BY THE BEGINNING OF JULY, Thornton Johns forgave South Pacific.
This act took place late one afternoon as he approached the Park Avenue offices of the Zoring Smith Lecture Bureau, and was signalized by his spirited whistling of “I’m In Love With a Wonderful Guy.”
Though it was the off season, he had lectured three times to unheard-of little groups, and though there had not been even a mention of him in any but pipsqueak local papers, he had proved the two things he had wanted to prove. Ladies’ literary clubs were the same in the East as in the West, and he hadn’t lost his touch.
What was more, he had new material. He could take the ladies with him into a publishing office when a runaway came in; he could talk learnedly about the time-lag on national bestseller lists; he could get a gasp by saying, “And next Sunday it’s still Number One.” He could talk about foreign publishing and about Imperial Century’s shooting schedule and quote his favorite Hollywood phrase, “If it pends, it peters,” enjoying their bewilderment until he said Horn of Plenty might never have been sold at all had he not remembered just in time that Jill Goodwyn had one commitment a year with Paramount also, and then refused to let Metro keep the matter pending until it petered out for good.
Why, if he left out all the old anecdotes about Gregory, he still could keep going for three hours. If the breathless ladies assumed that the “we” who went to the plastic ice party included Gregory, that was no lie on his conscience. Or to the Daphne Herrick party, or the Danny Kaye party, or the Bogart party.
He had taken a taxi uptown to see Smith; the subway was faster, but he was in no mood for subways. A few days ago he had sold the digest rights of The Good World for ten thousand dollars, netting himself an unexpected thousand, and in a week more the book would cross the unbelievable mark of a hundred thousand copies. Who was he to ride in subways?
It was a glorious hot day, one he would long remember. The heat wave everybody else moaned over made him feel as jaunty as if he had just had a workout at the Racquet and Tennis Club, where Jim was putting him up for membership. He always felt wonderful as a summer bachelor, and tonight he was taking Diana out to dinner again. They’d go to a quiet place on the Island and be leisurely; this time he meant to break down the reserve that cloaked her continuing sadness. It was too bad he had had to lie to Cindy about staying in town all weekend for business reasons, but instinct had told him to keep Saturday and Sunday available.
He wasn’t quite sure what he would do about Jill next week, but that was too far ahead to worry over now. Jill had called him from Hollywood an hour ago; she had adored his last two letters; they were the bright spots in the longest draggingest picture she had ever been stuck with. Retakes were nearly done at last and she was absolutely starting East on Monday. She would stay two whole months and wasn’t telling another soul in New York until she’d had some rest, so would he meet her at the airport? She was fed up, beat, worn out, and she wanted a new lease on life. “Got a new landlord all picked out?” he had asked.
After that, he’d picked up his pigskin portfolio and set forth as if the Smith contract were already in it. In the impressive reception room of the Zoring Smith office, a pretty redhead explained that Mr. Smith was talking to London and would be only a minute, and Thornton looked about him with satisfaction.
Around the dark green walls ran wide strips of tan cork, an endless belt of bulletin board, and he rose to read the handsome leaflets and folders about Zoring Smith clients. With a stable of winners like that, no wonder this was one of the largest bureaus in the country—authors, explorers, economists, industrialists, professors, publishers, radio quiz masters, astrologers, monologuists, scientists—apparently he, Thornton Johns, wasn’t the only one who enjoyed being on a stage and having people flock in to see and hear him.
The folders contained photographs, short biographies, and titles of speeches, as well as quotes about the charm and personality and audience appeal of the lecturers. Thornton Johns imagined one about himself, and was, for one second, abashed. Like selling prize livestock, he thought. No, that was the sort of thing Gregory would think; he must watch himself. Anyway it was natural for an out-of-town club to try to size up what its honorarium was buying. Why was it always an “honorarium” in letters, and a “fee” in conversation?
The door opened and the redhead looked out at him apologetically. “The overseas connection went bad,” she said; “it will only be another couple of minutes.”
Nobody knew about this visit except Diana. Not Jim, not Cindy, nobody. Least of all Gregory. Nobody except Diana knew about the three new lectures either. He had taken her along to the one in Morristown—how shining and proud her eyes had been as she sat there looking up at him, hearing the applause burst all around her. Once, long ago, he had seen that shining look when she discovered that a second-string radio star was a client of his and might come into the office where she could meet him. Diana would find Roy Tribble mighty small beer now!
