Youngblood hawke, p.92
Youngblood Hawke, page 92
"Well, Phyllis, to tell the truth I never got that impression."
"Ha! You should hear some of the talk at the hen parties these days. Of course, now you're Youngblood Hawke. That makes all the difference. Honestly, it seems you were really in love with nine-tenths of these girls, and they could all have had you, too, but you were just too shy to speak up, and they weren't going to make the first move."
Hawke said, "They all were spared a horrible fate, then. Actually, Phyllis, you were the only one who had such a narrow escape."
She laughed and blushed, glancing at Gus Adam, who sat smoking with slow gestures. "Well, you're gallant to say so, now that you know it's safe, but I'll never repeat that, I'd die if my husband ever heard it." She spoke to Adam in a quick change of tone, "It's been several years since I left Hawke Brothers, but I'll be glad to tell you anything I can."
He asked about the Eleanor Coal Company. She looked blank. She recalled the name, and also seemed to recollect that there had been separate stationery with that heading, on which she had typed a few letters. Hawke Brothers had had many subsidiaries over the years. Nor did she recall anything about the accounting Mrs. Hawke had obtained.
Adam said, "You do know, of course, that Mrs. Hawke is suing the company over some mining at Frenchman's Ridge, west of Edgefield."
The woman smiled. "This is a small town. Anne Maggard already had my job when that business started. I just don't know much about it, except gossip."
Adam shrugged and smiled. "Just a shot in the dark." He knocked out his pipe.
She said, "The funny thing is I think Frenchman's Ridge may have cost me my job. I had a run-in with Mr. Hoag about the files, and somehow I was never too popular with him afterward."
Adam said, "What sort of run-in?"
"Well, it was just that he was going through the Frenchman's Ridge files, bringing them up to date, and throwing out reams of stuff—they had gotten awful unwieldy and full of deadwood, he was right about that—but I happened to come into his office and see a title report in the wastebasket. I fished it out and gave it back to him, but he said it had been superseded, and tossed it away again. I mean, I suppose it was wrong of me to argue with him, but I was feeling on the defensive about the files, they really were in a mess. I had far too much work piled on me in that office, they've had three girls doing my work ever since, but anyway what I said was true, Mr. Will was a fanatic about not throwing away records and correspondence, no matter how old and out-of-date, and we had some words. He said Mr. Will had been a fine man but he wasn't running the office now. And I sort of resented that, but—" the woman shrugged and laughed. "Here I am getting mad, and it all happened a million years ago."
Adam said, "This wouldn't be Mr. Webber's title opinion?"
"Mr. Webber? No, it was one of Judge Sparkman's, it had the brown cover he always used. Judge Sparkman did all our title work until Mr. Will died, and for a while after that, actually I guess until he died too."
Adam nodded, looking rather disappointed. "Well, if you know anything that can help us in this situation—I gather you're friendly with Mrs. Hawke—"
Mrs. Trosper glanced roguishly at Hawke. "I guess I've always been on fair terms with the whole family. I just can't think of anything. Frankly I never could stand Mr. Hoag, but I think he's an honest man, I don't know anything against him, and there's nothing wrong with Glenn but liquor and women. I hope Mrs. Hawke gets something out of this, of course. A lot of people do. She's a fine woman and she does a lot of good in this town."
The men took their leave. Mrs. Trosper said at the doorway to Hawke, with a last flare of archness, "You tell your red-headed lady she's got a sincere friend in Hovey named Phyllis Trosper. Hear?"
Adam said in the car, as Hawke started it up, "Well, your belle has a lot of her charm left. I understand about the sonnets."
"Do you? To me Phyllis is like a haunted house, just scary and depressing. She was a flower, Gus, an angel, the girl who turned into that."
"How long ago did this Judge Sparkman die?"
"Years ago."
"Is his widow alive?"
"Yes. She lives in Lexington now. Mrs. Bertel Sparkman." Hawke glanced at the lawyer. "Why? Is there anything in what Phyllis said?"
"Well, if Hawke Brothers got an earlier opinion on the title to that land, I ought to look at it. Maybe she still has his files. I'll be in Lexington tomorrow anyway, I'll try to call her. Wait, where are you going, Art? You may as well take me straight to the hotel. The bus leaves at eleven."
"Let's go by the house for a minute. There's about two hundred pages you can take back to Leffer. I hate sending my manuscript through the mail."
"Sure enough."
