“Nebraska,” said Jack. “No, I guess she won’t be going back there for a while. Anyway, she’s living in Italy.”
“What’s she like, to meet, I mean?” said Mary.
“Rather plain,” said Gretchen. “Soft-spoken.”
“How old?”
“Early thirties. Maybe thirty-three or four,” said Gretchen. “This was her third novel—”
“Fourth,” said Jack.
“That’s right. Three unpublished, and then she wrote Harvest Time. Jack read the manuscript of one of her earlier novels and encouraged her to try again. And guess where he discovered that manuscript? In a pile of manuscripts that Stanley Grimes had rejected but hadn’t got around to returning. Harvest Time is entirely due to Jack. I’m very proud of my husband.”
“Well, she didn’t pull any punches,” said Billy. “Some of it was pretty raw. Pretty raw.”
“And I don’t think it’s a true picture,” said Mary. “You can go to any small town in America and find some queer birds, but why doesn’t she write about some of the decent people?”
“Wouldn’t sell,” said Billy.
“Oh, I don’t know, Billy,” said Jack. “Laughing Boy is selling. Edna Ferber has a new book out, and that’s selling. Naturally we’d like to have Edna Ferber and Oliver LaFarge on our list, but we haven’t got them. But we also want to publish new people, like Serena Von Zetwitz and Julian Joplin.”
“And how exciting it is when they sell,” said Gretchen. “A year ago nobody’d ever heard of either one of them, and today they’re both famous.”
“Well, they’ve all heard of the Von Zetwitz dame, all right,” said Billy. “Especially in Boston. Did you plan that, Jack? Getting her book banned in Boston?”
“Naturally,” said Jack.
“Oh, you did not,” said Mary.
“Of course I didn’t, but Billy likes to think I did,” said Jack.
“I was only kidding. Can’t you take a joke?” said Billy.
“Not very well, I guess. Not where our books are concerned.”
“The one I’m dying to meet is Julian Joplin,” said Gretchen.
“Oh, haven’t you met him? I thought you met all your authors,” said Mary.
“Most of them, but he hasn’t been to New York.”
“Not even when you published his book?” said Mary.
“Won’t come,” said Gretchen. “He won’t budge out of Kentucky.”
“He’s one I’d be afraid to meet,” said Mary.
“Why? I didn’t read his book,” said Billy. “Does he write like the Von Zetwitz dame?”
“Yes, and no,” said Mary. “He describes worse things than she does, but you have to read it over again to make sure. Isn’t that right, Gretchen?”
“Yes. He has such a complicated style that you can read and reread long passages in his books, and then it begins to dawn on you that he’s been describing something perfectly awful.”
“Like what?” said Billy.
“Well—it’s sex, but not just ordinary sex. Jack, you explain,” said Gretchen.
“Perversion.”
“You mean like a couple of fairies?” said Billy.
“No. A man and a woman, but having an extremely unconventional affair. Read the book. Maybe you won’t even notice it.”
“I’ll sure as hell notice it if Mary did.”
“Well, I had to go back and reread it, to make sure. Even so I’m not altogether sure,” said Mary. “Did you get it first time you reread it, Gretchen?”
“The scene in the churchyard? Yes, I think I did.”
“You didn’t have to ask Jack?”
“I did ask him, but I’d guessed right,” said Gretchen.
“Well, you’re a lot more sophisticated than Mary,” said Billy.
“Don’t ever say that about any woman, Billy, that she’s less sophisticated than another woman,” said Jack.
“I suppose I’m less sophisticated than Gretchen, but I’m getting there,” said Mary. “You make me sound not quite bright, Billy, but I know a lot of things I don’t necessarily talk about.”
“Well, don’t talk about them, because I think it’s very unbecoming. Gretchen is more sophisticated than you are, but still she doesn’t talk about such things the way some girls do nowadays. Have you got anyone else coming for lunch besides us?”
