XXVI
I had traveled extensively before, during and after the war. Many of my trips had been highly uncomfortable, combining physical fatigue, bad water, inadequate food, and insects; but when a trip was over, a mellow glow immediately began to dull its grimmer aspects. I would think of the sights I had seen, and the companions, whose eccentricities I had scarcely been able to tolerate, became warmly agreeable in retrospect. Small grudges and annoyances would be forgotten, and regrets would begin to arise that the party was breaking up and everyone would exchange addresses and promise everyone else to get together sometime soon.
We had all followed Melville Goodwin through a strange country, and the experience had drawn us together, but I personally was experiencing the sort of museum fatigue that comes when you have seen and heard too much. Somehow I had not been the casual observer that I had thought I would be—but it was almost over now. The portable bar was in the living room for the last time, and they would all be gone directly after lunch. One more of those peculiar meals, and Goodwin, Fineholt, Flax and Bentley would be drawn back to the orbits of their own lives. The old rule was already working. It had been quite a trip with Mel Goodwin and we were a swell lot of people, and we must get together sometime soon. I even remember suggesting to Fineholt that we have lunch so that I could show her the studio, and Helen herself was sorry now that the end was near, because I heard her telling Mel Goodwin, who was showing us for the last time how to mix Martinis, that nothing had been any trouble at all. He had not descended upon her. She had enjoyed every minute of it.
“I’m just beginning to understand the army,” I heard her say, “and now you’re going and I’ll have to start understanding Sidney all over again.”
“Say, Flax,” the General said, “upstairs in my room there are two parcels on top of my kit bag—some things I’ve been saving for Sid and Helen. Would you mind asking Oscar to bring them down?”
Of course Colonel Flax did not mind, and Mel Goodwin took a swallow of his Martini.
“Just two little things I picked up after the surrender,” he said. “They’ve been knocking around in my baggage. They don’t amount to anything, but they do have an association value.”
In spite of the casual way he put it, our journey together had meant something to him also. When Oscar brought the two parcels tied up in brown paper, I could not help remembering the postwar days when everybody began pinning medals on everybody else. The parcel he gave to me contained one of those ugly Luger automatics that had passed almost as currency in the early occupation.
“I suppose you own one of these things already,” he said, “but this is a special Luger. It turned up when they were searching Goering’s baggage—that time when they fed him chicken and green peas. It belonged to old Fatso personally, and here are the papers to prove it.”
I held the thing as though it were a hot potato, and everybody laughed.
“Is it loaded?” I asked.
“That’s funny,” the General said, “I’ve had it all this time and I’ve never thought to look. Hand it over here, Sid.”
It was impressive to watch him with the Luger. He handled it in an expert, half-contemptuous professional way, breaking out the magazine with a quick one-two motion.
“By God,” he said, “it is loaded. I wonder what was the matter with our boys. Here, Flax, you keep the ammunition. Maybe Mrs. Flax might like it.”
“She certainly would, sir,” Colonel Flax said, “particularly if—er—Sidney would let me have a copy of those documents.”
“Hand Helen her little bundle, will you, Flax,” the General said. “It’s a sloppy package. I didn’t tie it up myself.”
His words gave me a fleeting memory of young Mel Goodwin sealing packages in his father’s drugstore.
“Why,” Helen said, “what a lovely tea cloth.”
“It was right on the table in the bunker in the room where Hitler shot himself,” the General said, “but the stain on it is tea, and here’s the paper to prove it, signed by the Russian Intelligence. I got it at one of those vodka parties when we were still hotsy-totsy with the Russians.”
“Oh,” Helen said, “it’s lovely.” I recognized the tone, though the General did not, as one she employed whenever I gave her something that she could not imagine how to use.
“Just from me to you, dear,” he said, “and Muriel particularly wanted you to have it.”
Then I wondered fleetingly what grisly relic he might be saving for Dottie Peale. It was bound to be good, although I could not think of anything that might outrank Fatso’s gun and Eva Braun’s tea cloth. It was the direct measure of his gratitude, and I could not help but be touched.
“Why, son,” he said when we both thanked him, “they aren’t anything. I wish they could be the Hesse jewels,” and then he thought of Phil Bentley and Myra Fineholt. “I wish I weren’t running clean out of souvenirs,” he said. “Say, Flax, how about getting the powder taken out and then loosening up and handing Phil and Myra each one of Fatso’s cartridges?”
