TO REPORT THAT GREGORY Johns was any less apprehensive than Thornton about a possible rescinding of Imperial Century’s great decision would be to place so severe a strain on credibility that the point were better left unmade. Yet the unlikely truth is that during the restless days of the unsigned contracts, Gregory’s chief focus for anxiety was his approaching departure for Hollywood and that he was, as a result, incapable of fine, pure concentration on any other issue.
He had brought the trip on himself—in justice to Thorn and to Hathaway, he never lost sight of the point—but who could have thought that a chance remark, in the days when magnificent speeches cost him nothing, would ever have resulted in the twin strips of railroad tickets in his breast pocket?
He could, of course, have stopped that part of the movie deal, but he had been unable to reject what looked like a chance of getting a more honest and uncompromising picture. He had suspected his own motives, had accused himself of disguising a simple greed for another ten thousand dollars under a cloak of nobler motives, and had recalled horrid stories of many other authors who had built their own set of neat rationalizations before capitulating to Hollywood and its blandishments.
He, at least, would be back in four weeks.
But the fact of his going at all was, even now, almost unassimilable. Do what he might, he could not accept it fully, though at this very minute Abby was in the bedroom beginning to pack the few new things they had bought for the trip, and though he was at his desk, dutifully trying to clear it of neglected correspondence and of the remaining newspaper pieces to which he was committed.
It was the first of March and they were going on the fourth. He kept trying to imagine himself arriving in that city of glittering legend, going to the studio, meeting the fabled men from whose Jovian foreheads countless full-bodied—and luscious—Minervas had sprung forth.
He reminded himself that this same studio also employed producers, writers, directors who, from time to time, had actually offered their cameras “serious adult pictures,” and he comforted himself with the thought that it would be with these men he would be working. He began to frame the discussions he would have with them, about the sequences of scenes, about how to condense and telescope without watering down the book. For some reason, the vision of happy agreement eluded him; everything he imagined himself saying was in rebuttal of something they were all holding out for. He tried to picture himself seriously setting about the business, every Saturday morning, of endorsing a pay check for two and a half thousand dollars, but this also eluded him. Two and a half thousand—it was puzzling that his mind preferred to phrase it this way. The over-all price for the book had been split, on Hathaway’s and Thorn’s insistence, for tax reasons, into five equal annual payments, but he rarely thought about thirty thousand a year for five years, and couldn’t remember to deduct Digby and Brown’s share when he did. There was a curious rolling grandeur in the phrase “one hundred and fifty thousand dollars,” and he heard it, like a secret thunder, among the peaks and valleys of his loftier moments.
Then he would come back to the trip itself and the grandeur would depart and the peaks crumble. It was the social part of Hollywood that he could scarcely contemplate. He tried not to think of the inevitable dinners and parties to which the studio executives would invite them, and whenever he did think, the old inner tightness took charge of his lungs and stomach. At least twice a day he would visualize one of these parties, with everybody in evening dress, himself strangely encased in new black wool and starched linen, attempting small talk and witty banter with some reigning queen of the place. Or he would see himself at a long dinner table, next the hostess; he was gazing at the crystal and silver and candles and flowers, while he floundered desperately for something to say.
At these appalling visions, his breath would catch, his pulse race, and his heart burst with longing for the time when the icebox and Saks Fifth Avenue had seemed important problems.
Life, Gregory Johns thought without attempting to be original, changes. Hat had changed. Hat was being difficult about not going with them to Hollywood. Hat wanted to quit Hunter now so she could go too—and the hell with the lost credits and the longer stay at Poughkeepsie. The prospect of living alone, for a month, free of supervision except for the Zatkes’ promise to look in on her, had consoled her only briefly. Even her new clothes from Saks and the vista of Vassar had begun to lose their honeymoon charms. Though Gregory Johns considered himself no less a doting father than any other father of a pretty daughter, he had come slowly to admit that good fortune was indeed making Hat a bit of a problem. A pain in the neck, he amended, let’s face it.
“Oh, Mother, please! Now that I know I’m leaving Hunter anyway, I can’t finish out the semester.”
“We’ve talked it out and out and out,” Abby said. “We both think you have to.”