“Yes, are you getting hungry?” said Gretchen.
“A little, but no great hurry. I had breakfast at ha’ past eight.”
“What on earth for, on Sunday morning?” said Gretchen.
“I didn’t say I got up at ha’ past eight. I only said I had breakfast. We didn’t actually get up till about an hour later. Mary got up early, but then she came back to bed.”
“You might as well describe our whole morning,” said Mary.
Billy was baffled, then realized the inferences that could be taken. “Oh,” he said. “Well, we’re married.”
“Oh, hush up, Billy. You’re only making it worse,” said Mary.
“I’m not, but you are. To change the subject, who is coming for lunch. Or are?”
“You’ve never met them. Michael and Josephine Landers. Jack just hired him a few weeks ago, as a sort of general assistant in the editorial department. And she writes for Harper’s Bazaar. She’s had some light verse published in The New Yorker, you may have seen. He’s written a novel that we’re going to publish, but he needed a job and Jack hired him.”
“He got the novel out of his system. Pretty terrible. But I think he’s going to make a very good assistant. Anyway, we agreed to let him try it for a year,” said Jack.
“And they needed the money. Michael spent over a year writing his novel, and they apparently had to live on her salary, which wasn’t much. Michael was really quite desperate for a job, and he’s very grateful to Jack.”
“Well, we don’t have to go into that,” said Jack. “We’re not paying him much, but I think he has a hell of a future in the office. I just hope he doesn’t decide to go back to writing novels. The one I read was really quite bad, and I think I know.”
“You certainly do,” said Gretchen. “There! There they are.”
“What’s their name again?” said Billy.
“Landers. Michael and Josephine Landers,” said Gretchen.
Michael and Josephine Landers came in and were introduced. They were slightly younger than the others. Josephine was smartly dressed in a good but not new suit, Michael in Brooks clothes from tie to shoe, all new and stiffish. It could be guessed that his new outfit had coincided with his new job. She was smallish and pretty, with light brown hair and bright blue eyes. He was tallish and thin, under six foot, loose-limbed and not quite awkward in his movements and his manners, saved from awkwardness by an integral self-confidence that came near to being arrogance, but was not.
Immediately after the introductions Michael Landers addressed Billy Walton. “Didn’t you row on the Harvard crew?”
“Yes, I did. How did you know?” said Billy. “Did you row in college?”
Michael looked quickly at Mary Walton, then back at Billy. “No—I just recognized your name.”
“Were you at Harvard?”
“No, I went to Brown.” He spoke with a finality that indicated his unwillingness to continue past the identification of Billy. But then he had a change of mind. “You don’t remember me at all?”
“That’s kind of putting me on the spot, but no, I’m afraid I don’t.”
“I don’t mean that you’d recognize me, but doesn’t my name mean anything to you? Michael Landers?”
“You’ve got to help me out,” said Billy. The others were taking a keen interest in their conversation.
“All right,” said Michael. “My father was the gardener on your family’s place in Mount Kisco. Now do you remember?”
“Of course. Now I remember. But you have to admit, that was a long time ago,” said Billy.
“How interesting,” said Gretchen. “Your father worked for Mr. Walton’s father?”
“For about twenty years,” said Michael Landers. “Do you want to tell her, Walton?”
“I don’t particularly want to, but I will, if you insist,” said Billy. “Mr. Landers’s father, David Landers, was the head gardener at our place in Mount Kisco. And when I was about thirteen or fourteen, at Pomfret at the time, there was a robbery at our house. A lot of my mother’s jewelry was stolen, and the police were convinced it was an inside job. They questioned Mr. Landers’s father.”
“They didn’t only question him. They arrested him.”
“Yes, I guess they did actually place him under arrest, on suspicion. But they released him. It was an inside job, but the guilty party was my mother’s maid. She confessed, and they recovered all the jewelry. But Mr. Landers’s father quit his job, although my father and mother wanted him to stay. Is that a fair statement of what happened?”