If Jim and he went ahead next fall, their offices would be uptown, somewhere right near here, on Park or Madison; they would lunch clients at “21” or the Ritz; words like “liability” and “compensation” and “term” and “annuity” would never come to mind again, except when he collected his renewal commissions on his old accounts. All he’d have to do for that was keep his license alive.
The Hathaway-Johns Agency. The Johns-Hathaway Agency would sound just as well, of course, and it had been surprising to find Jim so intent on getting top billing. There always was a streak of self-promotion in Jim’s character and at times it emerged so vividly it was embarrassing. Nevertheless it was Jim who would be putting up the capital, and when Jim had finally pulled the alphabet on him, the discussion of tonal effects became pointless; h, i, j was irrefutable.
In any case, final escape from the insurance business was at last more than a hopeless daydream and nothing could chip away at his gratitude to Jim. An imaginative and bold new agency, Jim had said repeatedly in their talks the last few weeks, could make huge money almost from the start; there needn’t even be any questionable “raiding” of the established literary agencies. All Jim’s authors and playwrights and actors were forever yakking about how little their present agents ever did to earn their ten per cent—
The door opened once again and this time the secretary stood aside in signal for his entrance. As he shook hands with Zoring Smith, Thorn thought, He’s hard as nails, I’ll have to watch it. Zoring Smith was no taller and no heavier than Jim Hathaway, but he had a slow deliberate speech instead of Jim’s quick clean delivery. He spoke the way you would expect a plump, affable man to speak, and as he talked about tours he had arranged for other best-selling authors, Thorn wondered whether it had been too risky to leave the purpose of this visit so equivocal.
“That’s what’s eating me,” he said. “With The Good World riding the top of the list, all my brother wants to do is take his family on a vacation and get on with his next book.”
“He still won’t lecture? You said—”
“I said I wanted to talk about a sort of try-out tour.”
Zoring Smith looked at him without expression, and again Thorn thought, He’s hard as hell. Well, so am I. He opened his portfolio and slid the largest of the Hollywood newspaper stories across the desk. Then he sat back and watched. He saw the uninterested first glance; he saw the dawn of recognition; he saw Smith read the captions and then the whole piece.
“That was my first lecture,” Thorn said easily. “I’d like to tell you a bit of a story about how they persuaded me to try it.”
Ten minutes later, Thornton Johns was thinking, When old Zoring smells business cooking, he softens up like butter. “So now I’ve tested myself in the East, in absolute secrecy, of course. Even my brother doesn’t know about the last three dates. Or Lenny Lyons or Winchell or any of the columnists or anybody who could even tell a columnist.”
“Why not?”
“My brother Gregory might act up and stop me cold. He came close to that out West. But next week, they’re heading for Wyoming. They’ve got the touring craze, and a problem with their daughter, and they’ll be gone until Labor Day.”
For the first time Zoring Smith permitted himself a smile. “While requests for lectures by Gregory Johns still keep coming in?”
“Precisely.” Thornton Johns smiled also.
“You’ve thought out every aspect of it, haven’t you, Mr. Johns?”
“I know summer is dead for big lectures, but if you could fix up a few minor dates, we might get some pretty good quotes and blurbs for your folders. Then, whatever happened after Labor Day could go ahead and happen. I’m working out a new lecture that nobody could stop me from giving.”
Zoring Smith was looking hard once more. “There’s a big draw in a title like ‘My Brother, Gregory Johns,’ you know.”
“‘Runaway Best Sellers’ is no slouch of a title, is it? There’s all kinds of stuff available—I’m collecting quips and anecdotes all the way back to David Harum.”
An unwillingness fell upon Mr. Smith. “Building up a new lecturer is a sizable investment,” he said. “Printing, mailing, sending wires, advertising in small towns all over the country. ‘Runaway Best Sellers’ might be a draw—”
“With my name played up so they’d get the hookup at once?” Thorn asked. The unwillingness visibly lessened. “I’m sure you’d find a way to link my billing up with my brother’s book. What other runaway best seller would I be talking about?”
“You have thought out every aspect of it.” Admiration touched Smith’s face with sudden brightness. From a black marble inkstand he plucked a ballpoint pen, wrote rapidly, and then read aloud. “‘Thornton Johns, Public Relations Counselor to Gregory Johns and Other Leading Authors.’”
Thorn nodded. “Mind you, I’m not looking for trouble—I usually can win Gregory over. He blazes up but then he’s apt to go philosophical and shrug things off.”
