THE GOOD WORLD CLOSED its record-breaking run at the Palladium the last week in October, and during November it was playing, as Variety put it, The Nabes. It played Poughkeepsie early; it played Martin Heights, Roslyn, and Freeton; out in Wyoming it played Greybull, Lovell, Cody, and Sheridan before the great snows began.
To virtually everybody in the Johns orbit, the tempo of life stepped up once more.
Hat’s letters from Vassar were, for the first time, ecstatic. For a while, like her occasional weekends at home, they had been so casual that they had worried her parents; they had sounded guarded, too filled with details about courses and teachers and not enough about friends and fun. Now they became lyrical; a lilt of joy ran through every one of them. “It’s playing right on campus at the Juliet, and I gave a party and took ten girls, and then on up to the Pub on the Hill afterwards. I’m stony but I don’t care. This is the most wonderful place in the world, and I’m so happy living at Cushing, I could die. Could you possibly send me fifteen dollars extra right away?”
From Freeton, Gerald or Geraldine telephoned nearly every day for a week, and only when The Good World was replaced by Pinky did Geraldine sound subdued. “You have to do something for me,” she told Gregory one morning. “Maybe it’s silly of me, looking way ahead to January, but your father and I want our next anniversary party to be out here in our house and you have to promise you’ll come.”
Gregory said mildly, “Now look—” but his mother’s voice trembled a little as she interrupted and went on.
“When you get old, even your close friends neglect you,” she said, “but I think your father blames me. I told him long ago that people never like it if somebody else’s child gets famous, and then when Thorny started to get famous too, it just broke their nerve.”
Gregory restrained an impulse to discuss the point.
“Anyway,” his mother said, “an anniversary would be a real reason to invite everybody in again. And they’d all accept if they knew you and Thorny were both coming.”
“Of course we’re coming,” Gregory said heartily. “We’ll throw the biggest anniversary party you ever saw. You go right ahead and ask all of Long Island.”
By Thanksgiving, Harry Brinton was pulled in for the art work on his first national advertising account. The president of one of the largest hat companies in America wanted a testimonial campaign on Distinctive Hats for Distinguished Men, and was told that Brinton not only had an A-1 art service, but also great influence with his brother-in-law, Gregory Johns. And since Gregory Johns had never yet signed any known testimonial, his photograph wearing a Distinctive hat, and his signature to a Distinctive statement, would clearly be even more distinguished than most of the distinguished signers they could line up more readily.
Upon hearing from Gloria of Harry’s latest and greatest new account, both Gracia and Georgia turned upon their respective husbands and demanded why they couldn’t show a little red-blooded American ambition.
“We belong to a famous family,” Gracia said, “and look at all the good it. does us.” Georgia’s remarks paraphrased her sister’s.
Up on Morningside Heights, Thorn Junior ran for the presidency of his two clubs. His fellow students, having mellowed considerably since their Shakespeare class at the close of the spring session, elected him unanimously, and young Thorn got gloriously drunk for the first time in his life.
“The trick,” young Thorn decided boozily, “is keep your, trap shut. The fellows know who’s Big Man on Campus anyways.”
In a beauty parlor at the Ritzy Mrs. Luther Digby repeated stubbornly, “Not even a rinse. Don’t touch it up at all. That’s why I changed from my old place—they won’t let me let it grow out. I like it gray.” She stared bleakly at the mirror before her. She had known it wouldn’t do any good; with Luther buried up to his ears in musty old letters whenever he did condescend to stay in for an evening, he wouldn’t notice it if her hair were dyed lime green.
At Digby and Brown, the switchboard came under the ministrations of a girl named Mabel, tall, angular, and inefficient. Janet married Mr. Muncy’s assistant, and, as she was leaving to do so, earnestly told two of the secretaries that if they’d only realize how high-class it was to work for a big successful publishing house instead of, say, for some hardware company or button manufacturer, they’d begin to feel and act glamorous and improve their position in life the way she had.
