The Celebrity (25 page)

Thorn glanced at his watch. It was just past eleven; Digby’s latest figure on the pad before him was 4215. These were reorders; the advance sale had been 19,000, and B.S.B.’s hundred and four thousand dollars was a minimum guarantee against nearly half a million copies to its own members. There was no telling what the maximum might be.

There came over Thornton Johns a dizzy respect for publishers, for bookstores, book clubs, book jobbers, book critics, book readers. And, he amended hastily, for Gregory.
This
matched even Hollywood for excitement and glamour.

It had been a little frightening to turn his back on everything he had won for himself out there, Thorn suddenly realized as Luther Digby put in his Chicago call, and he had been a bit let down his first days in New York.

Except, of course, the evening he’d got constructive and sent Lenny Lyons a message at his nightly place of business, or beat, or whatever a columnist called his regular stand; he had a scoop about Jill Goodwyn, his message had said, and would Lenny call him right back? It had worked; courage and decisiveness always worked, even about getting past that damn rope at the Stork Club. That very evening he and Cindy had gone down, and the next night, with Jim Hathaway, they had gone through the grilled door to “21.” To be at home in such places had given New York savor again, and Jill had never said definitely that her trip East was a secret.

Digby rushed past him and Thorn decided to call Diana to tell her where he was. The phone was apparently dead; he jiggled the hook and Janet’s voice blasted at his eardrum. “Not one line’s free, Mr. Digby,” she said with asperity, “you’ll have to wait
too.
”

Women, Thornton Johns thought. Even Janet’s feeling her oats, and when Diana knows what’s happening to us—

Diana. How she had changed! He had been unperceptive not to see it the instant he returned. Only a day or two later had he suddenly said to himself, She’s different. Diana looked older, lovelier than ever, but older. Had she suffered while he was away? He could not be egotist enough to suppose so, but something had indeed altered her. There was a hint of sadness about her now that called forth everything protective in him. Women like Jill and Cindy, with their hard bright surfaces—how had he come so close to letting Jill Goodwyn’s used, expert beauty make him forget Diana?

Digby rushed back. The phone on his desk was screaming and he scooped up the entire instrument. Thornton forgot Diana, Cindy, Jill, even the Stork Club and “21.” He handed Digby a pencil. A moment later, Luther Digby, who was not a profane man, whispered softly, to the phone, “Dear Christ, you don’t mean it!” He turned, with a look of beatitude upon his face, the face Thornton Johns had once thought popeyed and disgusting.

“American News just called back,” Digby whispered, “and reordered one more thousand.”

Thorn could think of nothing befitting the churchlike muting of Digby’s voice. Again he thought of calling Gregory, and this time wondered whether Ed Barnard had already beat him to it. He rose hastily, made farewells which Digby scarcely heard, and went down the hall.

He found Barnard’s door open to the din, and Barnard himself leaning back in his chair with his hands clasped behind his head. There was no smile on his face but his eyes proclaimed a holiday.

“What a morning,” Thorn greeted him. “Have you phoned Gregory?”

“I’ve tried to. They need more lines on the switchboard.”

“I thought I’d call him myself.”

“You’ll do better from the booth in the lobby,” Barnard said. “I won’t try again up here for a while, and nobody else has time.”

It was spoken soothingly and Thorn thought, Is he trying to kid me or what? He stifled the notion and said, “Five thousand copies already, I make it.”

“It’s over six,” Barnard corrected. “It will probably be eight thousand by noon. It’s being quite a day for Gregory.” He surveyed his visitor reflectively. “And for you too, Thorn,” he added.

“Me?”

“I mean,” Barnard said quickly, “for all of us who are close to him.”

Again Thornton Johns wondered whether this was as innocent as it sounded. Again his instincts told him not to be hotheaded, certainly not with Ed Barnard. Thorn said, “Well, I’ll call him now,” and started for the door. Barnard rose and said jovially, “I hear you made a great hit in Hollywood. Congratulations.”