“But I can’t bear the place one more day—it’s ghastly.”
“Please don’t say ‘gahstly,’ dear,” Abby said, broadening the “a” even more than her daughter had done. “You’ve never lived in England.”
“That’s another thing. You and Daddy seem to think everything I do these days is artificial or superior or something.”
“Not everything,” Gregory Johns said.
They all go through phases, he told himself now. They get over them, but it’s tough waiting. He sighed and was suddenly grateful for the pile of letters on the desk before him. Purposefully, he read the top one again, drew his yellow pad toward him, sharpened a pencil, abandoned both in favor of notepaper and a pen, and rapidly wrote, “Dear Mr. Lithergowan.” Then he paused.
There were twelve or fourteen letters in the pile; he could not possibly finish them all before starting for town. This would be the last time he would see Ed for over a month, but, clearly, he ought to sit right here and get through every last answer. Since the news of Imperial Century had been printed, his mail had changed character too. Most of this pile had come in envelopes marked URGENT, addressed to him at Digby and Brown, and readdressed, sometimes within the same week, by Ed Barnard’s secretary.
He glanced at the date of Mr. Lithergowan’s letter: February 19th. It was from the Society for the Prevention of Atomic Wars, and was an invitation to address the June 27th dinner meeting of the national council of SPAW at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. He studied the typed line under the signature of the Executive Secretary, saw that it was Lithengowan, and squiggled his pen over the “r” to make it an “n.” It’s no Communist bunch, he thought, or they wouldn’t let a world government speech into the room.
At this point Gregory Johns fell victim to another of his nightmares. He was on a lecture platform before an audience of a thousand people; he was being introduced; they were applauding, looking up at him expectantly; he tried to say, “Ladies and Gentlemen,” but his Adam’s apple was a blob of dry glue on his larynx and he could only stand there working his mouth like a bellows at a fireplace—
Scrupulously he perfected the curl of the comma after the “Lithengowan,” and began to write.
“I am deeply grateful for your invitation to address your June 27th meeting, and of course you must know that I am in heartiest sympathy with the basic purpose of your organization. However, as so many authors do, I have had to make an unbreakable rule, based in part on my belief that the primary function, and perhaps greatest usefulness, of—”
He held his pen in the air, read what he had written, and crumpled the sheet into a tight ball. He drew another sheet from the drawer and wrote again:
“Dear Mr. Lithengowan,
“I can scarcely plead a previous engagement for your dinner meeting five months from now, so I shall not even try to soften my refusal. I have—”
This sheet became an even tighter ball. How goddam coy could you be? And how positive that the unknown Mr. Lithengowan would regard a refusal as a blow that needed softening? He reached for a third sheet.’
“Dear Mr. Lithengowan,
“It is quite impossible for me to accept your invitation for June 27th, but I thank you for extending it.
“Yours very truly,
“Gregory Johns”
He sat back, satisfied at last. He addressed an envelope, folded the page, inserted one corner, and shouted, “Abby, could you look at this?”
Abby came in and read the note. “It’s fine,” she said.
“I wrote a couple of other ones first, but this is all right, isn’t it?”
“It’s pretty brief, but I don’t see why it shouldn’t be.”
“It’s abrupt and arrogant as hell,” he said.
He ripped it across and put Mr. Lithengowan at the bottom of the pile. The next letter was from “Author Meets the Critics,” and as he lifted it, the one below that was revealed. “Tex and Jinx,” Gregory said. “Aren’t they the lucky ones, both having X’s?” He began to riffle through the remaining sheets. “Here’s one from Pegeen and Ed Somebody, and one from a show called ‘Who Said That?’ and one from ‘Meet the Author’ and a couple from other political organizations and one from—”
Suddenly he opened the center drawer of his desk and swept the whole lot into it and out of sight. “I’ll get at them tomorrow,” he said, slamming the drawer and feeling immensely better.
“I can’t see why you won’t let me or Thorn do them.”
“Thorn’s in deep enough with the telephoned ones.”
“He loves it. He’s at his best fobbing people off, and leading them on, and being in the middle of a big to-do.”
