Youngblood hawke, p.78
Youngblood Hawke, page 78
"I swear to God it happened," Flagg said, very earnestly. "Just as I told it to you, and we're proud of our achievement, which we couldn't publicize. The contingency is remote but it touches on the survival of the United States. Now if as a Marxist you're content to see our country go down I can't reach you and that's that. I'm talking to you as a dissident American, but I hope as an American."
Gus Adam said, "I get a different moral from your story. Our counterespionage in that area is so feeble that some amateur detective work by staff members of a Congressional committee accidentally saved our country. In that case everybody in counterespionage who was responsible for the failure should be fired, and our professional counterintelligence should be enormously strengthened."
Flagg said, softly bringing a fist down on the table three times, "The constitution requires Congress to act for the common defense and the general welfare. Exposure of communists in places of public trust—in which I include the publishing field, Mr. Fry—is a direct discharge of that duty. You made a joke when I said before that you're my employer but it's so. Congress is a lot of nobodies who come down here for a term of years and then go home. They haven't an ounce of power that the people don't give them. The people are the sovereign. Any Congressman who doesn't do what they want goes into some other line of business pretty fast. Now Congress has voted over and over to give money to this committee and others like it. They've voted it to a man for years, because the people are worried about communism. The people sent you the subpoena, Mr. Fry, and the people want you to tell them what you know. Even Marxists believe in the will of the people."
Fry said, twisting his mouth, "They don't define it, I'm afraid, as the will of Charlie Flagg. They may be too dense to follow an irrefutable line of reasoning, but they don't."
"I know how I'm pictured in the press," Flagg said, "and I don't like it, but I believe in what I'm doing or I'd be back home in Nevada where my grandchildren are, putting on a black robe a couple of hours a day and otherwise enjoying life. I'm disturbed, believe me, by the split between the ideas of the intellectuals and the will of the American people the way Congress expresses it, and I don't enjoy being known as a horrible Grand Inquisitor, but by God, Mr. Fry, it's Russia or the United States, the game is on, and it's for keeps. That's the one thing I know."
Gus Adam stood, putting his pipe in his pocket, and paced the room as he talked. "You're making a good case for cooperating with the committee. It's true that you speak for the sovereign, and that the sovereign is the people. The sovereign may be ill-informed. It may err in approving of your committee's work, or your committee may be making constitutional errors. There's no reasonable doubt, at least in my mind, that what you do is a serious abridgement of liberty. You're pleading national danger as the reason for the abridgement. You may be right. Then you get into Fry's contention, that our free way of life is a primitive arrangement that can't work under twentieth-century pressures. It's a large question. We won't solve it in this room. If you want to take it up to the Supreme Court my client and I are ready. We might perform a public service on both sides."
The committee counsel laughed, and lit a cigar. "We get these threats of a Supreme Court fight all the time. If we paid attention to them we'd just shut up shop here. They seldom materialize."
Adam said, "I wouldn't call it a threat. But in this case it will materialize."
Flagg and the lawyer exchanged a measured glance. Flagg rolled the cigar in his mouth. "Well, let's see how things work out tomorrow. We don't examine every witness with the same rigid procedure. We never waste the committee's time, we're too far behind as it is. However, we don't yield to threats, and we don't make deals. We follow our own needs." He stood and held out his hand to Adam. "Senator Breckinridge referred to you as an ornery son of a bitch in a fight, but I've enjoyed this. And I've enjoyed talking to you, Mr. Fry. Maybe we've all learned something."
They were in the taxi, driving to the hotel, before Fry spoke. "What do you think?" he said abruptly.
Adam said, "Well, we lost the first round."
5
Hawke sat in his shirtsleeves scrawling at a vast antique desk with a green leather top, a desk of the size Hitler or Mussolini would have fancied. It stood in the middle of a broad stark room that had two walls of roughhewn blue stone, two walls of glass, and a colossal white bearskin in front of the desk on the marble floor. The bear's bright dead glass eyes looked out on a dizzy plunging canyon covered with the brownish green scrub of Southern California.
A hollow voice came out of nowhere, echoing on the hard surfaces of the room. "I beg your pardon, Mr. Hawke."