“I’m sure he does. I’ve often noticed that people who are high-hat about publicity are perfectly able to appreciate the vast benefits that accrue from it.”
Thornton laughed. “Anyway, I’d say we could plan on using the old title for quite some time. By the way, do you ever send out scouts? I have one more date of my own, a garden club, really, in Kingston on the tenth. My friend Miss Goodwyn is coming from the Coast for several weeks, and I thought she might drive up with me.”
Smith tipped back in his chair and looked appraisingly across the desk. For several moments he said nothing whatever. Then he reached for his phone and pressed a button on it. “Dot, bring in the list of opens, will you?”
Thorn watched him run down the typed schedule sheets, checking off one, then another, then another entry. After nine check marks, Zoring Smith looked up. “Do you think you’d be ready to tackle a New York City audience by the end of August? In, let’s say, the Waldorf-Astoria?”
Thorn jumped. “Good Lord, the Waldorf!”
“The Grand Ballroom, about a thousand people. It’s a special function and it’s hard to book speakers out of season like that.”
“A thousand people?” Thorn quailed. But hadn’t he proved he could face an audience anywhere? A thousand people applauding at once—
“It would be a shame to waste Miss Goodwyn on Kingston,” Zoring Smith said gently.
Early that same morning, when Thorn had phoned Cindy about being kept in town all weekend, damn it, on important business, he had also informed her of Gregory’s and Abby’s sudden choice of Wyoming for their vacation. Both pieces of information had made Cindy snap with annoyance. It was turning into a terrible summer.
It’s all right for Thorn, she had thought. He’s busy every second; he doesn’t have to sit around this awful beach and talk to these awful middle-class people and wish something would happen. Something does happen to him all the time; everything that happens to Gregory’s book Thorn takes over bodily and makes it happen to him too. And it’s only right that he should. I suppose Gregory and Abby never admit how much of The Good World’s success is due to Thorn. If he hadn’t sold it to pictures and there hadn’t been all those months of exciting movie publicity all over the country, publication day might have been a mighty different affair.
This wifely defense of Thorn, coming on the heels of wifely resentment, confused Cindy. She looked around at the beach, then at the two women who had plopped down beside her the moment she had arrived, and she thought of the month she had spent with the greatest movie stars in the world. Pain pierced her and though she had barely been out doors for twenty minutes, she made vague excuses and returned to the house.
The house was more awful and middle-class than the beach. Three years ago when they had first come out to Quogue for the summer, the rented Cape Cod cottage had seemed colorful and charming; now the varnished rattan furniture and glassy cretonnes chilled her blood. Their apartment in New York was inane too. Gloria’s apartment, Georgia’s, Gracia’s, the house in Freeton—how different they were, how dismally, sadly remote from the great dramatic places of Beverly Hills and Brentwood!
A heavy thump-thump slapped at her ears and she glanced toward the kitchen. She had screamed at Hulda about those bare feet; Hulda would listen stolidly and slide into the broken-down sandals she had stepped out of in the middle of the kitchen floor. Two minutes after Cindy left, the naked, thump-thump would start once more.
This was the last summer for Quogue.
Other summers, Thorn always came out on Thursday evenings for long weekends. Now that was unheard of, and every other Friday the phone would ring and before she picked it; up she would know. Next week Jill Goodwyn was arriving—a preliminary anguish squeezed Cindy’s vitals. She went outside once more and sank onto a weather-beaten canvas hassock.
The heat, the implacable heat! Right on the beach, ten o’clock in the morning, and there was no stir of air, nothing but this stationary choking heat. If only she were going to Wyoming too! The boys were still asleep; they might as well stay asleep around the clock for all the companionship she got out of them this summer. Beachcombers by day, the town beaus by night, they had become as impossible as their father.
I need a facial, Cindy thought, or a new dress.
She was suddenly seeing Magnin’s and Saks in Beverly Hills. “Mrs. Thornton Johns, isn’t it?” Again an anguish gripped her. In New York, it hadn’t been so galling a comedown; at places like the Stork, it still meant something to be Mrs. Thornton Johns. She was perfectly sure she could get in at the Stork now even if she went without Thorn.
She glanced at her watch. With that endless drive, lunch in town was out, but she could shop in air-conditioned stores during the afternoon, go to the Stork with Thorn or somebody for cocktails, and spend the night at the apartment. A new dress would help; just getting away from this blaze of hot sand would help.
