IF THOSE FIVE O’CLOCK CHIMES could have drifted all the way down Fifth Avenue to the noble arch at Washington Square and then on for another few miles southward, they might have brought a moment of cheer to a tall fair-haired man in an office at the lower tip of Manhattan.
As it was, the only sound that came to him was the restless drumming of his own fingertips on the desk blotter before him. It was a muted tattoo in an odd rhythm, made by running the tips of four fingers rapidly over the blotter and then striking his ring finger twice against it before beginning the little arpeggio all over again with his pinky. He had repeated this accented pattern dozens of times and did not know he was doing it. All he knew was that he wished to hell the evening ahead were over. It would be so dull. So absolutely goddam dull.
As his fingers flew, his eyes remained fixed on the top page of a memo pad at one side of the blotter. Nothing was written there, but in neat printing across the top ran the legend,
“From the office of G. Thornton Johns.” Below that, in two banks of smaller capitals appeared
| LIFE | FIRE |
| HEALTH | MARINE |
| ACCIDENT | BONDING |
| BURGLARY | LIABILITY |
| COMPENSATION | AUTOMOBILE |
The stacked words caught his attention and his flying fingers came to rest. He picked up a pencil and began to draw a descending line connecting the top corners of the final letters in the first bank, and then the top corners of the initial letters in the second bank. He could not get a true V and wished, for the hundredth time, that “burglary” had two more characters in it, to maintain the symmetry of the arrangement from the four-letter word at the top to the twelve-letter word at the bottom. Four, six, eight, eight, twelve was no good, he thought, and began to count the letters on the right bank; the right bank was even worse. Four, six, seven, nine, ten—he shoved the pad away disconsolately.
To describe Thornton Johns merely as a tall, handsome, fair-haired man is to ignore those particularities of contour and coloring which would set him apart from other tall, handsome, and fair-haired men. He would have stood three inches over six feet if he were bald, or if his hair lay spraddled or pasted flat to his scalp. But slightly over an inch was added to his six-three by the vigorously upstanding cropped hair on top of his—elsewhere—closely cut skull. This haircut gave considerable distress to his barber, who would murmur, without a halt in the rhythm of his rapid snipping, “Crew cut—she ain’t such the rage now, Mr. Johns.”
“Yeah, I know, but I like her.”
He did not like the tow color of his hair, fearing that someone might take it for white or gray. No one ever did. So lean a face, so bright an eye, so vigorous a body gave no associative hints of middle age. He still looked the ex-college athlete, which he was, and if occasionally he had to frown at the bathroom scale in the morning, he had the requisite will power to cut out carbohydrates and butterfats for enough days to make frowning unnecessary.
Now, however, Thornton Johns was frowning. His lower lip was caught at the left of his mouth by vexed teeth and there was a scowl in his eyes, which were blue, and noticeable in that they gave the hasty observer an impression of being triangular. This was because their upper lids had a down-slanting fold at the outer corners, a characteristic no other Johns child could boast.
It may have been the continuing pressure of incisor and canine on his lower lip that suddenly told him he was working himself up to a state, and he at once relaxed, told himself not to be a sorehead, and immediately felt better. Just the same, the evening ahead would be dull. He liked parties and he liked his parents and he liked his family but when it came to combining all of them something terrible happened. Were all parents so sentimental about their wedding anniversary? For a full week leading up to every January 17th for as far back as he could remember, he had wondered precisely the same thing. But year succeeded year, his parents’ sentiment grew, and more and more small fry in the Johns family grew with it, becoming big enough fry to be expected to attend. Eighteen for dinner is what it would be this time. And, as usual, at his house.
“The gathering of the clans—or rather, the blathering,” he had called it at the luncheon today and it had got a laugh. It was easy to get a laugh at the Premium Club, easy for him anyway. Everything seemed to come out with a funny twist the moment he stepped on the small dais; his vocabulary changed; odd turns of expression came to him without effort. Long ago he, and others, thank Heaven, had discovered his unexpected ability to ad-lib, and at most of their meetings he was Chairman, Master of Ceremonies, Proposer of Toasts, and Unofficial Host to visitors or newcomers.
It made him feel good when he saw appreciative faces turned up to him and heard the low contagious sound start in their throats. It made him stand straighter and feel like somebody. Since he had turned forty, three years ago, his morale seemed to need such boosts more frequently. Sometimes he felt as if sarcastic movies were forever being made about hucksters, and a play called Death of a Salesman was getting rave reviews in its out-of-town tryouts. It was opening on Broadway soon, but he might not even see it. Sometimes it was frightening to be a salesman.
