IF HARRY VON BRANN were a man for an ulcer or high blood pressure, the summer of 1949 would have seen him felled by one and terrified by the other. Two-other studios were rushing out films with world government themes, and Harry Von Brann was no man to trail anybody. Thus, weekends were abandoned for the entire summer by everybody with what Von Brann now called “a civilized employment contract,” and even the Fourth of July was no official holiday for Hy Bernstein, Dick Morosky, or himself.
Instead of “in the cans by October and on Broadway by Christmas,” the new schedule called for “sneaks by Labor Day, and goddam it Broadway right after that.”
The news of the early release date reached Gregory Johns and his family a few days after their arrival at the H Bar C Ranch, the official name for the large, untidy, prosperous Chisholm place, and, immediately, Gregory’s inner seismograph began again to register his old tremulous fear about the movie. Hy’s last letter had said nothing of this speedup, but that was back in June, and it would have been in character for Hy not to mention it even if he had known it at that time. Hy had written only of the script, of the new opening he was suggesting to Von Brann and Morosky—“a moody device,” Hy had called it, “to establish the mood, I mean, not moody. If it plays right, it ought to be larger than moodiness, and when the delayed dialogue begins, Barlowe’s lighthearted first speech, the one we agreed on, should have redoubled impact.”
Abby and Gwen and Howie were delighted at the comparative nearness of the picture and Hat was sent into a spin of excitement, as if she could see it next week. Gregory warned Hat that even Von Brann could be frustrated, that there was still, an excellent chance the picture could not be ready until October, by which time she would be at Vassar, and not present, for the official opening.
Hat took this warning lightly and dashed out to the corral to tell all her Chisholm cousins. The Chisholms raised horses; a couple of hundred were off in the hills and about thirty in the corral. Along with two hired hands, the three older Chisholm children were responsible for them, and Hat pitched in on all the heavy work they did. She was up at six every morning; in a week she could ride as well as they. She did not limit herself to pleasure rides, like the occasional tourists the Chisholms put up in the two dude cabins they had built a year ago; she quickly got tough enough to go along on a full day’s roundup.
In levis and plaid shirts, Hat no longer bore a resemblance to the pages of Vogue; since her cousins showed no interest in what dormitory she was to live in at Vassar, she soon dropped all references to Strong, Lathrop, and Cushing; she even forgot cashmere sweaters and the desperate necessity for a fur coat. Watching her, her parents sometimes wished they need not return East for a long time.
Gregory and Abby rode clumsily, with no hint of carefree ease in the saddle, but they soon loved riding as much as Hat did. Occasionally, with Howie and Gwen, they would ride off directly after six o’clock supper and watch the sun go down in pure brilliance behind the jagged red rock skyline of the Big Horns. They could hear the roar of Shell Creek cutting down through Shell Canyon; the gradual night came down soft and hesitant; the dry heat of the day blew to nothingness in the wind from the mountains.
Sometimes they drove all the children twenty miles to Greybull to see an early movie; occasionally ranchers and their wives would come down from Lovell or all the way out from Cody, to visit the Chisholms and meet the Johnses.
“You didn’t think ranchers read books, did you, Greg?” Howie Chisholm asked Gregory after one such visit.
Gwen said, “Let him alone, Howie, and how many times do I have to tell you he hates to be called Greg?”
Gregory laughed. “Anything Howie calls me is fine.” In the ten years since the Chisholms’ last trip East, Gregory had forgotten how much he liked both of them. Howard bore no resemblance to the rangy, gimlet-eyed rancher in Westerns; he was mild in manner, short and squared-off in build. During the winter months he went back to his reading of Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles in the original; he had meant to teach Greek and the Attic tragedies at Missoula, and had done so for one year after getting his B. A.
“Damn my hide,” he liked to say, “if Uncle Bill didn’t die just in time and leave this place and twenty skinny cow-ponies, I might have stayed on forever and become a trustee.”
