Aurora Dawn (11 page)

“If that is not the only way to handle Father Stanfield–and if it is not an effective sales idea–then I’ll willingly give
up my position with you, Mr. Van Wirt, because my judgment in these matters is meaningless.”

Andy sank into his chair and sat poised, his eyes on Marquis. Grovill, Leach, and Van Wirt seemed hypnotized. Not a sound,
not a flicker or a gesture indicating approval or disapproval escaped any of them. Even Leach’s ring ceased its rotation,
lest it seem in some obscure way to suggest an opinion. Marquis leaned back in his chair and gazed intently for perhaps a
full minute at the end of his cigar. Then he looked around at the waiting faces and said, in deliberate tones: “Gentlemen,
that is the greatest idea for radio promotion that I have ever heard.”

This statement acted upon Van Wirt, Grovill, and Leach like a starting gun. They jumped up, dashed at Andy with shouts of
joy and praise, shook his hand, pounded his back, shook each other by the hand, pounded each other on the back, laughed, cried,
capered, and generally conducted themselves as though a war had just ended. Marquis observed this demonstration with a calm
smile, while Mike Wilde’s eyes widened like a child’s at a zoo when he comes upon a dancing bear. Van Wirt twined his arm
affectionately around Reale’s waist and refused to remove it. “He’s my boy, my boy,” he kept repeating. Grovill observed with
many happy giggles that he would steal this young genius from RBC; Van Wirt defied him to try it. Leach’s ring spun furiously,
and Leach himself made several centrifugal tours of the room in the manner of a dervish, thus releasing the energy which the
others expended in laughter, a form of activity of which he had apparently lost the muscular pattern.

When the jubilation had abated, Marquis said to Leach, “Tom, will we be able to shift the Steele show? USBS can plaster us
with lawsuits. The contract gives us another year on that half hour.”

Leach’s face tightened into its accustomed lines. “I don’t think they’ll struggle too hard,” he said through his teeth. “Not
with four daytime and one other evening show still on their nets. I’ll talk to Wolver. It’ll be all right.” His manner of
saying this left no doubt that it would be, and indicated that his “talking” to the unlucky Wolver would be in the tradition
of persuasion followed by antique monarchs with the aid of quaint machines.

“Even so,” mused Marquis, “it’s obviously vital that no word of this deal get out until it’s all arranged. I hope, Reale,
that you warned Father Stanfield to be discreet.”

Andy said the Faithful Shepherd had himself observed that he desired secrecy to be maintained, if possible, until all was
ready for him to go on the air.

“And I presume,” went on Marquis, “that you have discussed the matter with no one?”

Van Wirt, his arm still around the small waist of his protégé, broke in with: “Why, he never even told me about it! Andy’s
the deepest boy in our organization. He’s a Sphinx, a silent tomb!” He gave the silent tomb a heavy paternal squeeze.

A small box on Marquis’s desk came to life with a woman’s voice and said, “Mr. Marquis, Carol is here.” Marquis touched a
button on the box and said, “Tell her to come in.” “Yes, sir,” said the box. This bit of Oriental fantasy went totally unregarded.
Electricity is ending all mystery. How can we impress children any longer with Aladdin’s djinn? He was simply televised, and
worked by remote control.

The door opened and a young lady entered. Andrew’s heart bounded and his head swam so that he all but collapsed in his chair;
he stared at the girl with dropping jaw as Marquis said, “This is my daughter, Carol, gentlemen.”

It was impossible to mistake the sweater, the hair, the face, the paint, the hands. Carol Marquis was no other person than
the Beautiful Brahmin of the train; the inquisitive stranger to whom Andrew Reale had disclosed, with many disparaging comments
on the peculiarities of Talmadge Marquis, his entire scheme for the capture of the Faithful Shepherd!

Containing the story of Bezalel,

with some of Stephen English’s ideas about life

and people—and a little more plot.

A
T THIS EXACT MOMENT
in time–no, that is not correct, for late research indicates that there is no such thing as an exact moment in time; but
it is very hard for the clay feet of history to keep up with the winged sandals of science–at this inexact moment, then, Laura
Beaton and Stephen English were standing in a gallery of the Museum of New Art on Fifty-third Street, gazing at a painting
by Michael Wilde. It was a beautifully executed honor of arms, legs, breasts, and faces disposed in a circular pattern. The
color was subtle and rich, and the design, could it have been voided of its charnel-house content, would have been entirely
pleasing. The title of the painting was: “He Looked Again, And Saw It Was A Letter From His Wife.”

“I hope,” said Laura, laughing, “that he isn’t going to make me appear like that.”

“Have no fear,” said the millionaire. “Mike is guilty of many apish tricks like this one, but he knows exactly what he’s doing
all the time, and, as you must see just from his work on these walls, he’s a good painter.”

“He Looked Again, And Saw It Was A Letter From His Wife”

Said Laura, with puzzlement putting a charming furrow between her brows, “But why does he take so many silly or nasty themes?
And why the elongated titles?”

“I can explain all that, but it would require a little time,” said English, taking her arm and starting to walk down the gallery,
“and you must have work to do this afternoon.”

“All I have to do is check in at Pandar Agency, and I can attend to that by telephone. Do tell me about him.”

“There is nothing I would enjoy more,” said English, with just the ghost of a smile. “Come.”

With this he turned abruptly to the right, and Laura found herself stepping into a small automatic elevator. The banker pressed
a button marked “Roof,” whereupon the doors closed, the little elevator sighed its way up three stories, and the doors opened
again on cold air and blazing white sunshine. English led Laura through a garden crowded with curious statues, some all curves,
some all angles, some all planes, none particularly resembling any sublunary object. At the other end of the garden was a
penthouse, the door of which, as they approached it, was opened by a smiling little gray-haired lady in a very starched, very
green apron.