“I know he is.” He took off his glasses and dug at his eyes with the knuckles of his index fingers. The arrangement about business calls had begun one morning when the switchboard girl at Digby and Brown had breathlessly called Thornton’s office in a crisis of indecision and apology. She hated to bother him but the Zoring Smith Lecture Bureau was in a terrible state and so was she and she had phoned Mr. Gregory Johns three times with no answer at all and the Zoring Smith Lecture Bureau had an emergency about a lecture for that very evening and she just didn’t know what to do. Thornton, quite happily, had authorized her to give out his office number any time she wished to; he was his brother’s representative and it was no bother at all. Informing Gregory of this step, Thorn had urged the wisdom of extending it to official mail as well. Business letters were murder for Gregory but duck soup for him and there would be tons of them once the book was published and the movie on Broadway and in Podunk.
“I’d let him do some of the mail,” Gregory went on, “if he weren’t so pigheaded. If we did buy him a car or some other big present, he’d refuse that too and we’d have another fight. We don’t fight much but that one sure was a peach.”
“We’ll think of something.”
They looked at each other. They kept coming back to last week’s quarrel: Thorn had exploded into shouting rage. “For God’s sake, if I was right not to take commission when a book earned eleven hundred dollars, what the hell magic makes it O.K. if it earns eleven thousand or a hundred and eleven thousand or a million?” Gregory had shouted back, “But if I’d pay any other agent over twenty thousand, what makes it O.K. for me to pay you not a red cent?” “Lay off, will you? I didn’t have one damn thing to do with the book club, and as for the movie sale, I wanted to try it, and it worked. I’m satisfied.” “Quit thinking only of whether you’re satisfied—how do you think we’re going to enjoy keeping that twenty thousand?”
The deadlock was still unbroken and Gregory and Abby had come to hate it for existing. Neither one had the soul of a bookkeeper, yet they felt that any small present was somehow inadmissible and verbal gratitude no longer adequate. As Gregory had once pointed out, when somebody works day and night for a month to put a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in your pocket, you couldn’t feel right merely by saying, “Gosh, thanks.”
Now Abby said, “Thorn doesn’t want a new car. He’s having a great lark and he gets a big bang out of seeing his name in the papers.”
Gregory looked reflective. “I bet it’s not going to be much fun, getting back to fire insurance and fur floaters, when all this is over. Thorn must think of that.”
“Cindy says he’s reading all your old books again.”
“Just Partial Eclipse. He’s already talked to Hathaway about it.”
They had met Hathaway just once. It was an odd evening; they were so grateful for his belief in The Good World, and for everything he had done about it, that they had expected to like and admire him immensely. But they found him somehow glib even about his political convictions, and they thought him vain and too ready with mentions of well-known people.
“Knowing Hathaway has changed Thorn a lot,” Abby said. “Don’t you think so?”
“He started changing before he ever saw Hathaway.”
“Before?”
“Something got boiling up in him that night Digby phoned from Chicago.”
She tried to remember anything significant in the way Thorn had behaved at the anniversary party. When Gregory pocketed impressions for further examination, he usually drew them out later, one by one, for her to examine with him, but he had said nothing about this.
“I’ve sort of been wondering,” Gregory went on slowly, “whether Thorn wouldn’t really like to chuck his whole life and start over.”
“His whole life?”
“Let’s say, just the insurance part of it.”
“Do you mean just the insurance part?”
“I’m not sure what I mean.”
Two hours later, Gregory Johns, both overcoat pockets bulging, opened the door of his editor’s office. Ed Barnard waved a pencil in greeting, made an infinitesimal x in the margin of a manuscript, dictated to his secretary, “page 430, pearly again,” and made a gesture indicating, “No more now.” Gregory Johns knew that some young author would soon be listening to one of Ed’s best little lectures, on the over-polished phrase, the burnished, lacquered, curved perfection that so often was mistaken for something to say. Except for those specks of crosses in the margins, Ed never marked up a manuscript; he held that editors who felt free to track over an author’s work were exhibitionists and vandals, besides being victims of a jealousy they would angrily deny.
When his secretary left, Ed began to put the manuscript into its box and said, “I’ll have fifty pages of notes on this one. Hello, Gregory.”
