Youngblood hawke, p.90
Youngblood Hawke, page 90
Jeanne sensed that her nerves were giving way again, but she could not stop herself, and she snapped shrilly, "Where's your indignation? That's what I want to know. The man who's responsible for the debt is that crook Hoag, nobody else, and you seem to have gone to great pains to hobble Arthur, if not to destroy him, and to let Hoag off!"
Adam shot back, "I realize you're tired, Jeanne, and we all are, but you don't know what the devil you're talking about. Withhold your verdict till you find out a little more."
Hawke said, "Here, here. All hands take an even strain."
Jeanne and the lawyer lit cigarettes with irritated gestures that were so nearly alike as to make a comic mirror effect. Adam spoke first after a pause. "Sorry, Jeanne."
"Oh, it's all right. I guess I should go to bed. I'm not contributing anything here but female noise."
The lawyer stood and paced. "No. This thing must be thrashed out. Somebody should talk against it. Arthur as usual doesn't really give a damn about anything but his work."
"Fiscal idiots, us artists," said Hawke. "The thing is, Jeanne, when a man signs a note and it falls due he ought to pay it. If I can't pay I have to take the terms I can get."
Adam said, walking back and forth, "The alternative here is an involuntary bankruptcy proceeding against Youngblood Hawke that Newton Leffer will start tomorrow morning. I sat in his office while he talked on the transatlantic telephone with his Swiss principals for twenty minutes. Those are his instructions. These Swiss fellows are professional moneylenders, specializing in second mortgages, putting down a quarter of a million here, a hundred thousand there, all over the world, the way you'd put chips on a roulette board. Their procedures are cut and dried. When there's a default they apply the pressure where it'll hurt most. It couldn't be more abstract. The most sensitive point in this picture is Youngblood Hawke's public standing. That's always been their ace in the hole, and they're playing it." He stopped in front of Jeanne and spoke straight to her. "I'll win a bankruptcy proceeding, Jeanne, I'll get it dismissed. Arthur's assets, when you add in the continuing royalties from past work, and the book that's half finished, and the book he's publishing, and the real estate he's frozen into—including Hoag's venture—are considerable. He's in a murderous cash bind, that's all. Of course Hoag's responsible, and in a court his responsibility would come out."
Jeanne said, "These Swiss people are blackmailing Arthur because he's prominent, that's what you're saying."
Hawke said, "Except that it isn't blackmail because I signed the note and owe them the money."
"Why did you let him sign the note?" Jeanne said to Adam.
Hawke struck in, "Well you see, Jeanne, it happened to be my twenty-first birthday that day. Gus couldn't stop me."
Adam looked at Hawke, and his eyebrows went up in the clown look. "Thanks, Arthur," he said, and he dropped in his chair.
The two men did pencil and paper work for a while, and determined that Hawke was about twenty thousand dollars short of what he needed to clear all his debts and pay the first Leffer installment. Adam said that wasn't going to be a problem; he could arrange a twenty-thousand-dollar loan. Jeanne began to press him suspiciously; if Hawke's situation was as bad as Adam said, who would lend the money, and on what security? At last the lawyer said that he intended to put up some stocks of his own as collateral. They were just lying in a bank vault, and it made no difference to him. Hawke protested, saying he'd go to Hodge for a higher advance or even sell the paperback rights of Evelyn to Givney for fifteen thousand dollars.
"That's silly," Adam said. "I'm being purely selfish here. Once you're out of this hole I intend to hit you with one of the biggest legal fees on record. I'm protecting my investment."
"I see," Hawke said. "You're a greedy vulture, and that's why you want to secure a note of mine that nobody in his right mind would touch at the moment."
"Exactly."
There was quiet in the room while Jeanne picked off the floor the sheets she had thrown down. She said to Adam, "Arthur has known all along that I'm a shrew, and now you do."
Adam said, "Well, I hope I gave as good as I got."
"All right," Hawke said. "Before we close with a benediction, there are two things in the agreement that are out of the question. They must be changed or Leffer can take me to bankruptcy court."
Adam picked up his copy of the agreement. "Shoot."
Hawke said, "Page three paragraph 15 sub A. 'Hawke agrees to complete his new novel, Boone County, within six months.' I can't do it."