The racing pen slowed and stopped. Hawke spoke into the empty air. "Yes, Gordon? What is it?"
"Mrs. Honor Hauptmann is here, sir."
"Christ, is it lunch time already?" Hawke picked up the old cheap watch that he had won in high school. "Where has the time gone to? Tell her I'll be down right away."
"Very well, sir."
Then a woman's voice: "I'm coming up."
"Hello, Honor. Look, I'm not shaved, I'm a real mess. Give me a minute."
"Nonsense, I think you look best unshaven. Remember the Waldorf?"
Hawke sat back in the enormous swivel chair, put his hands up to rub his eyes, and was surprised to strike the eyeglasses. He had been wearing them less than a month, and was not yet used to them. He took them off and squinted at the page he had been writing, hoping that the diagnosis was foolish after all, that he didn't really need glasses. He was still making these tests. But the lines he saw on the yellow page were certainly vaguer now than before.
When the doctor had first forced the glasses on him Hawke had been astounded by the new hard clarity of print, of movies, of street signs, of his own handwriting. The headaches had much diminished, though they still came on now and then. The doctor had scolded him for having had no physical examination in so many years, and after some ominous talk about the trembling of his hand and the hallucinations of smell during long writing sessions—he had mentioned possible brain damage from Hawke's accident at nineteen—the man had given him capsules which had cleared up that trouble. Hawke was certain nothing was wrong with him but overwork. He had been driving at Boone County ferociously, and was proud to have almost two hundred thousand words in hand before his previous book, Evelyn Biggers, was even being reviewed. He was used to overworking, and he did not intend to slow down on his longest and best novel because of a Hollywood doctor, or even because of the brain specialist who had been called in, and who had been equally grave and scary. Hawke had had headache and eyestrain and tremors before. Once he finished a book, a week or two of rest and hard drinking usually quieted down the symptoms.
There was a rap at the door.
"Honor? Come in."
He had not seen her since the opening night of Alms for Oblivion. She wore a sleeveless navy blue dress, no hat, and no jewelry. Iron corseting gave her an acceptable if stiff shape, but her sunburned face was fatter than before. She said, "Hello there. Did I break in on a deathless page?" She strode up to him and offered her cheek, kissing the air with her painted lips. "What in God's name are you doing in Travis Jablock's house? I almost died when Ferdie told me you were here. My father sold Travis this land long long ago."
Hawke said, "You look mighty elegant. I've ordered lunch here but we can go out if you'd rather."
"God, no. There isn't a restaurant in this town I don't know and loathe, and the food's wonderful too. It's the faces. Can we have a big big martini and talk first? My, you are unshaven! What's this, Arthur? Eyeglasses? You? The world's most perfect man?" She picked the glasses off the desk and held them to the light.
He said, "Temporary, I hope. Too much night work." He pressed a button on the desk and ordered drinks.
Honor Hauptmann dropped on an immense divan covered with furry white material. On the stone wall behind her was a Modigliani, a woman with an eggshaped head aslant on a long snaky neck. Honor's pose amply displayed her legs, which were almost as beautiful as her mother's had been. "It's years since I've been in Travis's eyrie. Doesn't it give you the creeps, sort of like the platform on the Eiffel Tower? Unless you have an ego like Travis's, you're bound to feel you're on the edge of a plunge to your doom. It's built that way. I think he modelled it after Berchtesgaden. He was invited to Berchtesgaden, you know, back in 1937. The son of a bitch actually went. My father wouldn't talk to him for years."
Hawke said, "It's a good place to work. Quiet."
"Oh, it's that, all right. You're not renting it, are you? I can't imagine Travis renting this abomination."