It was the time for passing out the Legions of Merit.
“I’d love to have one for a lipstick holder,” Myra said, “and Phil can put his on a key ring.”
“It takes a woman to think up things,” the General said. “Sister, you’ve got a lot of bright ideas.”
We were all a swell crowd, and the trip was almost over, and now the General was in a reminiscent mood. He was about to tell another one of his stories, and it was sad to think that it would be the last of them.
“I don’t know why I should have thought of this,” he was saying. “There was a young officer at Maule. That was right in the middle of the Bulge show, and everything was pretty scrambled up. Goochy, my chief of staff, sent him to report to me personally about some snarl up forward. I don’t remember what, because it was all one big foul-up. He was just a kid, a nice first lieutenant, nice face, nice hands. He gave me his name and outfit, but I forgot his name because I was thinking of the tactical situation. He gave a good report, too, all the facts in order. Then I saw him swaying. I should have seen he was going out on his feet—just plain pooped—but I wasn’t thinking about him until he fell down slam on the floor, out cold. Then I thought what a dead-game kid he was, and I wanted to make a note of his name personally so that I could pin something on him later. So I looked in the kid’s pocket and pulled out a letter, and found myself reading it, forgetting I shouldn’t. Well, do you know what the letter was? It was a ‘Dear John’ letter. The kid’s wife was leaving him for a navy flier in Jacksonville. He reminded me of Robert, stretched out there on the floor, except he didn’t have my kid’s physique. Well, anyway I saw he got a bronze star out of it, even if he lost the gal. Maybe it helped a little, but it didn’t fix anything permanently, because he was killed up on the Rhine. Well, I don’t know how this crossed my mind. Who’s ready for another drink?”
I wished that Oscar would appear with the news that lunch was ready, because the shadow of the young lieutenant lingered in the room, an uninvited guest, the ghost of an unknown soldier who should have stayed in the ETO where he belonged. I wondered myself how he had escaped out of the tight compartment in which Mel Goodwin kept the memory pictures of other officers and men, to run erratically across the General’s mind. There was more in his mind than one ever thought. There were the scars of old decisions and old regrets, for instance, and the weight of responsibilities that still rested on him, which he could not shift from himself to any subordinate or superior. Those were the things he had to keep all buttoned up and packed away and which he could never allow to move up front. There must have been a lot of things that he had felt obliged to forget as rapidly as possible. It made me uneasy that the young lieutenant should have appeared, but Melville Goodwin was forgetting him again and remembering something funny.
“The blast lifted us right off the seat,” I heard him saying, “and then we landed on it again hard, right by the numbers, and Goochy began to swear. Swearing was all right for Goochy, though it always hurt him when I used bad language.
“‘What’s the matter, Gooch?’ I said. ‘Did you pick up one of the pieces?’ You see, it was an HE shell and a lot of metal was flying around.
“‘No,’ he said, and he looked as though he wanted to cry, ‘but I sat down on that God-damned pint.’
“It was that pint of bourbon in his hip pocket. We hadn’t seen bourbon for two weeks and I had told him not to carry it on his hip. Well, you should have seen Goochy doing his work that evening. He had to write his orders lying down flat while the medics were taking pieces of glass out of him. The glass was there but the bourbon was all gone. It was really a two-way operation.”
Colonel Flax and I were standing a few steps away from the portable bar. We both joined in the merriment, relieved that things were back in the right groove.
“I think this has all been good,” the colonel said to me. “Don’t you think the General handled himself all right?”
He was appealing to me as a connecting link between the service and the eccentricities of civilians.
“I think Mel did a swell public relations job,” I told him.
The colonel looked toward the portable bar and lowered his voice discreetly.
“I’ve been watching Bentley,” he said, “and frankly I had my fingers crossed once or twice. The General is the type that’s hard to put over public-relations-wise. You never know how the combat type is going to jump. They get too natural. He’s getting pretty natural right now.”
I did not answer. After all, the show was over.
“The hours I’ve sat with combat types, sweating it out in press conferences,” the colonel said, “waiting for them to drop it all on the floor. The rough-and-tumble ones are never public-relations-conscious.”