This gave Gwen her opportunity to say he might at least have made a good trustee. It was Gwendolyn who was the driving force behind the ranch. She was as easygoing and gay as a colt, but it was she who set the prices and did the trading on the horses, ordered the supplies, kept the books, ran the hired hands. It was she who had insisted on building the two cabins and who was planning two more in the fall. “It kills me,” she said, “to have tourists drive up when the sun’s going down, afraid to try the pass to Sheridan in the dark, and have to say no room.”
After a few days on the ranch, days of riding, fishing, chopping wood, Gregory rediscovered the solid good ache of forgotten muscles, the big muscles never used at a desk, the thigh and calf muscles, the chest and shoulder muscles; he swore they would return every summer as long as the Chisholms would have them.
If anybody had told Gregory Johns that he had been in a state of shock since publication day, he would have laughed. At most he might have conceded, “Well, a happy shock.” But now, a sense of strain, of watching, of waiting for Thorn’s news and bulletins and reports—all this began to die away, with the gradualness of the mountain-clinging daylight of Wyoming, and, in its dying, proclaimed its onetime existence.
In the third week at the ranch Gregory began to write. Only the middle hours of the day went into working; after breakfast he would hang around with all the kids at the corral, or go riding with them, or alone with Abby. Toward ten he would go to his room, emerge for lunch at high noon, and then go back until four. Since the train trip to the Coast, he had worked on his new book only in bits and pieces, spurts of a few hours at a time, days apart, each stop a reckless throwing away of momentum, each new attempt a digging down within himself to recapture ideas, sequence, mood.
But now, day after day for most of August, he wrote, and the slow arduous pages once more began to pile up in a blessed yellow sheaf. The last chapter of The Good World had been completed nearly a year ago; a writer had at last to write forward steadily or feel part of himself die.
Thorn’s letter about the Waldorf shattered his calm.
It came on their last day at the ranch, and Thorn explained that he had decided to write rather than wait for their return, to give Gregory plenty of time to see what it had meant to him, in case they should later feel like reopening the question of his lecturing again. “I had put the whole idea behind me, of course,” Thorn wrote, “and the idea of speaking again took shape so slowly, it was scarcely an act of will at all.
Weeks ago Zoring Smith approached me on this plushy affair at the Waldorf, a centennial for the Carstairs Paper-Co. They wanted outside speakers, not just the usual vice-presidents, and since they supply half the book presses in the country, Zoring thought a talk about the No. 1 best seller would liven up the proceedings. Finally I gave in and now that I’ve tried the Big Time, I just can’t tell you what it’s done for me. And, in the damnedest unexpected way, for the boys. They were there that night—I’d never realized how big a lift kids get when it’s their own father earning all the applause.”
Gregory swore. “So now I’d be robbing young Thorn and Fred,” he said to Abby.
Thorn had enclosed small notices of the talk. The blare of Hollywood was missing; there were no pictures; the tone was pleasing. “The longest speech was the last one, by Thornton Johns, who spoke about his brother, the author of the highly praised best seller, The Good World. The delighted audience applauded him to the echo, as did the guests of honor seated on the platform. These included—”
Gregory ignored the dozen names, but over his shoulder, Abby read aloud, “‘—and Jill Goodwyn, who will appear next year in a Paramount picture based on Gregory Johns’ earlier novel, Horn of Plenty.’”
“Where did it say that?” Gregory went back to the last paragraph and read it word for word.
“Do you suppose they’re having an affair?” Abby said.
“Not unless it’s on a lecture platform with every seat sold.”
Later they got back to the rest of Thorn’s news. The Hathaway-Johns Agency was still problematical; time had flown so quickly, it would be next spring before they could hope to start. This presented a basic problem. If Gregory’s next book should be ready in the spring or summer of 1950, Thorn’s first obligation would be to that. He hoped Gregory could, on his return to New York, give him some Indication of schedule on his new manuscript, also some Idea of its theme. In the greatest confidence, of course. It was a touch embarrassing to have people ask him what the new one would be about and not to know enough to sound convincing when he replied that it was even better than The Good World but that he was pledged not to reveal a word of it. “You see, I’m laying the groundwork for the next big push already.”