"No, I'm his guest. The whole thing is most peculiar." He told her how he had driven from New York across the country, stopping at motels and writing at night, sometimes staying in one place a week or more. He admitted that he had been running away from his orgy of squandering money on the Haworth House offices. Honor was amused, and said it served him right for being so damned greedy; he belonged in a garret and that was where he would end. The butler came with martinis, his manners and his speech so like a movie butler's that Hawke grinned at Honor behind his back. "I have to fight with myself not to call him Jeeves," Hawke said, when he left. "I've been here three weeks and I'm still not used to him, nor to anything about this monstrous house. I don't know why Jablock pressed it on me. He came to the party that Ferdie Lax threw for me at Romanoff's when I got here. That, by the way, was an occasion I'll never forget. Do you know that when I came into the room Dane Garnett walked up to me, fell on his knees and kissed my hand? He did. He kissed my hand, down on both knees. And everybody else reacted in almost the same way. I couldn't have caused more excitement, more awe if I'd been the Queen of England or the Pope. And the people there were stars, Honor, big directors, millionaires."
"Arthur, the movie of Chain of Command has been number one at the box office for how long? Sixteen weeks? Ferdie says it's going to gross ten million, domestic. Dane Garnett is going to get an Academy Award for playing the hillbilly marine as sure as I'm sitting here. In this town you're awesome, dear. You're holy."
Hawke said, "The last time Travis Jablock spoke to me, before I saw him at this party, was six years ago. I was walking on the studio grounds with another screen writer. He said, 'Hey you! The tall one!' He claims now he doesn't even remember what I looked like then. He owns the movie rights to Oblivion, Luzzatto had them cross-collateralized some way and Jablock bagged them. He's making the picture, naturally, now that Oblivion is a Broadway success."
Honor finished her martini and held out her glass. Hawke refilled it from a dripping pitcher. She said, "The one thing you must know about Travis Jablock is this—never trust him, and never believe him. He lies the way you breathe. He's very good at playing dumb. Mainly because he is dumb, dumb as a dog, but terribly cunning. My father used to say that you're helpless in the movies until you learn that great stupidity and great cunning can go together. Is that what you're doing in this house, for God's sake, writing a screenplay for Jablock? You?"
"Hell no, I'm almost halfway into my new book. Jablock told me to stay here as long as I pleased. He said it's better to have someone in the house than to give his staff the run of it. He's in Cannes."
"I know he is, Manuel wrote me that he went with Travis to Monte Carlo."
"What's Manuel doing in Cannes?"
"Skin-diving. He struck up a friendship with a loathesome lunatic we met in Marseilles, one of these bearded skinny boat bums who's crossed the Atlantic alone in a sailboat and all that. They skitter around the Mediterranean diving for Roman pottery and swimming through sunken wrecks and whatnot. It's asinine and it's dangerous, those people are always getting drowned, and it gives me the horrors just to think of it. But Manuel's wild for it, and he couldn't care less about my feelings, as usual." She stood. "Arthur, you don't look well. You look about the way you did when you fell into the Waldorf a hundred years ago, except you're not dripping snow. You're not feverish, are you?"
"No, I've been up since before dawn and my eyes get red, that's all." He went to the bathroom. Honor followed him and leaned in the open doorway, sipping her drink while he took off his shirt and lathered his face. He was a little uneasy at being so isolated with her in Jablock's huge house. She said, glancing at his broad bared chest and shoulders, "How do you stay in such shape? You don't exercise, do you?"
"No. I haven't been eating much."
"Maybe that's why you have that haggard expression. But it doesn't matter. You certainly don't have the physique of an esthete, do you? You look as though you'd been carved out of brown marble."
Hawke said in embarrassment, scraping the razor down his jaw, "What's brought you to Hollywood, Honor?"
"What brings everybody here," Honor said. "One of my father's old corporations is being bought by an independent—you know the way Hollywood's dissolving into new shapes, more disgusting than the old ones. The trust my father left me is the chief stockholder and the lawyers wanted me here. It's a great nuisance. I'm flying back home tomorrow. I can't wait to leave. Of course stumbling on you has made it worth while."
The hollow voice spoke from the other room, "Mr. Morris Fuld is on the telephone, sir. He wants to know if he can come by at three today."
"One moment," Hawke said. "Honor, what are you doing after lunch?"
"I don't know. Shop, I guess. Unless you want to cheer up a depressed old friend and take me driving."
Hawke called, "Gordon, I can't see him today. Tell him tomorrow at ten."
Honor poured herself another martini. "What does little Morrie Fuld want of you?"