Adam nodded. "I asked for a year. I told Newt there might be trouble on that one. What's your earliest possible date?"
Hawke lay back in the armchair with a hand over his eyes, lolling wearily. After a while the antique clock on the mantelpiece broke the silence by striking midnight, in long slow tolling bell-sounds. He sat up. "If I go on the emergency routine, and if I have a reasonable escape clause for serious illness and so forth, I can and I will deliver this novel on the fifteenth of June. Eight months."
"You can't," Jeanne said. "Not from what you've told me. You're working now as fast as you possibly can, and the end's a year away."
Hawke smiled at her. "Now? Now I'm coasting. I wrote the second two hundred thousand words of Oblivion in five months, and I did some bulldozing too, for grocery money. The real problem's the revision. After the Judd review I think I'm bound to do this one all alone, Jeanie, for your sake as well as mine."
"Oh, God, to hell with Judd."
"No, I'll do this one alone. Ross will publish exactly what I turn in. That will take care of that."
Adam made a note on his sheet. "June fifteenth. We'll get that point, since we have to. What else?"
"This provision here that I give my manuscript now to Leffer, and send him more pages as I write them. I've never let an incomplete manuscript out of my hands in my life, except to Jeanie. I can't agree to that."
"That's an absolute must, straight from Switzerland. Physical possession of the manuscript."
"Christ, they've got every cent it can possibly earn tied up, Gus! Isn't that enough?"
"No. To put it bluntly, Arthur, in case you die the unfinished last manuscript of Youngblood Hawke will be a valuable property. They don't want merely a legal claim on it. They want possession of it. The deal will break on that point."
Hawke looked to Jeanne. "I have to give them the manuscript," he said wonderingly. "How will I work?"
Adam said, "Newton suggests you photostat what you've got and then either keep carbon copies or photostats of the rest as you write it."
Hawke said, "I guess I can work from photostats. Do you know, Gus, if I had a wife it would be no harder for me to deliver her to the bed of another man than it's going to be to give Leffer my yellow pages of Boone County?"
"Well, you speak as a bachelor. This has to be, Arthur."
"Yes, I speak as a bachelor." Hawke slumped in his chair, and for the first time that evening he looked like a fighter who was losing.
Adam stood and began putting papers away in his briefcase. "We all need sleep badly. Don't ever forget, Arthur, that this is a temporary thing, a counsel of desperation, coming out of a run of very bad luck. If that rascal Scotty gets the big lease and refinances the second mortgage, or if your Evelyn Biggers becomes a real success, as I still think it may, or any event comes along that gives you cash relief, we'll wash this thing out and you'll be free as air. And you'll get back the manuscript."
"Just tell little Newton," said Hawke, "that if anything happens to my manuscript while it's in his possession, small as he is, I'll beat him into raspberry jam."
Adam put on his tie and jacket, and took up his briefcase. "Well, Jeanne, thanks again for those tacos." He looked at her, head cocked to a side. She slouched on the ottoman, her face clouded. "Are you satisfied, now? I'm not the world's best lawyer. If I tell Newton tomorrow that Arthur's getting another lawyer to negotiate a different settlement, I imagine he'll grant a week's grace for that."
Hawke said, "Don't be ridiculous, Gus. I'll be at Leffer's office at nine." He walked with Adam to the elevator.
When he returned Jeanne was splashing whiskey into two glasses. She said, "Have a slug for a nightcap? It's routine for me. I'm trying to get by without the sleeping pills."
They sat side by side on the couch, drinking straight whiskey. Jeanne had turned out the lamp that illumined the picture of Karl, and the room was restfully dim. Hawke said after a while, "Here we are, more or less back where we were that first Christmas Eve, after the Prince party. Remember?"
"I remember. A few things have intervened."
Hawke said, "Time for the man to show up hammering at the door for his prostitute."
Jeanne laughed sombrely.
Hawke said, "I think he damn near ruined two lives, you know? I'm glad I threw him down the stairs, and I'm only sorry I didn't kill him."
"He didn't ruin anything. If I couldn't win you away from an old vamp like Frieda there was something wrong with me, or you, or both of us, at the time." She drank. "What are you going to do? Will you still come to California?"