“Oh, very fair. You never knew what happened to my father, did you?”
“No. I was away at school, and about all I knew was that he quit his job, and he and his family, which would include you, left Mount Kisco.”
“Under a cloud, would you say?” said Michael.
“Not as far as we were concerned. I know my father wanted him to stay.”
“But didn’t keep the police from arresting him.”
“I don’t know anything about that part of it.”
“But that’s the important part, as far as my father was concerned. And as far as I’m concerned. My father was incapable of stealing anything. He’d worked for your father and your grandfather, for twenty years. But they allowed the police to put him in jail.”
“No necessity to bring my grandfather into it. My father couldn’t have prevented the police from—”
“Your father, in Mount Kisco, could have prevented anything. If he hadn’t suspected my father, they never would have arrested him.” He turned to Gretchen. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Harrington, but you’ll have to excuse us.”
“Well, under the circumstances, I suppose there’s nothing else to do,” said Gretchen.
“Yes there is,” said Billy. “You can excuse us. Mr. and Mrs. Landers can stay. We were going to have to leave early anyhow, to go to Mother’s. So I really insist, Gretchen.”
“I don’t know,” said Jack. “Why don’t you all stay?”
“Ridiculous,” said Mary Walton.
“No more ridiculous than reopening an old wound and then not trying to do something to heal it,” said Jack.
“Sorry, Jack, but I didn’t reopen it, and I don’t think it can be healed. Mr. Landers could have postponed this little scene till some other time, but as soon as he heard my name . . . No, we’ll leave, and you can get the rest of the story from Mr. Landers.”
“I’ll see you Tuesday, Gretchen,” said Mary.
The Waltons left.
“There’s no use trying to talk about something else,” said Gretchen. “What happened to your father, Michael?”
“Do you know what gardeners are like, Mrs. Harrington?”
“In what way?” said Gretchen.
“They’re generally very quiet men, really more interested in what they’re doing than they are in people. Most of the time they’re working with dirt, the soil. And all they produce is beauty, and often the most beautiful things don’t last very long. A few days, maybe a few weeks. But it’s worth it to them, to bring that beauty up out of the ground. My father knew every flower in the Waltons’ garden, and every petal on every flower. He was up at five o’clock every morning, seven days a week most of the year, and in all kinds of weather. He was no more capable of stealing Mrs. Walton’s diamonds and pearls than he could have taken one of her prize roses and crushed it in his fist. My father didn’t even carry a watch. He had a watch. This one. It was given to him on his twenty-first birthday, but he never carried it. He only owned one necktie, to wear to church on Sunday. But as soon as he came home from church, right after Sunday dinner, he put on his work clothes and was back in the garden. He had two helpers, two Italians, but they wouldn’t work on Sunday, and some things had to be done while the weather was right. He was paid twenty dollars a week and we got the cottage rent-free and all our fresh vegetables, that he grew, although one of the Italians did do most of the work in the truck garden. He wouldn’t have known a diamond from a piece of cut glass.
“Well, that was the man that J. W. Walton suspected of stealing his wife’s jewelry. Locking him up in jail, even just for one night, was the most heartless, most senseless, cruelest thing I ever knew of. He didn’t understand it at the time, and the more he tried to understand it later, the worse he got. I mean—well, it affected his mind. He wasn’t very bright anyway. He hardly ever read the newspaper. Seed catalogs and books on gardening were all he ever read. I’ll tell you something else about my father. When they released him from jail, he was actually going back to work in the garden. He’d missed a whole day. It was my mother that stopped him. I was about seven years old, but I can remember coming home from school and my sister telling me that Pop had been arrested and was in jail. She and I and my younger brother cried all night, and the next day we stayed home from school. Then when my father got home we packed our suitcases and cardboard boxes and went and stayed with my uncle and aunt in New Rochelle.
“My father got a job in a greenhouse in New Rochelle, but two years later he got t.b., and the next year he died.
