XXXV

“Generals Are Human. I Know of None Immune To Error.” —Omar N. Bradley

Though I had thought seriously that my friendship with Melville Goodwin was buried deep in a Never-Never Land, I heard from him exactly six days later. This was surely a short enough lapse, but somehow it seemed like a space of years. In the meantime, the feature story on the General had appeared, a little late for the full news impact, but still it was a good story. His face on the cover of the weekly periodical was a decorative portrait that must have pleased Colonel Flax and everyone else in Public Relations, and I imagined its being passed avidly around the Pentagon. Melville Goodwin’s head and shoulders appeared against the background of an American flag, and in one corner was the crossed-rifle emblem of the Infantry. The lines about his eyes and mouth were exaggerated and they made him appear stern, heroic and watchful, but underneath the picture appeared one of those smartly cryptic titles which I was afraid would be painful to the army—The color of Martinis grows lighter every year. Phil Bentley had intended this somewhat disconcerting caption to refer to the acceleration of world events, as I saw when I read his Goodwin piece on the inside pages, but I instinctively dreaded its effect on serious-minded parents of draft-age boys at a time when universal military training was a subject for wide discussion. I even thought of calling up Phil Bentley to tell him his idea was unfortunate, but then, Phil had probably been told this already, and it was too late anyway, and besides, it was the Pentagon’s problem and not mine.

Actually I had plenty of problems right in the office, what with hirings and firings and reconstruction. On the docket, among other things, was an annual challenge which was just around the corner. Although it was only late November, Miss Jocelyn, my new secretary, had already taken up the subject of Christmas. She had reminded me that I had been asked to make the main speech at the office Christmas party, and she asked if I did not want to prepare a draft of it to get it out of the way, because the editors of the office house organ wanted it in type as soon as possible for the Christmas number. Then after touching on the speech, Miss Jocelyn brought up the subject of Christmas cards. When I reminded her that it was still November, she said, quite correctly, that the office would send them to the right people at the right time, but that we were close to the deadline for having Christmas cards personalized; it would also be wise very soon to make up a list of gifts. Christmas had been a difficult time of year ever since I had married Helen, who took Christmas seriously and emotionally, and it was beginning to appear that Miss Jocelyn had the same ideas.

I would have to make an unusual effort this year about presents. The Yuletide was always an occasion for the healing of old wounds, and it was also a time that bred new hurt feelings, if you were not very careful. It seemed to me that I ought to give some sort of a present to Dottie Peale, although I did not know on what basis we were at the moment. I would also have to give something adequate to George Burtheimer, possibly a case of Scotch. Miss Maynard was no longer working for me, which was all the more reason why I should give her something handsome, and the same was true with Art Hertz. Also, there would have to be something for all the boys in buttons and something particular for Gilbert Frary that would be a permanent monument to affection, something original and intimate, like a first edition of Dickens’s Christmas Carol. By and large, it had not been an easy day at the office, and besides thinking of the party speech, there was the regular broadcast. I had been writing most of it myself, because the new writer, Billy MacBeth, was not as good as Art Hertz—and I must remember to give him something handsome, too, because after the New Year I would have to make a change.

It was just ten minutes before I was to go on the air, and I was still struggling with all these questions when Miss Jocelyn told me that a General Melville A. Goodwin was on the telephone. She had typed the name on the proper memorandum blank. She knew it must be important, because he had the private number. I could not recall ever having given him that number, but then I remembered that I had given it to General Gooch.

“Tell him to call at seven-twenty,” I said.

Miss Jocelyn said she had suggested this already, but she had been told that it was a matter of extreme urgency. That was what he had said—extreme urgency.

I felt resentful, I remember, not only toward him but toward the whole system he represented. I thought of the time that Goochy had barged in unannounced with that summons to Washington, and then there had been the original telephone call from the Pentagon—and it seemed years ago—about helping Colonel Flax with my old friend General Melville Goodwin—the call that had started everything.