Hawke sat with his elbows on his knees, pondering. "No, I hardly think so. Not now. The emergency routine is tight. It requires isolation. I think my answer's going to be the same as yours, after all. Home to mama."
Jeanne said desolately, "Hovey?"
Hawke nodded. "The old upstairs room in mama's house. This is a regime that turns night into day, Jeanne. It's a torpedo run, you commit yourself to it and you must keep going. Hovey's the only place. I'm just old Art Hawke there, and all this business about my writing books is sort of a joke. As for mama, she leaves me alone except at meals, and then her drivelling is sort of peaceful, like the babble of a brook."
Jeanne could not help laughing. "Well, but this is awful. You mean we're not to see each other until—when? June? My God."
"Jeanie, darling, I wish we could get married tomorrow and never leave each other's sight again. But a man trying to scribble his way out of a bankruptcy is no fit bridegroom, and anyway—"
She said softly, "Wait, wait. Hold on now. That was a big leap. Who was talking about marriage? I never said a word about marriage."
He said, "I didn't intend to. It's the wrong time to talk about it, the wrong place, the wrong everything, but we will get married, won't we? As soon as we can? As soon as we've both dug out of our cave-ins?"
She looked at him for a long time, with a strange stern expression that at last softened into a faint smile. "Well, don't keel over with astonishment, but I'm going to accept that beautiful proposal. Only on an abstract basis. Like your agreement with the Swiss moneylenders. Don't kiss me or anything. I'm not up to any more emotions, joyful or sad."
"What's there to kiss about?" Hawke said.
Jeanne yawned luxuriously. "Do you know something? I'm going to sleep tonight without a pill. I can feel it. Go home."
"Sure." Hawke downed his drink and put on his jacket.
"This isn't goodbye, is it?" she said through another yawn. "I mean you won't be going to Hovey for a few days, will you?"
"Certainly not."
She walked with him to the door, holding his hand. "I feel awful about this ordeal you're plunging into, this eight-month sentence to your mother's upstairs bedroom. Isn't it possible that you'll send for me once or twice? For an editorial conference?"
"Yes, more than twice." He leaned in the doorway. "Jeanne, all this is for the best. We're going to live in a small house with a small car having small expenses all our lives, while I write the Comedy. I don't care if money pours in like a deluge. No real estate. Not even one share of A T and T. Cash in the bank, government bonds, and you're going to handle all the accounts."
"Well, fine. I'll make us both rich. I have an exciting tip right now on a shopping center."
"Jeanne," he said, "I love you."
She stood on tiptoe and kissed his lips, briefly and sweetly, like a girl at her door after a school dance. "Now go home," she said, and he left.
When he got back to the garret room at Haworth House he went to the desk, brought the Leffer agreement out of his pocket, and read it straight through, though fatigue, and the effect of the last helping of whiskey, made the words jerk and slide about. He impaled it on a spike. He pulled open a desk drawer, took out the unfinished manuscript of Boone County, and put it in a neat yellow stack before him, a stack about a foot high. He stared at the manuscript—just sat and stared—until his eyes began to droop and his head to nod. He sighed, pillowed his head on the manuscript, and fell fast asleep in the lamplight, with his long arms circled around the thick heap of yellow pages.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
1
GUS ADAM quite understood Jeanne's anger at the Leffer deal. But he could not answer her by telling her the real truth—which was that he had avoided the bankruptcy suit by the merest hair.
One of the things the Swiss moneylenders had wanted was a life insurance policy on Hawke for $300,000, to be taken out and carried by the author until the note was all paid. Adam had laughed at this as an indignity to Hawke—a very bull of a young man, he pointed out—and a totally unnecessary expense. He had maneuvered this demand into the narrowing number of matters still at issue at the end of the bargaining, and he had managed to trade it off for another of Leffer's points. Adam suspected that Hawke could not pass an insurance examination; and he was sure that if the Swiss people ever found out the author was a questionable health risk, they would lunge to throw him into bankruptcy.