But when that ripple of laughter came up at him, he forgot his jitters about the future. Today he had been at his best. “Fellow Insurance Vendors,” he had started dourly, “I’m in a grouchy frame of mind.” Even that had made them smile expectantly. “Tonight I’ll be feeding and entertaining seventeen people at my own expense and not one hot prospect in the bunch!” They had roared and for the rest of his talk they had lapped up every word.
That was thin comfort now, with the inundation less than two hours off. Cindy dreaded the evening too and had talked darkly this morning, as she did every Thanksgiving and Christmas, of giving up their nine-room apartment and moving into a tiny one, “like everybody else in your family.”
He was the only one who could play host to the whole gang at once; a momentary warmth coursed through him. His attention was caught by a long narrow envelope beside his memo pad and he reached for it. It was of heavy paper, almost cardboard, terra cotta in color, and tied around with a flat half-inch tape of the same tint. He yanked at one end of the band; the pleated packet opened fanwise and he drew out some two dozen folded documents, green-bordered and crisp as new dollar bills at a teller’s cage. Roy Tribble ought to have more coverage, he thought, my letter about it is perfectly sound. Even second-string radio stars are managing to get into television on the side and that means added income. Was it not a cardinal principle of life that added income should mean added coverage?
He riffled quickly through the documents and then threw them on the desk. He didn’t feel constructive about Roy Tribble or anything else; morning would have to do. He rose, went to the window, and looked out at the dying afternoon. Below and beyond him he could see the Battery and the confluence of New York’s two great rivers. Movement, flow, direction—a man wanted to be going somewhere instead of feeling impaled on the sharp stake of routine. He watched the fat twin funnels of a huge steamship moving slowly down the Hudson; England, he thought, Paris, skiing in Switzerland, sun-bathing on the Riviera. He turned slightly to the left and saw a rusty dirty old freighter nosing out of the East River. South America? The Azores? The West Coast of Africa?
He needed a vacation; it wasn’t like him to be beefing about he knew not what. A week’s fishing would fix him right up. Even when he was a boy he had learned there was no better way to get over things—scoldings, bad marks, or any other misery—no quicker way than to drop everything and go fishing. “Let’s go to the dock, Gregory,” he’d say and the kid would rush to the cellar for their tackle. As long ago as that, Gregory never let anyone say “Greg” or use any other nickname; in a shy, unspectacular fashion, he was independent even then, never bothering about what anybody thought of him, never trying to be popular at school by going out for the teams. Fishing was the only sport Gregory was good at; when he was no more than eight or nine he’d learned everything he could teach him about bait and hooks and spinners and reels. On a thousand summer days they’d fished for perch or lafayette off the dock at Freeton or, when they could sneak a rowboat and get out into the channel, for flounder or fluke or small bass.
The smell of summer was suddenly in the room with him; melting tar between the wide dry planks of the dock, the faint saltiness in the wind blowing off the bay, the marshy odor of low tide and flats. It was funny, he thought, how often his mind turned back to boyhood as he grew older. Everything had been simple then; he was the older brother and Gregory his special charge in a family of girls, and the feeling of being the kid’s hero was wonderful. A shadowy imitation of that welled up even now, whenever Gregory turned to him for advice and help on some business matter—it was still pleasant.
Five years ago, with Gregory in uniform at a Washington desk, it had seemed natural enough that he, the businessman of the family, should fill in for a while on business matters at home. Gregory had quit his literary agent, and his small affairs were in a mess. Nobody as careless as Marilyn Laird should have been anybody’s agent, it turned out, but once the bolloxed-up accounts were straightened out, once the incomplete records and inaccurate files were put to rights, the rest had been easy. There was nothing particularly hard about familiarizing himself with Gregory’s book contracts and asking around until he knew about publishing practice in general, on royalties, rights, options, and the rest of it. It was a welcome relief from insurance anyway, and a hobby had been born.
A man needed hobbies just as he needed vacations. It would be even better if that week’s fishing weren’t a solitary affair. Cindy had been talking about Florida a good deal lately but that wasn’t what he meant either. He looked again at the freighter below him; she wasn’t nosing along any more; she was out in open water, full steam up. It was years since he had taken a winter vacation—
A harrowing memory of day before yesterday’s check to the Collector of Internal Revenue ripped through him. He abandoned his post at the window, went back to his desk, and put a despondent finger on the buzzer. Beyond the frosted glass of the closed door, an open drawer was thumped home and a chair on creaky casters was pushed across linoleum. The door swung in and a caressing voice said, “Yes, Mr. Johns?”