War always gave those people too much power. Its fumes still remained in their heads like old Burgundy from the night before. Even the best of them developed a Messiah complex, once they had the rank. If they gave the word, they still expected you to snap into it with pleasure, always secure in the belief that their own affairs were of paramount significance. Goodwin now had so little to do with anything around me that I even found it difficult to believe that I had seen him only a few days before at the airport in Washington. It was nine and a half minutes before I would go on the air, and even his voice seemed far away.

“Look here,” he was saying, and he was angry, “I don’t want any more of this run-around. I want to speak to Mr. Sidney Skelton.”

“You’re speaking to him,” I answered, “but I’ve only got a minute, Mel.”

“Well, well, Sid,” he said. “Say, Sid, where do you think I am?”

“I don’t know,” I answered.

“Well, I’m right here at the Waldorf and I have a suite. The management gave it to me—no extra charge. Boy, that’s what comes of getting a piece about you in the magazines.”

Somehow his voice indicated that being at the Waldorf in a suite at no extra charge seemed both to have settled and to have explained everything.

“That sounds wonderful,” I said, “but I’ve only got a minute, Mel.”

“Well, drop everything and come up here, will you, Sid? Put this down—rooms fifteen eighty-three and four. It’s important.”

“I can’t,” I told him, “I’m going on the air in just eight minutes.”

“Oh, hell,” he said. “Can’t you get someone else to say your piece?”

“No,” I said, “of course I can’t, Mel.”

There was a brief incredulous pause.

“Well, how soon can you get up here?”

“Around half past seven,” I said.

“Well, see you make it and don’t keep me waiting,” he said.

“Yes, sir,” I said, and I accented the “sir” in a heavy way that was impertinent.

There was another pause that, told me he had caught my meaning.

“Now, now,” he said, “what’s the matter, son? Are you mad at me about anything?”

“No, sir,” I said, and I elaborated the last word again in my sincerest tone, and then he laughed.

“Horsefeathers, boy,” he said. “Well, make it nineteen-thirty. Are you happy, boy?”

“No,” I said.

“Well, that’s too bad,” he said, “because I’m feeling God-damn happy.”

Almost everyone I knew in New York had first arrived there in a fairly adult state instead of having been born there. We had all reached that city because of legends as old as Horatio Alger. We had all come there to make good and to set the world on fire, and we had all been in a highly impressionable state. In spite of the abrasions and frustrations we might have suffered since, those first impressions of New York were inviolate. No matter how the city grew and changed, its traffic and its skylines and its subway always looked as you first remembered them, gilded by an old magnificence, and among those early visions the most vivid and lasting of them all was always your first hotel.

Mine had been the old Murray Hill. I had dined there with Dottie Peale, after buying marked-down theater tickets at Gray’s Drugstore for a show that was fast folding. I cannot remember anything about the play, but it might have been only yesterday that we entered the marble-floored lobby of the Murray Hill and gazed upon the potted palms set among the rococo decorations of a simpler age. It did not matter that the main dining room was already stodgy—it belonged to the Murray Hill, and it had always remained in my mind as a unit of measure, a perpetual standard for gaiety and perfection. I might know better, but my youth and my first wonder and my first brash attempts at sophistication and my first shock at prices on a menu all belonged to the ghost of the Murray Hill. Years afterward whenever there was something special in my life to be celebrated, my instincts turned me back there. The first time I ever invited Helen to dinner and the theater I took her to the Murray Hill, and when I returned from Paris the first time, I stayed at the Murray Hill.

You could not escape those early loyalties easily, so I could see exactly what the Waldorf meant to Melville Goodwin. He had first entered the Waldorf with his bride and he had returned there after World War I. The old building was gone and the immense new structure was nothing like it, but still there was the name.

The outer door was open a crack and he had shouted to me to come in. He was standing in the center of a small impersonal sitting room that looked as functional as he did, and there was no sign of anything about him there except himself, no hat or coat or open suitcase, only Melville Goodwin. He might have just stepped in from somewhere else. Something about his appearance puzzled me for a second—he was wearing one of his older uniforms and not the new one I had seen him in so often since he had returned from overseas. It might have been the same uniform that he had worn in Paris. It had the same used look and the same efficient neatness and even the ribbons had a faded quality. It was a uniform that had been in and out of post tailor shops many times. It looked very well, but the sight of it disturbed me vaguely. It was not what he would ordinarily have worn in New York.