“Good afternoon, Mr. English; good afternoon, Miss,” she said, as though she had been expecting them for half an hour. “There’s
a nice fire, Mr. English. Will you be having some tea?”

“Later, thank you, Mrs. Brennan,” said English, as he and Laura stepped inside. They were in a small vestibule, with doors
opening to the right and left. The beaming Mrs. Brennan went to the right, and following her with her eye, the girl caught
a glimpse of a committee room decorated in the modern style and furnished with a long table and many chairs, and beyond it
a swinging door leading to a kitchen, into which the old lady vanished. English led Laura to the left, and together they walked
into a sunlit, old-fashioned library which might have been transported detail by detail from a cinema setting for a story
of rich Tories in the American Revolution. It was, in fact, a replica of one of the replicas in the Williamsburg restoration
of colonial homes; the wraith of a wraith, its quality of other-worldliness heightened by its forlorn setting atop a building
full of fearfully New things. A real fire burned in a real stone chimney, and a wisp of real smoke even brought a sting to
the eyes, due to a really faulty draft.

English and the girl seated themselves on the deep-cushioned sofa that faced the fire. Neither spoke. English contemplated
the dancing flames, pale in the sunlight, and Laura contemplated the millionaire, waiting for him to begin his explanation
of the work of Michael Wilde, and wondering not a little at his curious manner with her, particularly his custom of long,
placid silences. Perhaps for five minutes they sat so, then English looked up at her, and smiled the baffling smile that made
her feel an absurd, pitying kindness toward him.

“Take your hat off, Laura,” he said.

After a moment’s hesitation, Laura in a quick movement unpinned the nonsensical little bonnet from her yellow hair and laid
it on the arm of the sofa, saying, “Well, but what does my hat have to do with Michael Wilde’s painting?”

“Nothing at all,” said Stephen English, leaning back comfortably in the sofa. “It’s surely no secret to you that I enjoy looking
at you. The hat is becoming, but I find the unadorned hair more so. Now, about Mike. You have seen him referred to as Bezalel,
haven’t you?”

“Yes, many times,” said Laura. “The columnists are very fond of the name. I’ve seen his illustrated Bible, and I know the
reason for that.”

“That incident,” said the millionaire, “is Wilde’s career in miniature. But be sure that you are quite comfortable, because,
like Scheherazade, I intend to spin out my tale, to postpone the cutting off, not of my head but of this agreeable scene into
which I tricked you and which I should like to last as long as possible. This then, is

It has always entertained me (said Stephen English) to listen to a furious discussion among aesthetes, with one side maintaining
that Michael Wilde is a poser and a charlatan, against an equally heated assertion that he’s a brilliant artist. The reason
for such disputes, of course, lies in the assumption that the two descriptions are contradictory. In Mike’s case it’s obvious
that they’re both true.

Mike was born in the Irish slums that used to exist around Ninety-sixth Street and Columbus Avenue in New York. He has, therefore,
the poignant love of money that’s reserved only for people who’ve known poverty. Rich people respect money because it’s their
safety, but to poor people money is freedom. Never forget that when you analyze the behavior of someone who used to be poor;
there’s a friskiness about such persons which is only the lightness of limb that comes from taking off chains. Mike’s antics,
of course, have further, more self-conscious motives.

Really, Mike carries on the way he does because it helps to sell his paintings. It’s true, of course, that he’s enormously
conceited and that he has a natural taste for being the life of the party, but such characteristics are commonplace. In most
careers they must be severely repressed, because the aim of a man is to give an impression of reliability, steadiness, and
a sense of propriety. Artists–in all the arts–are exempt. Successful artists today must be crowd pleasers, and its the opinion
of the crowd that artists are a little crazy, so a man of talent who plays up to that opinion will unquestionably make more
money than one who doesn’t. He’ll be talked about and he’ll gain stature. Mike stumbled on this open secret in Paris when
he was nineteen. Have you ever seen the ballet he designed, “Chanson de MoiMême”?

(Laura said that she had not; and, shifting a little in her corner of the sofa, she tucked her famous legs under her skirt,
folded her hands in her lap, and regarded English with the clear, serious eyes of a listening child.)

Well, at the time, he was in the thick of the impecunious artistic set that you used to find sitting around in front of the
Dôme in the evenings, drinking
fines
and arguing about everything. He fell into the hands of a celebrated première danseuse, who was well on the nostalgic side
of thirty, and he became a pet of the ballet people. The choreographer of the company was inspired to do a ballet based on
Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”; and, thanks to the intervention of the danseuse, Mike was commissioned to try his hand at
the
décor
.

He was an entirely irresponsible kid then, spoiled both by his talents and his attractiveness. He had come to Paris after
working in an advertising agency for a year, just long enough to accumulate the money to travel, and in that year, by the
way, he acquired his single vicious prejudice: get him started on the subject of advertising, sometime, if you want a jeremiad.
Anyway, in Paris he habitually followed only impulse in whatever he did. In designing the ballet he was seized with the whim
of taking the title literally, and he proceeded with some pains to sketch out a weird, extravagant set consisting of nothing
but reproductions of himself. The center piece was a colossal bust of Mike Wilde with the lower part formalized into a Greek
temple; the trees were graceful, gnarled versions of himself; even the rocks were worked into profiles of him; and the dancers
all wore masks in his likeness. Well, Freud was a fad then, ten years ago, so the choreographer was rapturous, and worked
out a dance on the theme of Narcissus which really wasn’t bad. The ballet was a sensation in France and in America. It’s odd
that you never saw it.