On the sidewalk in front of Mrs. Hawke's house, Adam paused, sniffing the air, glancing up and down the steep hill at the old ramshackle wooden houses. It was a gray raw day, filled with the smell of the rotten brown leaves that lay all over the roofs, the front yards and the street gutters. "I don't know," he said. "Maybe I should have stayed in Kentucky myself. I had my Phyllis Trosper too, in Brightstar High. Smell this air!"
"Ye gods!" he exclaimed when Hawke took him upstairs into his bedroom. "Is this where you work?" There was barely space for the two men to stand in, and Hawke, crowded toward the sloping ceiling, had to stoop over his desk, which was piled high with gray thick photostat pages.
"Why, it suits me fine," Hawke said, laughing. "I sort of hate to leave it, but I'm thinking of renting a cabin up the road. Mama means no harm, but I just can't take the drivel."
Adam was troubled by the half-empty bottle of whiskey on the desk beside the stack of photostats, and the wooden case of whiskey under the bed. "Do you drink when you write?"
"Just now and then. Want a snort?"
"No, thank you."
Hawke took a glass from the washbasin, poured about three fingers of bourbon, and drank it off. "Doctor's orders," he said. "Great healer, Dr. Eversill. Small town tragedy. Mute inglorious Milton." He stood a wooden yard ruler beside the pile. "Of course photostats are much thicker than plain paper, but still, sixteen inches of solid story! That's something, hey? I calculate Boone County will be almost exactly two feet high. Here are the pages for Leffer. Guard them with your life."
Adam was staring at the crumpled black gloves on the desk which Hawke had uncovered by picking up the manila folder of pages. Hawke laughed. "Yes, they're the same ones. The ones you picked out of the gutter. They still have a trace of her perfume, d'you know?"
"What do you hear from her, Arthur?"
"Her letters get more cheerful all the time. She says she's turned into a vegetable and is seriously thinking of staying one. Jim's gaining weight and is all brown. California was obviously a good idea."
"Well, with that talisman before you I'm sure you're writing a great novel," Adam said, carefully putting away the manuscript in his briefcase, "My last word to you is, easy on the booze. Dr. Eversill may be an unsung genius, but I'm not sure John Barleycorn is a novelist's best collaborator."
A winning, faintly desperate, smile passed over Hawke's face. "It's an emergency, Gus, don't you see? I don't expect to burn alcohol ever again, but I'm going to deliver this novel on the fifteenth of June. Tell that to Leffer. I'm right on schedule, and despite everything it's going to be the best book I've ever written."
4
Mrs. Hawke's second trial came on early in May. Adam rescheduled a couple of seminars so as to allow himself two days in Hovey. He was more concerned about Youngblood Hawke's condition than about the lawsuit, which he felt his cousin Fred could probably handle well enough. Hawke's letters had been getting fewer and shorter all winter. The last one had come late in March: half a dozen drunkenly scrawled lines on a yellow sheet, saying that the novel was rolling along too fast to be interrupted by letter-writing. Adam flew down the night before the trial was to begin, drove from Lexington to Hovey in a rented Chevrolet, and presented himself at Mrs. Hawke's door at nine o'clock in the morning. She greeted him with a combative spark in her eye; she was dressed in a good-looking black suit she had bought in New York, and her best jewelry. He talked a bit about the trial with her, refused the breakfast she tried to press on him, and asked her to take him to Hawke's cabin.
"Who, me? Not on your life," said Mrs. Hawke. "Why, that boy's like a bear with a sore nose these days. It's worth my life to show my face around that hovel. When he happens to think of coming home I feed him, and that's about all the good I am to him. You want to see him, you just drive on out Indian Creek road, that's right straight out Main Street to the south, keep going, and you'll see this cabin in the woods on the left. He's got this old Pontiac painted a horrible yellow out by the road, you can't miss it. If you can make your way through the whiskey bottles and the beer cans, there he'll be, the big money maker."
The yellow car blazed like a beacon, pulled up off the road under the trees beside a pile of household coal dumped on the grass. The cabin was on a steep hillside across a ravine that fell away from the highway. Adam went down the meandering dirt footpath to the creek, crossed the stepping stones and climbed to the cabin. It was an unpainted brown shack, surrounded by high grass and ragged weeds, with a refrigerator and a washtub on the front porch. An orange cat nursing half a dozen kittens under the washtub stand gave the lawyer an unfriendly meow as he approached through the litter of whiskey bottles and beer cans; there were empty food cans too, sardines, pork and beans, tomato soup and the like, in a buzzing cloud of flies. Adam heard an alarm clock go off inside the cabin as he mounted the shaky porch steps. His wrist watch showed half-past nine. He rapped at the door, and elicited a groan and a sleepy hoarse voice, "That you, Patchy? Half a minute."