In an elegantly decorated three-room office on Park at Fifty-Seventh, a stack of new memo pads sat on a desk of off-white mahogany. They were engraved, “From the office of Diana Bates, Executive Assistant to Mr. Johns.” Since moving uptown, Diana had got a typist to assist her on routine work, a twenty-dollar weekly raise, a nutria coat, and a new point of view. Having inadvertently stayed in on a California call eight seconds too long, in her official desire to check the clarity of the connection, she had recently overheard one remark of Jill Goodwyn’s, noiselessly replaced the receiver, and proceeded to Think Things Over. If famous movie stars had to compromise with life and accept the risk of scandal and disaster, might it not be wise to give in at last and embrace the second-best possibility long offered by “Roy Tribble?
Diana gazed at her off-white desk, the dark charcoal walls, the white Venetian blinds against the glittering expanse of wall-to-wall window. She stared at her new memo pads and saw the buzzer by which she might now summon help.
The lids on Diana’s beautiful eyes lowered and as if from behind a veil, she delicately dialed Roy Tribble’s number.
Hulda no longer drove Cindy mad. Hulda no longer indulged in bare feet, sullen looks, or sotto voce rudeness to the Mister or Missus. Hulda never went to market without getting dressed up and never ordered without first demanding loudly, “You seen that movie yet?” Whether the answer was yes or no, Hulda took it as a signal for prolonged discussion, and proved herself an expert on box-office figures at the Palladium and the entire Loew circuit. Whenever the butcher did try to palm off a tough chicken or stringy steak, Hulda resorted to a remark she had made three times a week for over a month. “Mr. Gregory Johns comin’ tonight, won’t eat nothin’ but the best.”
A New York institution, founded in 1939, and known as Celebrity Service, Inc., received twelve calls in one day from subscribers so conditioned to the ways of The Great that it had not occurred to any one of them to look for Gregory Johns in the telephone book.
Dedicated to duty, Celebrity Service sought once more to expand the meager information which, unknown to Gregory Johns, had begun to appear in its files last January, when the book columns had announced the B.S.B. selection. The files still showed nothing that had not appeared in the public prints. And this was only a fraction of what they showed on Thornton Johns.
Thereupon, Celebrity Service, also detouring the telephone book, called the Stork Club and asked for Thornton Johns’ number.
Diana and Mr. Johns being out to lunch, Diana’s new assistant redirected Celebrity Service to Mrs. Johns.
Cindy had never heard of Celebrity Service. As she listened to explanations, she scarcely believed that there was anything so glamorous as a firm that bothered only with celebrities. And when she realized that her own husband was listed with them, she could scarcely contain herself. The Social Register, Who’s Who, Burke’s Peerage—all of it was mid-Victorian, stuffed-shirt, old-hat. She, Lucinda Johns, was married to a man who had been crowned in true twentieth-century style.
From Wyoming, in December, came a thick letter enclosing several clippings and snapshots. Gwen and Howie, who had remained endearingly simple about the book and movie, had been amused by these pieces from the Wyoming press, which declared that Gregory Johns and his family were annual visitors to The Equality State, and would again be staying at the Chisholm ranch at Shell Canyon next summer. “Have a look and laugh,” Gwen wrote.
Gwen then went on to her news. She had finally talked Howie into gambling on six large cabins instead of two small ones. The stone foundations and outside chimneys were already complete, the log walls were nearly up, and as the snapshots would prove, everything ought to be ready in the spring. Resort advertising in the Saturday Review of Literature had already been contracted for and the new entrance from the main highway was finished and handsome. “If you were a civilized tourist or dude,” Gwen wrote, “wouldn’t you find it inviting?”
The photographs of the entrance showed tall rough-hewn gateposts with a horizontal fifty-foot beam suspended across them in true Western style. From this beam swung a forty-foot sign which proclaimed THE GOOD WORLD RANCH. Below it, in a smaller but still highly legible square, hung another sign: “Gwendolyn Johns Chisholm, Manager.”
Precisely one week after Abby announced she was through with apartment-hunting until spring of next year, the Zatkes ended the search for her. Mary Zatke had often made the rounds with Abby; Mary said it would be hateful to have their closest friends give up and move to New York, and the Smiths and the Feins down the street agreed with her.
