The Celebrity (15 page)

“There’s a party,” Hat said.

Gregory suddenly noticed that every window on the first two floors was lighted and that voices were drifting out to them. “There couldn’t be,” he said. But the front door was already opening, and his father was calling out welcome. As they greeted each other, Gerald said apologetically, “Your mother asked a few people over and somehow—” He waved to the rooms behind him.

The whole floor was mobbed. Geraldine appeared, bubbling with joy, kissing each of them, talking through everything they said. “So many people want to have a look at you, Gregory—”

“But, Mother,” he began. Unlike Hat, he never said “Mother” except when he was angry, and Abby threw him a warning look.

Geraldine said, “Now, Gregory, be good. I just asked Fanny and Edith and one or two, but everybody called up all day. We know so many new people now, who’ve never laid eyes on you, and they’ve been entertaining us, and I had to ask them back, didn’t I?”

She was in a new dress, not the old black taffeta but an electric blue of a stiffish material that made her look plumper than ever. Her curly white hair no longer reminded one of a child’s; it was marcelled and rigid and faintly blue. Under it her eyes sparkled, her color was high, and as she ushered them into the parlor, she laughed with pleasure.

Fanny and Jim Heston rushed up, and behind them came their two married sons and their wives. George and Edith Markham were there, and Amy and Jud Persall. Seated on sofas and chairs, but already rising to their feet, were Hiram Spriggins and his wife, and the old Blairs, and the Conroys. Other names flew about—somebody Simmons, a woman named Linda Peck, the McGills, Antons, Smiths, Garsons.

Oh, heavens, Abby thought. Mother Johns had firm hold of Gregory’s arm, and was piloting him about the room. From each knot that formed about the pair, phrases drifted back to Abby and she implored Fate to help her devise some quick escape. “Why, Gregory Johns, I remember that day you fell out of the second branch of—”—“Deeny, how does it feel to have a famous son?”—“I declare, I said to my husband, I’d never have dreamed that such a peaky child—”

Gregory was nodding, forcing smiles to his lips and words from his throat. “Thanks, Mrs. Heston, yes, it
is
wonderful”—“No, Horace, I never expected it at all”—“I don’t know when a movie takes a long time”—“It’s being published in late April”—“Yes, thanks”—“No, thanks—”.

Abby, too, was the center of admiring, congratulating, questioning faces, and off in the dining room, leaning back against the sideboard, the only one of the three thoroughly enjoying herself, Hat was surrounded by younger people. Abby caught her father-in-law’s eye. He at least feels guilty about this, she thought, he knows, he’s ashamed. But Mother Johns! She’s become the queen of Freeton, the Dowager Mother, the female Ward McAllister! Into Abby’s unheeding ear, Fanny Heston bubbled frothy joy. “Twenty years younger, I told Deeny, just made
over.
It’s true—she’s the most popular
thing
and so sweet and—”

“Would you excuse me a minute” Abby interrupted, with a meaningful look toward the downstairs lavatory. “The long drive—” She left Fanny in the middle of a syllable and went out to the hall. The telephone was in a deep recess, where the guests’ coats, one atop the other, hung thickly from hooks. She felt choked in cloth and fur as she made her way through them, but she pulled them together behind her into a partial screen and stooped to the instrument. She gave Thorn’s number, and begged Fate for two free minutes of time and a prompt answer to the ringing.

“Cindy, thank God you’re in,” she began. “Listen—” She gave a succinct account of what was happening. “Tell Thorn to call back here, right away. Make up some emergency, some sort of crisis has come up, the movie deal is falling through, anything, and Gregory must dash to New York for a meeting. Will you, Cindy? Please?”

Cindy’s big laugh was sympathetic. “On one condition,” she said, fairly shouting as she always did on the telephone.

“What condition? Hurry—somebody’ll catch me.”

Cindy laughed again and Abby could see her at the phone in New York, tall and handsome and redheaded and full of energy. “I won’t tell Thorn unless you come on over when you get out of there.”

“Tonight?”

“It’s only nine-thirty and we haven’t seen you for days. Drop Hat off at home and come and have a couple of swift drinks.”

“I’d better ask Gregory. He looks dead already.”

“Say yes, or I’ll forget to tell Thorn.”