She went inside to the telephone and called Thorn back. His reply merely stiffened her resolution; let him have business appointments right through the afternoon and evening, if that’s what he really had. Men were so naive; they expected their wives to believe every single thing they told them, never, realizing that even wives who weren’t taken-in at all might decide on compromise rather than showdown, provided enough was at stake. What fool would give up everything Thorn had won for himself this year, and the larger things Thorn was moving toward?
Cindy put in a call to Fran Hathaway; Fran was just as bored with Stamford as she was with Quogue and most certainly could meet her by four-thirty. They could have drinks, an early dinner, perhaps an early movie, and if Cindy did decide to drive back tonight, it wouldn’t be too awfully late for her. Cindy thought, If not a new dress, a new hat, and I’ll wear it to the Stork.
A pumping energy sustained Lucinda Johns through the long slow trip; it carried her through eleven try-ons in Ready-to-Wear Millinery at Bergdorf Goodman and through six try-ons in Ready-to-Wear Millinery at Saks Fifth Avenue, at which point a click of recognition told her she had found a love of a hat. It was early for black velvet, but her rough caramel straw was poison. She adjusted the triple mirrors on the small table at which she sat, and studied her left and right profiles. The sweep of blue-green coq feathers at one side really was dashing. “I’ll wear it,” she said. “You can send my old one.”
“Is it a charge?”
Cindy nodded carelessly. She didn’t like this salesgirl, a mousy, studious old maid, with bifocals. “Mrs. Thornton Johns,” Cindy said to the pad in the girl’s hand. The hand went on nipping carbons between the sales checks, and a tiny geyser of anger erupted in Cindy’s heart. Obviously this creature never read Leonard Lyons or Danton Walker or even Winchell.
“What was the name?” the salesgirl asked.
Cindy paused. Had the last bill been corrected, as per written request, to Mrs. Thornton Johns, or had it still been addressed to Mrs. G. T. Johns?
“Mrs. G. T.—” Cindy began. The pencil waited. Through the upper half of the bifocals, the enlarged eyes looked up bulbously. “Now please don’t get it confused with Mrs. Gregory Johns,” Cindy said. “It’s—”
The pencil jerked away from the pad. “Gregory Johns? Are you related to Gregory Johns the author?”
“He’s my brother-in-law.” Cindy glanced once more at her left profile under the iridescent sheen of the feathers. “And we are forever getting each other’s bills. Mrs. G. T. Johns; better put down Mrs. Thornton Johns too. The account is being changed over.”
“Oh, Mrs. Johns, I’m a real bookworm, and I just can’t tell you what a thrill—”
Cindy interrupted to give the address. The mousy one went on gabbling; Cindy signed the sales check, nodded in farewell, and left. As the elevator doors slid silkily open, she thought, A new hat always does set you up; no wonder I feel better.
Gregory Johns’ suggestion about Wyoming, as a solution to the family vacillation between Canada and the Cape, had come one blistering afternoon after Abby had lost her temper at a watermelon.
It was only half a watermelon, and even before she had tried to fit it into the icebox, a sense of impending disaster had threatened her all day. The mailman had brought nineteen more letters from readers and for the first time Gregory had looked at them with lackluster eyes. “Eight hours a day for me, and four hours a day for you, for over two months,” he had said. “We’re never going to get back to normal, and I’m never going to get back to my manuscript.” She had asked if the time had not come to call a halt on answering readers, and he had curtly replied it had not.
For three weeks the temperature had never dropped below ninety except for a couple of hours before dawn. There were almost daily scenes with Hat about extra money for clothes, about a larger allowance for everything, about why she couldn’t stay out as much as she liked in the evening, now that she had made all her grades at Hunter and was supposed to be having a vacation and some fun before starting Vassar.
The search for an apartment also had precipitated two or three quarrels with Hat, the latest one that very morning. “I saw the most divine apartment yesterday,” Hat said, as Abby started wearily on the real estate ads once more. “Pat and I were passing this new building going up on Fifth Avenue and we stopped to look at the floor plans pasted on a window. The renting agent came out and I told him who I was and he took us right up in the workmen’s elevator. There’s only one apartment left—it has a terrace running around three sides of it—”
“I suppose,” Abby said, “you didn’t ask what the rent was.”
Hat looked at her mother pityingly. “None of the good buildings going up on Park or Fifth are for rent. They’re all co-operatives—you buy the apartment. This has six rooms and is just divine.”
