IN THE END, GREGORY and Abby drove back. A certain succinct statement of Hat’s had made this possible, a statement Gregory cherished, though privately, since Abby could not, or would not, share the delight it gave him.
When the long-distance call to Martin Heights had finally gone through, it was supposedly a three-way conference, with Abby in the living room and himself on the bedroom extension. However, until the close of the discussion was in sight, he had cravenly let Abby carry most of the load alone. He had thoroughly admired the restraint and tact with which she had probed for evidence, to allay or support her worst, fears, though he had secretly deprecated her lack of faith in their daughter’s natural good sense and in their own upbringing. At last it had dawned upon Hat where her mother’s skillful questioning was really leading, and in that tone of barely concealed contempt so characteristic of loving daughters of seventeen Hat had finally met it head on.
“Oh, Mother! You’re trying to cross-examine me about are we having an affair!”
“Why, Hat, I—”
“Honestly,” Hat interrupted crisply, “nobody I know would do anything so corny!”
Gregory had laughed into the telephone. This, it turned out, had been an error; afterwards Abby laid him out more roundly than she had done for years. And when, after a long talk that same evening with Mary Zatke, Abby had canceled her air reservation, Gregory had disgraced himself once more.
“I knew nobody else was going to drive that car home. I saw the fire in your eye when Cindy made her offer.”
The only thing Abby had approved of in his entire performance was that he had gone stern all over with Hat about her attendance at classes. “I’ve never threatened anything in my life, Hat,” he had said, “but if you get low grades at Hunter, there will be no Vassar for another full year from next October. You are going to stay put until you leave with a decent record behind you. Get it?”
Hat had got it and during their remaining days in Hollywood, two further letters from her convinced them that scholastic redemption had begun. Gregory magnified this one virtue into all virtues, succeeding so well that most of Abby’s original eagerness for their return by car was restored.
They drove off an hour after Gregory’s last afternoon at the studio. April had brought a sharp rise in temperature to all of Southern California, and Thorn had relayed advice from many experienced motorists that they drive mostly at night until they were beyond the heat of the desert. This advice suited Gregory’s impatience to be off on their adventure; they decided that, despite their afternoon start, they could do nearly three hundred miles for the first lap, to a town near the Arizona line. Without consulting them, Thorn telephoned ahead for reservations in an air-conditioned motor court there. “You’ll appreciate it,” he said with authority. “Even at night, that desert can boil.”
It was two in the morning when they arrived. As long as they had been in motion, the heat had not been too intense, but whenever they stopped they were both grateful for Thorn’s farsighted efficiency. As they drove through the dark silent streets of the small city, there was no one about to direct them to their motor court; only on the railroad sidings was there sign or sound of life: locomotives being switched, freight cars being coupled and uncoupled, lanterns being waved in mysterious night signals. When they finally found their motel on the far side of the town, everything was in darkness save for a single bulb glowing above a sign at the entrance. The sign said “No Vacancy.”
“There must be a night bell,” Gregory said.
Uneasiness attacked Abby. The place looked white and clean and inviting, but it looked dead. After prolonged ringing, a man in a T shirt and pajama trousers opened the door marked “Office.” There was no welcome on his face and when Gregory spoke of reservations and gave his name, the man looked belligerent.
“We held the room till twelve,” he said.
“But you were told we’d get here late,” Gregory protested.
“If there’s a deposit mailed in, or wired in, we hold. Otherwise we let go after twelve. I can’t afford to get stuck with it, can I?”
“Why the hell do you take a phone reservation without saying that?”
The man looked aggrieved, and cut across any further discussion by telling them where there was another motor court they might try. Then he said, “Next time, mister, just remember one thing. Everybody who calls up is supposed to be a big shot in Hollywood. We can’t go by that. You’ll get fixed up all right at this other place. They only charge six dollars.”
Gregory turned on his heel.
The other place was atop the railroad tracks, or so it seemed to Abby. It was not air-conditioned; their box of a room smelled of dust and clattered with noise. As they undressed, Gregory said they must never stay on the road so late again, but Abby was too tired to answer him. They sat on the edges of their beds, testing the mattresses, and Gregory said, “Not too bad,” lay down, and stretched elaborately. A moment later he kicked off the top sheet and fell asleep.
