Aurora Dawn (33 page)

The doctor says it will be in mid-September. Andrew, junior, has worn me to a shadow already. How I will cope with two children
I can’t tell, and that brings me to the point. If the child had your character and sweetness he’d be no trouble–and just on
the chance that naming him after you might help, I’d like your permission to call him Stephen English Reale. Don’t ask me
how I know it will be a boy. Andy’s family never have girls, it seems, or so he maintains.

Dear Stephen, I’m being flippant about something that means very much to me. I have never known anyone as decent and as generous
as you, and I expect I never shall. Even the man in Bleak House, which you read to me in the hospital (was the appropriateness
a complete accident?) only released a girl who was engaged to him–and I thought he was impossibly good! Whenever the war depresses
me too much about human beings, I remember you and instantly feel better.–Please write soon, telling me that you consent.
I will love the baby more if I can call him Stephen.

Andy is out with the animals, as usual, but he asked me to greet you for him. He’s very well, and I pray that this letter
finds you so. When will you come to stay with us?

Affectionately,

Laura.

The millionaire dropped the letter on a small table beside his armchair, and stared with visionary eyes at a high-backed old
chair on the opposite side of the room, in which his wife had sat on that important night, their delayed wedding night, the
first night after her release from the hospital. The dimness which Time casts over most scenes of the past it had somehow
neglected to supply in this instance, for the amount of imaginative effort necessary to enable English to see his former wife
still sitting there was astonishingly small–a little less, in fact, and the memory could properly be called a hallucination.
There she was, in a plain black gown which emphasized her pale charm as a black velvet case does that of a pearl, erect and
prim in the chair, her hands firmly gripping the ornamental knobs of the arm rests, her face impassive as it had been in the
church, her eyes following his movements like the eyes of a dog watching a stranger. The cinema of memory reviewed, with painful
accuracy, the desultory, unmeaning conversation that had preceded his sudden, determined statement: “Laura, I wish to have
our marriage annulled.” Then came the stormy part, the long protests from her, the brief rejoinders by himself, while (how
clearly!) he saw a wild rising hope wrestle with a sense of duty in his maiden wife’s spirit. Once again he felt his own hopes
flag and perish under the reiterated vehemence of her objections, obviously the product of determination to do right, and
nothing more. Once again he brought himself to mention the freedom of Andrew Reale, and to inquire whether she did not wish
her marriage vows unsaid as they were unconsummated. The wraith in the high-backed chair responded as always: with a weak
unfinished sentence, with shamed silence, and with a flood of wretched tears, her yellow hair falling about her bowed head,
the new red scar vivid on her cheek and neck.

Stephen English sighed and shook his head. The scene ran out. All the incidents that followed belonged in the Ever-after which
the storytellers never record, his memory being no better. He picked up a leather writing-portfolio and a pen from the table
and commenced to write:

Dear Laura,

By now I am almost an old man, and many things are plain to me that were once obscure, but I have yet to find out just what
virtue there abides in giving, when it is the only possible course for a man to follow. It seems to me that I have never been
charitable, for charity is the privilege of those with limited means, or kind, for kindness is admirable only when unkindness
exists as a profitable alternative. I cannot accept the honor of being Stephen English Reale’s godfather as though it were
my due for any act of mine. If you and Andrew wish to be so gracious out of friendship, I will accept the favor with gratitude.
The Roman, Marcus Aurelius, whose ideas seem increasingly sensible to me as I grow up, says, “It is possible to be happy–”
here the banker broke off, crossed out the reference to the philosopher, and then crumpled the whole page quickly and started
a new one:

Dear Laura,

How good it is to hear from you! Of course, call him Stephen English if he arrives a He, and I’ll come to stand godfather,
if you’ll have me. All goes well. I am immersed in trivial business, as always–
the millionaire stopped again, gazed out of the window for several minutes, and then absently put the writing materials aside.
His right hand reached to the shelf beside him and took down a worn copy of Marcus Aurelius’s
Meditations
. As he placed the book on his lap it fell open to a much-thumbed page, in the middle of which a sentence was underlined in
ink:
“It is possible to be happy, even in a palace.”
English took up his pen and wrote in the broad margin beside it, “5/27/45. Perhaps. Time appears to be running short.”

* * *

It is a literary custom today to leave one’s characters on the last page still breathing hard from the climactic action, with
no hint of what becomes of them thereafter, the reader being free to fill in the aftermath on the principle of aesthetic inevitability;
but since the author has already talked along into an epilogue, he may as well tell exactly what has happened to the people
of his story, giving it the merit of completeness to atone a little for its deficiencies.

Talmadge Marquis emerged from the directors’ meeting chastened and humbled, but not deposed. By the time the soap man faced
the fire of criticism the situation had a tone of anticlimax, for celebrated causes evaporate quickly in our land; and, after
undergoing the disagreeable experience of having all his personal policies discussed in his presence as though they were the
vicious habits of an animal that might have to be destroyed, he escaped with no more serious damage than the appointment of
one of the managers as supervisor of advertising policy, with the understanding that Marquis was never more to exercise authority
in such matters. The burden was given to the oldest manager, who died within a year, whereupon Marquis quietly restored himself
into his old ways, unopposed by English, who was preoccupied with a crisis of another corporation. To this day, therefore,
the many Aurora Dawn programs enjoy his unique administration, and those who observe him with scholastic detachment have despaired
of his acquiring, at least in this incarnation, sufficient Being to overcome the phenomenal deficiency with which he began.