“The more Thorn does for me,” Gregory said, “the further away from him I feel. That’s base ingratitude, I guess.” Abby made no answer and he fell silent. He was thinking about young Thorn and Fred.
Hat hated to leave the ranch, but just as they were starting, they had a telegram that made her feel she would explode with joy. The Good World was completed and private screenings for New York’s most influential people were to start before she left for Vassar!
How many girls her age had ever seen a preview of a movie, she asked herself again and again, during the long drive home. How many Vassar girls had ever been invited to a screening for New York’s most influential people? What luck to have something fascinating to talk about, instead of gawking around the campus, the way new girls always did at college. She could kiss Mr. Von Brann and all of Imperial Century for pulling this off in time, and if some Act of God forced them to delay the Previews after all, she would simply die.
Had Pat ever been to a private screening of a movie before the public was allowed to see it? She couldn’t wait to see Pat again either; she could imagine his face when she casually invited him. to the preview with her. That is, if Daddy and Mother would let her. If? With college taking her away from home so soon, they certainly wouldn’t be silly enough to start a row about anything she wanted. She’d wait until they were back in the apartment and then, with her trunk half packed with new clothes, and separation looming large, she would ask them.
Often in the next days, Hat wished they could pull off on the shoulder of the highway, park and lock the car, and take a plane to New York. Eventually they did reach Martin Heights and, no Act of God having disturbed Imperial Century’s schedule, full details about it were waiting for them on Uncle Thorn’s lips. The private showings were to begin on Monday, the twelfth, and take the place of any gala Broadway opening at the Palladium Theater later on; Von Brann didn’t want that kind of fanfare for this picture. On Monday, in the afternoon, Gregory and Abby alone would see it with Harry Von Brann, and after that there would be a showing every night for five nights, to Imperial’s blue-chip list of influential people.
In Hat’s hierarchy of thrills, neither her shopping expeditions to Saks Fifth Avenue’s College Shop nor her reunion with Patrick King could rank with the excitement of accompanying her parents to Imperial Century’s spacious projection room, as large as a newsreel theater, and seeing her father’s name on the screen and hearing words he had written issue forth from the famous lips of her adored Stephen Fields and her adored Jean Singleton. She could scarcely believe that this was she, seated in the midst of people whose names and faces everybody in the world knew, nor that the tall slim man beside her, her own familiar, often unsatisfactory father, was basically responsible for drawing such audiences together. Before the week was out, all the movie critics in town were there, all the columnists, newspaper feature writers, radio and television people who knew everybody, journalists who knew everybody, publishers who knew everybody, visiting producers from other studios, visiting Hollywood stars, local Broadway stars, and Kukla, Fran, and Ollie.
Hat went all the time her parents went, except for the first hush-hush afternoon when even Uncle Thorn was excluded. For the real showings in the evenings, Uncle Thorn, of course, was all over the place, best pals with everybody, and Aunt Cindy managed to horn in twice. Daddy did let her invite Pat along, and the instant Pat looked around at the audience, he lost his resentment that she was not saving a single one of her last evenings in New York just to date him.
All week Daddy behaved well; after each showing, after all those great people had applauded the picture like mad, Daddy would forget about being shy and talk to everybody who came up. The movie critics and newspaper people would leap at him first, and make a hoggish circle around him, so it was only in the reception room, coming in or going out, that wonderful things could happen. But there Uncle Thorn or Mr. Von Brann or the New York executives of Imperial Century did introduce them to Gregory Peck and Moss Hart and Kitty Carlisle and Bette Davis, whose glorious eyes were still wet over the picture, and to the Quentin Reynoldses and Celeste Holm and Gertrude Lawrence and Bennett and Phyllis Cerf. One evening Oscar Hammerstein came, and Robert Sherwood; another time, Uncle Thorn pointed out Russel Crouse and Howard Lindsay and told her that all these famous playwrights belonged to a world government committee and worked awfully hard on it. “Does Daddy know that?” she asked him. “Of course he does, Hat.” It was the only time all week her old disapproval came alive again. Daddy talked often about the dull people who were for world government, even dead ones like Wendell Willkie and Nicholas Murray Butler, but he never once had told her that the idea made sense to terrific successful people like these. Maybe there was something to it after all.
