puffed in silence, looking hard at Hawke, who at last blurted out, "And I'm extremely fond of Jeanie, of course, and of Karl, too."
Adam nodded. "Fry's attitude about his communist past is hopeless. He proposes to confess all about himself but to name no names. In Washington that's the way they tell sheep from goats among ex-communists. Ross Hodge knows that. I'm sure he's keeping Fry on because of Mrs. Fry's usefulness to you. I saw that Mrs. Fry was offended when I touched on that point. But if a meeting isn't to be just chit-chat somebody at some point has to say what it's about."
"Why didn't you advise Karl to resign? That might have been more frank."
The lawyer cocked his head and arched his heavy brows. "Why should he resign, so long as Hodge is willing to keep him on? He's a good editor. The government mill grinds slowly. He may have a couple of years' grace before they come around to him again. Or they may never do so. What's lost and who's injured if he just goes about his business?"
"With a sword hanging over his head," Hawke said.
"Hung there by himself," said the lawyer. "He has to make the best of his life. Before the government bothers him again all kinds of things can happen. The panic about communists may subside. Fry may quit editing. Or since he's had two heart attacks he may die. Of course we hope that won't happen, and it's unlikely. People who can solve a lot of problems by simply dying are the ones who hang on and on." He was pouring coffee as he talked. When he said these last words he put down the pot and glanced at Hawke, and Hawke in a flash was reminded of the way Adam had looked on the campus: alert, foxy, and too self-satisfied to be wholly attractive, despite his handsomeness and his heroic prestige.
"I guess what bothers Jeanie, and me too, is that it isn't clear whose side you're on."
"Why, like any lawyer, I'm on the side of whoever pays me."
"Do you think it's right to hound a man out of his job because he was once a communist? Do you think a man who's left the party ought to be forced to name names to the government?"
Adam smiled, wrinkling his eyes to slits. "I'm a tax man, Mr. Hawke. My main work in life is setting up the debt structures of large corporations, especially utilities, so that they pay as little taxes as possible, and my main pleasure, aside from hunting and fishing, is passing on this small brand of wisdom to Columbia law students. I'm not in the moral judgments business." He fell silent, looking at Hawke expectantly.
The author said, "I asked to see you because I've committed certain financial imbecilities. I don't know whether it's because I'm naïve and inexperienced or whether I'm a born fool, but anyway at the moment I need help."
The lawyer chewed on his pipe and his blue eyes gleamed at Hawke. "Any man who's willing to consider the possibility that he's a born fool probably isn't one."
"Let's hope not." Hawke told the lawyer his affairs in a fifteen-minute monologue. The lawyer sat like a physician listening to a recital of symptoms, with a blank and forbidding face now and then lit by a mechanical smile of encouragement. He kept putting his pipe to his mouth and taking it away with slow even gestures. When Hawke stopped talking Adam burst out in an odd boyish laugh, and the lawyer turned into an unsophisticated red-faced man from Letchworth County. "Well, it's fascinating, all this about the literary life, Mr. Hawke, and pretty reassuring. You certainly don't have the problem of starving in a garret. You seem to have a case of financial indigestion, that's all—too much reward too fast. Your immediate problem, at least the one I can do something about, is your tax deficiency. That sounds as though you've been manhandled. But you really asked for it, filing returns without an accountant."
"I'm a suspicious mountain boy, I guess. I don't know a good accountant."
"I know several. You'd better turn over your records to me, and I'll talk to Internal Revenue."
"You will take on my mess?" Hawke said. "What'll it cost me?"
"Quite a bit, I'm afraid. As I said, my field is utilities, mainly. There must be good lawyers in the literary field and if you prefer I can look one up."
"No, Professor Adam, we're both out of U.K. and Letchworth County, and that makes me feel good."
The lawyer laughed. "Acting on sentiment like that is a handsome way to get skinned. I'll charge you my going rates on time and office expense. I hope I'll save you enough on taxes so you come out even, anyway. In the long run it seems to me you'll need a business manager. You're not going to stop making money."
"Maybe I'll learn how to handle it."
Adam knocked out his pipe and stood. "Of course you will. I've got my afternoon class now."
The elevator was jammed with faculty members chatting in quiet cultivated tones. Hawke heard a snatch of a sentence about Santayana, a fragment of talk about radiation, and he felt nostalgic for the academic life. He had planned to be an English teacher before the war had set him to driving a bulldozer in the South Pacific. It seemed to him that Adam, with his law school post and his Wall Street office, had the best of both worlds.