“They can’t be everything,” I said.
Colonel Flax sighed. “Someday,” he said, “you and I have got to get together and tell each other stories. I don’t know why they’re always dropping bricks. They want to be liked and the public is all set to like them and indulge in a little hero worship, and then they drop a brick. Take Patton.”
“Well, he was the greatest figure in the war,” I said.
“I didn’t say he wasn’t,” Colonel Flax answered, “but, oh brother—whenever he made a speech!” He cast a level appraising glance at General Goodwin. “He hasn’t got the color but he’s got a few of the Patton traits.”
“Well,” I said, “they’ve got to be the same piece of goods because they all have to do the same thing. Maybe the public understands them better than you think.”
“Not the left wing,” Flax said.
“Everybody isn’t left wing,” I told him.
“Sometimes it seems as though everybody is,” Colonel Flax said, and he sighed again. “Somebody is always pulling the carpet out from under combat generals,” and he glanced again at Melville Goodwin. “They have to put over their personality to a lot of twenty-year-old kids. They have to tell themselves they’re good about a hundred times a day. They’ve got to hold that thought or else they’ll crack. Look at Goodwin. He looks pretty good, doesn’t he?”
Now that he had mentioned it, I had never seen Mel Goodwin looking better.
“He’s got his mind on something else now,” Colonel Flax said. “Boy, I’m feeling tired,” but Mel Goodwin was not tired.
“Hey, Sid,” he called, “come over here. I’ve been asking Helen the name of your tailor, and she can’t remember.”
“What do you want a tailor for?” I asked.
“That tweed jacket and slacks of yours,” Mel Goodwin said. “I need something to wear on Sundays. The war’s over.”
I wondered whether it was a desire common to all army officers to get out of uniform or whether he was thinking of Dottie Peale. There was something preposterous in the idea of Melville Goodwin dressed in a tweed coat and slacks, minus stars and ribbons with only perhaps a small single enameled decoration in his buttonhole. I wondered what Dottie Peale would say if she saw him in gray slacks or a conservative double-breasted suit. Half of him would be gone and he did not know it.
“Well, what’s so funny about it?” Mel Goodwin asked.
He could read my thoughts correctly at the most unexpected times.
“It would give you schizophrenia,” I said. “You’ve been in uniform too long.”
The General put his arm around my shoulders. “Sid always comes up with something good,” he said. “Maybe Sid’s got something.” He finished his cocktail and set his glass down deliberately. “All you people on the outside seem to have queer notions about officers in civvies. Now I’ll bet Sid here got out of his uniform as soon as he had the chance. Didn’t you, Sid?”
“Yes, sir,” I answered, “I certainly did.”
“You’re damned well right you did,” Melville Goodwin said. “There’s nothing more satisfying to an army man, after a hard day, than getting out of uniform into some everyday clothes. It’s like taking off your corset and scratching—excuse me, Helen, my dear.”
We all smiled at one another appreciatively.
“Just walking down the street like a plain citizen, without having to take a salute, means a lot. It’s like getting out of school.… But do you know what Muriel told me as soon as I got off the plane?” He paused dramatically, but none of us knew. “She said that Charley—my kid Charley—had taken over all my civilian wardrobe—and it was a pretty sharp one—and had worn it ragged for the past two years. So here I am, without a fig leaf, except my uniform.”
Something in his voice showed it was no time to be amused, even when he mentioned a fig leaf.
“But didn’t you get some suits made during the occupation, sir?” Colonel Flax asked.
“I did have a couple of suits made over there,” the General said. “There was a tailor in Wiesbaden—Bethge. Frankly, off the record—mind you, off the record, Bentley—that bird would make you up a suit for two cartons of cigarettes.”
“What?” Miss Fineholt said. “For only two cartons of cigarettes?”
Melville Goodwin shook his finger at her.
“Off the record, Myra,” he said. “Well, those suits are with my baggage in Frankfurt. I was yanked over here pretty fast. They may be following me, but they haven’t got here yet.… Anyway, I think they may look pretty Krauty over here.… I’ve really got to get some civvies.”
He stopped, but his mind was already moving away from civilian clothes. They had reminded him of something else.