Something had changed in his manner, too. He looked careless and easy, almost as I remembered him at Saint-Lô.

“Well, hello, son,” he said. “I’m damned glad to see you,” and he did look glad. He gripped my hand hard and slapped me on the shoulder. “I called you up the first time I had a free minute. God damn, you’ve really got yourself dug in up there. I had a hell of a time getting through to you. How’re Helen and Camilla?”

“They’re fine,” I said, and then I found myself hesitating, because I did not know where to go from there. I did not know whether the ice was thin or thick, and his face showed me nothing, except that he did look happy, but this might have been the service veneer, the officers’ club party manner.

“How’s Muriel?” I asked. Somehow I was impelled to ask it, and not a line of his smile changed.

“Muriel’s fine,” he said. “She’s busy as a bird dog. By the way, she had a swell time up at your house. She really needed to get away for a while, and that reminds me, she gave me a package to give you to give to Helen—a piece of Chinese embroidery.”

“That’s awfully kind of her to remember it,” I said.

“You know Muriel,” he answered. “She’s like me—she never forgets anything. I’ll get it for you in a minute, but first I want to give you a little call-down, Sid.”

“A call-down about what?” I asked.

His smile had gone but his expression was gently paternal, and his words were measured.

“When I try to get you on the telephone, son,” he said, “I want to get through to you without telling my life history. Get this arranged in the future when I call you, will you?”

“Yes, sir, I will, sir,” I answered. “I’m sorry.”

“That’s all right,” he said. “Have you eaten yet?”

“I’m sorry,” I began. “I had some food brought in at half past six.”

“That’s all right,” he said, “I’ve eaten, too, and now we’d better have a drink. Call up room service, will you, for some ice and glasses? I’ve got some Scotch. Bink Collamore gave me three bottles. Do you know Bink Collamore?”

“No,” I said, “I don’t think so.”

“You wouldn’t have to think, if you had ever met him,” he said. “I’ve been with him all morning. I hadn’t seen Bink since Manila. Call up room service, will you, Sid?”

“I really don’t need a drink,” I said.

“Call up room service,” he said. “This is a sort of celebration, son—partly. You telephone and I’ll get the bottle.”

I was alone in the sitting room while I was calling room service, and he seemed to have vanished so completely that I almost felt he had not been there at all, until he came back and put a fifth of Scotch on the table.

“There,” he said, “now the room looks lived in, doesn’t it? Say, Sid, it’s funny, isn’t it, how we’ve got to be friends—close friends, I mean?”

He had moved me up in the category, which seemed strange to me when I had been thinking of him as part of the past.

“It’s funny,” he said again, “because you don’t often make friends—I mean close friends—after you’ve got the rank. It’s funny but just as soon as I checked in here, I began saying to myself, I’ve got to see Sid before I push off. I’d have called you earlier today, but I’ve had a lot of things to clear up.”

He sat down opposite me on the edge of an easy chair with his feet drawn under him in that habitual pose that made him always seem ready for anything.

“I didn’t know you were pushing off, Mel,” I said. “Where are you pushing to?”

His forehead wrinkled and he rubbed his hand over the back of his closely cropped head.

“Why, son,” he said, “haven’t you heard the news?”

It was like Mel Goodwin and all the rest of them to think that everyone knew when orders had been cut, especially close friends. I had not heard the news, but I remembered Muriel Goodwin’s pronouncement—Melville would have to be sent somewhere.

“Of course you haven’t heard,” he said, “I just keep thinking everybody ought to know. Listen, boy, they’ve asked for me at SCAP, right from the horse’s mouth in Tokyo, and I hardly know anyone on the inside in SCAP. It’s a damned tight little crowd. I’m flying out in two days and it’s going to be with troops and Goochy’s coming over, too. Frizell is coming back. They’ve been riding the hell out of him over there, but that part’s confidential. You know who Frizell is, don’t you?”