When Gregory Johns saw The Good World for the first time, he wept. Except for Abby, Von Brann, and himself, the projection room was empty. They sat well back, tiers and tiers of empty seats before them. Even before the ceiling lights dimmed far above them, they did not speak.
The light receded; Gregory sat rigid. In the darkness, as the first bar of a thin troubled music drifted through the air, as the first beams from the projector hit the screen, there came not the traditional opening, not Imperial Century Studios Presents, not the names of the stars, not the title, not Screenplay By, Directed By, Produced By—
Nothing at first but a world of desolation sweeping across the screen; cities half crushed, spires fallen, forests blackened and blown, rivers-and ports emptied of ships.
Nothing after that but a .laborer walking down an empty street, a woman and child in a tumbled doorway, a Red Cross ambulance careening around a corner.
A narrator’s voice came gravely across the music. “It is Sunday morning. Three months have gone by since the end of the Fifth Atomic War. Ninety million people were killed in twenty hours and the rest of mankind is still afraid.”
Suddenly then, across the entire screen, came
THE GOOD WORLD
and Gregory’s eyes filled and his ribs could not contain his heart.
The “cards,” as he had learned to call them in Hollywood, now appeared in due and hallowed sequence; they were a dancing brightness, he could not read them.
Beside him, Abby took his arm, but he could not turn to her. Harry Von Brann lighted a cigarette; the flame was like a sword. The empty seats were a cause for love. Today he could not have borne it if he had had to speak, smile, give an opinion of this that his book had become.
Not one of the three theaters in Freeton would show The Good World until November, and old Geraldine was furious. She went and talked to the manager of the Main personally; he assured her he was as. sorry as she. “Not till it’s off Broadway,” he said. “We never get a quick shot at the real big ones.”
On opening day at the Palladium, Gerald couldn’t leave the store because Hiram was sick; Geraldine, and Fan Heston went to New York without him. They took an early train, but even at eleven in the morning, the line waiting for the box office to open went clear around the block to Sixth Avenue.
At first Geraldine couldn’t understand, why Gregory was so crazy about the picture, and the critics too. She and Fan were surprised at the queer opening, and, though neither of them said so, disappointed. The book hadn’t begun that way; Geraldine had expected to see Stephen Fields looking at a television wristwatch and a calendar that said 2000. But when the action and the dialogue began, she cheered up, and so did Fan, and soon they began to enjoy it as much as anybody else. There was a hope to it, under all the sophisticated talk and humor; it really made you believe the time would come—
When Gregory’s name came on, after that silly backward way the film began, Geraldine was furious. The title of the book was in letters as large as houses, but Gregory’s name was small, down at the bottom of the screen; it hardly stayed on long enough to read. At least it didn’t say “Based on” or “Adapted from.” It did say, “By Gregory Johns.”
“I should hope so,” Geraldine said aloud and a man next her shot a quick annoyed look in her direction. She wanted to turn to him and say, “My son wrote it,” she wanted to scream it aloud so the whole theater would hear. All the way through she sat there wanting to, and at the end she could have kissed all the people who burst into applause. She wanted to talk to everybody, she wanted to stand on a seat and shout, she wanted to cry.
She shushed Fan on the way out so she could hear everything said around her. Only one man said anything nasty. “Capitalist malarkey,” he called it, and she wished she could follow him and turn him right in to the F.B.I. If there was anything that came out clearer for her in the movie than it had been in the book, it was just that, about those Russians. They could veto everything they wanted about world government, right up to the time there was one, but then if they were the only ones out of it, they’d be like people without passports, or criminals who had lost their citizenship, or businessmen with no customers. “I just hope it doesn’t take five more wars, Fan,” she said. Fan shuddered but didn’t answer. Fan was still obeying the Shush.