"It's Gus Adam."
"Hey, Gus! Is this Wednesday already? I lose track of the goddamn days." Adam heard heavy trampling about, and in a few moments Hawke flung open the door. He was barefoot, buttoning blue jeans over a red wool shirt, and the sight of him gave Adam a real start, because he had grown a bushy brown beard streaked at the chin with gray. Since his brow and cheeks were so broad the beard made him appear very fat. His eyes had a tired, burning look, and all in all he was a savage dirty object at first glance. "Gus, I didn't know whether you were arriving today or tomorrow. Come on in, for Christ's sake." He closed the door, stumbled to an iron-bellied stove and threw a match into a mass of crumpled paper. There was a flare, a roar, and an instant blast of heat. "Gloomy, chilly little hole, isn't it?" Hawke said, lighting a green-shaded desk lamp, and pulling on thick mud-caked shoes. "Home, sweet home, though. Wrong side of the ravine. Don't get the sun but about an hour a day. How about that stove, hey? One day's issue of the New York Times, boy, makes this place comfortable in a couple of minutes. I've almost stopped burning coal, it's getting on to May. But this is what takes off the chill like nothing else." He splashed bourbon from the bottle on his desk into a glass. "Have an eye-opener, or do my depraved ways disturb you? Doctor's orders."
"No, thanks, Arthur."
The bewhiskered author tossed down the bourbon, grinned at Adam, then lumbered to a corner and got the yardstick. "This is what you came to see, isn't it, Gus?" He set the ruler beside the towering pile of gray photostats in manila folders stacked on the desk. "Twenty-two sonofabitching inches, Gus! By God, I called it! Three or four inches to go. Four big scenes, all laid out in my head, and Boone County will be written!" He flung the ruler into the corner. "Did I eat supper last night? I guess not, I'm hungry as a wolf. How about some bacon and eggs, Art Hawke style? That's drowned in chili."
"Sounds good, Arthur. I don't have to be in court until half-past ten."
Hawke went out, brought food from the refrigerator, and began cooking on a kerosene stove. He never stopped talking as he moved clumsily about. The book was going well, very well indeed. He was proud of it. He was sorry Adam had arrived on a Tuesday, because Wednesday was when this Negro boy Patchy came and cleaned up the place, so there was a week's junk around. In the main room of the cabin Hawke had created once more his usual environment of piled books, flung clothes, scattered papers, steel cabinets, and a strangely neat, orderly desk. There was the smell in the room of a big man who was neglecting to wash, although the wonderful breakfast odors of bacon and coffee were obliterating it. Adam saw Jeanne's black gloves beside the author's desk watch, and a new large photograph of Jeanne in a leather frame on the desk; a pensive pose, the back of her hand under her chin, a faint melancholy smile softening her mouth.
He said, "Jeanne wrote me she was coming here at the end of April. What happened?"
Hawke shot him a sly look. "Well, the fact is the mountain's going to go to Mohammed instead, and don't ask me to unriddle that dark saying till we've had some chow. She was coming in February and Jim got the mumps. She was all set for March fifteenth and there was that goddamn airplane strike. I talk to her on the phone twice a week. If Leffer doesn't like it he can sue me. I'm living on about twelve bucks a week here."
"How is she?"
"Wonderful. I think she's all right, Gus. She's full of pep. Hodge Hathaway's been sending her some manuscripts to edit again.—Chow down. The desk is also the dining table, so pull over your chair and let's go."
He ate voraciously, spilling egg and chili sauce on his beard. Wiping himself with a paper napkin, he laughed, his teeth showing big and white in the frame of hair. "How about this beard? Do you want me in court today? I've been planning to whack it off anyway, sooner or later, and I can do it this morning."
"We won't need you today, Arthur. Tomorrow, possibly. Maybe not at all."
"Is mama going to win me a couple of million dollars after all, Gus? It sure would help at this point."
"Well, Arthur, it's not inconceivable that she'll recover some money, depending on the verdict and the accounting."
Hawke said, soaking up egg and chili sauce with a broken roll, "But I shouldn't count on that money in making my plans for the next sixty or ninety days, I gather."
"You can't count on it at all, as I've told you often. One never knows how long a circuit court will take to hand down a verdict, or what it'll be in a land dispute."
Hawke nodded, pushed away his plate, and poured himself more bourbon. "Gus, there's bad news about the book. I can't make it."