Adam knew few definite facts about the author's health. Hawke was closemouthed about this, as about nearly everything else. But Hawke's spells of trembling, his red-banded white capsules, his complaints of headaches, gave Adam concern. More alarming were Hawke's sporadic disclosures of hallucinatory symptoms when he was unusually tired. Several times he had asked the lawyer whether he was carrying any freshly sharpened pencils. This disorder of smell haunted him; it had gotten to be a morbid joke. Hawke during a conference would say, "I'm smelling those goddamned pencils again. Let's knock off for a while." He had also spoken of the smell of damp, smoldering hay and of dizzy spells.
Adam had once asked him what the capsules were, and Hawke had said they were dilantin sodium, a sedative. Checking with his own doctor, Adam found out that this was a medication for epileptics. He told the doctor everything he knew about Hawke, and the doctor guessed that Hawke had sustained some brain damage, resulting in the formation of scar tissue, from his trucking accident at the age of nineteen; and that lately stress or fatigue had been bringing on either the aura of a convulsion, or perhaps an actual convulsion or two. The disturbances of smell fitted the picture. The doctor told Adam that while Hawke could live to ninety with proper care and medication, he dwelt on an edge of danger; and he had volunteered the remark that such a man was a poor insurance risk. Adam had gone into the Leffer negotiation with this knowledge. Sidetracking the insurance demand, which he had done in the most casual way and almost as an afterthought, had been a skilled victory for which he could never claim credit. Because there was something about Hawke that forbade, at least for Adam, any talk of his possible infirmity.
Adam had little doubt of Hawke's eventual recovery of health and prosperity, once he got through this narrow time. The lawyer was reconciled to the fact that Hawke would sooner or later marry Jeanne, and he knew this would be the author's salvation. Adam had been instantly and violently attracted to Jeanne Fry at their first meeting, and she was the only woman who had so affected him since the death of his wife. But he had been compelled to veil his infatuation; and not merely because she was married. He had quickly discerned that beyond the barrier of her husband lay the famous author, to whom Jeanne was tied in a peculiar and inextricable way.
A promising turn in Mrs. Hawke's lawsuit made Adam decide to pay a visit to Hovey during the Christmas recess of the law school. She had been granted a new trial; as Adam had guessed, the circuit court had made a reversible error of law in its summary judgment against her. This did not mean, of course, that she had any better chance of winning a second trial. Adam was not interested in catering to an old woman's obsession, but the more he looked into the case, the more he began to suspect that Mrs. Hawke might recover some money; especially as he became familiar with Scotty Hoag's character. Adam's young cousin Fred in Brightstar, who had just started the practice of law, had won the reversal with only scant supervision of the appeal by the older lawyer. Now Adam thought—or rather had a hunch—that he himself ought to make a fishing expedition to Hovey for some facts. Also, he wanted to see how Hawke was bearing up.
He had no good news to bring Hawke for Christmas, three months after the crash of the author's fortunes. Scotty had failed to get the Mehlman lease; it had gone to the Mineola shopping center. Paumanok Plaza was about thirty percent occupied. It had a gaping space with enormous soaped windows where the department store should have been, and an air of failure hung about it, but Scotty was negotiating with other big stores on reduced terms. Even on those terms Adam calculated the center could become a money maker, if Scotty could stave off the collapse of the corporation. Otherwise, if the bank took over on its first mortgage, the three hundred thousand dollars Hawke was paying for the second mortgage would perhaps melt irrecoverably into air. Scotty had a big cash stake in the Plaza. He was putting in more cash month by month to keep it going, and Adam expected that he would pull it through out of pure self-interest, and in so doing save Hawke's investment. But at the moment this was just a hope.
For the rest, Evelyn Biggers was the failure nearly everyone had predicted; thirty-five thousand copies sold, and returns starting to drift back. Such a sale, for another author, would have meant success, but Hawke's launching of the book had cost more than the profits on those copies. The critics had been strangely divided. Many had followed Judd's lead in denouncing the book, the printing job, and the author, but some influential ones had called it Hawke's best work, and a marked advance in his powers. Nevertheless it had died in the shops, the big pyramids in the windows dwindling quickly to a couple of dust-gathering copies on rear racks, eclipsed by new pyramids of the season's fiction success, a vast book about the gold rush in Alaska, well laced with gory death and sexual intercourse.