“All right. Somebody’s coming.” She hung up. It was easy to disapprove of Cindy, but you forgave her when she was so responsive and hearty. Through the forest of coats, Abby went back to the din. On the sofa, Gregory looked trapped, as an unknown young woman lunged at him with an open, fountain pen and a sheet of white paper. “Please, Mr. Johns, so I can paste it in your book when it comes out.”

The telephone rang, but nobody moved, and Abby wondered if anyone but herself would hear it. It rang again. “The phone,” she called out to the room at large. “Didn’t I hear the phone?”

Old Gerald turned and made his way through the crowd. A moment later he came back, paused at Abby’s side, and whispered, “If you arranged it, I don’t blame you. No, sir, not a bit.” He called across the room, loudly, as if he wanted everybody possible to hear, “Phone, Gregory, it sounds urgent.” Gregory jumped to his feet and Abby joined him in the hall.

“Whatever terrible news Thorn has,” she said in an undertone, “don’t get scared. I put him up to it.”

His eyes brightened and he pinched her arm.

A
T THE BAR TABLE
at the side of the living room, Thorn was preparing a second drink for Gregory and Abby and a third for himself and Cindy. He waved a half-filled glass at his brother and said, “You just weren’t cut out for it, Gregory, I’ll be damned if you were. Now if it were Cindy here—”

Across the room Cindy shrieked, “Me? How about
you!
”

“I’d get by,” he conceded and addressed himself again to Gregory and Abby. “We all know I like having a fuss made over me, but I’m discovering that God
meant
Cindy to go to parties or give them. That night we had the Hathaways here, and Fin Blacker of Imperial, and the Leonard Lyonses—”

“Who thought of having the Lyonses?” Cindy said.

“I didn’t have to urge you much. When Fin said he had a date with Lenny and Sylvia that night, you panted to rope them in.”

“I s’pose you wouldn’t pant unless it was Walter Winchell.” She shrieked again, and Thorn thought, She’s getting tight. He didn’t mind. The description of the evening at Freeton had seemed uproarious to both of them and when Cindy ragged him about things she didn’t really disapprove of, she was always amusing. She was as pleased at meeting a columnist as he was, and as eager to meet others. It was remarkable how it spiced up a conversation to say you knew so-and-so, and equally remarkable how often it was perfectly apropos. Since he had begun to read
Variety
religiously, he had found himself irresistibly drawn to all the columns in all the daily papers, and was astonished at how much he now knew about Broadway and Hollywood, their stars, their plans, their purchases and options and cancellations, as well as their romances, either developing or dissolving. Cindy had become an equally avid reader of the columns; she was as familiar as he with the special vocabularies, internecine feuds, and worthy charities so zealously publicized by the progenitors of these vertical brainchildren.

His favorite column was not a column in the ordinary sense, any more than its sire was a columnist in the ordinary sense. Because of something Hathaway had said, he had begun to read the
Saturday Review of Literature
every week at the office, and had soon discovered that “Trade Winds” held for him a charm unmatched by any of the others. Could it be because Bennett Cerf also knew the thrill of standing up before an audience and making it laugh?

When he let himself daydream, he would sometimes imagine himself a columnist like Winchell or a lecturer like Cerf. He could see himself standing, easy and tall on a platform, not just at the Premium Club either—

“Quit dreaming, Thorn,” Cindy yelled. “We all need drinks.”

He distributed the new drinks and said, “There’ll be plenty of panting over you, Gregory, when you hit the Coast. Hathaway says they always make a fuss over a real live author. Just get set for it in advance, and then you won’t panic when it comes.”

“I won’t, hey?”

At the dry tone, Thorn slapped his thigh boisterously, but Gregory had not meant to amuse him. Describing what had awaited them at Freeton had made him wonder if it were not a small-town rehearsal of what might happen unexpectedly at any of his relatives’ or friends’ houses. The idea, Unexpected, added a new dimension to the idea, Party. This was a further little nightmare to sweat through.

Thorn was still laughing and talking about giving authors a quick easy course in meeting strangers. Gregory thought, He probably wishes I’d let him try it before I get on the train. The fight’s all forgotten and he’s ready to help out in new ways if he could think of any. He’s always been ready. And me, I’ve always been ready to let him. When you get down to it, I’ve always been perfectly goddam ready.

