The Pledge (11 page)

“I'm afraid not.”

“Puts the onus on me. Ah, well, I can be honest if pressed. I shall certainly read it over the weekend.”

It was a very long and difficult weekend for Bruce. He had a date with Sally Pringle for Saturday night, and it was difficult for him to focus.. It nettled her.”Do you have a television?” she wanted to know, repeating the question a second time.

“You know I don't,” Bruce said. “What on earth would I want with a television set?”

“You might want to connect with what's happening in the real world. Here's a great big change in my life, and you ask me what you would want with a television set. You might want to look at me.”

“I love looking at you,” Bruce said.

“I left my job.”

“Why?” He was not displeased that she had parted company with Hillsdale Fashions and the handsome Phil Sturtz. Whatever had been happening to their relationship, she was still the woman he was dating and taking to bed, even if all talk of marriage had ceased and even if on occasion she went to bed with another. Since he had no hard evidence of this, he preferred not to linger over the notion. If there was only nominal passion, there was pleasant sex and they made a handsome couple.

“Because I've just signed a three-year contract with the DTB network as fashion consultant and women's editor. I'll be on the air each afternoon at four o'clock, and if you don't think television's the wave of the future, Bruce, you're simply not with it. They've agreed to double what I got at Hillsdale — and it's going somewhere. Have you seen any of the statistics on the proliferation of television sets?”

“I haven't noticed.”

“You will. You certainly will.”

Bruce made a mental note that on Monday he would buy a television set. Since his mother's arthritis was making it increasingly difficult for her to walk any distance, Dr. Bacon had purchased a television set. Bruce had watched it on occasion and had not found it terribly enlightening, but then he had not been much of a radio fan as a kid. He had preferred the movies or the printed word.

Sunday dragged on forever, and on Monday he decided not to leave his apartment until Bronson called him. But Bronson never called on Monday, and that night Bruce lay awake for most of the dark hours, convinced that a year of work had been a total failure, and wondering whether the fact that he had doubled his time of leave at the paper would militate against his getting his job back. Tuesday morning, at eleven o'clock, his telephone rang. It was Mel Bronson, and he said to Bruce, “Forgive me for not calling yesterday. I had about twenty pages still to read, and it was one of those days. Bruce — if I may call you Bruce — Bruce, you have the beginnings of one hell of a book there, and if you'll meet me at a place called the Balkans, on Twenty-ninth between Lexington and Fourth, we'll have lunch and talk about it. Say one o'clock? Can you make that?”

Wild horses couldn't keep him away. “I'll be there,” Bruce said.

The Balkans was another Armenian restaurant that Bruce vaguely recalled from before the war, a place popular with the Fourth Avenue publishing houses. Bronson was waiting for him when he arrived, and over stuffed mussels and shish-kabob, he talked about Bruce's book, about his perspective on war, the development of his pacifist convictions, his lack of the hatred that pervaded so much war writing, his contempt for the so-called bravery of the German soldier, his analysis of courage in wartime and human conscience in wartime. “It is different,” Bronson said. “It's different thinking and it's new thinking, and if the next few hundred pages are as good as this, we've certainly got something.”

“Thank you,” Bruce said. “I've been living in the dark. You're the first one to read this. I would have shown it to some others, friends, perhaps my father, but Greenberg was very insistent that I show it to no one but a professional editor.”

“He was absolutely right. Interesting chap, Milt Greenberg. When he was a kid, he covered World War One for the old
New York World.
Got a special congressional citation. I've been begging him to write a book. He won't.”

“I can understand that,” Bruce said. “Once is enough for me.”

“I hope not. Now look, Bruce, we have to come to some arrangement, and since you don't have an agent, I have to do some honorable bargaining. On the basis of this section — by the way, how many of these manuscript pages do you feel it will be?”

“About four hundred and fifty or so. At least, that's what the material adds up to, the way I have it now.”

“Good enough. Now, on the basis of this section, what I have already read, I can make the following offer: a signed contract at this point, with an advance of ten thousand dollars — or an agreement on our part to pay an advance of fifty thousand dollars when you bring in the completed manuscript, based of course on our” willingness to accept the manuscript for publication. On that score, I have no doubt about the quality of the completed book. Now think about it for a moment.”

“And what happens if I accept the ten thousand, and then you decide not to publish?”

“If that should be the case, which I doubt, the ten thousand comes off whatever advance you get from another publisher. No publisher, you don't repay it.”

“And the fifty you pay when I finish the book — that comes with an agreement to publish — right?”

“Absolutely.”

“I'll finish the book and take the fifty,” Bruce decided.

“You're sure you don't want to sleep on it? Ask the advice of a third party? Another opinion?”

“No. No thank you, Mr. Bronson. I have enough money to finish the book. At this point, I think I'm secure enough to gamble. The main thing is that you like it, that you've given me an opinion I can trust.”

“All right. I respect your decision.”

But afterward, Bruce wondered whether he wouldn't have been better off had he accepted the ten thousand. Hearing that the first part was so good, he was weighed down by the need to perform to the standards set. For two days, he found himself tearing up page after page, but that did not last. By Friday, he was at work again and in control of what he wrote. It was on the same Friday that Greenberg telephoned him to find out how it had gone from his point of view. He explained that he had already spoken to Bronson, who was very excited about the project.

“It went well,” Bruce said. “I have to thank you.”

“Then I'll ask a favor from you,” Greenberg said.

“Feel free. Anything I can do.”

“Well, it's no big deal, and you can say no, if you wish. We have a group called the Broadway Forum, mostly news people and magazine people and a nice sprinkling of theater characters — you know, some actors, directors — and we get together once a month at the Murray Hill Hotel in their big room, anywhere from a hundred to a hundred and fifty people, and we listen to a speaker and then talk about it. Well, they heard me mention that I knew you, and they're asking you to come and speak Monday a week.” Greenberg drew a long breath and waited while the silence lengthened.