“It wasn’t much,” Thorn said and all his doubts of Barnard’s integrity vanished. He strode down the hall as if he were racing someone to the lobby, but in the reception room he stopped at the sliding glass panel that protected the switchboard from the outside world. Janet’s hair was disheveled, her forehead damp; her fingers flew at the cords, her thumbs flicked switches up or flipped them down. She glanced at him and for one instant her hands stopped in mid-air. Half the bulbs glowed red.

“How about knocking off, Janet, and coming out for some coffee?” She giggled and turned back to her flaming board.

Around the public booth downstairs, a cluster of irate people were soon glaring in upon him, but Thorn ignored them. Eight thousand by noon! He called Gregory, their parents, Jim Hathaway, and then Gloria, Georgia, and Gracia. Let the poor saps glare.
Their
book wasn’t a runaway the whole country would soon be discussing.

Before the week was out, the newspaper loyalties of the entire Johns family, as well as those of their friends and acquaintances, underwent a rapid metamorphosis.

At noon on Saturday, Thornton called Martin Heights and then Freeton, Long Island.

“Mom, get today’s
Evening Post
and look at page eight of the weekend magazine in. it.”

“Your father likes the
Telegram.
”

“Tell him to bring home a
Post
too. They have a best-seller list covering New York and
The Good World
is Number Two. After three days!”

“Why not Number One?” She sounded indignant.

Thorn was patient about explaining and went on to predict that, a week from tomorrow it would also show up in the national list in the
Times.

“Why don’t they put it in tomorrow?” He was less patient this time, but he told her why.

“That always
was
a pokey old paper,” she stated. “The
News
wouldn’t wait a whole week.”

“For Heaven’s sakes,
listen
to me!” He hoped he had not been so dense, when Luther Digby had explained these mysteries half an hour before. “National best-seller lists only come out in the
Times
and the
Tribune,
and there’s always a time lag.”

“I never thought much of the
Tribune
either. Those big ones have no snap to them.”

Thorn restrained an impulse to slam up the receiver. “There
has
to be a time lag. They get figures each week from all the biggest bookstores and jobbers throughout the entire country. Then they have to collate them and arrange them in proper sequence. And remember, the book sections, where the lists appear, are printed a whole week before they’re sent out with the Sunday paper, just the way the magazine section is, and all the other sections that aren’t last-minute news.”

“But Gregory’s book
is
last-minute news.”

Thorn decided that filial obligation did not demand further anguish and turned to his other calls. Before the afternoon was out, there was a run on all the newsstands of Freeton.
Posts
were sold to such staunch Republicans as the Hestons, the Markhams, the Hiram Sprigginses, the Persalls, McGills, Antons, Smiths, Garsons, some of whom went so far as to reserve copies for Saturdays to come. In Metropolitan New York, no shortage developed; nevertheless, for very nearly the first time in their lives, Gloria and Harry Brinton bought two newspapers in the same afternoon, as did Georgia and Fred Mathews. Gracia missed it, but on the way home from the last show at Radio City Music Hall that night she insisted on buying all five Sunday newspapers. “Maybe it
is
in already,” she said firmly to her husband. “Thorn
could
be wrong.”

The following Saturday, Thornton Johns made his telephonic rounds once more, feeling himself akin to every five-star general who had ever dispatched communiqués to a waiting country. “It’s Number One for the city and Number Eight in tomorrow’s
Times.
And it’s going to jump straight up—eight, four, two, one—the real ones always go something like that.”

In actuality, it went eight, four, three, two, two, one.

I
T TOOK
G
REGORY
J
OHNS
many days and nights to absorb the exhilarating shock of his book’s reception by the public. The country-wide reviews (most of them), the sales, the new printings, the best-seller lists, the deluge of mail, the smiles of his neighbors, his parents’ pride, Thorn’s bulletins, Hat’s delirium, Abby’s joy, his own inner turbulence and sense of miracle—all this combined into a force to stun him.

On publication day he lived from moment to moment, scarcely able to think, for the rapidity of impression and sensation; for perhaps a fortnight more, he welcomed endless talks with Abby, with Ed, with Thorn and each of his sisters and their families, with the Zatkes and his mother and father. One night Mr. and Mrs. Digby came out to pay a call; a strange and lively delight possessed him at the sight of them, and even Digby’s spate of reminiscence and rosy froth of prediction did not dispel it completely.