Abby’s irritation over this had revived her irritation over last night’s episode about the car. Hat had been learning to drive, and it was inevitable that sooner or later she would ask to go out in it alone, without Gregory. At dinner last night, with Patrick once more the family guest, Hat had suddenly said, “Look, I know won’t be allowed to drive this year, but Pat has a license.”
“I’ve had one for eight years,” Pat said.
“Couldn’t we go out for some air?”
It was clear Hat was not suggesting a family drive. Refusal would have been so revealing, and so difficult for modern parents to defend; in the presence of Pat, discussion had been stilted and surface-thin. “Well, be home by ten, please.”
And then, by ten-thirty, the resentment at disobedience; by eleven, the intrusive unwelcome visions of what they might be doing; by eleven-thirty, the terror of a smashup. To have the pair of them blandly explain, at midnight, how they had taken the wrong turn off the Speedway and driven for miles along the Belt Parkway—
Abby had waked this morning, still roiled, and found herself remembering it off and on all day, angry each time. But it was the watermelon that pulped her remaining self-control. The fact that it was only half a watermelon, by some secret mathematical logic of her own, had quadrupled her rage. Properly iced in the market’s ceiling-high vault, it was guaranteed to remain cold until dinner, and she had carried it home eagerly at five o’clock, a magnificent coolness in her wilted arm. Thirty minutes later, she had looked at it suspiciously on the kitchen table, rolled back the cellophane over its pink flesh, touched it with a forefinger, and even spooned out and tasted a round chunk of it. Then she had taken it to the old icebox and opened the door.
A strawberry couldn’t have been fitted in anywhere.
Suddenly Abby wheeled, took the watermelon in both hands, and hurled it at the sink. Her aim was bad. The pink fruit splattered all over the wall. Whereupon Abby did something she had not done in ten years. She ran to her bed, threw herself down upon it, and sobbed.
When Gregory came, she tried to joke about being an actress in a B production, with B production sobs, but she only wept the harder. Gregory had heard the squashy thump, and in a moment he left her to investigate. The watermelon had rolled halfway across the floor, leaving a slippery wet track; a good deal of its flesh clung to the rough plaster wall. He found a pancake turner, scraped off the wall, retrieved the watermelon, and dampened a kitchen towel, which he used indiscriminately on plaster and linoleum. Then he returned to his wife.
“Three weeks at the Cape or in Canada in August always was a silly idea,” he said. “I want to go somewhere that’s too far away for mail, the telephone, the Sunday papers and visits from Patrick King. Let’s go out to Gwen and Howie.”
Abby sat up. This time she did behave like the traditional wife. “You mean drive all the way out to Wyoming?”
“And take Hat. If she won’t come, just make her come.”
“She’d kill herself rather than miss another big trip. But I wrote Gwen and Howie we couldn’t possibly get anywhere this summer for more than a couple of weeks.”
“We can write Gwen and Howie and say we can.”
“But all that way in three weeks?”
“We’ll make it six weeks.”
“We just were out West.”
The telephone rang and Gregory left her. He said, “Hello,” and then nothing for several minutes. “I’ll talk it over with your mother and we’ll see.” He listened once more, and finally said, “Of course you can; he’s always welcome here.”
Gregory returned and sat on the edge of the bed. “A perfectly respectable weekend at Fire Island,” he said, “staying with somebody named Mike Kellerton, a best friend of Pat’s; Mike Kellerton is having a girl out too, so nobody could be alone very much.”
Abby rose. “I think I’ll take a deep cool tub for a while.”
“How soon could we pack, Abby? I’d like to have Hat back for a while, in old clothes, and no dates, and no Mr. King.”
“Oh, Gregory, so would I.”
“Let’s write Gwen and Howie now.”
“Oh, darling, let’s be like Thorn and call them.”
In the candle-pierced darkness of the outdoor dining-room near the Sound, Thorn thought Diana more beautiful than ever. Driving out, when he had told her about his lecturing contract, she had looked almost happy, but now her eyes were dark and veiled. He wanted to stop talking about himself, but she made that difficult. She couldn’t abandon her new vision of him as a country-wide lecturer.
“That’s off in the future,” he said. “For the rest of this year, I’ll be too tied to Gregory’s work to accept any big-time tour.”
“There are plenty of places just overnight from New York.”