“Say, Flax,” he said, “don’t forget those orchids for Mrs. Goodwin, will you?”
“No, sir,” said Colonel Flax, and then the General laughed.
“Look at old Flax,” he said. “I’ve run him ragged, haven’t I? Don’t worry; it’s almost over, son.”
He must have been watching Flax and me very closely while we were talking. Then I saw Oscar standing in the doorway, and Mel Goodwin saw him, too.
“Come, dear,” he said to Helen, “soup’s on.”
The house was very quiet after they all had left and Farouche began pushing his rubber ring at me more hopefully. The old routine was returning, but Mel Goodwin’s personality was still in the house. There were echoes of it everywhere, and everything was at loose ends.
“Sid,” Helen said, “what do you think he’s going to do?”
“You know what he’s going to do. He put on his ‘A’ uniform after lunch,” I said.
“I don’t mean that,” Helen said. “What do you think he’s going to do about everything?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t care right now.”
“Well, I care,” Helen said. “I wish people wouldn’t come here and throw their personalities around until I begin to worry about them.”
It was about time that I looked over the script for the broadcast. It was about time I dropped the problems of Melville Goodwin, because I had problems of my own.
“Forget about him. He’s all grown up,” I said, and I wished that Farouche would stop dropping the rubber ring in front of me.
“Farouche needs another ribbon,” Helen said.
“All right,” I said.
I thought we were on another subject, but I was wrong.
“He’s a lot younger than you are in a lot of ways. He’s so innocent,” she said, and I knew she was not speaking about Farouche.
“You shouldn’t have done that about the orchids,” I told her.
“I couldn’t help it,” she answered, and she smiled, and neither of us spoke for a while.
“I wonder why Gilbert Frary sent you so many orchids,” I said.
“Maybe we’d better think about that, too,” she answered, but the personality of Melville Goodwin was still with us.
Once when the dust of events had settled, Mel Goodwin told me quite a lot about that looked-forward-to evening he had spent with Dottie Peale.
Knowing them both, I was able to make for myself a fairly accurate reconstruction of their meeting, in much the same way that an archaeologist can make a model of some vanished Grecian shrine. Mel Goodwin told me about it in one of his embarrassingly confidential moods, and though much of his narrative made me acutely uncomfortable, I still think it fell into an artistic frame instead of being only another errant night away from the reservation. Perhaps because I have always been fond of the Odyssey I kept seeing in the Goodwin chronicle the return of a hero, weary of the wars. I always found myself thinking of Circe and Calypso, of palaces, fine wines, rare napery and of perfume in the air. Actually there was a wine list and Chanel Five and a new gown from Valentina and a silver-blue mink stole and diamond clips. Seen through Mel Goodwin’s eyes, Seventy-second Street must have come as quite a shock. It certainly had been a shock to me when I had first seen it and I had not been to any war.
There had been a traffic jam on the West Side highway so that Williams and the Cadillac had been unable to bring the General to the Park Avenue entrance of the Waldorf before half past five o’clock, and this cut his timetable short, as he had arranged to meet Dottie at about six. He had decided to stay at the Waldorf out of loyalty to the name, though it was not the old Waldorf, and he could have taken an army discount at some other hotel. He had on his “A” uniform and frankly he looked pretty sharp. The clerks and the bellhops made him feel like a VIP, yet at the same time he also felt like a kid. Someone who must have been a manager shook hands with him and took him up to his room himself and was sorry it was not a better one. It looked too good as it was, considering his budget, but he could only stay for a night because he would certainly have to check in next day in Washington. When he had left his canvas bag in his room, he went downstairs to the florist’s shop with an idea of buying Dottie some of those yellow orchids, but he decided against this because it was too late to have the flowers delivered, and he did not want to walk up Park Avenue carrying them in a box. He had a fixed desire to walk up Park Avenue.
It was sunset when he started up the Avenue, and New York was still the magic city it had always been for him, rising into the clouds and pulsing with life and hope, never weary or disillusioned like Paris or London. Nobody had bombed New York, and by God, nobody would dare to touch it. The truth was it didn’t give a damn for the past. It was forever reaching for something just around the corner, and this was his own mood exactly.