He didn’t look up at her. There were times when it was better not to meet that cool glance. For two years he had known she would look at him so and in no other way, turning to him the face of an indifferent angel while she spoke in a low voice that assured him he was her one concern, and often that knowledge did not disturb him. But this was not one of the times. This was one of the quite-opposite times, when she became a symbol of all the unreachables in the world. Her name was Diana.
He looked at his desk sternly. “I won’t wait for the draft of the Tribble letter after all,” he told his memo pad. “I won’t have time to revise it.”
“You won’t?” Surprise, regret, understanding—all were in the two syllables.
“I forgot this was the seventeenth. I promised to be home early.”
“Oh yes—‘the gathering of the clans, or rather, the blathering.’”
The quotation marks in her voice were like tiny fishhooks. What the Premium Club appreciated might not rate as high with other people—he must remember that. She probably thought it corny or, even worse, Babbitty. The tiny hooks were now imbedded in his flesh and he squirmed.
He would not continue, he thought angrily, to sit with downcast eyes this way, like a schoolboy. At once his mind sent out executive directives through all the proper ganglia and synapses of his nervous system, and the muscles of his eyeballs and eyelids obediently retracted. He looked up. She was smiling, but the meaning of the smile was not clear enough to be soothing. He spoke icily. “So if you’d rather leave early too, you can finish it in the morning.”
She slapped her notebook shut and said, “Thanks,” with alacrity. She began to tidy up his desk and he leaned back in his swivel chair, his eyes closed. It was nice to hear her bustling about so near to him. Diana indeed. There was nothing of the Amazon—or of the huntress either, worse luck—about Diana Bates. She was small and slender and, for all her severely unadorned black dresses, as feminine as pale pink satin and high-heeled mules.
This notion, however, was not soothing either.
Thornton Johns crossed the room to the clothes tree in the corner, glanced briefly at the scrap of emerald velvet nestling close to his gray felt, and averted his eyes. He thought, If I were a bachelor, and at once saw Cindy’s and the boys’ faces reproaching him. It wasn’t only being married anyway; girls like Diana were looking for somebody more romantic than a salesman in a city crawling with salesmen. Once, just after she had begun to work there, she had said, her eyes shining, “Roy Tribble, the radio star? Does he ever come in here, Mr. Johns? I’ve never met anybody on the radio or in the movies.”
Well, he decided, what the hell. Let her set her cap for a man she considers A Somebody.
“Good night,” he said coldly.
Purposefully he strode down the hall. Glamour, a name, that’s what impressed girls like Diana, and that was all right by him. He wasn’t going to go around hanging his head because he was just a salesman and start brooding over all the jokes about people ducking insurance salesmen more than any other breed of salesman. Let her shine at Roy Tribble as much as she wanted to. Once this boring evening was behind him for another whole year, he’d feel better about everything.
He reached the bank of elevators and though the hall was empty, the imperfect bulb in the down signal was flickering busily. It seemed to be winking at him.
There are certain families, and the large Johns family was one such, that have a mania for nomenclature. Parents who name their sons after Presidents and Generals, parents who zealously thumb through the Bible when a new baby is due to join their little group of Zillahs, Absaloms, and Bathshebas—these parents surely reveal, if “mania” be too harsh a term, a strong attachment to nomenclature as well as to American history or the Book of God. And what of a certain large family with so passionate a love of horticulture that its girls were christened Ivy, Laurel, Rose, and Hyacinth, and its boys Oakley, Ferndon, Elmwood (since Elmer was too lower-class), and Larch?
The Johns family would never have gone as far as that.
But when, in the early days of the century, Gerald Johns met a pretty girl whom he politely called “Miss Thornton” for an entire evening in the shy tempo of that time—when Gerald then discovered that of all possible feminine names, hers was Geraldine, he immediately felt, in the neatness and sweetness of this phonetic pairing, an importance, a charm, and a destiny. And Geraldine felt them too.
Once they were married, they decided to bestow upon all their children names beginning with G. A year later, they found it grievous to wreck the auditory perfection of Gerald Johns, Junior, by inserting a middle name for the sake of the Thornton grandparents, never suspecting that their first-born would disown the Gerald anyway, once he reached the age of consent—in his case, five. Before this unhappy defeat, having had four years to discuss hard G’s versus soft G’s, they were ready with Gregory, and when the recessive characteristics finally won out over the dominant, and girls began to appear, they were equally prepared with Gracia, Gloria, Georgia, and Gwendolyn.