. Then Bruce said, “You know, I never made a public speech in all my life.”

“You're kidding.”

“No.” Bruce shook his head and stared at the telephone.

“Bruce?”

“I've just been thinking about it. Thing is, the thought scares the hell out of me. I mean, why should anyone want to listen to me?”

“Because you been around the way few people have. You were right in the middle of the worst trauma this planet ever experienced, and you're a damn good newspaperman.”

“Oh, hell, I'm one in a hundred. You know that.”

“OK. I'm the messenger boy, that's all. I told them you'd probably say no.”

“Hold on,” Bruce said. “I want to think about it. Can you call back in, say, half an hour?”

“Absolutely.”

Bruce put down the telephone, dropped into a chair, and thought about it. Astonishing; here he was, embarking on the fourth decade of his life, and he had never delivered a talk in public. He reviewed his postteenage life: the four years at Williams College, the two years of postgraduate journalism at Columbia, the job of a cub reporter on the
Tribune
, and then the moment of good or bad fortune — depending on how one saw it — that took him to England as the war began. Where was his life, his experience, his need to belong to a human race that was not preoccupied in the art of killing? He had holed up in his little apartment like a hermit who had taken a vow of solitude. He had a strange relationship with a woman who fitted some remote Williams College definition of what a proper mate should be, and while he slept with her, there was no idea, thought, or conceivable future that they shared. And now, asked by Greenberg to talk to a group of his peers about the only experience that really defined his life, World War Two, he had begged off with the excuse of fear.

When Greenberg called back, Bruce said, “Sure. I'll do it. How long do you want me to speak?”

“As long as you wish, twenty minutes, half an hour. You can field some questions afterward if you wish, or not. Whatever you decide. No one expects you to do anything that might make you uncomfortable.”

If the thought didn't frighten him, it still worried him. He brooded over it for the next week, and it messed up his writing schedule. He disliked talking about his war experience for two reasons: first, because the notion of war and battle that most people had was derived from newspaper stories, books about the war, and movies — even servicemen were inclined to accept this notion, since most of them by far had never seen action; and second, because it depressed him and caused him to suppress his real feelings, his decision that war was madness beyond justification in any case.

Whereby, when he came to the Murray Hill Hotel and stood in front of the crowded room, at least a hundred and fifty people, he said: “Tonight, in spite of the fact that most of you who read my dispatches associate me with the war in Europe, I decided not to speak about that, but rather about a much shorter experience in the Far East.”

He then went on to tell them what had taken him to India, and rather briefly of his pursuit of the truth about the famine. “In the course of which,” he said, “I came to know a man named Ashoka Majumdar.” After that, Bruce told the story of the day he had spent with Majumdar. The audience was with him, intent upon what he was saying, and this gave him sufficient sense of security to put down his notes and talk from memory. When he finished, a man by the name of Jerry Gionni, a sort of chairman, asked Bruce whether he would field some questions.

“I can try.”

“All right” — to the audience — “but make them short and to the point.”

A woman asked, “This theory of yours that the British were responsible for the famine — do you still believe so?”

“I still do. Yes.”

“Do you have any new evidence?” from an older man.

“No. Nothing more than I had before.”

A man of about thirty: “Did it ever occur to you that you were being used by the local communists?”

“Well, yes and no. In one sense, every correspondent in a war zone is being used. I never met a senior officer who didn't want his name in the papers. Big competition there. The war is their moment. Then the High Command uses us to give out what they want to give out, and the press officers use us to push whatever they're pushing, and I'm sure that the two men I told you about were using me to get the horror of the situation across to people on stateside. But this does not impugn their integrity. I know this country is going a little crazy on the question of communism, but don't forget that while it was only a couple of years ago, it was another world. I saw Russian and American soldiers embrace each other with tears in their eyes, and I also know, from my own eyewitness, that there was no way in the world that we could have defeated the Germans without the Red Army as our allies. So I saw no reason to make any judgments about the communists I met in Bengal.”

“But you'll admit,” another voice said, “that the Russians couldn't have survived the war without our Lend Lease.”

“Perhaps. I have no strong opinions about that.”

A tall redheaded woman stood up and said, “Mr. Bacon, what's your opinion about the wave of anticommunist hysteria and the loyalty oaths that go with it?”

The question brought him up sharp, and he had to ask himself whether to answer it honestly or accept the inner voice that told him this was a very hot potato indeed, and that the smart thing to do was to sidestep it. The audience was waiting.

“Well, I can say this. I have a squeaky, unhappy feeling that it resembles the first tactics of Adolf Hitler after he took power. He used the communists as an excuse for every rotten provision in his program. I can also say that, like millions of my fellow Americans, I take comfort in the fact that I know nothing very much about communism and have never associated with communists; but that's poor comfort when I recall the German who said, When they came for the communists, I was not afraid. I was not a communist. When they came for the socialists, I was not afraid. I was not a socialist. When they came for the Jews, I was not afraid. I wasn't a Jew. And when they came for me, I was alone. It was too late. Maybe that exaggerates the situation. I can't say. It's simply not the kind of thing I like to see happening in my country.”

When the meeting was over, Bruce had to admit to himself that he had enjoyed it. After his self-enforced isolation, it was in the way of a relief to talk about ideas, to exchange points of view. The audience drifted out. Greenberg shook his hand and told him that he had done very well. Jerry Gionni shook his hand and then gave him a check for two hundred dollars.

“Hey, hold on,” Bruce said.

“We don't pay a fortune, but we also don't expect you to come in and do this for nothing. We're taking advantage of you. If we reached you through an agency, it would have cost us three times as much.”