Youngblood hawke, p.72
Youngblood Hawke, page 72
Hawke jumped up. Adam said, "Here's our great novelist, playwright, and piano mover, Jeanne. What? No, I wouldn't worry about that yet. Tell Karl to forget it. I'm going down to Washington Monday. I hope we won't have to bring Karl down there at all. Here's Arthur."
Hawke took the telephone. Adam stood chewing on his pipe, looking out of the window at the Statue of Liberty. "Hello, Jeanie . . . What, so fast? Didn't you get any sleep? Well, what do you think?" Adam glanced at the author and saw his face grow tense and disturbed. "Of course I want to talk to you. Well, any time. The office? My hotel in half an hour? Okay, but Jeanie, that's a whole half hour. No verdict at all?" He laughed uncertainly, and there was a tremor in his voice. "Well, that's a little more like it. Good God, just listen to that baby bellow. Has he been reading the book too? . . . All right, Jeanne." He hung up and said to Adam, "Jeanne sat up all night—I left her at half-past four—reading my new novel. She finished it a few minutes ago."
"Does she like it?"
"I can't tell."
"I'm sure it's excellent."
"I'm not. What were you saying about Karl? More communist trouble in Washington?"
"Yes. It can be extremely serious at this point. The climate in the country's gotten worse."
Hawke said, "You think so, too? I thought it was just the shock of coming back from Venice into the New York atmosphere. It hit me as soon as I left the airport."
"Oh, there's been a change."
"Change! There seems to be a miasma of terror and panic here. Smartly dressed people in droves rushing here and there in huge glittering new cars all colors of the rainbow on colossal highways, or scampering around the streets and hotel lobbies of the city, their faces as drawn and driven—even the beautiful women—as if the siren has gone off for the atomic war."
"Well, there speaks the literary man," said the lawyer. They stood in a dark corridor lined from floor to ceiling with brown legal volumes. "New Yorkers have always looked pretty frantic and driven. No, it's this Senator McCarthy. He's doing some damage."
"Is he anything?" Hawke said. "In Europe they think he's the coming American dictator."
Adam laughed. "Well, no, he doesn't draw that kind of water. I don't think he does. But for a while things are going to be narrow for people like Karl Fry."
5
Coming into the hotel lobby, he saw Jeanne stand with the old smile and toss of her head, and he was reminded with a pang of the many many times he had seen this welcoming gesture, this shy mannerism of a girl meeting a date, when she had been Jeanne Green. She said in the elevator, "This feels real raffish, an afternoon rendezvous in a hotel room."
And when he opened the door of the small room, which seemed to be all double bed and window, she hung back, then went in ahead of him. "Raffisher and raffisher! Isn't this a modest accommodation for the darling of two continents?"
Hawke closed the door. "Europe spoiled me. I now know what luxury is. I'm going to have luxury or else live like a careful Hovey boy, I don't much want anything in between."
He came to her and took her coat. She slipped out of it with a shrug that was charming and familiar, saying, "You had it on Seventy-third Street, and you sold out."
He said, "I had no right to it, I wasn't secure. The whole thing was parvenu foolishness."
"It's a nice view of the park," she said, stepping to the window and adjusting the black leather belt of her dress. Perhaps because of the all-dominating bed and the hotel odors, Jeanne's movements were as innocently provocative to Hawke as a newlywed bride's. He said, "You don't look as though you've had no sleep."
"Well dear, pancake makeup plus exhilaration can do a lot."
He stood beside her, looking out at Central Park, a bushy carpet of autumn color blocked in by gray buildings. The wind whined at the closed casement. He said, "There's no fit habitation in New York that doesn't have this view, you know. Also a view of downtown, with at least one river."
"Really? About seven million of us live in unfit habitations."
"Yes, you do."
They stood for a little while, saying nothing. He enjoyed her nearness like sunshine falling on him. Her arms were folded, and she looked pensively out at the park, as though she were enjoying the silent isolation with him too. It was all different, not having Karl Fry asleep close by, and Karl Fry's baby; the fearful wall of time and events between them seemed to dissolve. But when she turned her rounded matured face up to him, and a sarcastic little smile flickered on her mouth, the wall reappeared. "Did you have a quick shortcut to luxury in mind, Arthur, when you wrote Evelyn Biggers?"