“But it’s the national swings Zoring goes for. He says a real draw can get to clear ten, maybe twenty, thousand dollars on a three or four months’ tour. If I make good, why, maybe by this time next year when our second movie hits the screen, I’ll be trying out the big stuff.” He hadn’t told her a word about the Hathaway-Johns possibility; the time hadn’t come for that, any more than the time had come to tell Zoring Smith about it. Nor to tell Hathaway about Zoring Smith.
Diana looked at the tablecloth. “Even this year, you’ll be gone from the office so much.”
Here it is, Thornton Johns thought, the perfect opening, and I’m as tongue-tied as a kid. No light turn of phrase came to him; it never did any more with Diana. But he couldn’t go mawkish and heavy either. “You’re not pretending you’d miss me?”
“Oh, I did miss you when you were on the Coast.”
“You might have missed having a proper boss; you didn’t miss me.” She looked up at him and then away. “You’ve probably got some handsome young man in your life who keeps you from missing anybody. For all I know, you’ll be getting married one of these days.”
“Oh, no, I’m not marrying anybody, ever.”
“Di,” he said, and covered her hand with his. “You’re unhappy—you’ve been unhappy so long.”
“Yes, I have.” She drew her hand back, and clasped it with her other.
“Can’t you tell me? We’re friends, we’ve been friends.”
She shook her head, and fumbled for a cigarette. She never smoked in the office; only when they had dined together or gone driving in the car had he ever seen her smoking. A dread of next week suddenly came into his heart; Jill was brilliant, glorious, a triumph of a woman, but she was spoiled, imperious. Diana was a girl, a soft lovely girl, who demanded nothing, who suffered in secret, a girl he could make happy.
“There’s nothing wrong about confiding in a friend, Diana,” he said. “I can’t go on, day after day, seeing you so sad, trying to guess what it is.”
“Seeing me?” She turned to him. “You’ve known it all along?”
For answer he took her hand into both of his. “Of course. And now you’re going to tell me about it.” He hesitated. “I think I have the right to know.”
She glanced down and her lips parted. She was wearing green silk, so dark it was nearly black. It was cut into a deep V, closely fitted, discreet. Her throat was beautiful and suddenly Thorn wanted to be kissing it—he had never felt this about Diana before; for months and months he hadn’t felt this about anybody.
“I am unhappy,” she said slowly, “and why wouldn’t I be?”
He waited. In the flickering light from the hurricane lamp, shadows moved across her lips. They seemed to be trembling. He wanted to kiss them too. His heart began to pound.
“Wouldn’t you be unhappy,” she went on, “if you were—”
“Were?”
“Were hopelessly in love with somebody who’s married and isn’t the kind to get a divorce?”
Thorn’s breath caught. Hopelessly in love. Hopelessly, steadily, unchangingly in love, tormented by the secret of that love, brave with the secret, unwilling to reveal it until he had forced the revelation from her. A wild longing came, to be young, free, not to have the boys, not to have Cindy.
“How long,” he said gently, “have you felt this way, Diana?”
“Oh, forever.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Perhaps, for a while, she could be content with his love alone; perhaps for a year or two more, until the boys were out of school, Diana and he could find in each other—“Why didn’t you tell me?” he repeated.
“It seems like ‘forever,’ anyway,” she said. “Ever since the first day I met him in the office.”
“Met him?”
“Since before I met him,” she whispered. “When you told me he was a client, I nearly died. I’d always been in love with him, just listening to him on the air, and when he came in that day and. you said, ‘Diana, this is Roy Tribble—’ ” She squeezed her eyelids shut and tore her handkerchief out of her bag.
For this brief respite from observation, Thornton Johns thanked God.
During the next hour, Thorn found it all too easy to stop talking about himself; Diana scarcely allotted him time for a syllable. In her low voice, still the caressing voice that had for so long assured him he was her one concern, she began her story all the way back at the precise moment when a pivoting needle swept around a radio dial and stopped over a voice singing a love song. For a while Thorn listened intently, but as she proceeded unhurriedly through her growing conviction that the unseen, still unmet Roy Tribble was addressing himself directly to her, Thorn began to discover within himself an ability he had heretofore suspected only with his wife. He could listen intently to each word and pay no attention.