As for Father Stanfield, after “The Hog in the House” he desired to give up radio broadcasting, but Chester Legrand induced
him to continue without commercial sponsorship as a matter of public service. The Shepherd’s popularity soon brought on a
number of imitators, who were not finicky about merchandising the gospel; none of them, in fact, was far above the level of
coarse fraud. In their efforts to gain his audience they all had recourse to synthetic confessions spiced with sensational
sins, because the radio production experts had eventually analyzed Stanfield’s success in the formula, “Sex, sugar-coated
with religion.” The breaches of good taste began to border on the scandalous. Stanfield left the air in disgust, and the Federal
Communications Commission finally issued a ban on “confession” programs, to the general relief, but causing anguished concern
for the future of free speech in America on the part of several advertising executives. Stanfield, united with Gracie and
a strapping Cockney-speaking son, lives on at the Fold in great peace, in an Indian Summer of life that brings increasing
abundance about him each year.

To the author’s knowledge, Mr. and Mrs. Michael Wilde abide in wedded harmony, although Milton Jaeckel and other gentlemen
of his trade have lately reported their appearance in different places, each with a partner other than the one contracted
for by ritual. Mrs. Wilde’s name in particular is linked, with a frequency almost passing coincidence, to that of the leader
of an eminent jazz band; but if gossip were truth, whose marriage could be called happy? The Wildes are an up-to-date couple,
and have surely extended latitude of companionship to each other in the enlightened manner of our better levels of society.

No such tales are told about Andrew and Laura, possibly because they have disappeared into the obscurity of ordinary people,
beyond the focus of Mr. Jaeckel’s art. Shortly after their marriage, Laura’s ailing uncle, Tom Wilson, passed on, leaving
his prosperous ranch to his niece. The blissful couple, holding their happiness more dear because they had so nearly lost
it through their errors, went to New Mexico with Mrs. Beaton for a holiday on the ranch, in the common impulse to withdrawal
from the world that animates the first months of a true union. They stayed on as Andrew, with all his radio plans temporarily
at a standstill, turned his attention to the finances of the ranch, an enterprise mainly devoted to the raising of the Hereford
variety of cattle. A year passed in this way, then another, and the return to New York became less and less an imminent reality,
and finally ceased to be even a project; country existence proving increasingly satisfying and comfortable to the Reales as
well as to the repatriated Mrs. Beaton.

The pacific way of life into which they settled suited Laura, who gradually acquired a charming roundness, quite different
from the modish angularity into which she had disciplined herself during her photographic career. Her face was slightly furrowed
in a few years by the care of an exceptionally spirited son, but her scar became hardly visible, and she soon ceased to limp
at all. No observer of this blooming woman today can fail to notice a fullness of figure auguring the nativity of Stephen
English Reale, and certainly the connoisseurs of salable beauty in the Pandar Model Agency would be horrified to see her in
such a decline.

Andrew Reale has reformed less than one might hope, considering the change in his way of life. The advertisements of his prize
bulls in the
Hereford Journal
still disturb orthodox cattlemen. He was the first client to order and pay for a back cover in four colors on that staid
publication. He also confronts Laura, once every half year or so, with a scheme for raising a new kind of crop, or a new breed
of beasts, which will make them millionaires in a few years. Laura’s quiet good sense has outweighed these explosive enthusiasms
ever since an early disastrous venture into melons, and Andrew himself has acquired a sort of wry self-knowledge which enables
him to wait a week for the fulmination of a new idea to die down before he regards it seriously. Nature, he finds, cannot
be cajoled like a soap manufacturer. He has had the good sense, in the main, to leave the actual working of the ranch to Tom
Wilson’s old overseers, confining himself to the work of sales, purchases and administration; thus, things go well. His first
moral revulsion against his early career has passed away, and he sometimes even thinks nostalgically of the adventurous tension
of his broadcasting work, although he could not be persuaded to leave the ranch. Literature has suffered a blow, in that he
never wrote his book exposing radio, after all; in the process of gaining Laura, he mislaid the reforming urge. Of making
such books, however, there is no end, and literature may be consoled with the reflection that it might have suffered a greater
blow had he written it.

Into such domesticity do the heroes and heroines of comedy settle after the curtain falls. Shorn of the shining plumes with
which they soared and swooped through their high adventures long ago, earthbound and undistinguishable among the mass of quiet
folk, they move placidly through the chores of their days.–Are you disappointed, good friend? Would you have had the boy and
girl of our fading fable preserved forever in the bright amber of a first nuptial kiss? Come, I will be faithless to the conspiracy
of my craft long enough to tell you a tremendous secret: the sweet of life comes when the couple emerges from the church door
into a true marriage, with its small troubles and joys, a thousand years of which would not yield enough stuff for one page
of the storyteller. May you and I be granted no worse portion while we walk under the sun.

And Aurora Dawn? Why, reader, you know as well as I that the images of the pink, half-naked goddess decorate our land more
prominently than ever at this writing. It is a pity, really, that they are all wrought in perishable paper or paint, and that
sculpture is not useful in advertising; for it is amusing to consider that men of after-ages, digging up these multitudinous
images among our ruins, might engage in a hundred-years’ controversy to decide what manner of deity this was that we worshiped.

“
D
elightfully fresh and funny….

A writer of extraordinary comic and satiric gifts.”

—Spencer Klaw,
New York Herald Tribune