Abby tried to imitate him and could not. The air lay upon her like paste; and in five minutes her nightgown was gluey; the freight cars outside the window might have been crashing together under her pillow. Eight dollars mailed or wired in, would have assured them the cool quiet of the other place; it was dreadful to be deprived of a night’s rest for so small a reason. If Thorn and Cindy were traveling with them, Thorn would have found out about deposits in plenty of time.
So petty a thought shocked Abby. She rose and went to the washbasin to slosh cool water on her face; the stringy little towel made her think longingly of their beautiful rooms in Beverly Hills. She dropped the towel hastily, and went to the door, opened it, and stood just inside the doorway, waiting for cooler air to strike her face. It did not do so. Leaving the door ajar, she returned to her bed and closed her eyes with determination. It really was outrageous of Thorn to have been so careless.
Outrageous, Abby thought. Outrage. The heat isn’t what’s keeping me awake. I can’t sleep because I’m so angry.
At Thorn?
Or at this come-down from what we’ve grown used to?
Or at that man treating us to cheap sarcasm about pretending to be big shots in Hollywood?
Abby’s eyes flew open and she sat up. Her last sentence echoed in her mind, and she looked quickly at Gregory as if he might have heard it. We are big shots in Hollywood—is that what she had felt in rebuttal? Mr. and Mrs. Gregory Johns don’t need to pretend anything?
No, Abby thought violently, no. I didn’t feel that. I couldn’t. Here I’ve been laughing at the frightened little scrabblings for importance you find everywhere—I couldn’t have gone in for it myself!
And towels and mattresses don’t matter that much to me; I don’t set any value by those trappings of smart hotels for rich people, I don’t, I don’t. It was lovely to have them for a while, a new experience, part of our adventure, but that’s not what life is all about, that isn’t what makes you happy or unhappy.
She fell back against her pillow; the bedspring creaked rustily and she heard Gregory shift his position. No wonder Gregory could sleep, heat or no heat; nothing had been churning inside Gregory about what was due him, what was fitting to his position. Finding the reservation canceled had made him angry, but on a different level. He was sore over arrangements gone wrong at two in the morning, over being sent off to look for a substitute room. But no outraged dignity, no outraged sense of power, no I am Gregory Johns, I am the author of The Good World, I am accustomed to the best.
Nothing like that had ever occurred to Gregory in his whole life and nothing like it ever would. What protected him from the hundred traps set by sudden fame and fortune? What guided him so surely? Upbringing, family example? Thorn had had the same. His sisters had had the same.
She had had the same too.
Abby drew a deep breath. Until tonight, she hadn’t been trapped either. Marriage to Gregory had shaped her attitudes and desires so closely to his that she hadn’t had to exercise any more care than he to stay clear, but this time she had suddenly stumbled off the path they had both found most natural and agreeable.
Well, it was a funny kind of trap; if you did stumble into it, you could turn right around and walk out of it the minute you felt like it. Abby turned over on her side. The minute you felt like it, the minute anybody felt like it. There was comfort in that. Trap. A queer word, onomatopoetic, snapping down on you. Trap. Trappings. The trappings of fame. A blurry image of Thorn and Cindy in evening dress began to form in her mind, but it gave way to a picture of Hat in her cashmere sweater. She wished Hat were right here so they could talk for a long time; she could imagine Hat running down the steps next week to welcome them home.
The next minute Abby was asleep.
The twentieth of April fell on a Wednesday, and two nights before, at Ed Barnard’s invitation, Gregory Johns had dinner alone with his editor. It was good to get away from the recurring Pat-and-Hat debate at home which had gone on intermittently for over a week, and even if Ed had not sounded so commanding, Gregory would have started for town with alacrity.
“I want to brief you about publication day,” Ed had said.
“You never briefed me on the others.”
“This one will be different.”