Hawke said, "That's an unpromising beginning."
Jeanne went to the bureau and picked up the typescript. "I always have to worry about the sensitivity of authors, they're a pitiable race. But I'll be damned if I'll worry about your sensitivity. I never have. Why did you write this story, Arthur?"
He threw off his jacket and dropped on the bed, loosening his tie. "Jeanie, I picked up the pen to start Boone County and instead it began writing Evelyn. After a while I stopped fighting. It was a ghastly undertaking, I had no heart for it, unlike all my other work it was brutal cold-iron drudgery from the first word to the last. I don't even know whether it's publishable. Maybe I was possessed by the ghost of one of the Brontës."
Jeanne sat in an armchair, crossing her legs. "I felt self-conscious and embarrassed reading it, to tell you the truth. Your women have always been good, but this story seems to have been written by a woman. I felt as though you'd been reading my mind, or heard me talking in my sleep. We don't like to have all our petty secrets seen through by a man and written up in this way, Arthur. Or rather we do and we don't. Your book is a very strange experience. It's far and away your best writing. There's almost nothing for me to do."
Hawke was hanging on her words, which were still short of a verdict. He said, "Well, careless outpouring wasn't going to work. It was hell being imprisoned inside that not very bright woman's mind. I hope I never get another idea like it. I tell myself now that I was exercising myself in brevity because the critics say I'm just a spouter, and I also tell myself that I needed this work to get my hand in for the dozens of women in the Comedy. Anyway, it's done. Is it going to sell?"
Jeanne took a long time to answer, looking at him with her head thrown back, her eyes narrowed. She wore a flowing aquamarine silk dress that minimized the fullness of her hips and bust. "I don't know. I speak with less than my usual annoying assurance, but I think the Hawke audience will be jarred and disappointed. Anything with your name on it must sell at first. But it may stop dead. Men aren't going to like it. Until now you've been one of the few serious novelists who has pleased the men."
"Shall I publish it? I can shelve the book."
Jeanne sat up straight. "Are you crazy? Of course you must publish it. That miserable woman living in the Los Angeles hills on the very fringe of the movie world, and as far from true glamour as though she were on Mars, is a lasting picture of the American woman. She's your sister Nancy, more or less, isn't she? I kept thinking of Nancy."
Hawke nodded. "The whole story is the skeleton in our family closet. Nancy had her Charlie Bick, only he was a manager in the bank where she once worked, but the same kind of smooth illusionist. And of course Nancy had a happy ending, but that was just her dumb luck. She should have ended like Evelyn."
Jeanne said, "This is a very hard one to figure. The critics may up and cheer you for a fresh and difficult change of pace. But my guess is they'll pounce like a dog pack and rip the book to shreds. They'll see it as a sign that you're weakening and beginning to pay attention to them."
"How big a first printing, Jeanne?"
"About thirty thousand," she said promptly, "but that may well be it."
"Horne has already sold what? A hundred twenty?"
"More. And going like mad. But Horne is a familiar Youngblood Hawke novel. Evelyn Biggers is a strange little work of art—at least that's how it strikes me—and it may be received as an unwelcome curiosity."
"That raises the question," Hawke said, "as to the wisdom of starting to publish my own work with this one."
The telephone rang. Hawke had found on his doorknob a festoon of four messages asking him to call Frieda Winter's office; he hesitated, letting it ring. It did not stop. He said to Jeanne, "Will you answer it? Impersonate a public stenographer or something. I don't want to talk to Frieda."
Jeanne took the telephone. "Hello? I'm sorry, he's not in—yes, I suppose I can take a message." A horrified look sprang into her face. "I beg your pardon? Five o'clock when? Today?" She glanced at her watch, and then at Hawke, her eyes glassy and wild.
Hawke said, "What on earth is it, Jeanne?"
"It's a man speaking. He says Paul Winter's funeral will be in an hour from now!"
Hawke seized the telephone. "Hello? This is Arthur Hawke. What is it?"