But once they were out on the street, Fan began to chatter and whir like an eggbeater. Fan’s face was red, her hat was crooked, she would stop in the middle of the street and say, “Oh, and that scene where—” and start describing it as if Geraldine hadn’t seen the picture at all. “I can’t wait to get back home,” Fan said, “and tell everybody.”
A small pang, like a stitch, shot through Geraldine’s side.
That was a cruel thing for Fan to do, rubbing it in. Once it would have been Geraldine who told everybody, before the change, before the conspiracy. It was just like a conspiracy, except that it hadn’t started all at once. It had just crept up, and last week, when she tried to arrange a big party to go to New York to the Palladium, Fan Heston was the only one who would go.
It was then Geraldine had realized that something had been going on behind her back for weeks and weeks and weeks. Scarcely a soul in Freeton, except the Hestons, had dropped in or even phoned, and when she did meet the Markhams on the street, or the McGills or the Antons or the Smiths or the Garsons, and start to tell them about the bestseller list or the total sales, they would stand there as if they were worried about the parking-meter running out.
Once she had asked Gerald about it and he had passed it off heartlessly. “I was getting all worn out from all those parties, and so were you. Anyway, at the store, business is hotter than ever.” And now here was Fan being heartless too.
“Shall we, Deeny? I’ll treat,” Fan said.
“Shall we what?”
“Have some of these hot doughnuts and coffee? The smell is killing me.”
Geraldine looked around her. They were at a large plate-glass window, behind which great shining machines were spilling forth golden doughnuts. The smell of baking always cheered you, Geraldine thought, and she made for the revolving door. Inside, as they squeezed into two tight little chairs behind a table no bigger than a breadboard, a vast humanity entered Geraldine’s heart. Fan couldn’t help rushing right out to the Markhams and McGills and Antons, and telling them about the picture and the line around the block and the bursting applause. It was just human nature. If Fan wanted to batten off her fame, why, it was perfectly all right with her.
If Geraldine Johns had waited for the Palladium’s afternoon show that day, she might have seen her daughters Gloria and Georgia and Gracia standing in line for tickets, and her daughter-in-law Lucinda taking two guests in on passes.
Since Cindy had been to two previews, she was not aquiver to see the picture again, but it was wonderful to have so fine a reason for asking Maude Denkin and Nell Abbott to lunch. Without the official passes, they might have thought her pushy to call them; as it was, it had gone off perfectly. She’d felt marvelous, going in with them under that great marquee shouting The Good World at all of Broadway, and besides she liked just sitting there between them, half watching the picture, half letting her mind drift.
Thorn had arranged with the Publicity Office of Imperial Century to get as many passes as he needed, and she had asked him not to throw them around too casually. After that dreary summer in Quogue, she had explained, she was going to do a lot of entertaining—
Cindy smiled and leaned luxuriously back into the wide loge seat. Whenever she said “dreary summer” or the equivalent, Thorn promptly acquiesced to whatever the phrase had prefaced. At least while Jill Goodwyn had been in town, he certainly had. Like any wife, Cindy had let him stew about what she knew and what she didn’t; it would have been madness to admit she didn’t know anything and that she would have swallowed it if she had. Ever since that smash triumph of his at the Waldorf and ever since he had let her in on the secret that he was going to make a lot of money from a spring lecture tour as well as from Hathaway-Johns, Inc., she had actually found it easy to avoid an open break about Jill Goodwyn or anything else. Those tabloid pictures had nearly tripped her, but she had caught herself just in time.
And such good sense was paying oft, as it always did. This month Thorn had doubled the money for running the house; he hadn’t carried on much about the new draperies and rug for the living room; this morning he had said, “Of course, engraved;” when she had asked him about the cards.
It seemed crazy to order Christmas cards so far in advance, but she had never waited beyond October 1st, even with the cheap printed ones they had always sent out. This morning she had shown Thorn the stack of their old ones; she always kept a sample, so there wouldn’t be duplication, and she had run through about ten for him, going back before the war. Thorn had agreed they looked garish and cheap; that kind of thing wouldn’t go now, he had said. This year they’d be sending a card to everybody they had met in Hollywood, to all the possible clients of the Hathaway-Johns Agency, to dozens of movie critics and journalists and publishers and columnists and Heaven knew who all. “Go ahead and order something good. Let me check your list first.”