Adam said as they walked up the lawn to the law school amid the hurrying streams of students, "I suppose what you could use, even more than a manager, is a level-headed wife, but of course that's just a matter of luck. Karl Fry now, is a lucky man. Mrs. Fry struck me as an exceptional woman."
"Are you married?" Hawke said.
Adam halted by the statue of The Thinker in front of Philosophy Hall, and squinted at Hawke in the strong sunlight. "I was. My wife died. That's one reason I'm up here among the Yankees."
Hawke said soberly, "I see. I wondered about that. Seems to me you'd have had a clear road to the legislature back home."
"Well, you know Kentucky politics. They play with a hard ball." Adam held out his hand. "You let me have your records, now, and I'll take on Uncle Sam for you. I sort of like the idea of helping Youngblood Hawke clear his mind to do his work. I'm not at all sure that it's equally worth while to save Cape Cod Power Company half a million in taxes by a sale and leaseback of an office building. Luckily, as I say, I'm not in the moral judgments business. Give my best to Mrs. Fry if you see her, and try to convince her I'm not a monster."
3
The loudest noise Youngblood Hawke ever heard in his life was the opening of a door.
It was probably inevitable that his mother should find out sooner or later about his adultery with Frieda Winter. But it was not necessary, and it was a horrible thing, that she should find it out by opening the door of his room at four o'clock in the morning and seeing Frieda undressed in his bed. That was what happened.
Whose fault was it? Frieda's, perhaps; deprived of him for more than a month, she was brimming with amorousness. His own, perhaps; was it so hard for him to keep his head, knowing that his mother was under the same roof with them? He took the precaution of tiptoeing upstairs to her room, making sure that she was asleep, and closing her door softly. Not softly enough, it may be. Whether he woke her by closing the door, whether she woke by herself—Mrs. Hawke usually slept soundly—why she took it into her head to come downstairs and open his bedroom door; he never found out those things.
He was standing in his maroon dressing gown, lighting a cigar. Frieda lay on the bed in a satisfied torpor, her eyes half-open, her smeared mouth curled in a mischievous lazy smile, her limbs under the sheet loose as a doll's. The knob turned, the latch clicked, the door swung open, and there was Hawke's mother, in hair curlers and the old Hawaiian wrapper, blinking in the light.
At the very instant the noise began Frieda started up like a frightened cat and half-turned in the bed to look at the door, leaning on one thin naked graceful arm, holding the sheet to her breast though she was wearing a peach-colored slip, her thick graying hair tumbling over her shoulders. All three of them seemed to freeze into silence for an hour, but the time that really elapsed before Hawke's mother spoke could hardly have been a dozen seconds. Hawke heard his alarm clock ticking thunderously, and the far-off dying wail of a siren in the street.
"Sorry," Mrs. Hawke said. She closed the door, and they heard her footsteps on the uncarpeted stairs.
"Oh, God," Frieda said. She seemed incapable of moving out of her perfect pose of surprised female guilt; still she leaned on one arm, the sheet pulled to her breast, looking over her shoulder in horror at the closed door, her hair in disorder, a naked thigh jutting pink and round from the pulled-up wrinkled slip where she had yanked away the sheet and exposed herself in trying to cover herself.
Hawke's fresh-lit cigar was dead and charred in his hand. He didn't want it; he threw it into the wastebasket. "I think we both can use a drink," he said, and he reached for the bottle of Scotch.
Frieda flung aside the sheet and leaped from the bed. "I'm going home. Oh, God, what must she think of me? She must think I'm a whore. Why did we have to do it, why didn't you stop? I begged you to stop, I said we'd wake your mother. Oh Christ." Indeed she had said those things, Frieda was fond of putting up verbal resistance as an added sauce to love-making, but her eager acts as she talked had more than matched his. She twisted into her red evening dress and began to pull on her stockings with violent haste, as though she were trying to avoid being caught, as though it had not yet happened.
Hawke said, "Look, Frieda, mama's no fool. I'm sure she's known all along. And she's not naïve, she's told me some home-town gossip that would curl your hair. It's not serious, have a drink."
"She didn't know, she didn't! There are none so blind as those who won't see. She didn't want to see it and I didn't want her to. Oh, God, she'll think I'm a whore. She thinks in those black-and-white terms, and you do too, you hillbilly, in your heart you've always thought of me as a whore and you've treated me like a whore. You treated me like a whore tonight, threw me down on your bed in this tumbledown room and I didn't refuse you because I love you. I love you, that's what makes all the difference, that's what she'll have to understand!" She sprang at him and twined her arms around him. Without her high heels she always seemed pathetically cut-down. His chin was higher than the top of her head. "Tell me that you love me, at least. Say it and mean it."