The tiny clever worm of guilt began to wriggle through him. Had he regarded Thorn’s help as his proper due, belittling it as he accepted it, with phrases about “the left hand”? Abby’s help? Ed Barnard’s? Whenever he heard somebody castigated as selfish and self-centered, he felt pleasantly superior, but had he the right to? He looked at his brother speculatively.

All at once Gregory hated himself. He had offered Thorn commissions and cash payments and they had been fiercely rejected as he must have known they would be. But beyond that his mind would not go—except to a Cadillac, first cousin to the showgirl’s mink coat. His author’s mind, his inventive mind that could—such was the theory—create plot and devise incident! Break a deadlock in a story, yes, but one concerning a sort of moral debt to his own brother? (We’ll think of something later.)

Gregory set his glass down too hard; the drink sloshed on the table. Thorn said, “Did you hear what I just said?”

“Sorry, no. I was thinking about something.”

“Well, quit, and listen. I was telling Abby, if you do agree about the mail, it goes for California too. You’ll be swamped, once the columns say you’re out there. Just dump it on yours truly.”

“Send it back from California?”

“No use letting it pile up till you get home.”

“Oh, Thorn,” Abby said, “out there, I could take over.”

“Sure, but we’re just at the start of this interview and lecture racket, and it’s better to keep handling it from one central spot. Let’s try it while you’re away, and when you get home, we’ll decide whether I keep on.” He wasn’t boisterous now; he was intent, pleading for a favor. “I’ve been finding out about Hollywood, I tell you. The most unexpected things come up out there—you’ve got to be able to hand out the brush-off and you can’t go antagonizing everybody either. Neither can Abby.”

To himself, Gregory said, Unexpected. The most unexpected things. Perhaps the studio arranged things before a man even got out there to say yes or no. He picked up his glass again and took a long swallow from it.

Unlike his brother, Gregory Johns was no follower of journalism’s chattier practitioners, and thus was not so expert about the accepted rituals west of San Bernardino. He had, however, read enough stories, articles, plays, and novels about Hollywood to be fully informed about the chauffeured limousines at the airport or railroad station, the hotel rooms filled with flowers, the arrangements with the press, and all the rest of it, though not once in all his life had he ever connected any of this with lesser lights than Somerset Maugham or Ernest Hemingway or, say, Kathleen Winsor. Had he, he now asked himself, been naïve not to?

With a sinking heart, Gregory Johns replied with a stout affirmative. The studio was already talking of
The Good World
as a Property; suppose they regarded him as a Property also, and meant, with the natural instinct of property-owners, to make him appear Valuable and Gilt-edged regardless? Suppose their publicity experts had already arranged for photographers at the hotel, suppose they took it for granted that he would be—what was their word?—cooperative with Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons? For all he knew there might already be lecture dates accepted for him, party invitations sent out.

As was his custom under implacable stress, Gregory Johns took off his glasses, drew out his handkerchief, and wiped his face. “I’ve half a mind to call the whole trip off,” he said.

“What?” Thorn yelled, forgetting the mail, remembering only his own prediction to Hathaway. “You
can’t
back out now.”

His anguish roused Gregory. “Take it easy,” he said hastily, “I just said it off the top of my head.”

“Well, don’t
fire
things at people that way.”

Cindy said, “Oh, Gregory, once you’re there, you’ll love every minute of it.”

Gregory made a gesture of apology, and did not challenge her verb. He had not confided his liveliest forebodings even to Abby, and certainly not to anybody else. “I’m really looking forward to it in lots of ways,” he said, making his voice convincing. “It’ll be a big experience—new ideas, new scenes, all sorts of new material.”

“You’re so lucky,” Cindy said. “I wish we were going too.”

“Now, Cindy,” Thorn said.

“Wouldn’t it be fun, though, if we were? The four of us on the train together, and having champagne cocktails the way they do on ships?”

“It would be nice,” Abby said.

Thorn stirred uneasily. He looked at Abby and Gregory and then back to Cindy. Her always high color was intensified so that she looked sunburned; her hair had become a little disarrayed and one reddish strand fell over her right eye. Her rollicking good humor was gone; she frowned and clutched her glass.

“I mean, if we could afford
any
vacation, you know, like Florida or any other place, why, I’d rather it was Hollywood than all the rest put together.”