“Hello.” He waited, watching the care with which Ed did it. No curled and dog-eared pages either, he thought, anymore than ringed words and long annotations. The dictated notes were for Ed Barnard’s eyes only, mnemonic tricks to guide him later on. To the author of the manuscript, Ed would never say, “pearly again,” or anything else that could wound or depress; Ed never forgot the uneasy pendulum of self-distrust and self-confidence which made the arc of most writers’ lives.
Ed Barnard covered the box, said “There,” and turned toward his visitor. Without speaking, Gregory Johns dumped the contents of both pockets on the desk. Ed glanced through the letters, one by one, a smile of recognition on his face. When he finished, he said, “I wish they wouldn’t all use twenty-pound rag-content bond with engraving that scratches your thumb,” and handed the letters back.
“Does this kind of thing really sell books?” Gregory asked.
“Some of it does.”
“For instance, what?”
“For instance, lecturing. I don’t mean a sporadic speech here and there, but an arranged tour, almost certainly.”
“Not one dinner at the Waldorf?”
Ed shook his head for no. “But on a country-wide tour, there’s a lot of preparation and build-up. Bureaus like Zoring Smith send out leaflets, put ads in the local papers, and get the chief bookstore in the town to send over a stack of books for display in the lecture hall. Then the worshiping ladies in the audience are told they could get an autograph if they had a book.”
“Does anybody fall for it?”
“Sure. Sometimes fifty or a hundred copies go at one clip. It depends on how famous the author is.”
Gregory said, “What about radio and television appearances? Does that sell books?”
“Some people think it doesn’t and others think it does.”
“What do you think?”
“I’m not sure. It ties in, though, with everything else—it makes the author more famous, so his lectures draw more people, so he autographs more, so the radio and television people want him on more shows, so the publisher sells more books.”
He laughed but Gregory Johns did not.
“How many books?” he said.
“There’s no telling. I’d guess a few thousand extra.”
“Three thousand? Ten? What’s a few thousand extra?”
“It varies so, it’s hard to say, even with a B.S.B. selection, and a movie coming. Of course a dud wouldn’t sell one extra copy if the author stood on his head in Brentano’s or Kroch’s.”
“But with B.S.B., and the movie, would you guess the extra sale at five thousand, if I did all the things?”
“I might.”
“More than five?”
“Let’s say five.”
“How much does Digby and Brown make on a copy?”
“That varies too, with size of printings, production and paper costs, the amount of advertising, the price the book is sold at—”
“Will mine be three dollars or two seventy-five?”
“I don’t think they’ve set that yet.”
“If it’s three, I’d get forty-five cents royalty on a copy, wouldn’t I?”
“Once you’re past a certain sales figure—and you’ll go past this time.”
Gregory tilted his head to one side and looked like a man doing arithmetic. “So if I said yes to everything and sold five thousand extra copies, I’d earn about two thousand dollars more and D. and B. somewhere about the same.”
“About.” Ed Barnard looked at him judiciously. “You’d have to say yes to lecturing too, though. A few radio shows, and television, wouldn’t do it.”
Gregory Johns nodded, three or four times, and then fell silent. He did not notice the pack of cigarettes Ed shoved toward him across the desk. He began to hum “Happy Days Are Here Again,” and quit sadly after two measures; it came out sounding like the opening of “The Barcarole.”
“Ed, does Digby feel I owe him every possible co-operation now, after all these years of small sales?”
“I suppose so.”
“Does Alan Brown?”
“Probably.”
“And McIntyre and everybody?”
“I imagine they do.”
“Do you?”
“No.”
The word fell neatly, a small round stone. Gregory Johns sat back in his chair and smiled for the first time since he had come in. Ed reached forward and slid the pack of cigarettes closer; this time Gregory saw it and began to smoke. A minute went by. Then he said idly, “Do you ever listen to ‘Author Meets the Critics’?”
“It’s on television now. You can watch it, as well as listen.”
“That must be worse.”
“You can see the author squirm.”
Involuntarily, Gregory Johns closed his eyes. “It’s a survival of human sacrifice rites, isn’t it?”
“Except that the human sacrifice chooses to be sacrificed,” Ed Barnard said affably. “He walks in on his own two feet, with nobody prodding him in the behind, and submits to being slaughtered.”