The moment he’d left for the office, she had begun on the names. The old list, Thorn’s clients and the family and their old friends, was in a cubbyhole at the right of her desk; she could put her hand on that in five minutes. But the new list had occupied half the morning. Making it had excited and thrilled her—it was a kind of shorthand record of the fabulous year they’d just had. No wonder she had finally had the brainstorm about what the card should say!
All the while she’d been adding names to the list, her mind had been searching for something original, something clever and witty and, above all, smart. No Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, no Best Wishes for the Holiday Season, none of those middle-class things the stores showed you in catalogues. Not this year, thank you. She’d design one herself, and write out the message herself, and then it would be right. It would be the kind that opened like a book, with a decoration or picture on the cover and the engraved words inside. She remembered one they had received last year from the investment broker, Bryson Goodhue. A well-known artist had done an etching of the Goodhue town house on Fifth Avenue, and the whole card had breathed wealth and elegance the moment you opened the envelope.
She had put the Goodhue card out of her mind and begun making sketches and writing out phrases; two minutes later her brainstorm had happened and she’d taken some of her best note paper and put the whole thing down.
It was in her bag now. If Maude Denkin wasn’t on one side of her and Nell Abbott on the other, each gulping with emotion one moment and laughing the next—if she were alone, she would take it out and look at it right now in the dim light that swam up from the screen.
Cindy closed her eyes and saw it anyway.
THORNTON AND LUCINDA JOHNS
HOPE THAT IN 1950
YOU WILL INDEED FIND IT
A GOOD WORLD
Again, as it had that morning, a rare joy filled Cindy’s heart. It was clever and witty; it was sophisticated and smart. The decoration on the cover might be something like a little spinning globe, garlanded with holly; she hadn’t fully thought that part out, but the notion rather appealed to her. The Goodhues’ etched town house loomed before her and momentarily blotted out her garlanded globe, but she refused to let dissatisfaction, nibble away at her pleasure. Maybe by this time next year? Or the year after next? After all, if Thorn kept having one triumph after another, it was perfectly possible. Not on Fifth Avenue, of course. The side streets were really considered smarter.
In the third week of the Palladium run, Ed Barnard asked Gregory to see the film with him there. “It’ll be different from the previews,” Ed said. “We’ll get the feel of a regulation audience. We could go to the four o’clock show and then have an early dinner.”
Gregory had already seen it twice in the theater, and with the same motive, but since his visits to the Palladium had been the seventh and eighth times he had seen The Good World, he could not bring himself to confess them, even to Ed. The loges were sold out, so they sat in the orchestra, and Gregory reflected that only on the fifth or sixth viewing had he begun to see approximately what everybody else was seeing. Until his inner clamor had really died away, the emotions generated from the screen had been overlaid, threaded through, tangled with fifty separate private emotions. Apparently Ed, too, had found it impossible, the first time, to be simply “one of the audience.”
At dinner, Ed discussed this phenomenon at length, and praised the picture almost without reservation. “It’s lost some of the subtlety of the book, of course, and they’ve glamoured it up a little too much in places, but everything basic was kept. It’s really a beautiful job in building up suspense and human drama.” He waited for Gregory to say something, but Gregory only nodded. After a moment, Ed said, “Are you ready to tell me about the new manuscript?”
“Not for a few weeks more. I think you might like this one.