His mind was on more speculative matters. He had never been egotist enough to ascribe Diana’s sadness to his absence, but he should have known long ago that it was abnormal for a girl to remain so cool, so aloof. So free of guile was he that even when he had seen her go all shiny at his first mention of Tribble, he had done nothing but accept, humbly accept, the dictum that girls like Diana wanted a man more glamorous than a salesman in a city of salesmen. Not once had it occurred to him that she merely wanted Roy Tribble.
Diana the Unreachable, he had called her. Diana the Un-huntress. Her pride in his first successes, her wide eyes looking up at him in awe—she had been playing The Perfect Secretary all the while. Her readiness to go out to dinner with him whenever he asked her was a secretarial readiness too, or a marking-time readiness. He had always been square with Diana while she—
He had to get away alone as soon as possible, to cope with , this debacle. Cindy wasn’t expecting him this weekend, but now his farsighted alibis for remaining in town jeered at him. In her discreet haunting dress, Diana shifted position and he looked directly at her. She was assuring him that hers was a virtuous love still, unspoiled by yielding to. what could only corrode its inner purity. Quite suddenly Thorn prayed God to speed the day when Diana Bates would bitterly regret having thrown away, for a minor celebrity like Roy Tribble, her one chance at somebody really famous.
“Thank you for telling me,” he said, “for trusting me enough.” He slipped his hand over hers and this time, as if accepting the open expression of a sympathy she had sensed in secret all along, Diana curled her fingers inside his. Thorn spoke to her of courage and the long view; he praised her for her strength and wisdom in eschewing compromise. Eschewing struck the membrane of his ear with a dull archaic thud but he ignored it.
“I’m going to take you home now,” he said at last, “and then drive out to the beach tonight.”
“Oh, Mr. Johns.” She spoke in the same gentle astonishment he had heard when she had first seen his name in print.
“Not all that way tonight? You’ll never get there before two or three in the morning.”
“I know it.” He met her glance, but only briefly. “Seeing you so unhappy, realizing there’s no easy out for you and Roy—it’s just flattened me, Diana. I’ll feel better after a quiet weekend with my family.”
Like the new self-sealing inner tubes on the latest cars, Thornton Johns’ nervous system was usually able to heal its own wounds almost instantaneously. This time, however, there had been no sharp clean puncture but an untidy sprawling rawness, and it took longer for large protective layers to form over it.
Nevertheless, aided by sun and wind and many neighborly martinis, as well as by Cindy’s, young Thorn’s, and Fred’s obvious delight at his sudden availability, Thorn’s unscheduled visit to Quogue gradually restored most of his self-confidence and by Sunday morning he was glad he had come. He had tried not to think about Diana, and when he failed, he found his thoughts had at last veered to a larger, more philosophical plane. What Diana did not yet know, in her poor dreams that a Roy Tribble could one day make her happy, was that in this day and age, a minor celebrity was almost as dismal as an absolute nobody. Once you were a cut above the mob, you wanted to be several cuts above, and after that there was no satisfying you until you got clear to the top.
He suddenly remembered a painting he had seen years ago; since he hadn’t been to a museum since college, he must have seen it in Life. Perhaps it was an etching or drawing; anyway it was by Breughel and though there were people in it, what he remembered most vividly were all sorts of swimming fish, curving, swooping, mouths open, eyes as uncovered as marbles. It was called “The Big Fish Eat the Little Fish,” and it was so ugly you could scarcely call it a masterpiece, but it had certainly stayed with him for a long time though he couldn’t explain why he had thought of it now.
As always, on those rare occasions when Thornton Johns discovered the joys of reflective thought, particularly if these were coupled with the joys of artistic appreciation, he was reluctant to sip them too briefly. But at this moment guests began to arrive for lunch; he rose to greet them, and the rest of the weekend sped by. Whenever his pain threatened to throb again, Thorn made himself think either of his Zoring Smith future or his date to meet Jill Goodwyn at the airport tomorrow night. Had all gone well with Diana, his appearance at the airport would have had to be a perfunctory gesture of helpful friendliness. Now it might be anything.
Back at the office on Monday morning, Diana’s greetings were flustered and her glance uncertain. Obscurely this pleased Thornton Johns, helped him achieve his habitual manner with her, and seemed to release an effervescence of energy within him. This pleased him too; it always meant new action was in the offing, in what direction, toward what specific goal, he did not yet know. Obeying an impulse without examining it, he dialed Roy Tribble, found him free for lunch, and promptly invited him to the Premium Club.