But the ominous note had disappeared when Gregory joined him at a small restaurant in the East Thirties. Ed showed no sign of getting to his briefing; he was in one of his we-have-all-night moods and it suited Gregory to have it so. Ed was avid for a full and unexpurgated account of Hollywood, and Gregory happily obliged, omitting only the topic of Hat. This omission came hard, since it forced him to withhold not only her cherished pronouncement, but also any mention of Patrick King’s several visits since their return.
Ed was joyous at what he did hear. “Going out there doesn’t seem to have changed you much,” he said at the end. “Maybe it proves that in Hollywood you find what you’re really looking for.” Ed stirred his coffee thoughtfully. “Or in New York or Paris or Sodom and Gomorrah. I’m not sure about Moscow.”
Gregory smiled. “Well, when we finally got back home, the family gathered to honor the heroes. But, of course—”
“With Cindy and Thorn beating you in by a full week,” Ed said appreciatively, “you and Abby were a bit of an anticlimax?”
“Something like that.”
“Like the second Armistice Day.” Ed watched the waiter clearing their table for dessert. “One remarkable little thing, Gregory. Between Thorn and Hollywood, the book’s a whole industry already! If we never published it at all, it would still be a whole industry to a lot of people.”
Ed Barnard fell silent and, illogically, Gregory thought of Patrick King. Several days ago, that young man had prevailed upon Hat to lend him an advance copy. His literary craving had apparently been thoroughly slaked by its physical possession; he talked frequently about “having it before it’s out,” but thus far had read no more than the first two chapters. Apart from a rather tony air, Patrick King could have been worse, and at a time when Hat was feeling fairly tony herself it was probably inevitable that Mr. King would appeal to her. Twenty-seven and good-looking and “in the theater,” as he invariably described himself, Patrick King would represent masculine glamour to a lot of girls more experienced than Hat. But just the same—
“It would still be a whole industry,” Ed repeated, as if there had been no pause after his last sentence. “Only we are publishing day after tomorrow.” The ominous note returned. “And this time they’ll be laying for you.”
“Now, Ed,” Gregory expostulated, “I’ve been pretty grateful to critics in the past and so have you.”
“That’s when you were getting criticism. Nice, pure criticism in a literary sense, an appraisal of where a book succeeded and where it didn’t, some decent weighing and balancing of virtues and faults. You’ll get some of that now too.”
“And some of what else?”
Ed Barnard looked at him quizzically, “Did you know that you wrote The Good World just to hit a big book club?”
“But I—”
“—and that you studied the Hollywood formula, carpentered everything to fit it, and typed it all on the keys of a cash register?”
“But my God—”
“—and that it isn’t even a novel? It’s a tract.”
“It is, hey?” Suddenly Gregory relaxed.
“Most certainly. Novels must deal with the eternal unchanging stuff of the human heart, love, pain, greed, jealousy. Didn’t you know all that?”
“Sure I did. The fear of war and the awful longing for peace—they’re not in the human heart at all. Sure I know that. Try again.”
“You’re being irreverent,” Ed said. “I’m not sure I like that. Critics know what novels must deal with, don’t they? Don’t even ex-critics who write learned little prefaces once a year for the Christmas trade in Thoreau and Thackeray tell you what all novels must deal with?”
“Who’s irreverent now?”
Ed Barnard lighted a cigar and managed to look like an ascetic pugilist turned banker. Gregory waited. He began to hum a tune; after three or four bars the melodic line went off on its usual tangent and, sighing once, he let it go.
“They may let you off a little,” Ed went on, “in spite of B.S.B. and the movie sale, because The Good World is a fantasy. In a fantasy, the author is given a little more leeway about political implications, even if his book makes money. But I wouldn’t count on it, Gregory, I wouldn’t count on it.”
“I won’t,” Gregory said docilely.
“Now that you’re beginning to listen to me, I’ll show you two reviews. We get next Sunday’s book sections on Monday now. That’s one reason I phoned you.” He reached into his pocket and drew out two folded pages of newsprint. “I wish I had Wednesday morning’s instead.”
“Wednesday morning’s?”
“You’ll be reviewed in both papers Wednesday.”