Hard G or soft, all the Johns offspring, save one, were present in Thornton’s apartment on the mild January evening of the seventeenth, together with husbands and wives and those of their own children who had qualified for admission by having entered their teens. The missing one was Gwendolyn, who lived in Wyoming, wife of a rancher and mother of five little would-be ranchers.
Even without Gwendolyn and some dozen or so ineligible grandchildren who were there only in snapshot and anecdote, Mr. and Mrs. Gerald Johns could look about them, talk to, and lovingly touch quite a group of their progeny. This they did, at frequent intervals, through the preliminaries of arrivals and greetings and gift-giving and kissing, through the next stage of rum cocktails for the adults and ginger ale with a maraschino cherry for the youngsters, and then on through the precarious eating of an expensive, excellently prepared, and tepid buffet supper off the knees.
To the fond old eyes of Gerald and Geraldine, each son and daughter, each grandchild, whether in the flesh or on Kodachrome, was Beauty and Goodness personified. To their delighted ears, each voice spoke only the admirable accents of wit and intelligence and modesty. To their happy hearts there was no human frailty, no selfishness, no baseness, and certainly no knavery, hiding in the bosom of one single creature before them.
Their proud happiness sent forth emanations of joy so irresistible that the entire room responded to it. Laughter was constant, appetites were expansive, well-being was universal. The hulking maid, Hulda, was nearly successful at concealing her resentment as she collected abandoned plates and glasses and cutlery from laps and end-tables and carpets, and Cindy only smiled indulgently when one of her smaller nephews slopped a dishful of gravy all over her favorite sofa.
When at last everybody had been supplied with ice cream and chocolate sauce and cookies, Thornton went off to the kitchen and brought back an icy magnum of champagne, domestic. The cork popped splendidly and Thorn grinned. His spirits had lifted, as they invariably did, once he gave up rebellion and surrendered to these family evenings. He filled the glasses, not forgetting a token splash in the teen-agers’, and then stood with his back to the fireplace, raising his own aloft. A hush fell over the company and white-haired, plump little Geraldine rooted about in the large pocket of her black taffeta dress for a handkerchief.
“To Dad and Mother,” Thornton said, “to Gran’pa and Gran’ma! To many, many more of these wonderful anniversaries, with many, many more of our little ones big enough to come and in due time—who knows?—with the little ones of their little ones as well!”
Cindy sighed.
Hulda stacked dessert plates with that vicious clash which only angry china can produce.
Hat whispered, “Maybe sometime, Aunt Gwen can make it from Wyoming, with Uncle Howie, and their five kids.”
Old Gerald, normally a fairly hard-headed citizen, swallowed hard over Thorn’s words and touched his wife’s shoulder uncertainly. As the applause following the toast died away, he began to pick his way aimlessly through the children seated on the carpet, his legs rising and descending stiffly in a roosterish strut.
Cindy’s and Thorn’s sons, Thorn Junior and Fred, being twenty and twenty-one and therefore envied by all the small fry for being old, now beckoned to Hat and put a long-playing dance record on the phonograph. Their younger cousins promptly hurled themselves at the television set at the other end of the room, their elders settled down to typical adult lamentations about prices and politics, and the success of the party was assured. For a full hour no untoward incident occurred, no unscheduled event took place.
Then the telephone bell rang.
Even above the voices and laughter and music, the sound from the entrance hall just off the living room was clear and commanding. Everybody looked toward it and as the omnipresent Hulda reached the instrument, Hat turned the volume knob on the phonograph a little to the left.
“For you, Mr. Gregory,” Hulda announced, shouting needlessly since, like the phonograph, the entire room had diminished its output of sound.
“Me?” Gregory looked up. “Are you sure? Nobody knows I’m here.”
Hulda consulted the phone once more.
“Says Mr. or Mrs. Gregory Johns,” she yelled. She shrugged and departed massively for the kitchen, leaving the phone open and imperious.
“It’s for you, Gregory,” Thorn said.
Gregory rose. An almost full silence, broken only by younger and more innocent voices, now fell upon the room. Hat turned the volume knob, further until it clicked. Three adults put down their drinks, two others raised theirs, somebody lighted a cigarette, and somebody else rubbed one out. Old Mr. Johns consulted his gold pocket watch and, as if the lateness of the hour made the telephone call more threatening, moved hack across the room to stand close to his wife.
“Hello,” said Gregory to the telephone. “Yes, who is—oh, hello.” A moment later he said, “Telegram?” and then did nothing but listen. In this he was not alone.