But in all of Martin Heights, the only apartment that would be available this year was 3B, across the court from the Zatkes and the Johnses, and one room smaller than each of theirs. A place that would give Gregory a study and Hat a room of her own simply did not exist in that world of Garden Developments. Families that needed six rooms had never concerned its architects and builders; they had always regarded two-, three-, or four-room apartments as the American Norm.
And then Jake Zatke decided on a year’s sabbatical from teaching, to take advance courses for an M.S. degree. His sabbatical would date from the end of the current semester but budgeting had to begin immediately. Drastic cuts had to be made and 3B offered a fine beginning.
May and he discussed this thoroughly, saw their landlord, and inspected 3B. Then Mary flew in upon Gregory and Abby,
Gregory was working, but she told them about 3B anyway. “So you take ours, and knock a door through in that wall, and you’ll have two apartments thrown into one. They’ll let you do the door; Jake asked them. You’ll have to pay for it and restore, the wall when you finally move out—the landlord said, ‘Even for Mr. Johns, we don’t put out a cent on painting or improvements, this rent-control is killing us off.’ But a door won’t cost much, and there’s your six rooms.”
“And two baths,” Gregory said.
“And two kitchens and two iceboxes,” Abby cried. “Oh, Mary.”
“Our living room could be Gregory’s study,” Mary said, “and our bedroom could be Hat’s room, and the extra kitchen could be I don’t know what.” Mary pointed to the wall beyond the sofa where Hat had slept for so many years. “There’s where the door has to go. Jake looked at the girders on a blueprint.”
For the next ten minutes Abby and she forgot Gregory completely. “I’ll use Hat’s room while she’s away,” Abby said.
“You’ll use it?” Mary asked.
Abby laughed. “As my study. Imagine not typing on a bridge table in your bedroom any longer.”
“Oh, Abby, we’ll plan the room that way. Let’s go look at it now. Whatever Hat wants it to be, she couldn’t object to a nice desk and a big armchair in it too. You could do all your reading for your reviews.”
Abby could see herself working in comfort at last. The weekly batch of reviews might seem silly to some people now, but Mary and Jake had understood as completely as Gregory. With Hat gone, with Gregory engrossed in his work day after day, she had begun to miss the Monday morning package of juveniles and detective stories, to miss the rush toward her deadline. Even to miss the pride in adding her bit to the family income. When the postman had once again brought her the familiar old envelope with a check for twelve dollars and twenty cents, it had mattered in a way she could never explain.
Mary was gathering her purse and gloves and Abby followed her across the hall. The moment they were gone, Gregory Johns picked up the telephone. He dialed nervously and gave his name.
“On that order I gave you last week—”
“It’s on the way, Mr. Johns. It had to come from the warehouse, but it should get there any minute now.”
“Damn it. Would it be possible to—”
The bell on the kitchen door set up a clanging and a voice shouted, “Anybody home for this Frigidaire?”
The news of their impending expansion was to be kept as a surprise for Hat. She was due home again shortly, for the Christmas holidays, and Abby found the last days of waiting oddly difficult. Though she had not done so before, Abby at last told Gregory she was sure something had gone wrong at college. After Hat’s one lyric outburst of communication, she had relapsed into her earlier Poughkeepsie style—too casual, too uncommunicative. She rarely mentioned Pat King; she never mentioned her roommate; she was getting honor grades in each of her courses.
“She’s homesick,” Gregory said uneasily.
“It’s worse than that.”
They both went to the train to meet her, and Hat hugged and kissed them as if she had not seen them, for years instead of since the Thanksgiving weekend. All the way out in the car, she talked and laughed and asked questions; it was wonderful they’d been to the theater so much and bought the big Magnavox and the records; she hoped they had some dance records too and hadn’t seen every good play by now; she’d give anything to see Streetcar before it closed, and Mr. Roberts, and of course Kiss Me, Kate, and South Pacific. Lordy, it was good to be home for a big long time.
And when they reached home, and Hat saw four partially packed cartons and barrels in the living room, she guessed the news and was delirious. Abby explained about the Zatkes. “Before you go back, dear,” Abby said, “we’ll go shopping and pick out everything for your room, plus a desk and big reading chair you and I both like.”
The gaiety lasted through most of the evening. At last Hat introduced the name of Patrick King. “I’m not dating Pat till next week,” she said. “I wrote you he came up to the Snow Ball, didn’t I?”