“Maybe no one else would call it murder, but I do.”
3
The editorial and business offices were on the second and third stories of an old brick-and-plaster house in East 38th Street. Jack Harrington’s private office was on the second story rear, and except for the furniture the room remained as it had always been, with an open fireplace, two long windows, residential wallpaper. Jack, in shirtsleeves, was at his desk, with his back to the window at an angle, so that he could look out by swiveling his chair. It was evening.
Michael Landers came in, likewise in shirtsleeves, and carrying some papers. “I finished it,” he said.
“What’s that?” said Jack.
“The Julian Joplin novel.”
“And the answer is?”
“No,” said Michael. “At least as far as I’m concerned.”
“Well, that’s pretty far, Michael. I haven’t overruled you yet. What’s the matter with it?’
“You haven’t read any of it, at all?”
“No, you’re the only one that’s seen it. I will read it, of course, but you don’t think we ought to publish it?”
“It’s absolutely filthy, for one thing. It would never get through the mail. But it isn’t worth fighting for. It’s all shock. Four-letter words, five-letter words, one shocking scene after another, and without a single redeeming feature. In other words, I don’t see that it has any literary value, none whatsoever.”
“You liked his first novel.”
“This one makes me doubt that it was written by the same man. In the other one he had scenes of depravity and degeneration, but he was subtle about it. Artistic. Poetic. In this one he writes like a dirty little boy, putting down all the dirty thoughts he ever had. I may be wrong, but I’d be willing to bet that he wrote this one a long time ago, and now he wants to cash in on his reputation.”
“That often happens, of course, but Julian Joplin, he didn’t strike me as that kind of a guy. I don’t think this is out of the trunk, but I guess we’ll never know.”
“It’s not out of the trunk, it’s out of the cesspool.”
“You realize, of course, if we don’t publish this, we lose Joplin. And he’s one of the two authors that kept this firm going. He and Serena Von Zetwitz.”
“You can’t publish this, Jack. It’ll be banned all over the country, and rightly. And it’s not going to help the reputation of Harrington and Whitehill. Here, let me show you one page,” said Michael. He laid the typescript on Jack’s desk, and Jack read it in silence that lasted a full ten seconds. When he finished he looked up.
“Yeah,” he said. “That could get us into a lot of trouble. Is there more like that?”
“As bad, and worse,” said Michael. “And it isn’t a question of cutting. I couldn’t edit this, and I don’t think you could either.”
“Not if there’s more like this,” said Jack. “Horace Liveright and Alfred Knopf both think Joplin is great. I do too, for that matter. But Joplin isn’t a guy you can reason with. He owes us first look at this book, and if we reject it, he’s free to go where he pleases. That’s the contract. Well, I’ll read it tonight and let you know in the morning.”
“Don’t show it to Gretchen,” said Michael.
“Oh? Why not? She’s seen worse than this. You’re still pretty new in this business, Michael. This is bad because it was written by Julian Joplin, but I’ve seen worse and so has Gretchen.”
“Gretchen has seen worse than this?”
“We got a manuscript two years ago, maybe three. A translation from the Portuguese, written by a Brazilian millionaire. Gertrude Gelsey, the literary agent, was handling it, and it finally came down to us after everybody else had had a look at it. The English title was something like Forgive Us Our Sins, and it was this millionaire’s memoirs. It was like reading all the Havelock Ellis case histories, but all happening to one man. I asked Gelsey why the fellow would want to publish it under his own name, and she laughed. She said he wouldn’t let it be published unless it was under his name. That was going to be his greatest thrill, to be famous as the most depraved man of our time. Yes, Gretchen read it.”
“She must be awfully well balanced to read that kind of stuff and be as normal as she is.”
“That’s what well balanced means, doesn’t it?” said Jack. “Anyway, I wouldn’t dare reject Joplin’s novel without letting her read it. You know where the money comes from in this firm. Everybody does.”