I had described Dottie’s house to him vaguely, but he thought that I had been exaggerating until he saw it, and he found himself making a whole new evaluation of everything when he saw the suit of armor and asked the butler if Mrs. Peale was at home.
“Yes, General Goodwin,” the man said, “Mrs. Peale is expecting you. May I take your hat, sir?”
“Thanks,” he said, and he handed Dottie’s butler his cap and gloves and followed him up that broad, noiseless staircase.
“General Goodwin, madam,” the man said.
Dottie was waiting for him in that same monster salon with the travertine marble fireplace and Italian chairs and tapestries, where she had received me when I had returned from the Paris Bureau, and I remembered what she had said to me while I was still looking around at the sights.
“Very cinquecento, isn’t it?” Dottie had said.
“Yes,” I had answered, “unspoiled Borgia with a patina.”
Some months after the armistice Mel Goodwin had been to Italy on a two weeks’ leave, so he was able to take it without gulping, he told me. She held out both her hands to him and turned her cheek for him to kiss it. In a way it was half formal and half informal. He did not know exactly what the technique should be, since that butler was still there.
“Oh, Mel,” she said, “it’s been ages. Albert, would you tell Bernard to bring around the car?”
“What’s the car for?” Mel Goodwin asked.
“You don’t mind if I show you off a little, do you, darling?” she said. “Only cocktails at ‘21’ and then a quick dinner at the Stork and then we’ll come back home.”
He was glad that he had thought to bring some cash with him.
“It sounds all right to me,” he said.
She looked up at him. “I had completely forgotten you were so damned handsome,” she said.
“Why in hell didn’t you answer any of my letters, Dot?” he asked her.
“Because I never dreamed that anything could ever be the way it was,” she said.
“Well, it is the way it was,” he said.
“Darling,” she said, “let’s both be surprised for a minute, shall we?”
“All right,” he said, “that isn’t such a bad idea.”
He had thought of her a great deal and there had been plenty of time for that sort of thinking. He had thought of her again and again as he had first seen her among those other civilians in Paris in that austerely tailored suit. He particularly remembered how she sometimes called him “sir” in what you might have termed both a kidding and respectful way, but he had forgotten what he called her resilience and her loveliness. Of course she was dressed for the occasion, but if she had been dressed in coveralls like an Army nurse, they would have been becoming. Her gown was made of plum-colored taffeta that was tight on top with a long billowing skirt that rustled, and every fold and flounce of it fell into formation. Everything about her was always a unit, even the diamond clip and bracelet. She always wore clothes the way a regular wore a uniform. You always thought of the individual first if the whole uniform fitted properly, and that was the way he thought of Dottie.
“Do you like it?” she asked him.
“Like what?” he answered.
“Why, my Valentina frock,” she said. “I like the noise it makes when it swishes.”
“That’s right,” he said, “it sounds like a wave running up a beach.”
He was thinking of the waves on the windward side of the island of Oahu, where the crowd used to go sometimes for swimming picnics. Then Dottie began to laugh.
“As long as it’s a beach and not a bitch,” she said.
He had to laugh himself because they were right where they had been before, and you never worried about her language. If anyone else had said it, it would have sounded coarse, but not with Dot.
“Darling,” she said, “I’d almost forgotten how nice it is to see a man again. I don’t mean anyone in pants. I mean a man.” She pointed to a record player that was finished like the Italian furniture. “Turn on that thing over there, will you? I was playing it this afternoon.”
When he pressed the switch down the music was that old waltz from The Chocolate Soldier.
“Aren’t you going to give me some of this dance,” she asked, “my Hero?”
“Don’t kid me, Dot,” he said when he put his arm around her.
“My Hero” was still playing when Albert handed him his gloves and cap.
I had been exposed to similar evenings myself and I particularly remembered one occasion on which Dottie had taken me out to see the town. It was during my brief vacation from the Paris Bureau and on a night when Henry Peale was suffering from a head cold. I had never had the sort of money to go to the places where Dottie wanted to go that night and I was lucky enough to be in a position to tell her so. I had suggested that we go somewhere in the Village.
“Now, Sid,” she said, “of course I know you can’t afford it. Take this, and if we run through it, I’ll pass you some more under the table.” And she handed me a packet of crisp new bills and told me to be sure to give ten dollars to the captain, at which point I told her that I was not a gigolo.