“You rather glided over it,” Gregory said.
Hat didn’t answer that and Abby put her hand on Hat’s arm. “What went wrong, dear?”
Hat looked at her parents with a forlorn dignity. “Just everything. Other times Pat’s been up, the girls said he missed being white-shoe, you know, Ivy League men with their sloppy buckskins. I used to think they were all jealous, but for the Ball, Pat had a navy dinner jacket and oh, he sort of stuck out like a smooth character against all those men down from New Haven. And he’s become the most slurpy name-dropper too—it was just horrible.”
Without further ado, Hat burst into tears. “I hate Vassar, I don’t want to go back there. Please don’t make me go, please let me stay home and go back to Hunter, I just can’t tell you how awful it’s been even before the Ball, with everybody giving me the ice and talking behind my back because I won’t wear sneakers and blue jeans or khakis on campus.”
It was a long time before they had the full story. Through the pain of seeing her in pain, Gregory and Abby both felt an underlying relief. And a confidence they had not had for a long time. Now was the moment, Gregory thought.
“Name-droppers,” he said quietly, “aren’t very lovable, wherever you find them, Hat.”
“Oh, Daddy, Pat King’s so cheap! I can’t tell you—”
“I don’t mean Pat King.”
Hat looked at him quickly. For several seconds she said nothing. Her fair skin suddenly colored and she said, “But you’re my own father!”
“And it’s marvelous to have my own kid proud of me,” he said. “But, Hatsy, boasting isn’t marvelous. It’s cheap, the way you say Pat is cheap.”
Anger roared up in Hat. He hadn’t called her “Hatsy” since she was a child, but that couldn’t soften this unfair blow. It wasn’t true; she had never boasted; she had only told people—
Hat glanced at her mother, but though Abby looked unhappy, she seemed relaxed, as if she wouldn’t lift a finger to stop Daddy.
“You’re going to tell me you never boasted,” Gregory went on. “And that it would be unnatural, when people talk about the book or movie, for you not to join in, and that if you do join in, how can you help mentioning the best-seller lists and all the foreign rights and the Palladium run.”
Hat refused to meet his eyes.
“And that leads you on,” Gregory continued, “to the previews and Bette Davis and Gregory Peck and Jean Singleton and Jill Goodwyn and Hollywood in general and before you know it—”
“Daddy, stop.”
Now Abby did make a gesture to Gregory; and she went over to Hat and held her in her arms while Hat cried. After a while, above Hat’s shoulders, Abby motioned toward the bedroom: and Gregory left them. Abby talked about Hat’s phrase from long ago; “Timmy says the other boys are dying to meet me”; she asked Hat to consider her sudden scorn for Macy’s and Best’s and sudden love for Doubleday’s and Brentano’s; little by little she took Hat backwards over the road she had traveled so quickly since the night last January when their fortunes had been changed by a telegram read to them over the phone by Jake Zatke.
“But Daddy is a celebrity,” Hat cried. “I can’t help that, can I?”
“He really isn’t, Hat.”
“Of course he is, he can’t help being. He’s famous, and if you’re the daughter of a famous—”
“His book’s famous.” Abby scarcely emphasized the noun. “And I’m sure he’d be happy if every book he ever wrote became famous. But that’s not the same thing.”
“But, Mother, it’s such a waste, throwing it all away. Think of all the fun—”
“Has it been such fun at school, dear?”
Hat made no answer. There was silence for a long time and then Abby said, “Look, Hat. You’re going to go back to Vassar, and you’re going to be different, and it’s going to take them a long time maybe, but someday your roommate and all the other girls will know that you’ve changed back to the way you used to be, the way you were again in Wyoming, the way they have never seen you. And then they’ll love you as much as Daddy and I do.”
Long after Hat was finally asleep, Gregory and Abby talked on. At two, they went out to the kitchen where the huge new icebox dwarfed and demeaned all the shabby old equipment, and provided themselves with cheese and crackers and milk.
“Maybe she had to go through it for herself,” Abby said. “Maybe we did try everything we could. Perhaps we shouldn’t blame ourselves or Thorn or Cindy or the family or anybody.”