Gregory gulped. It was one thing to be discussing critics in general and another to be faced with two actual reviews and trying to visualize the Times and Tribune devoting their full book columns to The Good World right on publication day. Not one of his books had ever been reviewed the same day it appeared; often, not the same week. Horn of Plenty had dropped into a dark void for a month; the first notice of it came in a collective review where it was lumped with three other novels.
Gregory reached for the pages. Ed unfolded and glanced at them first and handed only one across the table. “Page three,” he said with satisfaction, “and a two-column cut.”
It was a long piece; the large heading said, “Incisive Wit, Ingenious Plot.” Gregory glanced at the line and then, at Ed. “It doesn’t sound as if this one’s laying for me.” He read the entire review. “Why, it’s good,” he said. “Most of it is really good. I think he has a point about Voronovsky’s suicide. I never was too certain about it.”
Ed Barnard took it back and read parts of it again. “It’s not what we call ‘a hot selling review,’ but it is good.”
Gregory reached for the other one, but Ed still would not yield it. “This is by Bill MacNiccol,” he said cautiously. “You’ve read his novels.”
“Just his first one, Monday in May.”
“The only good one of the lot. How could they expect a guy who’s done nothing but dismal repeats ever since to be fair with somebody who manages something fresh each time?”
Gregory laughed. “MacNiccol’s novels dig the same ground pretty often, but out West I read his new book of stories. He still has some freshness.”
Ed snorted. “The two best ones in that appeared ten years ago in the Atlantic, before he even wrote Monday in May. The jacket blurb didn’t mention that little fact.”
“Well, I’m warned.” Gregory nodded at the second review, but Ed still did not proffer it.
“This belongs to that self-love genre of criticism,” Ed said, “where, after a brief opening, we have to listen to the critic’s superiorities—especially his political ones. On world government, Mr. MacNiccol is right in bed with Pravda and. every isolationist in the U.S.A.”
“Hand him over. I’m ready for anything.”
“Some novelists,” the review began, “write out of sheer will power. Will power is essential to the completion of any book, to the long, arduous, patient, lonely effort of writing even four hundred bad pages. Mr. Gregory Johns, whose new novel was swooped upon by the august Best Selling Books and then showered with Hollywood gold, has will power. The Good World is four hundred pages long.
“But talent? True wit? Creativeness? Political clarity? Of these, the present reviewer sees not one sign in this dull and endless novel—”
Gregory Johns ordered himself to stay calm; only fury and hatred answered him. To criticize, to find fault, even to parody—these were the rights of anybody invited to review a book, but this outspewing of venom, this savagery?
“Someday you’ll laugh at it,” Ed Barnard put in quietly.
Gregory looked at him.
“Maybe not,” Ed added hastily. “Dickens never got so he could bear the London Times reviews. In all his life, the Times never gave one of his books anything but cold scorn or full-dress hell.”
Gregory read on to the end. For a long time, then, they discussed MacNiccol’s piece, and Gregory at last regained his composure. But not until he widened the field of his observations to include drama critics and their power did Ed know his self-imposed assignment for the evening was concluded.
“At least,” Gregory said, “half a dozen MacNiccols can’t close the whole country’s book stores by Saturday night.”
“In a couple of Saturday nights,” Ed Barnard said, “MacNiccol’s going to be smashing in Brentano’s windows.” He laughed and was pleased that Gregory could join in. Ed began to fold up both reviews but Gregory said, “No, you don’t. Abby might as well see them now.”
“You’ll have more good ones than MacNiccol thought,” Ed said. “I should have an advance copy of the Saturday Review tomorrow and maybe a make-ready of Time before the day’s out. That leaves Newsweek, the New Yorker, and sometime next week the May issues of Harper’s and the Atlantic.”
“You really think, every one of them right off the bat?”
“This time, it’s going to be right across the board. You’ll see. Are you coming in again tomorrow night?”
“Again? Why, no.”
“At Times Square,” Ed said, “the next day’s papers hit the stands around eleven.”
“I guess we’ll wait till morning.”
But on Tuesday evening, at about ten o’clock, Gregory and Abby Johns simultaneously decided to go for a short spin in their car.
On the great Wednesday, Thornton Johns entered Luther Digby’s office just before ten o’clock and was grabbed by the hand and pumped half off his feet.