"I'm sorry to hear that."
Hawke glared at the lawyer like a mountaineer confronting a revenue officer, all white-rimmed eyes and ragged whiskers. "I've done my damnedest, and my conscience is clear. Not Balzac, not Trollope, not Scott, not Dostoevsky, nobody has ever worked harder with a pen in hand than I have on Boone County. I'll finish by the fifteenth of June, all right. My miscalculation was on the revision. I thought I could revise the old scenes and work ahead on the new at the same time. I couldn't. I've poured out this book. It's excellent. This is my best story, Gus, it's going to be extremely successful, and I'll tell you something, even the English is pretty good! The college professors are going to start to fall in line on this one. I've really proved to my own satisfaction that I belong in this wretched trade. But I can't deliver it by June fifteenth. It would be criminal to publish the book in this form. It's all disfigured with repetition, extraneous scenes, the scaffolding that has to be knocked away. I must give it four more months of labor. There's only one thing more important to me than honoring my signature on that goddamned note, Gus, and that is not cheating on my writing. Because that's honoring my signature too, honoring it to the people who buy my books because they're by Youngblood Hawke. Even if it means a bankruptcy proceeding, I'm crawfishing on the June fifteenth date. The new date is October fifteenth. You're going to have to get it from Leffer."
"That's rough, Arthur. I don't think I can."
"Not even if I pay him seventy-five thousand dollars on June fifteenth, in lieu of giving the manuscript to the publishers?"
Adam's eyebrows shot up. "That's different. I'm fairly sure we could do business then. It's two months past the due date"—Adam was half talking to himself—"it changes several points in the agreement, we'd have to revise the liens and—well! The point is I think we can negotiate a respite on such a basis. But this is a very cheerful piece of news, that you have the seventy-five thousand dollars to give."
"I know where to get it."
"Will you borrow it from your brother-in-law? That would make excellent sense—"
Hawke jumped up with such suddenness that his chair crashed to the floor, and he slammed his fist on the desk so that the dishes rattled and the lamp danced. "Get that idea out of your head, Gus!" he roared, and he began to pace around like a madman. "I'll be everlastingly damned if I'm going to ask him or anybody else on God's green earth for help, do you hear me? I'm not paralyzed, I'm not sick, I'm a grown man, I've been a fantastic money maker, I think I'm going to be a great writer, and by the living Christ I'm going to be one artist who went to his grave without sponging on any man or woman! I'm not going to borrow from John Weltmann. I'm not going to borrow from Frieda Winter, either, though she sent me a sweet-as-sugar letter saying that she heard I was having money troubles and all I had to do was say the word. I'm not down, and I don't need rescue." Hawke halted in his pacing, and stood with his legs planted apart, facing the lawyer with haggard defiance. He spoke more calmly. "Ferdie Lax is flying here tomorrow to talk about a screenplay deal for me. I telephoned him last week. I told him I didn't care what the job was, providing I got seventy-five thousand dollars on or before the fifteenth of June."
The outburst took Adam aback because of the raggedness of nerves it disclosed. He said with purposeful calm, "That's a sensible thought. I hope it works out. You understand you'll eventually have to pay taxes on that seventy-five thousand too—"
Hawke laughed, "Gus, I'm well aware that I may be half my life digging out of the tax hole. As you said seven months ago, right now I need oxygen."
"Won't you have to stop work on your book?"
"Hell no, and I'm not selling my soul or any of that foolishness. I have a real regard for movie storytelling, it has some artistic advantages over fiction though it's more limited in the long pull—at least I think so—but anyway it's the director's art, not mine. The screenplay is just one of his tools like the scenery, the actors, the cameraman. I'm a storyteller and I can cobble up a screenplay. Happily Hollywood pays large sums on occasion to an experienced storyteller. I'll revise Boone by night and write the screenplay by day. I couldn't do this back in September. I was barely past the middle of the book, grinding uphill. I couldn't risk the least distraction. Now it's got a thundering momentum, and I can pile pages under any conditions. It's a wonderful book, Gus." He dropped into a chair, with a melancholy chuckle. "You know something? I felt terrible last week when I read about poor Quentin Judd. For two reasons. It's awful to think of any man you've known actually killing himself. But so help me, as Boone County has been taking shape I've begun to look forward to Quent's review of it. I think he would have taken it all back, truly I do. He was a venomous man, but he had a sharp mind, and he did admire good writing. He put up a real fight for it all his life. Evelyn was a peculiar book, and not his cup of tea. He'd have loved this one. Now Judd will never take it back."