“Why does he? Why would any author do it?”
“I’ve been telling you why, a lot of why’s.”
“Practical ‘why’s’—but they don’t explain all of it.”
“Wanting to be famous might. Our national god is Celebrity, isn’t it? To be recognized by shopgirls and headwaiters and taxi-drivers—isn’t that glory?”
“We worship money and success just as much,” Gregory Johns said.
“How many people would collect at Grand Central to see Rockefeller or Ford or Du Pont come through the gates?”
Gregory Johns said, “Touché.” It was the only French word he ever spoke aloud, being the only one of whose pronunciation he was fully confident. “Our national god? Is Europe any different?”
“Of course not. But we have more radios and more television sets and more picture magazines and more newsreels and movies and signed photos and ads endorsing beer and cigarettes—shall I go on?”
He laughed and this time Gregory joined in. “And more best-seller lists,” Ed went on. “In England and France there’s no such thing, or anywhere in Europe. Book ads don’t shout ‘Number One Best Seller’ at you or even print total sales figures. There’s not half the super-duper tub thumping about a successful book that you get over here. I’m not saying they’re right and we’re wrong, mind you.”
“But look, Ed, it’s a pretty universal trait, to want success for your work, to admire it in others and even long for it yourself.”
Almost severely, Ed Barnard said, “Who’s talking about success in your work? But Robert Oppenheimer, say, or Fermi, or Urey, would any of them thrill a necktie clerk in a store if he bought a tie? I don’t know why I hit on nuclear physicists.”
“I can hit on authors myself,” Gregory Johns said. He sounded comfortable and relaxed. They both thought of authors.
Then Ed Barnard said, “No, we don’t go haywire in this country over success itself or over money itself. But Celebrity?” Unexpectedly, he bunched his fingertips and blew a kiss toward the ceiling.
On the following evening, Gregory and Abby borrowed Thorn’s car and drove out to Freeton, to say good-bye to Gerald and Geraldine, whom they had not seen for a month. They took Hat with them and were delighted that she was apparently becoming reconciled to being left behind. Gregory looked at her from time to time, grateful for this tardy development, and thought, She’s becoming a little beauty, all that curly blond hair and tipped nose and good color; I wonder whether she secretly enjoys her new troubles? Do I? he promptly asked himself, but was sidetracked from this uncomfortable notion by his daughter’s next remarks. Hat said softly, “Timmy Murton phoned this afternoon and asked me to the spring dance. He says the other boys are dying to meet me.”
The Murtons were Martin Heights dwellers also, and though the senior Murtons had never appealed strongly to Gregory and Abby, nor Gregory and Abby to them, Timmy was clearly destined to go down in Hat’s memory as “the first man I ever loved.” He was ten months younger and in a horror of shame about it, but at sixteen was a head taller than she, and the captain of his school tennis team. He was a good dancer, was given plenty of money for movies and banana splits, read comics and movie magazines exclusively, and could borrow his father’s Ford for an hour every time he had gone an entire week without swearing, smoking, or ducking his share of the dishes. His courtship of Hat had not become notably intense until recent weeks but thus far neither of her parents had speculated aloud about the sudden change.
As Hat went on about the dance, and what she would wear, Gregory Johns found himself thinking, The complications, the collateral results. You remain what everybody considers a failure and your life is uncomplex and quite manageable; you become what everybody considers a success and the ramifications go on and on. Not only for you, but for everybody connected with you. He thought of his sister Gloria and her husband Harry Brinton, and in the semidarkness above the glowing dashboard, he grinned widely.
Gloria had managed to endure the endless nuisance of babysitters until Thorn had phoned her the news of the movie sale. Almost within the hour, though the logic of the act was revealed only to Gloria herself, she had hired a full-bosomed English governess, who, it soon transpired, needed a minimum of four highly starched, perfectly ironed white uniforms a week. Harry Brinton, an assistant art director in Macy’s advertising department, and hard-pressed enough before this wanton extravagance, had angrily taken on secret free-lance work for a department store in Brooklyn, only to discover that he enormously enjoyed making a lot more money and that his righteous indignation quickly dissolved into a heartfelt gratitude he could not admit to his wife.