“American News,” Digby said, “just reordered another thousand!”
“American News?”
“Biggest book jobbers in the country. Thorn, we’re in! What did I tell you last night when I saw those two reviews?”
Mr. Digby’s secretary ran in without knocking on the door. “Macy’s wants a thousand more,” she cried and ran out again.
“Like old times,” Mr. Digby said. “Just like old times. Sit down, Thorn, sit down. And everybody talking about the slump in the book business—”
His phone rang shrilly and he dived for it. “Seven-fifty? Great guns! Send Jack in, and Alan.” He looked up at Thornton. “Womrath’s,” he said. “It makes seventeen hundred and fifty since last week.”
Thorn sat down. He could scarcely believe that this was Luther Digby, for ten years the Titan of the Textbook Division. The door was flung open and a salesman Thorn knew only by sight came in, spoke rapidly, and departed. “Muncy’s been getting a busy signal for forty minutes. They want another five hundred.”
“Muncy is with Brentano’s,” Digby explained, reaching for a pencil. “Let’s see. A thousand, a thousand, five hundred, seven hundred and fifty—over three thousand already. I haven’t seen anything like it since I don’t know when. Where’s Gregory?”
“He said he might be in. If he doesn’t show soon, I’ll phone him.”
“He gets me sick, missing all this.” Digby looked up in quick apology. “I don’t mean he gets me—”
“That’s all right, Luther.” Thorn spoke gently. Any hatchets still extant had been buried at midnight when Digby had telephoned him, demanding to know where Gregory was; he had gone out, his daughter said; was he there? was he expected? had Thorn seen tomorrow’s papers? Did Thorn know what two rave reviews like that would mean in the office in the morning?
“As fast as that!” Digby had insisted. “You get Gregory and come in. You’ll see fireworks, and no carping Sunday reviews will put the brakes on them either.”
Thorn had pondered the metaphors, but only in passing. Remembering MacNiccol’s review, he had thought, Luther would call a blockbuster “carping.” He had tried Gregory’s number repeatedly until, at about one, Hat had said, “I’ll wait up, Uncle. Thorn, I can’t sleep possibly. Daddy will call you. Read me the rest of what they say—”
But when Gregory did call, just before two, it was impossible to pin him down about going in or not going in to the office. He might meet Thorn there and might not; Thorn was, to go ahead anyway.
“We’ve been up at Ed’s,” Gregory said. “We can’t believe those reviews yet. We might buy some more Times and Tribs when we wake up, just to see if they’re still the same.”
Digby’s secretary ran in again. “Doubleday, another six hundred,” she said. “Anybody that answers, they order from.” She disappeared.
“Doubleday?” Thorn said, “Oh, the Doubleday bookstores.” Digby missed it. He was rushing forward to meet Alan Brown and Jack McIntyre. The two men left the door open behind them and their greetings to Thorn took place to the accompaniment of a hubbub he had never before heard in these staid offices. Down the corridor, through open doors, bells rang, voices shouted, feet scurried. Digby raised his voice another decibel and compared notes with Alan and Jack, exchanging figures, adding totals. Alan Brown wore a patient look, but Thorn thought Jack McIntyre was planning a prompt escape.
“We better get on the ball right now with another printing,” Digby said. “How big, do you think? Twenty thousand?”
“We have ten on hand,” McIntyre said. “I just checked stock.”
“Maybe we ought to wait,” Alan Brown said.
“What’s that?” Digby was as shocked as if his partner had spat upon the flag. “Ten thousand will go by Friday.”
“This is Wednesday,” Alan Brown said, with a glance at McIntyre that plainly told him, “You and I will decide this later.”
The sales manager came in, a sheaf of notes in his hand. “Dimondstein’s five hundred, Beacon Hill fifty, Chaucer Head fifty, Byrne and Cooper ninety, even the Waldorf book stand—they couldn’t get through to American News, so they called direct.” He looked up triumphantly and then rushed through the rest of his slips. “Forty, sixty, twenty-five, a hundred, fifty—get this—the Columbia U. Shop wants another fifty by lunchtime.”
