Second Generation (52 page)

"You see," he said to Barbara, "this is only the beginning. Have a stout heart, a ready smile and believe nothing. It's rather unusual for a first novel to be successful, but our advance sales appear to indicate a very substantial success. That might very well mean a theatrical dramatization and then a movie sale, but that's in the future. Right now we want to sell books, a great many of them. I hope you won't mind being lionized?"

"Is there any way out of it?"

"Oh, yes. You can flee back to San Francisco, if you wish."

"I
don't wish,"
Barbara
said firmly.
"I
've been to
New
York before, but somehow this is different. I feel that it's
so good to be here. I've never really taken the time to see the city, to walk, to look at it the way I would look at Paris."

"Then nothing would please me more than to be your guide. If you need one. Well, even if you don't need one."

"I couldn't impose on you."

"Ah, let me decide that. Meanwhile, here are some of the tasks we've laid out for you. Day after tomorrow, the day before publication, a cocktail party at the Algonquin. Alexander Woollcott is dying to meet you. He'll be there, reporters, celebrities, writers—it will be an ordeal, make no mistake. Tomorrow, interview on WJZ in the morning, WEAF in the afternoon. Have you ever done a radio interview?"

Barbara shook her head.

"Well, the question that will be thrown at you most often is, how much of the book is true? I suspect a great deal of it. Am I right?"

"It's hard to say. I mixed fact and fiction. I suspect that even if one attempts to write very truthfully of oneself, it's so subjective that it is a fiction of sorts."

Halliday nodded. "That's a good approach. By the way, you'll have Hildy Lang with you. She's our PR woman, very good, very competent. She'll smooth over some of the rough spots. The New York
Times
and the
Herald Tribune
both want pictures and interviews for their book sections, and I think they want you to give a talk at Sarah Lawrence College, as a rather famous alumna."

"Good heavens, I'm not famous and I haven't the vaguest notion of what I would talk about and I never even graduated."

"No matter. You'll think of something. Barbara—you don't mind if I call you that?" She shook her head. "Barbara, just say no to anything that feels like a burden. I am a greedy, avaricious publisher, so don't hesitate to reject our notions."

Again and again during the time that followed, Barbara had opportunities to reflect on what the course of things would have been had she been plain, homely, old, or fat; and she felt a growing irritation with a world that dwelt on the fact that she was, according to how they put it, fascinating, lovely, beautiful, sensational—her face and figure rather than what she had written. The first radio interviewer said, "I wish my audience could be here with
_me
jn the studio, facing this very beautiful young woman who has written a novel that will surely be one of the most talked about books of 1941. I want you to meet Miss Barbara Lavette."

"What does one say to that?" Barbara wondered.

One says, "How do you do, Al." She had met him an hour before. "We begin with introductions. You call me Al. I'll call you Barbara."

"How much of your book, Barbara, is based on fact? This man who died in Spain, was he actually your lover?"

"How do you feel about the Nazis? Can we live with them? Or must we fight them?"

"Do you feel that there are good Germans?"

"Why does a girl with everything in the world leave home and go to a foreign country? Now that's a part of your experience."

"Do you feel that explicit sex is the wave of the future in novels?"

Hildy Lang, small, dark, efficient, and easily familiar with this strange world Barbara had entered, complimented her. "Great! Simply great! You handled that beautifully."

"I didn't handle it at all."

"Oh, yes, absolutely. Now, Barbara, the Prince Carelli people want to use you."

"Who? What on earth is Prince Carelli?"

"My dear, you have been a recluse. Only the most popular perfume around. They do movie stars and that sort of thing, and now they've decided that a gorgeous author is exactly what they need. They'll photograph you with the book in your hands, and there'll be some little statement about how you love the slop they sell. It's terribly good for the book and they'll pay five hundred dollars, which isn't exactly peanuts."

"Hold on! You're telling me you want me to pose for a perfume ad for something I never even heard of?"

"Darling, it's done all the time. Of course, if you don't want to—Bill says you're the boss."

"I don't want to," Barbara said emphatically.

She stayed up half the night writing her talk for Sarah Lawrence. She had never before in her life spoken from a Platform or made a public address anywhere under any circumstances, and now, facing a hall packed with eager, Wide-eyed young women, she froze in terror, tried to speak, and discovered that no sound emerged from her paralyzed vocal cords. "Good heavens, what do I do now?" she asked herself. "I suppose I could fall in a faint, but if I did, I'd probably fracture my skull. That would be just my luck. How—how did I ever get into this?"

She took a deep breath, and then said slowly and deliberately, concentrating on making her vocal cords do what they were supposed to do, "You are all wondering, no doubt, why I am standing here in such grim silence. The answer is very simple. Until a moment ago, my vocal chords were paralyzed." Unexpectedly, there was a ripple of applause and a burst of laughter. Barbara took courage. "Strangely, they're the same vocal chords I've lived with all my life, so the reaction was unexpected. But understandable, since this is the first time I have ever made a public address in my life, and if I have anything to say about it, it will also be the last time." Again, applause and laughter. Barbara still had not looked at her written address. She didn't dare to; her memory of it was of a rigid, awkward, and pretentious reflection on writing, youth, and college days.

"I'm a bit afraid to listen to my voice, for fear it will go away, and if I talk rather quickly, it's only to get something said before I go dumb again. I think it was Mark Twain who wrote about the man who discovered, with a good deal of awe and excitement, that he had been speaking prose all of his life. That just about sums up my knowledge of the art of writing. I never did better than a B in Lit, which is a reflection on my intelligence or lack of it, not on the local department, and then, when I was living in Paris, I was lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time, and I was actually paid for writing a weekly 'Letter from Paris.'" She went on, never looking at her notes, just talking.