“Now, Sid,” she said, “I know how confusing this is for you because it was for me once, but stop being silly and remember that some people play with different-colored chips. Consider it a social experiment, darling.”
I finally let her give me the money to pay for the party on a social experimental basis and because she was anxious to show me how she was living. I had never before been so aware of the uneven distribution of wealth, and I learned a lot from the experience. As Dottie told me herself, people who played with different chips had different thought processes, but Dottie could still step down from her new environment, and she could see with malicious pleasure what the environment did to me.
“It will come easier the next time,” she said, “when I pass over the cash. Naturally it’s demoralizing, but why shouldn’t I debauch you?”
That was exactly why there had never been a next time. I could see the corrosive influence of making free with someone else’s money, but then I had known Dottie for so long that we were able to discuss the subject without the least embarrassment.
“You’re always so damned difficult,” Dottie said, “but I don’t see why we can’t still be friends.”
I was not the one who was difficult. Friendship was usually complicated if you played with different chips and I had not been sea-green and incorruptible. I had taken the money—once.
In many ways this problem must have been even more confusing for Mel Goodwin than it had been for me. He had never seen much of New York high life on an army officer’s pay, with a wife and two kids who needed food and clothing. He had been to “21” once on a big blowout two days before he had sailed with “Torch,” but he had left the crowd before they reached the Stork. “21” was enlarged now and in front of it were all those iron jockeys that had once been hitching posts. He had never dreamed of going to the bar there with anyone like Dottie Peale and he had never dreamed that people would know who he was when she introduced him. Somehow Dottie made it all like something in those movies you kept seeing at the officers’ clubs. They had double Martinis—he remembered that she always liked Martinis—and he looked curiously around the room at the checked tablecloths and the hurrying waiters.
“Mel,” Dottie said, “why didn’t you come back sooner?”
“Well,” he said, “there are still pieces of an army over there, and I kept thinking the Russkis might act up. I like it with an army. It’s simpler.”
“Do you think I’m complicated?” she asked him.
“Yes,” he answered, “but I don’t mind some complications.”
“What are you going to do now you’re back?” she asked him.
“Dot,” he said, “I wish I knew. I don’t know what they can do with Joes like me, now we’re back.”
“Oh, Mel,” she said, “you don’t sound happy.”
When he helped her into the limousine her skirts made that swishing sound and she laughed. “Listen to the wave,” she said, “running up the bitch.”
Dottie was the only woman he had ever known who could be completely feminine and still talk like a man. He seemed to have known her always by the time they were half through dinner. She was interested in everything he said, not that he could remember clearly what they talked about, except that most of the conversation was about the relationship between men and women and what made such relationships successful.
“You know,” he remembered that she said, “every woman wants to make a man happy. That’s all she ever wants.”
Somehow she brought back to his mind all sorts of things he had forgotten—things about the Point and about when he was a kid—and then they began remembering things that had happened in Paris.
“It was all just something off the map, Dot,” he said, “like the fourth dimension or the Einstein theory or something.”
“Mel, dear,” she said, “do you think we’re off the map right now?”
“Yes,” he said, “because it can’t last, Dot.”
“Why can’t it?” she asked.
“Why, look at you,” he said, “and look at me.”
“It might,” she said. “I’m looking.”
When the waiter brought the check, he brought a pencil with him, and naturally he placed them before Mel Goodwin. What with the champagne and the caviar and everything, it was lucky he had brought that loose cash.
“Hand it over and let me sign it. It’s my party,” Dottie said. “There used to be a song about it, didn’t there?—‘When the waiter came she simply signed her name; that’s the kind of a baby for me.’”
The future must have hung in the balance, and the difference between Mel Goodwin and me was that he lived by regulation.
“Not my kind of baby, Dot,” he said.
The strange part of it was that she seemed surprised, which rather offended him until suddenly she looked wistful.
“God damn,” Dottie said—she was always picking up someone else’s trick of speech—“it’s awfully nice to feel helpless again.” And then she said one final thing and Melville Goodwin told it to me.
“Why can’t things be like this always?”
Calypso must have said it, and Circe, and Cleopatra undoubtedly said it to Antony, if not to Julius Caesar.