“No,” I said, “I don’t think so.”

“Listen, Sid,” the General said, “it’s time you got in touch with the setup.… Well, we’ll skip it because it’s confidential. I’m taking over from Red Frizell. I had it yesterday. It’s going to be the beginning of a build-up and it’s going to be with troops. Maybe it’s going to be a corps command. It’s about time they figured on a strategic reserve. God, I’m as happy as a kid. Congratulate the old man, will you, Sid? The only thing that gripes me is that you’re not coming, too.”

We both stood up and we shook hands formally, the way one should. “Well,” I said in my sincerest voice, “congratulations!” I did not know what any of it meant, because I did not know about future plans in the Orient, but I was thinking of Muriel Goodwin.

“Boy,” he said, “I’m still slap-happy. I still can’t believe I’d get anything like this. Boy, the only thing we need now is a war out there, and things don’t look so good in China, do they? I’ve got a hunch it might happen in Korea.”

He was never as dumb as you thought he was going to be. He knew his terrain and he had the prescience. It was the first time I had ever heard a serious mention of Korea.

A discreet knock cut off his flow of words sharply and there was an instant’s guilty pause, which was easy to understand. He had thought we were alone and he had been skirting the edges of indiscretion. In fact he had almost stuck his neck out.

“Yes,” he called, “who is it?” His voice had a new ring of authority. It was the room waiter with ice and glasses and soda, a timid-looking, middle-aged man, and I did not blame him for looking frightened.

“It’s only me, sir,” he said, “the room waiter, and the suite door was off the latch.”

Melville Goodwin glanced at him critically and reached clumsily for change in his right-hand trousers pocket. Uniform pockets were not designed for the graceful extraction of change.

“That’s all right,” he said. “Give me the check and a pencil. Thank you, waiter.”

“Do you wish me to open the soda bottles, sir?” the waiter said.

“All right, all right,” Melville Goodwin answered, “open them.”

We sat in a frosty silence while the waiter opened the bottles, and Melville Goodwin glanced meaningly toward the suite entry.

“God damn,” he said, “I’ve got to get over being careless. Sid, see that the outside door’s locked, will you? Close that entry door, too.” He was on his feet, removing the cap from the whisky bottle, when I returned from my mission, but I was sure he had taken a quick look in the bedroom. It was a simple little observation of military security. He had almost been indiscreet, but he was still as happy as a kid.

“Boy,” he said, “suppose we forget my last few remarks, just on general security principles, but if you knew what I know.”

“Well, I don’t,” I told him. “It’s all right, I can’t put any of it together.”

He was pouring out the Scotch and putting ice in the glasses.

“That’s so,” he said. “It’s all right as long as you don’t know who Frizell is,” and it did not seem to occur to him that he might have made me anxious to find out about the mysterious stranger named Frizell. It was often that way with security. “But, boy, I’ll tell you this—it’s just about time they had an activator in that setup, but picking me out ahead of all that South Pacific crowd … I’m on record to say that’s something. Of course some damn fools might say it was a demotion after Plans, but not for me it isn’t. They wouldn’t give it to anybody without a top combat record, and boy, I’m here to say I’m proud.”

He sat down on the edge of his chair again. He was lost in the glow of that unknown new assignment, and he had the shining morning face of Shakespeare’s schoolboy.

“Well, here’s to you, Mel,” I said. “Here’s luck.”

“Thanks,” he said, “maybe I’ll need it, but at the same time, I think I’ve got what it’s going to take to handle this one. God, I wish I could give you the whole blueprint—and you ought to have seen Goochy when he got the word, and you ought to have seen Muriel.… All this talk about an apartment in Washington … you ought to have seen her when she got the word. She was just as surprised as I was. She’s acting just the way she did when we started off for Bailey. You wouldn’t have thought any of us were grown-up.”

“I wish I could have seen her,” I said.

Melville Goodwin shook the ice softly in his glass.

“You know,” he said, “it reminds me of that poem.”