Little by little, the process of absorption did go on and though, even by early May, Gregory Johns could not yet go back to regular work on his new manuscript, he did quiet down enough to take up his old habits of observation and reflection. As he pondered certain bits of new behavior or speech or attitude on his own part, as well as on the part of his daughter, wife, brother, relatives, he found himself frequently remembering a phrase that had once amused him. He could not recall the precise circumstances of its genesis, and decided that these must have concerned Hat, or his parents, or perhaps his speculations last winter about whether Thorn really wanted to chuck his old life and start all over.

The collateral results, the phrase had run, the ramifications going on and on. Could Patrick King be called a ramification, Gregory asked himself? Could the small steady household wrangle over their vacation plans for August? The polite stubbornness that had developed over the merits of three weeks in Provincetown versus three weeks of touring in Canada was a phenomenon he never had encountered in the days when they couldn’t go anywhere. And there were other complications, not yet fully emerged from the cocoon which, instinct told him, would be terribly big butterflies before Abby or he knew it.

By an association of ideas whose classicism he would have appreciated if he had only been aware of it, Gregory Johns instantly thought of Jill Goodwyn. Thorn had not mentioned her since their return from California; indeed, though Thorn had continued to report every other hour on what he was doing, Thorn had recently become highly noncommunicative about what he was feeling.

Who, Gregory Johns thought, ever knew more than a fraction of what anybody else was feeling? You thought you knew, you secretly congratulated yourself on being more intuitive than less knowledgeable fellows, but the day came when life pitched you a fast curving one and left you fanning the air.

Thornton Johns was fully and gracefully prepared to take a back seat for quite a time, now that
The Good World
was the talk of the nation as well as the town. But he was caught short on
South Pacific.

For it to go and open just thirteen days before the pyrotechnics of publication day, so that everywhere he went people were talking about
that
too, was, he could not help feeling, just too much. It was one thing to give over the center of the stage to your own brother, but to have the whole proscenium arch and footlights and aisles ripped out over something you had had no part in at all—the justice of this kept eluding him.

Not being a man to harbor grudges or carry on vendettas, Thorn forced himself to sound gracious about
South Pacific
whenever people mentioned it, but it took something out of him each time he did. And so it was that one morning in the middle of May he found himself unexpectedly listless as he sat at his desk, waiting to call Digby for a report on yesterday’s orders.

As he meditated, the fingers of his right hand, for the first time in months, began to beat out their old restless tattoo; the rapid arpeggio from the pinky, the two downbeats with the ring finger. Soon his mind supplied lyrics to go along with the muted tune of fingertips on wood: the little arpeggio was accompanied by a long sighing SOUTHPA; the two raps by a pianissimo and dwindling “cific.”

He glanced at his watch and the telephone:
SOUTHPA
cific,
SOUTHPA
cific. It was still too early to call Digby. Each time he waited to call, he was reminded of the superstitious fears he used to have before the Imperial Century contracts were finally signed. If Digby were to tell him one morning that orders for
The Good World
had suddenly stopped dead, the blow would be unbearable.

And yet, Thorn thought, and yet.

He gazed vacantly around him. He was busier than he had ever been, even in Hollywood. It was nearly all desk work, though, paper work, tax work with Hathaway, trying for a digest sale, setting foreign publication in motion, planning a year ahead of time on cheap reprints to come. He was learning something every day and succeeding in everything he tried. There was no more solid satisfaction for any man, and yet—

Diana came in with a huge stack of mail and he welcomed the sight of it. She also unrolled a proof of a large newspaper advertisement. “Mr. Digby sent it down by boy,” she said,“B.S.B.’s running it June first in all New York papers. They’re scheduling a lot of out-of-town insertions too, and did you have any suggestions?”

Thorn smoothed the proof out on his desk. It was a distinguished-looking advertisement, despite the large coupon in the lower right-hand corner. The type face was conservative, the only illustration a life-size copy of
The Good World,
and a facsimile, signature reading “Lyman French, President.”