“May I use the phone?” Thorn said. “I’d like to tell Gregory about this if he’s not coming in—”
“We’ll put thirty thousand on press,” Digby interrupted, his voice raised, his face red. “Or we’re, out of stock in two weeks.” He faced his colleagues and slapped his desk. “We’ve been small potatoes for so long we’ve forgotten how to be big punkins. I’m calling Chicago right now, so Kroch’s and Max Siegel will know what’s happening and get set. Alan, you get on to Boston and Philadelphia, Washington too. Get somebody to cover Cleveland and St. Louis and Indianapolis. Thorn, I’ll be with you in a minute—stay right there.”
Thorn had no intention of leaving. So this was what a “runaway best seller” meant. This was how even a Luther Digby could become a generalissimo, this was what McIntyre had meant, months ago, when he had wistfully said, “If you ever get hold of one, you know it by ten o’clock in the morning.”
Thorn glanced at his watch. It was just past eleven; Digby’s latest figure on the pad before him was 4215. These were reorders; the advance sale had been 19,000, and B.S.B.’s hundred and four thousand dollars was a minimum guarantee against nearly half a million copies to its own members. There was no telling what the maximum might be.
There came over Thornton Johns a dizzy respect for publishers, for bookstores, book clubs, book jobbers, book critics, book readers. And, he amended hastily, for Gregory. This matched even Hollywood for excitement and glamour.
It had been a little frightening to turn his back on everything he had won for himself out there, Thorn suddenly realized as Luther Digby put in his Chicago call, and he had been a bit let down his first days in New York.
Except, of course, the evening he’d got constructive and sent Lenny Lyons a message at his nightly place of business, or beat, or whatever a columnist called his regular stand; he had a scoop about Jill Goodwyn, his message had said, and would Lenny call him right back? It had worked; courage and decisiveness always worked, even about getting past that damn rope at the Stork Club. That very evening he and Cindy had gone down, and the next night, with Jim Hathaway, they had gone through the grilled door to “21.” To be at home in such places had given New York savor again, and Jill had never said definitely that her trip East was a secret.
Digby rushed past him and Thorn decided to call Diana to tell her where he was. The phone was apparently dead; he jiggled the hook and Janet’s voice blasted at his eardrum. “Not one line’s free, Mr. Digby,” she said with asperity, “you’ll have to wait too.”
Women, Thornton Johns thought. Even Janet’s feeling her oats, and when Diana knows what’s happening to us—
Diana. How she had changed! He had been unperceptive not to see it the instant he returned. Only a day or two later had he suddenly said to himself, She’s different. Diana looked older, lovelier than ever, but older. Had she suffered while he was away? He could not be egotist enough to suppose so, but something had indeed altered her. There was a hint of sadness about her now that called forth everything protective in him. Women like Jill and Cindy, with their hard bright surfaces—how had he come so close to letting Jill Goodwyn’s used, expert beauty make him forget Diana?
Digby rushed back. The phone on his desk was screaming and he scooped up the entire instrument. Thornton forgot Diana, Cindy, Jill, even the Stork Club and “21.” He handed Digby a pencil. A moment later, Luther Digby, who was not a profane man, whispered softly, to the phone, “Dear Christ, you don’t mean it!” He turned, with a look of beatitude upon his face, the face Thornton Johns had once thought popeyed and disgusting.
“American News just called back,” Digby whispered, “and reordered one more thousand.”
Thorn could think of nothing befitting the churchlike muting of Digby’s voice. Again he thought of calling Gregory, and this time wondered whether Ed Barnard had already beat him to it. He rose hastily, made farewells which Digby scarcely heard, and went down the hall.
He found Barnard’s door open to the din, and Barnard himself leaning back in his chair with his hands clasped behind his head. There was no smile on his face but his eyes proclaimed a holiday.
“What a morning,” Thorn greeted him. “Have you phoned Gregory?”
“I’ve tried to. They need more lines on the switchboard.”
“I thought I’d call him myself.”
“You’ll do better from the booth in the lobby,” Barnard said. “I won’t try again up here for a while, and nobody else has time.”