Gregory let the discussion lapse. When he spoke again it was in a different tone. “Pretty soon Imperial Century Studios hand over another thirty thousand, don’t they?”
Abby welcomed his change of mood. “The second payment’s due on January tenth.”
“And this time,” Gregory said, “I’m ready for Thorn and his scruples. Next year I’ll be ready too.”
“Are you going to cancel his three-thousand-dollar loan? He’d never let you.”
“I know he wouldn’t. This hasn’t anything to do with cash. When we go to. Europe next summer, we’ll take them as our guests again. And in ’51, if we do fly to South America—”
“But we’ll want to go tourist and stay at inns,” Abby said. “And they’ll want the Queen Elizabeth and the Savoy.” She suddenly looked wicked. “Oh, Gregory, it’s going to cost us lots more than three thousand a year to keep Thorny’s conscience clean.”
Always considerate, Thorn had not yet risked an interruption to Gregory’s creative mood by mentioning his own work progress. They had scarcely seen each other, he suddenly realized, since the previews. The telephone had become their stand-by; the lazy old evenings spent together seemed a thing of the distant past.
That’s not too good, Thorn thought. It makes us like nothing but business acquaintances.
He buzzed through to Diana and asked her to get Gregory. Diana said, “Righto,” and buzzed through to her assistant. “Righto” was a new expression for Diana, Thorn reflected, more pert than her usual style. Diana had once again changed. Her eyes were happy, smiling, warmer in their glance to all their new clients.
I certainly did something for Diana’s morale, moving her into a smart neighborhood, giving her a raise, letting her make something of herself. Beneficence flooded Thorn’s heart.
“How’s it coming?” he said a minute later to Gregory.
“Fine,” Gregory said. “The connecting door is in already. We’re nearly settled.”
“I mean the new book.”
“Well, it’s going faster than usual.”
“How far along would you say?”
“About halfway, maybe.”
“Great. Say, Gregory, how about Cindy and me coming out there one of these nights?”
“Come on. Bring the boys.”
“I meant next week, after the holidays. Cindy’s driving me crazy with parties and dinners, but after New Year’s—”
“Any time, Thorn. You name it.”
Thorn hung up thoughtfully. It might be wise not to bring up Digby’s idea with Cindy there; Cindy always put her foot in anything subtle. The stenotype technique was working brilliantly; there were three hundred pages of recording already. With all due allowance for inevitable repetition, about half of that was clearly usable.
Thorn reached for a cigarette and wished Digby would come up with as good an idea about an editor for it. Last week Thorn had suggested Ed Barnard, but Digby had summarily rejected the nomination.
I wonder if Gregory himself—
This notion so startled Thornton Johns that he burned his fingers with the match he had lighted.
There would be a sort of justice in it, he thought a moment later. When you consider the larger aspects of everything—the two movie sales I engineered, and his month at Imperial. Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars over five years on those three deals alone! Gregory does owe me something. And all I’m taking is a thousand a year commission for five years on Horn. Apart from foreign and digest peanuts.
The Collector of Internal Revenue was taking nearly sixty thousand this year—on Gregory’s old level that would have been thirty years’ income! In 1950, the Collector of Internal Revenue would take even more—ninety thousand in royalties became payable in February. Digby’s slice of the two movie sales would total thirty thousand on top of fifty-two from B.S.B. before they even began to count their regular profits from book sales on World. Even Hathaway would get fifteen thousand over the same five years.
God, Thorn thought, if I didn’t have standards.
But he did have standards and he was glad he did. Let them all milk Gregory for everything they could squeeze out of him; let them all wonder why they had to take sleeping pills every night. Did the Collector of Internal Revenue take sleeping pills every night?
Thorn smiled over this conceit and pondered Gregory’s “faster than usual.” It worried him. Could Gregory conceivably finish before the tour was over in late April? This time there could be no waiting around for galleys and book clubs; he had promised typed manuscript to Von Brann, to Metro, to Paramount, and all the rest of them. He was building up quite a head of steam for the new book in Hollywood; it mustn’t be allowed to cool off.
Impatience bubbled high in Thornton Johns. He longed for the time when negotiations could begin; there was nothing quite like the potency that came when you had a property the moguls were all bidding for. This new one better be good. “Better than The Good World” was quite a prediction.