There, though he would never betray Diana’s confidences, Thorn was so persuasive in his argument that everybody’s future was unpredictable, and so eloquent in his defense of a periodic re-examination of one’s long-view savings program, that Roy Tribble was deeply impressed. “Give me the dope again, Thorn,” he said eagerly, “on an extra twenty-year endowment policy.” A pencil was immediately forthcoming from Thorn’s breast pocket, and a Premium Club tablecloth, from which scribbled premiums and maturity dates were scoured out at each laundering, forthwith acquired its new batch.
That evening, with Jill Goodwyn not due at La Guardia Airport until nearly midnight, Thorn dined, with Jim Hathaway and Maude Denkin, going to Le Persiflage, a small French restaurant Miss Denkin had specified and of which Thorn had never heard.
This dinner was one of a series Jim had arranged with all of his three-thousand-dollar clients, to sound them out, one by one, on the subject of Hathaway-Johns, Incorporated. Thorn was automatically invited each time and he admired the way Jim kept everything perfectly hypothetical, perfectly candid, and absolutely confidential from the members of his old firm. All he was doing, Jim made it clear, was canvassing the exciting possibilities with his own clients—would they be interested in making a change, as soon as any existing contract with other literary agencies expired or was otherwise disposed of? Gregory Johns, for instance, was only too eager to come along, actually regretful that he had to wait until October or November for such unified service. “Hathaway-Johns,” Jim would say to each of them, “is not going to be any weak little premature infant, I promise you, with clients like that already signed up. We wanted to see how you feel about our new baby.”
Jim didn’t phrase it just that way to Maude Denkin, and Thorn was relieved. He had admired this already legendary old lady the night the Hathaways had taken him and Cindy along to her party of Broadway stars, and he had pumped Hathaway about her in preparation for this evening. She was indeed an eccentric, with her diatribes against jeweled fingers, costly furs, and what she called “the rubberneck restaurant, with everybody craning to see who’s four tables down.”
Now, sitting here with her and Jim, over a gourmet’s dinner and important wines, Thorn was doubly fascinated by her; with her shabby clothes, her indefatigable play-a-year for twenty years, her movie-a-year for the past ten or twelve, and her old-maid passion for six nephews, four nieces, and seven Persian cats. Whenever Miss Denkin stopped talking about her newest play or her last play or what would be next year’s play, she began enthusiastically on the cats and nephews and nieces, all of whom she appeared to adore with indiscriminate fervor.
And soon Thornton Johns found himself wondering about her generosity. Having started her big-time successes so long before taxes jumped through the ceiling, Miss Denkin must have a million or so tucked away. Could he take her out to lunch alone one day, and interest her in securing endowment insurance for each of the ten kids, to provide them with certain sums of cash at the milestone moments of their lives—at graduation, marriage, the launching of business careers?
The effervescent energy that had moved him to talk insurance to Roy Tribble suddenly bubbled higher than ever. How odd that, at the moment when final deliverance from insurance was at hand, he was finding himself so keen to beat all his previous records for new business.
Was it Jill’s impending arrival tonight, and the memory of her chatter last spring about untransacted business on an extra policy, that had turned his mind so sharply again to insurance? Or Maude Denkin’s present chatter about six nephews and four nieces?
Hip-deep in prospects. Not Tribble-sized prospects either. At the outside Tribble might be good for another twenty thousand; Roy’s annual premium on that would be a thousand dollars; commissions on it only four hundred the first year, and fifty a year for the next nine. No longer would that make a Thornton Johns reach, stretch, put his full powers to work. But a hundred-thousand-dollar deal, spread among Miss Denkin’s beloveds? Or an additional policy of a hundred thousand to Jill Goodwyn? If the assured were age thirty-five, the annual premium on a hundred thousand was about five thousand and the broker’s commission would come to two thousand the first year and two hundred and fifty dollars per year the next nine.
Thornton Johns smiled into Miss Denkin’s watery old eyes and thought, I wonder how old Jill really is. Suddenly he longed to see her once again. At this very moment, she was in the skies above Illinois or Ohio, lying back in her adjustable chair, resting, thinking ahead. Just before dinner, he had wired the plane, “THE NEW LEASE IS READY, IF YOU’LL SKIP THE SMALL TYPE,” and though he was not certain what he had meant by the last phrase, it set his pulse racing to imagine Jill trying to interpret it. Sentimental young girls, after all, were not his style. To a mature and gifted man, the spoiled imperious demanding woman offered more of a challenge. And in many ways more of a reward.