It was spoken soothingly and Thorn thought, Is he trying to kid me or what? He stifled the notion and said, “Five thousand copies already, I make it.”
“It’s over six,” Barnard corrected. “It will probably be eight thousand by noon. It’s being quite a day for Gregory.” He surveyed his visitor reflectively. “And for you too, Thorn,” he added.
“Me?”
“I mean,” Barnard said quickly, “for all of us who are close to him.”
Again Thornton Johns wondered whether this was as innocent as it sounded. Again his instincts told him not to be hotheaded, certainly not with Ed Barnard. Thorn said, “Well, I’ll call him now,” and started for the door. Barnard rose and said jovially, “I hear you made a great hit in Hollywood. Congratulations.”
“It wasn’t much,” Thorn said and all his doubts of Barnard’s integrity vanished. He strode down the hall as if he were racing someone to the lobby, but in the reception room he stopped at the sliding glass panel that protected the switchboard from the outside world. Janet’s hair was disheveled, her forehead damp; her fingers flew at the cords, her thumbs flicked switches up or flipped them down. She glanced at him and for one instant her hands stopped in mid-air. Half the bulbs glowed red.
“How about knocking off, Janet, and coming out for some coffee?” She giggled and turned back to her flaming board.
Around the public booth downstairs, a cluster of irate people were soon glaring in upon him, but Thorn ignored them. Eight thousand by noon! He called Gregory, their parents, Jim Hathaway, and then Gloria, Georgia, and Gracia. Let the poor saps glare. Their book wasn’t a runaway the whole country would soon be discussing.
Before the week was out, the newspaper loyalties of the entire Johns family, as well as those of their friends and acquaintances, underwent a rapid metamorphosis.
At noon on Saturday, Thornton called Martin Heights and then Freeton, Long Island.
“Mom, get today’s Evening Post and look at page eight of the weekend magazine in. it.”
“Your father likes the Telegram.”
“Tell him to bring home a Post too. They have a best-seller list covering New York and The Good World is Number Two. After three days!”
“Why not Number One?” She sounded indignant.
Thorn was patient about explaining and went on to predict that, a week from tomorrow it would also show up in the national list in the Times.
“Why don’t they put it in tomorrow?” He was less patient this time, but he told her why.
“That always was a pokey old paper,” she stated. “The News wouldn’t wait a whole week.”
“For Heaven’s sakes, listen to me!” He hoped he had not been so dense, when Luther Digby had explained these mysteries half an hour before. “National best-seller lists only come out in the Times and the Tribune, and there’s always a time lag.”
“I never thought much of the Tribune either. Those big ones have no snap to them.”
Thorn restrained an impulse to slam up the receiver. “There has to be a time lag. They get figures each week from all the biggest bookstores and jobbers throughout the entire country. Then they have to collate them and arrange them in proper sequence. And remember, the book sections, where the lists appear, are printed a whole week before they’re sent out with the Sunday paper, just the way the magazine section is, and all the other sections that aren’t last-minute news.”
“But Gregory’s book is last-minute news.”
Thorn decided that filial obligation did not demand further anguish and turned to his other calls. Before the afternoon was out, there was a run on all the newsstands of Freeton. Posts were sold to such staunch Republicans as the Hestons, the Markhams, the Hiram Sprigginses, the Persalls, McGills, Antons, Smiths, Garsons, some of whom went so far as to reserve copies for Saturdays to come. In Metropolitan New York, no shortage developed; nevertheless, for very nearly the first time in their lives, Gloria and Harry Brinton bought two newspapers in the same afternoon, as did Georgia and Fred Mathews. Gracia missed it, but on the way home from the last show at Radio City Music Hall that night she insisted on buying all five Sunday newspapers. “Maybe it is in already,” she said firmly to her husband. “Thorn could be wrong.”
The following Saturday, Thornton Johns made his telephonic rounds once more, feeling himself akin to every five-star general who had ever dispatched communiqués to a waiting country. “It’s Number One for the city and Number Eight in tomorrow’s Times. And it’s going to jump straight up—eight, four, two, one—the real ones always go something like that.”
In actuality, it went eight, four, three, two, two, one.