Visible to everybody, Gregory Johns kept a tight clutch on the instrument but everything else about him seemed to sag. His mouth was open, his head hung forward, and behind his glasses, his eyes looked stunned,
“He looks sick,” young Thorn said.
Abby thought so too and went out to him. “Gregory,” she said. He gave no sign that he had heard; she touched his arm.
He started, turned, and the sight of her brought a look of immeasurable relief to his face. “Wait a minute,” he told the phone, and to Abby he said, “It’s Jake Zatke. There was a telegram and I told him to open it.”
Abby took the telephone from him. “Hello, Jake,” she said.
“Here’s a pencil,” said Thorn, who had followed her out.
“And some paper,” added Cindy just behind him. She reached around Abby’s hips, sliding a pad marked Telephone Messages into her line of vision, and then straightened up, breathing on Abby’s neck. By now several other members of the family were breathing on Cindy’s.
Abby made no move to write. She was more composed in manner than Gregory had been, but she was concentrating intensely on the metallic squawkings at her ear. Gregory was leaning against the wall now, stricken still, but with his color returning.
At the Martin Heights end of the conversation, Jake Zatke, who taught Science at Jamaica High and could never slur over preliminary data, was going through all the introductory steps once more: how he and Mary had heard the repeated ringing of the Johns’ bell, how they had finally opened their door to see a Western Union messenger preparing to hang a notification card on the Johns’ doorknob, how they had offered to sign for the message, assuring personal delivery no matter how late the return of their friends and neighbors, how the messenger had at last agreed, though being new at his job and uncertain of protocol, he had resisted for a long time, how more than two hours of staring at the unblinking yellow envelope had made Mary so apprehensive that she had finally insisted on looking up Thornton’s number in the directory, and transferring all jurisdiction and responsibility.
Abby said; “Would you read it now, Jake?”
As she listened, her whole manner changed. Her lips parted over a gleeful gasp, a squeal of joy sounded in her throat and she sent her husband a glance of such melting adoration that he straightened immediately and overcame his need for a wall against which to lean.
“Read it again slowly, will you, Jake? I’m going to write it down this time. It’s just too wonderful to believe.”
Around her; grimness fled from faces, fear from eyes, tension from muscles. Thorn Junior said, “They’ve guessed the Mystery Tune or something,” and went back to reassure those beyond the listening area. Everybody followed him except Gregory and Hat, who watched Abby begin to write.
It was a long telegram; she used a second page and part of a third. At last Abby said, “Oh, Jake, thanks. Slide it under our door, would you, so we can see it with our own eyes when we get there?”
She hung up, gathered up her scribbled pages, rushed to Gregory and Hat and hugged them both at one time.
“Mom, what?” Hat cried.
“Best Selling Books took Dad’s novel!”
She propelled Gregory back into the living room. “Read it aloud, Gregory. It’s your news.” By now thirty-four eyes were on Gregory as he cleared his throat, consulted the sheets in his hand, and adjusted the fit of his glasses.
“It’s a telegram,” he said. “About my book.”
“What about your book?” This was Thornton and if a faint disappointment, as of decreasing interest, tinged his tone, no one noticed it. “Which book?”
“My new one, that is, the new one before this new one I’m starting now.”
“The one about the world?” his mother asked, her eyes glowing.
“Yes, that one,” Gregory answered. “The one that’s coming out in the spring. It seems—” He tugged his tie. “Well, you see, this telegram is from my publisher. He—” Again he stopped. He looked at Abby, and in a voice that was suddenly beseeching, said, “You read it.”
Abby laughed and took the pages back. “B.S.B.—that stands for Best Selling Books, and it’s the biggest and most famous of all the big famous book clubs, with nearly a million members—B.S.B. has just chosen Gregory’s new novel.”
“My God,” said Thorn.
“I don’t believe it,” said Cindy.
“What?” said everybody else together.
“Here, I’ll read Mr. Digby’s wire,” Abby said, “word for word, ‘UPON MY INSISTENCE THE GOOD WORLD WAS OUR SOLE ENTRY AT B.S.B. THIS MONTH AND NOW ALL CONGRATULATIONS STOP IT IS APRIL SELECTION WITH JUDGES UNANIMOUSLY IGNORING ALL OTHER CONTENDERS STOP INITIAL PAYMENT WHICH WE SHARE EQUALLY IS ONE HUNDRED AND FOUR THOUSAND DOLLARS STOP PLEASE TELEPHONE IMMED—’”
The rest of the telegram was lost in the uproar.