"He's doing the Oblivion screenplay. Jablock asked me just before he went to Europe whether I'd be available to answer Fuld's questions now and then. I said yes, of course. It's turned into a script conference twice a week."
"For which you're getting how much?"
"Well, nothing."
"Oh God." Honor laughed heartily. "That's why Travis gave you this house, of course. There had to be something. And you fell for it? You should be getting fifty thousand dollars, as a consultant, you fool."
"Well, I know, Ferdie threw a big paroxysm when he found out, but Christ, Honor, I'm glad to talk to Fuld about the picture. Maybe it'll turn out less of a comic strip than the Chain of Command movie is."
Honor shook her head. "I said you're greedy, but you don't know what greed is, really. You just go through the motions. You're not disciplined about money. You're an inattentive slob. I bet I could manage you and make a millionaire of you in no time."
"Probably so."
They had lunch in a patio extravagantly planted up with tropical vegetation, where two Japanese gardeners moved to and fro trimming and weeding. Honor only picked at the trout, but she drank most of the bottle of Chablis, and she gobbled her dessert, a large biscuit tortoni, and asked for another; and after downing that she glanced at him slyly, licking her lips, and asked whether he'd think her too awful if she ate a third. Honor Hauptmann was the only woman Hawke knew who habitually ate more than one dessert; her sweet tooth was one of her least attractive traits. She was both penetrating and tough in her judgments, a trait she no doubt had from her father, but she seemed to have inherited little of her mother's charm, and there was a spoiled, aggrieved, whining manner about her that sat ill on a young woman whose wealth was almost beyond his own imagining. There she sat, this incredibly affluent young woman, in her sleeveless Paris linen dress that perhaps cost more than the ordinary American woman spent on all her wardrobe for a year, stuffing herself with nut-sprinkled ice cream like an adolescent, and maundering about Hollywood and her father.
"The great tragedy of my father's life was that he was a Jew," she said. "He did nothing about it of course, he believed nothing, he observed no holidays, and he liked to eat things like rattlesnake and octopus, but he couldn't have been more Jewish, more intensely and obsessively Jewish, if he'd been a rabbi with a beard down to his knees. He was horribly sensitive on the subject. My mother in her charming way stabbed at that sensitivity when it suited her. We had a terrible home, and yet they loved each other and as far as I know were even faithful to each other, though who can say what goes on in this vile sink of a town? But when the three of us sat at breakfast the atmosphere was usually as cold and clammy as a morgue. They both had too much on their minds. My father was a great man and a very sad man, and—"
The butler was hovering at the patio doors, holding a thick newspaper. Hawke said, "There's today's New York Times. Want a look at it?"
"God, yes. These moronic papers out here, five hundred pages a day and nothing in them but advertisements and rapes!" Hawke beckoned to the butler. Honor said, "I'd go out of my mind down home if I didn't have the Times. I don't get the air edition, I get the paper itself flown from New York at a dollar a copy. Cheap at the price. I like to see the department store ads. Thank you."
Honor said after a little silence, in which they both rustled pages, "You must know this Karl Fry."
"What about him?" Hawke reached impulsively for the paper. Honor's finger pointed at the headline:
HODGE HATHAWAY EDITOR BALKS
AT TRAYNOR COMMITTEE HEARING
It was a long story, continuing to an inside page, where there was a picture of Jeanne in glasses and a big black hat, looking gaunt and anxious: Mrs. Karl Fry, also an editor at Hodge Hathaway, hears her husband testify.
Flagg had asked Fry to name his associates in the Marxist discussion group, after Fry had described its workings. Fry had refused. Legal wrangling had ensued among Flagg, Gus Adam, Senator Traynor and Fry, to clarify the exact basis on which the editor was declining to answer. The session had ended in this disorderly and indecisive exchange; and Senator Traynor had directed Fry to appear at the next hearing prepared to name his associates or to be cited for contempt of Congress.
Hawke returned the paper to Honor and rested his face in his hands. "Poor Jeanie," he murmured.
"She's your editor, isn't she?" Honor looked at Jeanne's picture critically. "I'm sorry I've never met her. She seems quite pretty for an editor."