"Oh, thank heaven, Mr. Hawke. It's Lloyd," said the simpering voice of Frieda's male secretary. "I've tried and tried and tried to get you. I'm terribly sorry to tell you, but Paul died very suddenly of pneumonia, and Frieda said I was to be sure to hunt you down and tell you about the funeral. I've been trying for hours and hours. It's at the Wilson Funeral Home at Seventy-third and Lexington, it's scheduled for five."
"Paul?" Hawke said. "You mean Mr. Winter?"
"No. Little Paul. He died at school."
"I see. I'll be there." Hawke put down the telephone. He stared at Jeanne in stupefaction, then he began to cry. Jeanne had never seen him cry before.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
1
THE STORY, then, at least for the moment, was pneumonia. The funeral was modest and hasty. Frieda had notified only the closest members of the family and a few friends. The service for Paul took place in one of the smallest rooms of the undertaking establishment, and even so Hawke saw rows of empty benches when he came in, and only a straggling knot of people clustered up front near the coffin. He and Jeanne slipped into an empty pew and sat. A man in clerical vestments of black frilled with white was speaking. He quoted a letter of Longfellow about "the early blossoms which sweeten the air in falling." It was a short practiced speech, delivered in easy rhythms like an old song, and Hawke could tell that it was the man's standard performance over a dead child, probably taken from a book of funeral talks for all occasions. The only insertions were the names of the family. "Dear Frieda and Paul, give ear to the consolations of faith . . ." From where he sat Hawke could barely see the boy's still hands and chest in the coffin. His mind wandered from the canned eulogy and he thought painfully about the first time he had seen Paul, in yellow pajamas, fending off a glass of milk in a black nurse's hand; about his pitiful thirst for stories, about his strange and silent watchfulness, about his grave dignity when he cut his birthday cake. He wanted to make amends to the dead boy, in some way, as we all want to make amends to the dead when they lie before us. He wished he could rise and say something kind and true about Paul. But of course it was unthinkable that he should utter a word at a funeral of this family; he had misgivings about the propriety of his appearing here at all, and that was why he had asked Jeanne to come with him.
The talking ended. The people in the pews filed forward to look at the boy. Hawke was stared at as he came up to the coffin. Paul lay in a heavy casket of chocolate-brown wood, in a creamy froth of white silk and velvet; the horrid thought went through Hawke's mind that it was a little like burying the boy in a rich long birthday cake. He thought too that a child like Paul ought to lie in a coffin on his side, with one hand under his cheek, as though he had fallen asleep. The flat-on-the-back pose with the hands folded was unnatural. Paul was dressed in a dark gray suit, with a blue tie. He was a dead little boy, with no expression, glowing with applied undertaker health under a recessed ceiling light. An organ purred sympathetically. Still Hawke looked, until Jeanne's tug at his elbow made him come away.
He saw the Winter family in the first bench: Frieda in black, her face obscured by a black veil, Mr. Winter beside her, shrunken and vacant, the older brother enormous in brown tweed, bursting with vitality, embarrassed, the two girls also in black, red-nosed and weepy. Hawke remembered the family portrait in the dining room, with the bright-eyed baby on Frieda's knee. He had never looked at that portrait, in all his years of familiarity in the Winter household, without feeling a twinge of discomfort, if not of guilt. The guilt was strong on him now; and he could scarcely connect in his mind the bowed woman in black in the first row with the excited shiny-eyed Frieda of a few weeks ago, pounding the little piano in the Expatriates Bar in her sleeveless green dress, flirting with the piano player; the Frieda who had been his abandoned, tormenting, self-righteous, wily mistress for five long years.
Jeanne had to lead him out of the funeral home as though he were a blind man. He obstinately halted on the sidewalk in front of the place, and waited until the coffin was carried out and slid into a hearse. The hearse drove off and thick traffic swallowed it. In the cold twilight all the electric signs on the avenue were winking and dancing. "Isn't anyone going to the cemetery with him? Christ, I'll go," Hawke said.
Jeanne said, "The family must be following. Be quiet. You're not to
He saw Bennett helping his enfeebled father into the first of three black limousines at the curb. Frieda came out and stood on the sidewalk amid a group of people, her veil thrown back, apparently giving instructions on the funeral arrangements. She saw Hawke, walked up to him, and said without smiling, "Paul would have wanted you to come, more than anybody."