Again he buzzed for Diana. “I’m going out to Martin Heights. I won’t be back today.”
Within five hours Thornton Johns was cursing himself and his impulsive visit. After an anguished night, he ordered his garage to rush his car over and went down to the sidewalk to wait for it. A moment later he hailed a taxi and gave Gregory’s address. He was too unnerved to do any driving; he had hardly slept. In his pigskin portfolio was the cause of his agony. If only yesterday’s mission had failed! If only Gregory had not broken a lifelong rule about unfinished work!
Thornton Johns, Master of Timing. Thornton Johns, the man in the know. What would he give now to be out of the know, at least until after the spring tour?
Hell, it was better to know, know now, know while there was still time. This would take tact, softness, self-control; he had them all.
As he paid off the cab, Hat came out of the house, and said, “Why, Uncle Thorn!” In an offhand way he said, “Business again,” and was glad she was dressed for town. He waved good-bye and dashed inside and up the steps, put his finger to the bell, held it there, and then remembered the need for self-control. If any of God’s creatures were vainer than authors, he didn’t know which. Thorn arranged a smile upon his face and when Abby opened the door he laughed. “A little morning call,” he said.
Through the connecting door to his new study, Gregory came in. Thorn waved his portfolio and said, “I told you I’d read it fast. It’s marvelous, Gregory,” That didn’t sound right. “Remarkable, original. You are going to surprise them with this one.”
Gregory looked at him quizzically. Thorn went on with his praise until he saw Gregory and Abby exchange glances. “But I have a suggestion to make,” Thorn said.
“Fine,” Gregory said,
“I thought about it all night. I wondered if you could perhaps—”
“Perhaps what?”
“Perhaps set it aside awhile. Not make it the very next book, but the one after the next.”
“Thorn,” Abby said.
“I take it,” Gregory said, “you don’t think it’s so marvelous.”
The tone unnerved Thorn, but he forced himself to stay calm. Affably he went on, “I do. I’m looking at the over-all picture. If the next, one could just, consolidate our position, why then, after that—”
“This is the next one,” Gregory said.
Something exploded inside Thornton Johns. “It can’t be,” he said loudly. “You can’t do this to me. Or to yourself.”
“Leave me out of it, thanks.”
“All my hard work, all my buildup for the next one, everything I’ve counted on for you, and now—”
Gregory opened the portfolio, drew out his manuscript, and carefully set it on a table at his side.
“You’ve got to believe me,” Thorn went on. “No magazine will touch this, no book club will take it, no movie studio will bid on it. My God, I can’t even make out what it’s about. Aborigines? Pygmies? Native blacks in the jungle? God!”
Gregory’s right hand went rigid. He picked up the manuscript again and carried it off and out of sight into his study.
Abby said, “Oh, Thorn, you shouldn’t have. I’ve never seen him so furious.”
Thorn went toward the open door. “I don’t mean to upset you, Gregory,” he called. “It really is marvelous. It’s just—”
Gregory returned and almost collided with him. “You listen, Thorn,” he said. For a second no one moved. “There’s one thing you can’t do, and you’ve done it. Everything else I don’t give much of a damn about, one way or another. You can go right on—lecture about me, get in the papers, be photographed, hobnob with Big Names, be more famous every day. But the one thing you can’t do is tell me what to write and what not to write.”
“I only said that this next book—”
“This next book or the book after that or the hundredth book from now.” Gregory’s voice did not rise in pitch, but each word was a rock hurled. “Not now, not ever, are you or anybody else going to tell me what to write and what to throw aside, and if you don’t want to go ahead on those terms and on no other terms in this world, you don’t have to.”
Gregory turned on his heel and slammed out of the room. Abby started to follow him, but pulled her hand back from the doorknob, and sat down slowly on the sofa.
Thorn stared at the blind expanse of the door. He looked at Abby’s appalled face and turned away. He had never seen Gregory like this either. Compared to this, last winter’s shouting fight about commission was nothing.