“There’s always that chance.” Only infrequently did Ed Barnard feel like prodding Gregory to talk before he chose to; this was one of the times. He held his impulse in check, and as silence continued, he began to wonder whether Gregory would tell him what he felt about Thorn’s current lecturing. He decided to wait about that too. At the office, clippings about Thorn’s lectures were beginning to pile up; last August there had been dozens of more enticing ones from the gossip columns, about Thorn and Jill Goodwyn at the Stork, Thorn and, Jill Goodwyn at the Copacabana, Thorn and Jill Goodwyn at Le Persiflage, suddenly booming as a new favorite with the Gourmet Set. Haskell’s Clipping Service, in its zealous coverage—WE SPOT IT EVEN IF IT’S SIXPOINT—could not have included these under the Digby and Brown contract-but for the fact that no columnist ever spoke of Thorn, without lugging in his relationship to the author of—
“What are you so amused about?” Gregory, asked.
Ed looked bland. It was a matter for regret that he could not emulate Haskell’s and manage to include Thornton and Miss Goodwyn in the official area of his concern. Those tabloid pictures of Thorn bidding farewell to Jill Goodwyn at La Guardia had certainly, said more than a thousand words. “Thorn keeps asking me about the new book,” Gregory-said. “I keep telling him even you aren’t in on it yet.”
“He doesn’t regard that as a convincing point, does he?”
“You’re wrong. You and Alan Brown are the whole firm to him. He says, the ladies heckle him about the next one; in the question periods after his lectures.”
“You do know he’s lecturing again. That’s fine.”
Gregory told him about the letter to Wyoming. “Abby heard him at White Plains last week. She says he’s not going in for so much horseplay and that there’s nothing to bridle at, take umbrage at, or raise hell about.”
“Have you ever heard him?”
“No, but I’m going to sneak in on one soon.”
Ed grinned widely. “As a female impersonator? I’ll sneak in with you.”
“We’ll wait until there’s a mixed audience.” Gregory fished around in his pocket, drew out some old envelopes, and searched through them. “He’s giving one this week sometime; it’s an evening date and it is a mixed audience. My mother wants me. to go with them. All my sisters and their husbands are going; and Cindy and some of her guests.”
“How does Cindy like—er—Thorn’s lecturing?”
Gregory looked up, saw the sly smile, and laughed. “Abby says Cindy has forgiven Thorn about Jill Goodwyn, if that’s what you mean, and it is Abby guesses that Jill was a small price for Cindy to pay, to acquaint Daily News readers with Thorn’s name and handsome features. I think my wife’s gone a little catty.” He went on with the notes scribbled on his envelopes. He glanced at his watch. “Maybe it’s tonight. Would you drive out with me if it were?”
“Sure would.”
‘“The Thursday Lit Club,’” he read aloud. “What’s today?”
“Tuesday.”
“Hell. I’m just in the mood.”
“You’ll be in the mood Thursday night too. Where does the Thursday Lit Club have its being?”
“Roslyn.”
“I’ll drive my car out Thursday night and pick you and Abby up.”
“Let’s get there early, so we can sit away from my mother. In spite of her assurances, I’m afraid she’d just manage to let the whole audience know—well, anyway, let’s get there early.”
But on Thursday night it rained, and Ed found traffic over the bridge bumper-to-bumper slow. By the time he stopped by at Martin Heights for Gregory and Abby, he was already twenty minutes late, and the eighteen miles to Roslyn delayed them more. When they arrived at the lecture hall, every parking space in a five-block radius was occupied. Walking back to the hall drenched them, and they stopped only for a second before the large poster, Thornton Johns Speaks Tonight on “MY BROTHER, GREGORY JOHNS.” The man in the ticket office had his back to the barred window and was talking sharply to an attendant behind him.
“They forgot these autograph cards,” the man said. “And this pen. You get them up on the platform when it starts to break up. The Bureau says they mob this one.” The ticket-teller turned forward again.
“Three please,” Ed said.
“Sorry, sold out.”
“But just a minute. This lady and gentleman with me—”
“Standing room is all gone too.” He pulled open his cash drawer and Began busily to count bills.
“Just a second,” Ed began angrily. He felt a tug at his sleeve, and he turned. Abby looked disappointed, but Gregory, his thumb raised and jerking backward and away, was convulsed with laughter.
The man behind the wicket looked up from his money and surveyed Gregory Johns coldly. “What’s the big joke, Mac?”