Gregory Johns cherished the memory of the phone call in which Harry had confided these confusing matters. There had been other phone calls, from Gracia and Georgia or their husbands, and a couple of letters from Gwen and Howie Chisholm in Wyoming. Only the Chisholms failed to report new difficulties in their private lives that could be traced to his own changed fortunes.
The news, in each case, had gone forth from Thornton on the very day Imperial Century had met the terms. Thorn had wired Wyoming, not having learned as yet from Hathaway that the telegram, like the letter, was obsolete even for personal communication, and had telephoned everybody else in the family. “I’ve sold Gregory’s book to the movies for a hundred and fifty thousand dollars—isn’t it great?”
“How do you mean, Thorn, you sold it?” One by one his dazzled listeners had got around to this question, and Thorn had immediately ripped off half of his laurels to make a crown for Hathaway—
“It’s the next exit,” Abby said.
“What?” Gregory glanced around him. “I hadn’t realized we were this far out.”
Hat was silent at last, and Abby glanced up at her husband. He was driving slowly, as he always did, what with his bad eyes and the fact that he could only keep in practice with a borrowed car. This trip was his idea; his parents would be hurt, he had said that morning, if they went off on anything so impressive as a transcontinental trip without dropping in to say good-bye. His mother’s delight and gratitude, when Abby had phoned to ask if it was “convenient,” had been touching. Abby tried to think of herself as a woman of seventy, and prayed she would not be so dependent on a kind gesture from Hat.
The car was turning into the small street where Gregory had grown up. Both curbs were lined with cars; he had to drive a block east and another block south before he could find a place to park. They walked back slowly. Apart from the traffic and the well-paved street, little was different since Gregory had left, home twenty years ago. The trees still bent in the wind off the bay, their bare branches glistening in the night dampness as if they had been brushed with a thin black oil. White picket fences shone against the empty space of winter lawns and far behind loomed the high square old-fashioned houses, with dormer windows breaking through the steep slope of their roofs. Yet, Abby thought, change had touched the old town. Television’s metal scarecrows perched on chimneys, gardens had been sliced in half for garages, over Main Street the sky was not the blue black of a country sky but the yellowish pink of a neon-tubed, bulb-spiked city.
“When I was eight or nine,” Gregory said to Hat, “I used to run all the way home from the library after dark. There weren’t even street lights down this way, and that house there”—he pointed to a huge dark shape—“with all those gables and porches, and cupolas used to give me fits.”
“I’d run even now. It looks like an Addams cartoon.”
“Here we are,” Gregory said, looking up. He used to think his house was huge too, though later he wondered how six children had ever been packed into it. It was a shingled house, square under its mansard roof, with a high unrailed porch running the width of it. Each spring, he and Thorny used to paint that porch with battleship-gray paint; their father gave them a dollar apiece for their labor, and always complimented them on doing it “like a couple of pro’s.” Once they had kicked over a can of paint; the thick grayness had poured over jonquils and lily-of-the-valley planted just below the edge of the porch, and Thorny and he had tried, with benzine, to wipe the flowers free of the oily viscous gray.
“There’s a party,” Hat said.
Gregory suddenly noticed that every window on the first two floors was lighted and that voices were drifting out to them. “There couldn’t be,” he said. But the front door was already opening, and his father was calling out welcome. As they greeted each other, Gerald said apologetically, “Your mother asked a few people over and somehow—” He waved to the rooms behind him.
The whole floor was mobbed. Geraldine appeared, bubbling with joy, kissing each of them, talking through everything they said. “So many people want to have a look at you, Gregory—”
“But, Mother,” he began. Unlike Hat, he never said “Mother” except when he was angry, and Abby threw him a warning look.
Geraldine said, “Now, Gregory, be good. I just asked Fanny and Edith and one or two, but everybody called up all day. We know so many new people now, who’ve never laid eyes on you, and they’ve been entertaining us, and I had to ask them back, didn’t I?”
She was in a new dress, not the old black taffeta but an electric blue of a stiffish material that made her look plumper than ever. Her curly white hair no longer reminded one of a child’s; it was marcelled and rigid and faintly blue. Under it her eyes sparkled, her color was high, and as she ushered them into the parlor, she laughed with pleasure.