“You mean the one about Ulysses?” I asked.

“That’s it,” he said, “exactly. ‘Push off and sitting well in order smite’—and it’s a nice thing from Muriel’s point of view. There’s quite a little dog connected with it, not that I give a damn, but Muriel has a weakness for putting on the dog. Do you know what?”

“What?” I asked.

“Well, just confidentially, we’re moving into Frizell’s quarters, and I’ve got the word on them today. He has one of those houses in Tokyo that belonged to the Mitsuis—you know, part European and part Japanese—with dwarf gardens and all the old servants in kimonos and all paid for by the occupation. It will be something for Muriel to get her teeth into. Muriel’s really going to get something, and maybe it’s about time.”

I was familiar with the sort of real estate in Tokyo to which he was referring, half grotesque and half beautiful. I had a vision of miniature rock gardens, of stunted pines and azaleas and little pools—a setting for the usually ludicrous and unsuccessful effort of a wealthy Japanese to reconcile the East and West. Part of the house would be an overelaborated London villa stuffed with heavy carpets and velvet hangings and furnished with contorted imitations of European period pieces upholstered in suffocating velvet, and then, like an austere rebuke, would come the traditional Japanese dwelling in back, chaste and exquisite, with its scrolls, its matting, its sliding partitions and its rice-paper windows.

“Yes, maybe it’s about time that Muriel had something,” I said.

It was a strange world, I was thinking, and it was moving so fast that it was impossible to keep up with it any longer—for me, but not for Melville Goodwin, who had the service right behind him and his own simple lexicon of belief. He was safe again, safer than I would ever be in this changing world. There had been a stormy moment of maladjustment, but it was gone. He was off again, behaving exactly as he should, able to shed experience, but still some thought made him stare solemnly at his glass.

“You know,” he said, “it’s queer how a thing like this clarifies your thinking and changes your point of view. I don’t seem to be the same person I was before I got the word. I don’t know what’s been the matter with me lately.” He looked at me with cold deceptive innocence. “You follow what I mean, don’t you?”

“Yes,” I said carefully, “I guess I do, partly.”

He could see things without intermediate shadows. I knew he was facing an awkward moment of confession, but his frankness saved the awkwardness.

“All right,” he said, “let’s lay it on the line. I had never thought of myself as being humanly inexperienced, but by God, I must have been. Let’s lay it on the line. Maybe I don’t understand about women, Sid. Let’s leave it at that, shall we?”

He had almost said all that was necessary. The clear truth of his innocence explained his aberration. He was not the sort of person who understood women, and this was almost enough to close the incident.

“Say,” he said, “did you ever hear the story about the southern gentleman of the old school who felt that he ought to give his son a little briefing on sex?”

“No, I don’t think I ever have,” I answered.

He was about to push off on another of his stories, and he smiled in anticipation.

“Well, it goes this way. When he was face to face with the boy, there didn’t seem to be a damned thing to say. That’s the point, not one damned thing, and that’s the way I feel about sex right now. All he could say was, ‘Listen, son, you’re getting to be a big boy now and you’re going out and around, and all I can tell you is this: Never put sweetening in your liquor, and try to tell the truth.’”

Melville Goodwin looked at me expectantly, as though he had told one of his best stories, and he was disappointed when I made no comment.

“Well, maybe that’s all there is to it,” he said. “Maybe I did sort of sweeten up my liquor.… All right, I know now what that gentleman of the old school meant. Take Dottie Peale. Maybe I ought to have run around some when I was younger. I don’t know what I was thinking of. Isn’t that the damnedest thing?”

He looked at me curiously, but I did not answer.

“You always knew I was being a damn fool, didn’t you?”

“Well, I wouldn’t put it quite that way,” I said.

“Horsefeathers,” he said. “I had never faced up to it, that’s all—not that she isn’t a nice girl. She’s a very remarkable person.”

“That’s so,” I answered, “she’s remarkable.”

“It’s sort of rugged, isn’t it,” he said, “to go to someone and just say you’ve been a damn fool, but I like to think I tell the truth.”