"This morning, I was being interviewed by a radio announcer, and he asked me where I got my ideas. Being a writer or being interviewed seems to bring out the worst in me, and I replied that I got them from Schenectady, from the Schenectady Idea Service, to which I was a subscriber and to which I paid an annual fee of two hundred dollars. This upset him terribly, and he assured the listener that I was only joking and that there was no such institution as the Schenectady Idea Service." She had to wait until the laughter and the applause died away. "Well, I really don't have much more to say. I made some notes, but I don't think they're any good. It's wonderful to be back here, and I sort of wish I had never left. I'm only half-educated, and perhaps someday I'll have enough courage to come back and finish college."

To Barbara's amazement, her talk was a huge success. Hildy Lang looked at her with new respect, and those of the faculty whom she had once known crowded around with praise and congratulations. Being back there on the campus was like a dream, things familiar and things strange, and the strange and the familiar mixed and haunting. It was only seven years since she had been here last, but they were like an eternity—the students so incredibly young, the faculty so unchanged. A group of students gathered around her; they were here in this lovely place, and the world outside was a threatening, terrifying mystery. They wanted to touch, to speak to, to question, to communicate with someone who had actually been to the lair of the beast, to the place called Germany. She had seen these men called the SS with her own eyes; she had actually walked on the streets of Berlin. Would it ever end? Would England fall? Would we be in the war? Could the Nazis invade the United States?

Barbara realized that she knew so little. She had fled from war and horror. The world was entering into a dance of death beyond the bloodiest dreams of the past, and she could not cope with it. To kill an insect tortured her. She had no answers. She could only say, "I hope for something, some way for it to stop. But I don't know—"

Hildy Lang rescued her. Hildy had no problems with war and peace, with life and death. There was a cocktail party scheduled for five o'clock at the Algonquin, and the car was waiting. "Those kids will eat you up," Hildy told her. "Anyway, that is a crazy place, that Sarah Lawrence, absolutely insane."

Almost a hundred men and women were crowded into the two-room suite at the Algonquin, and Barbara was belly to belly but hardly face to face with a small, fat man who came up to her shoulder, the dean of the literary critics, who informed her didactically that her book was by no means a novel. "And why call it that?" he demanded. "It's a personal history. You lived it and you put down what you lived. That poses a problem, young woman. Where to now?"

"I haven't the slightest idea," Barbara said. She had

downed two drinks with the deliberate intention of getting

drunk—as the only alternative to fleeing the place. She

was a poor drinker. The third drink, in her hand, promised

the desired effect. "San Francisco, I think, but I'm not

sure."

Over her shoulder, someone was saying, "Lewisite— that's the answer. One can of Lewisite on Berlin and that does it, every man, woman, and child dead. Then you build an iron fence around the place and label it: Here lies Berlin, executed for crimes against civilization."

Barbara squeezed around to see who was speaking. A stout woman was shrilly defending her position. Barbara tried to escape, and the dean of literary critics followed her. "Hemingway," he said, "participates. You observe. The curse of inherited wealth."

Halliday rescued her. "I want you to meet Bruman. He's on the
Sun,
and he wants to do a special feature."

"We are beyond Steinbeck," Bruman was saying. "He is already an anachronism. We are beyond weeping for the Okies. Hitler has solved the unemployment problem. Ah, Miss Lavette! Beauty and the brain! Not Roosevelt and his New Deal, but Adolf Hitler. Bless the ironies of history. What would a writer do without them? Did you meet the Fiihrer, Miss Lavette? You must tell me all about him."

At last it was over, and Barbara and Halliday sat in the empty room amid the litter, Barbara drunk, sick to her stomach, tired, wanting nothing so much as to be left alone. Halliday patted her hand and assured her that she had performed splendidly.

"But I'm not a performer," she said woefully.

"Let's have some dinner, and then you'll feel better. I know a place in the Village where they have marvelous steaks—steak, Bermuda onions, sliced tomatoes, baked potatoes—"

"Oh, no, please."

In the taxi, she tried to think, to put her muddled mind in order. Halliday was holding her hand, stroking it gently with his forefinger. "You're a patient, lovely wonder of a woman," he said, leaning toward her and kissing her on her cheek, and Barbara said to herself hopelessly, "Oh, Christ, he's on the way, and the last thing in the world I want right now is someone trying to make love to me,

and he's my publisher, and I'm so drunk I can't even think

straight."

"Mr. Halliday," she said primly, "what on earth is Lewisite?"

"Lewisite?"

"Someone was talking about dropping it on Berlin."

"Really? It's a kind of devilish gas. They say that one canister of it could wipe out an entire city. The trouble is, the Germans have it too. Everyone has it. Good heavens, we don't want to talk about Lewisite. Have you ever been to the Village?"

"Once, long ago, I don't know it well."

"It's a charming place. Not the way it was twenty years ago, but still a charming place. Suppose we stroll a bit and get the cobwebs out of our heads. It doesn't have to be a steakhouse. There are half a dozen good restaurants to choose from."

"I hate to say this," Barbara said, "but I think I must go back to the hotel and go to bed. I'm a rotten drinker, and it's taken every ounce of self-control I have not to throw up right here in the taxi."

It was more than an excuse. It was a reality. "There's always tomorrow," Halliday said, unable to keep the disappointment out of his voice. "Suppose we keep your schedule down to a minimum. Tomorrow is publication day, and I had thought we might wait up for the morning papers. I think there'll be reviews in both the
Times
and the
Tribune
—good ones, I'm sure."