Fanny and Jim Heston rushed up, and behind them came their two married sons and their wives. George and Edith Markham were there, and Amy and Jud Persall. Seated on sofas and chairs, but already rising to their feet, were Hiram Spriggins and his wife, and the old Blairs, and the Conroys. Other names flew about—somebody Simmons, a woman named Linda Peck, the McGills, Antons, Smiths, Garsons.
Oh, heavens, Abby thought. Mother Johns had firm hold of Gregory’s arm, and was piloting him about the room. From each knot that formed about the pair, phrases drifted back to Abby and she implored Fate to help her devise some quick escape. “Why, Gregory Johns, I remember that day you fell out of the second branch of—”—“Deeny, how does it feel to have a famous son?”—“I declare, I said to my husband, I’d never have dreamed that such a peaky child—”
Gregory was nodding, forcing smiles to his lips and words from his throat. “Thanks, Mrs. Heston, yes, it is wonderful”—“No, Horace, I never expected it at all”—“I don’t know when a movie takes a long time”—“It’s being published in late April”—“Yes, thanks”—“No, thanks—”.
Abby, too, was the center of admiring, congratulating, questioning faces, and off in the dining room, leaning back against the sideboard, the only one of the three thoroughly enjoying herself, Hat was surrounded by younger people. Abby caught her father-in-law’s eye. He at least feels guilty about this, she thought, he knows, he’s ashamed. But Mother Johns! She’s become the queen of Freeton, the Dowager Mother, the female Ward McAllister! Into Abby’s unheeding ear, Fanny Heston bubbled frothy joy. “Twenty years younger, I told Deeny, just made over. It’s true—she’s the most popular thing and so sweet and—”
“Would you excuse me a minute” Abby interrupted, with a meaningful look toward the downstairs lavatory. “The long drive—” She left Fanny in the middle of a syllable and went out to the hall. The telephone was in a deep recess, where the guests’ coats, one atop the other, hung thickly from hooks. She felt choked in cloth and fur as she made her way through them, but she pulled them together behind her into a partial screen and stooped to the instrument. She gave Thorn’s number, and begged Fate for two free minutes of time and a prompt answer to the ringing.
“Cindy, thank God you’re in,” she began. “Listen—” She gave a succinct account of what was happening. “Tell Thorn to call back here, right away. Make up some emergency, some sort of crisis has come up, the movie deal is falling through, anything, and Gregory must dash to New York for a meeting. Will you, Cindy? Please?”
Cindy’s big laugh was sympathetic. “On one condition,” she said, fairly shouting as she always did on the telephone.
“What condition? Hurry—somebody’ll catch me.”
Cindy laughed again and Abby could see her at the phone in New York, tall and handsome and redheaded and full of energy. “I won’t tell Thorn unless you come on over when you get out of there.”
“Tonight?”
“It’s only nine-thirty and we haven’t seen you for days. Drop Hat off at home and come and have a couple of swift drinks.”
“I’d better ask Gregory. He looks dead already.”
“Say yes, or I’ll forget to tell Thorn.”
“All right. Somebody’s coming.” She hung up. It was easy to disapprove of Cindy, but you forgave her when she was so responsive and hearty. Through the forest of coats, Abby went back to the din. On the sofa, Gregory looked trapped, as an unknown young woman lunged at him with an open, fountain pen and a sheet of white paper. “Please, Mr. Johns, so I can paste it in your book when it comes out.”
The telephone rang, but nobody moved, and Abby wondered if anyone but herself would hear it. It rang again. “The phone,” she called out to the room at large. “Didn’t I hear the phone?”
Old Gerald turned and made his way through the crowd. A moment later he came back, paused at Abby’s side, and whispered, “If you arranged it, I don’t blame you. No, sir, not a bit.” He called across the room, loudly, as if he wanted everybody possible to hear, “Phone, Gregory, it sounds urgent.” Gregory jumped to his feet and Abby joined him in the hall.
“Whatever terrible news Thorn has,” she said in an undertone, “don’t get scared. I put him up to it.”
His eyes brightened and he pinched her arm.