“You mean you’ve seen Dottie?” I asked.

“Hell, yes,” he said. “You didn’t think I’d write her a ‘Dear John’ letter, did you? Hell, yes, I saw Dottie at five this afternoon.”

He set his drink on the table and smoothed the wrinkles in his blouse. Perhaps he should have left his story at that. Whatever had happened belonged to no one but him and Dottie Peale.

“I don’t know much about these things, but she was wonderful,” he said. “I don’t know how she ever managed it, but she made it seem all right. She never let me feel for a minute that I was ducking out. In fact she made it all seem like something to be proud of. I’ll never forget her, Sid.”

For some reason or other, nothing in that confession sounded tawdry or shopworn, when every element in it should have. Something in Melville Goodwin prevented it. There was always a quality in him of simple fact that raised him above the obvious. There was a metal in him that life had never tarnished, though it possessed a confusing luster for people like Dottie Peale and me. He was a stranger from a strange world which we could never touch.

“Yes, by God, I am proud of it,” he said. He shook his glass slowly, watching the ice cubes carefully. “Of course,” he went on, “I took this up with Muriel last night. It all just came over me. I had to tell her I’d been a God-damned fool, and she was wonderful. She said it was only decent to clear it as quickly as possible with Dottie. She even helped me plan what to say.”

He was watching me, and sometimes he had a way of seeing everything, and he must have read something in my expression.

“You would have done that, wouldn’t you,” he asked, “if you had been in my shoes?”

“No,” I said, “I don’t think so. I don’t believe I’d have had the guts. No, I wouldn’t have done it in just that way.”

He shook his head slowly.

“That isn’t guts,” he said. “It’s only truth. There are some things you have to lay on the line—some things. For instance.…” He picked up his drink again. “There’s the flag, for instance.”

“What?” I said.

I could not see why Old Glory should enter into it, but then he had always been an Old Glory Boy.

“There’s the flag,” he said again, “and there’s taking care of the men and never telling them to do anything that you won’t do yourself. That has nothing to do with guts.” His eyes narrowed slightly. He could always see more than you thought he was going to. “You think I’m a pretty simple guy, don’t you?”

“No, sir,” I said, “I wouldn’t call you simple.”

“Well, it doesn’t make a damned bit of difference,” he said. “I don’t know how it is but I feel like a good boy who has done the right thing. Say, Sid, do you know what I’d like to do tonight?”

“No,” I answered.

“Well, it’s just a whim,” he said, and he looked at me doubtfully. “I don’t know when we’ll get the chance again. How about our staying here tonight and polishing off some of this liquor in a serious way?”

It was a curious sort of ending and yet somehow it seemed appropriate. It meant that he was human after all, and it was a way of bridging a gap that divided us.

“… Just because we’ve seen a hell of a lot together,” he said, “just because—oh, hell, there isn’t any reason.”

“Well, I don’t mind,” I said.

“Boy,” he said, “I knew you’d be right with me.” When he smiled, he looked like young Mel Goodwin from the Point.

“There used to be a bugler at Bailey,” Melville Goodwin was saying. “His last name was Lowther—funny that this should come back to me now. He was always getting into trouble, but he could really blow the calls. Even when he was in the pen, the Old Man used to order him out under guard to play taps. By God, when you heard that man do taps, it would hit you in the heels. It always eased you down and made everything clear—all the answers in the book. I remember what the Old Man said one night when taps was over—that was old Jupiter Jones. I’ll tell you some good ones about him later. He was sitting on his veranda with a bottle of Old Home Elixir for his cough, when Lowther marched by on his way back to the pen—the guard behind him, bayonet and everything. The Old Man had a real sense of humor.…

“‘Lieutenant,’ he said to me, ‘go down, will you, and see that that son-of-a-bitching bugler is locked in tight. I want him where you can get at him so he can blow taps over me when I die.’

“It’s funny I should remember a thing like that, but you really should have heard him.… It really was the answer.… I sort of wish we had that son-of-a-bitching bugler here now.…”