"I know, Frieda."
Jeanne said, "It's frightful. I'm sorry."
Frieda briefly pressed her hand with a hand that was strong and cold. She said to Hawke, "Did you get my letter?"
"No, I didn't."
"It should have been at your hotel today. I sent it special delivery. Anyway, Lloyd found you in time." She went and got into the limousine where her husband sat slumped.
Hawke stood on the sidewalk in a daze while the limousines one by one drove away. Jeanne said, "I'm terribly chilly."
He looked at her as though coming out of anesthesia. "What?"
"There's no point in standing here, Arthur."
Hawke looked around at the chapel, and the shops of the avenue. "Do you know what it is?" he said. "What makes this so strange? This corner is so familiar to me! I've walked past this funeral home hundreds of times. There's the barber I used to go to. That's my house, you know, the fourth one in from the corner. I see they went ahead and remodelled the entrance the way I planned it. It looks better that way, doesn't it, with the little arch?"
"Yes, it does," Jeanne said. She put her arm through his elbow. "It might be a good idea if you took me somewhere and bought me a drink."
Hawke said, "Why don't we drop in on the Hirsches and cadge drinks from them? I'd like to see my house."
"Arthur, you just don't do that. You don't drop in on people in this city. You know that."
"Oh, no? Well, I'm going to see my house. They can always throw me out if I'm not welcome. Do you want to go home, Jeanne? I guess we've finished our business. Or we can talk tomorrow."
Jeanne said lightly, "You're not shaking me off. Karl's got an author for dinner and I have nobody to feed me." She was concerned about him. He was falling into the quiet, remote, gentle manner that had preceded his illness.
Hawke sent a card in with a maidservant, and soon Hirsch came bounding out, tassels flying on the belt of his maroon satin smoking jacket. "Good lord, this is wonderful! You really took me up! Come on in! This is marvellous. You're just in time for a drink. Isn't it great about your play! Nothing but raves."
Hawke introduced Jeanne, and Hirsch seemed just as excited to meet her, and said she was far too beautiful to be an editor. As they walked inside and up the stairs, Hawke observed with wry pleasure—and with a certain sense of continuing nightmare, too—how orderly and elegant the house was, and how well his ideas had turned out. The Japanese grass paper of the stairwell, black with glints of gold, made a perfect background for the series of small colored prints of the American Revolution along the staircase. The old glass and gilt chandelier, bought after much search and at high cost, made the hallway charming, and set the note of the entire house. The curving cherry wood balustrade which had been carpentered to order from his sketch—the contractor had said it could be done for four hundred dollars, and the bill had come to over three thousand—was beautiful. He only glimpsed the kitchen, but its flowered wallpaper, maple cabinets and copper pans, with the polished broad planking of the floor, looked perfect. The molded wooden archway into the living room, the dark green carpeting and walls, the marble fireplace, the arched bookcases, the cream-colored molded trim—all of it was handsome, all exactly as he had pictured it.
Mrs. Hirsch appeared in a yellow silk housecoat, her hair piled in braids on her head, flushed and laughing, carrying a baby. "What a nice surprise! I've just been bathing the youngest inhabitant of the Youngblood Hawke house, if you're interested in infants."
"Sure I am," Hawke said.
The mother exhibited her child to Hawke and Jeanne. Lawrence Hirsch said, "Let Mr. Hawke take him, Anne. Then Harry can tell his grandchildren some day that the famous author once held him."
Mrs. Hirsch said coquettishly to Hawke, "Oh, you don't want to hold the baby."
Hawke said, "Well, if you'll trust me, I'd like to."
The mother carefully handed Harry Hirsch in his white sleeping bag to Hawke. The author stood in the middle of the room he had designed but never lived in, and made a friendly grimace at the baby, who smelled very powdery. He was nothing like Jeanne's Jim, he was all yawns and red wrinkles, a highly characterless standard baby. But the parents were exploding with pride over him. Hirsch said, "Maybe some of your talent will rub off on him. I'm superstitious, I think such things can happen." Harry was carried off by the maid, and then the young father said, "I think I'm behaving very well. I'm a camera fiend and it was with the greatest will power that I didn't get out all my paraphernalia and record that moment for history."