And on no other terms in this world. He could have punched Gregory for that. But Gregory had the pay-off punch; Gregory always had it. Gregory could stop him cold. Gregory alone in the whole world. Not Hathaway, not Cindy, not anybody else. But Gregory. He had forgotten that. Damn it, Gregory let you forget it for a year at a time.
Thorn wished Abby would leave the room, go out of the house. He had to think; with her eyes boring holes in his back, he would never collect himself. She was like another Gregory. She would wangle it all into something larger than stubbornness and better than ingratitude!
He forced himself to look at her. Abby said, “Thorn,” in a shaken voice, and fell silent once again. Minutes went by. “Thorn,” she said more firmly, “you’re thinking he’s forgotten everything you’ve done for him. But there’s one thing you’ve forgotten.”
Abby did not know just how to start. At the center, she thought, of the great widening circle of the agents who sell a book and the printers who print it and the publishers who publish it and the critics who review it and the bookstores who sell it and the readers who read it and the movie studios who buy it—at the center of all this world was an author who wrote it. Haltingly she tried to put this into words for Thorn. “Without that author,” she ended, “where would any of that world be? If he hadn’t leaned over a pad of blank paper, or faced the dead motionless keys on a typewriter, where would any of it be?”
Thorn looked at her, and she thought, Now he knows. Somehow they all know. Sooner or later, they all know. She did not ask herself who they were or what they all knew; but again she thought, Now he knows.
“You mean,” Thorn said, “without Gregory, where would I be.”
“It’s not only you and Gregory.”
“You do mean,” Thorn went on slowly, “without Gregory’s brains and talent, where would I be. Downtown selling insurance, you mean.”
He sat down and shielded his face with his hand. Looking at him, Abby suddenly remembered the rainy night when Ed had driven them out to Roslyn. Thornton Johns Speaks Tonight on “MY BROTHER, GREGORY JOHNS.”
In her mind, voices seemed all at once to be calling out to her: My father Gregory Johns, my son Gregory Johns, my uncle Gregory Johns, my brother-in-law Gregory Johns, my client Gregory Johns, our author Gregory Johns, our new property Gregory Johns—
Behind his shielding hand, Thorn was thinking, I shouldn’t have put that into her head, about where would I be. It was true once; it’s not true any more. Nothing could put me back downtown, an insurance salesman and nothing more. Just the same, one more fight like this could stop everything else cold.
He saw the piled-up stenotype record in his office; he tried to imagine the moment when Gregory would have to be told about it. Suddenly Thorn could feel himself tearing the three hundred pages to shreds. Prudence paid off better than punches, prudence and patience. A book about aborigines and native blacks was useless but the next one after it might be another Horn of Plenty or even another Good World.
“I know what you meant, Abby,” he said at last. “I won’t ever forget it.”
Abby nodded without looking at him and, after a bit, he crossed the room and knocked on Gregory’s door. “May I come in a minute?”
“Come ahead.”
“I just wanted to say—” He hesitated; there had been no welcome in Gregory’s voice, but no truculence either. Thorn opened the door. Gregory was standing at the window, facing the garden court, but he had taken off his glasses and Thorn knew he wasn’t looking directly at anything. Thorn waited for him to put them on again and turn toward him, but Gregory just stood there, holding the curved horn shaft and gently swinging the glasses to and fro.
“I thought,” Thorn began, “that we ought to talk this out a bit more.”
Gregory turned. “We really oughtn’t. We talked out all there is to talk out.” He left the window and sat down at his desk. As if his glasses; were a new kind of paperweight, he set them down squarely in the center of his yellow pages of manuscript.
“Any agent worth his salt,” Thorn said, and stopped. He never was aware of Gregory’s glasses but now they held him; as if they were eyes looking up at him, from Gregory’s work. “Any agent would try to brief you on markets and possible sales for anything you showed him.”
“If I asked him about markets and sales.”
“I’d do that if I weren’t your agent,” Thorn said. “You’d try to give me a steer if you thought I was getting off the track, wouldn’t you? Sure you would.”
The last words were spoken with such, warm confidence that Gregory found himself thinking, Please! No brotherly love, not just now. Even unspoken, this sounded so churlish; that he said aloud, “Probably I would, but—”
“That’s really all I was doing, Gregory. But the minute you tell me you’re not on the wrong track, that it’s the one track you want to be on, regardless, then what I say is ‘Fine, just fine.’”
Now the warmth was for Gregory’s judgment, for his rights as an author. If Gregory had thought, the tone said, that Thorn would ever dream of forgetting those rights, then Gregory had misjudged and even wronged him.
“Just fine,” Thorn repeated urgently. “You never gave me a chance to say that.”
“Let’s leave it at that.” Gregory’s hands began to move restlessly about the desk, shifting pencils, moving pads, finally coming to rest on his glasses. There was a pause.
“God, Gregory, put them on, will you? You look like a stranger.”
It was so unexpected that Gregory automatically complied. He glanced up; Thorn’s face was strained and flushed. Suddenly Gregory remembered the night when Cindy had humiliated Thorn in front of him and Abby, with her hints about affording a vacation, and, as it had then, an odd sensation came to him, of being the older brother, the taller, the heavier of the two. All at once the rest of his anger evaporated. “Take it easy, Thorn,” he said. “We’ve had it out; we had to have it out once. Now stop worrying about the rest of your applecart.”
He heard Thorn swallow and for one moment Gregory Johns longed for the old Thorn, the one who had never sold a movie, who had never made a deal with a studio. The old Thorn wouldn’t have let Cindy send out those Christmas cards, wouldn’t have sold Jill Goodwyn that policy, wouldn’t have told Hathaway at the last minute to go peddle his papers elsewhere. Long ago a process had started; in this age it was a process that could go on and on, faster and faster. In a year or two would this Thorn be the old Thorn? Were there to be newer and newer Thorns?
The ramifications, Gregory Johns thought, the collateral results. Sometimes you laugh at them, and sometimes you watch them and feel deprived and lonely.
“The hell with the applecart,” Thorn said then. “I wasn’t worrying about that.” He glanced at Gregory; it was the old Gregory again, no longer a stranger. “Or maybe I was. An applecart a day—” Gregory smiled, and Thorn thought of the relief he always felt when an audience of strangers laughed for the first time and became an audience of friends. Pretty soon the spring tour would be starting; Zoring had already signed on six or seven dates in Hollywood and Brentwood and Beverly Hills. This time he would be going out alone—no Cindy, no Gregory and Abby, just himself, unhampered and free.
He looked at his watch. “Well, Gregory, I’d better get back to the office. I’ll be seeing you one night next week. Remember?”
He waved genially and went back to Abby, slapping the door to behind him. Gregory could hear their voices and then the thump of the front door. He’s recuperating already, Gregory thought, and was unexpectedly glad. In a day or two the applecart would be rolling along as usual. It never would tip over all the way; it was a nice twentieth-century applecart, on stout wheels, complete with resilient springs, perfect lubrication, and white-wall tires. Plus jet propulsion and calliope sound effects. Here comes Thornton Johns; there goes my brother.
The door opened again and Abby looked in anxiously. He smiled and she came toward him, around the desk and behind him. She reached down and moved the top page of the manuscript so she could see it. This part hadn’t been typed yet, hadn’t been shown to Thorn. Gregory looked down at it too. Words were scratched out, rewritten and scratched out again; lines were struck through entire sentences; a great X bisected the whole center. The entire page was black, scribbled over; every margin was filled, every inch of space covered over.
She waited until he looked up at her. Then she said softly, “Page 153. Quite a lot of progress since a month ago when you were at 200, isn’t it?”
The holidays were over, the New Year came in, and on Monday, the sixteenth of January, 1950, the Cathedral chimes on Fifth Avenue began to ring out six o’clock.
In an office high above the street, the five judges of Best Selling Books, Inc., stared at each other hopelessly. With five votes now instead of six as it used to be, thought Ethel Flannegin, the renowned novelist, lecturer, and book-club judge, deadlock should have been impossible. But two monolithic immovable stand-pat die-hards could achieve deadlock too. Miss Flannegin heard the chimes, looked at her watch for corroboration, and then glanced around the table. Each weary face was stubbornly dedicated to duty; in each pair of eyes was a miserable but pure mulishness; each pair of jaws was set with the willingness to do battle for another two hours.
“Why,” Miss Flannegin whispered tentatively, “don’t we compromise?”