The Celebrity (37 page)

Thornton Johns, Master of Timing. Thornton Johns, the man in the know. What would he give now to be out of the know, at least until after the spring tour?

Hell, it was better to know, know now, know while there was still time. This would take tact, softness, self-control; he had them all.

As he paid off the cab, Hat came out of the house, and said, “Why, Uncle Thorn!” In an offhand way he said, “Business again,” and was glad she was dressed for town. He waved good-bye and dashed inside and up the steps, put his finger to the bell, held it there, and then remembered the need for self-control. If any of God’s creatures were vainer than authors, he didn’t know which. Thorn arranged a smile upon his face and when Abby opened the door he laughed. “A little morning call,” he said.

Through the connecting door to his new study, Gregory came in. Thorn waved his portfolio and said, “I told you I’d read it fast. It’s marvelous, Gregory,” That didn’t sound right. “Remarkable, original. You
are
going to surprise them with this one.”

Gregory looked at him quizzically. Thorn went on with his praise until he saw Gregory and Abby exchange glances. “But I have a suggestion to make,” Thorn said.

“Fine,” Gregory said,

“I thought about it all night. I wondered if you could perhaps—”

“Perhaps what?”

“Perhaps set it aside awhile.
Not
make it the very next book, but the one after the next.”

“Thorn,” Abby said.

“I take it,” Gregory said, “you don’t think it’s so marvelous.”

The tone unnerved Thorn, but he forced himself to stay calm. Affably he went on, “I
do.
I’m looking at the over-all picture. If the next, one could just, consolidate our position, why then, after that—”

“This is the next one,” Gregory said.

Something exploded inside Thornton Johns. “It
can’t
be,” he said loudly. “You can’t
do
this to me. Or to yourself.”

“Leave me out of it, thanks.”

“All my hard work, all my buildup for the next one, everything I’ve counted on for you, and now—”

Gregory opened the portfolio, drew out his manuscript, and carefully set it on a table at his side.

“You’ve got to believe me,” Thorn went on. “No magazine will touch this, no book club will take it, no movie studio will bid on it. My God, I can’t even make out what it’s about. Aborigines? Pygmies? Native blacks in the jungle? God!”

Gregory’s right hand went rigid. He picked up the manuscript again and carried it off and out of sight into his study.

Abby said, “Oh, Thorn, you shouldn’t have. I’ve never seen him so furious.”

Thorn went toward the open door. “I don’t mean to upset you, Gregory,” he called. “It really is marvelous. It’s just—”

Gregory returned and almost collided with him. “You listen, Thorn,” he said. For a second no one moved. “There’s one thing you can’t do, and you’ve done it. Everything else I don’t give much of a damn about, one way or another. You can go right on—lecture about me, get in the papers, be photographed, hobnob with Big Names, be more famous every day. But the one thing you can’t do is tell me what to write and what not to write.”

“I only said that this next book—”

“This next book or the book after that or the hundredth book from now.” Gregory’s voice did not rise in pitch, but each word was a rock hurled. “Not now, not ever, are you or anybody else going to tell me what to write and what to throw aside, and if you don’t want to go ahead on those terms and on no other terms in this world, you don’t have to.”

Gregory turned on his heel and slammed out of the room. Abby started to follow him, but pulled her hand back from the doorknob, and sat down slowly on the sofa.

Thorn stared at the blind expanse of the door. He looked at Abby’s appalled face and turned away.
He
had never seen Gregory like this either. Compared to this, last winter’s shouting fight about commission was nothing.

And on no other terms in this world. He could have punched Gregory for that. But Gregory had the pay-off punch; Gregory always had it. Gregory could stop him cold. Gregory alone in the whole world. Not Hathaway, not Cindy, not anybody else. But Gregory. He had forgotten that. Damn it, Gregory let you forget it for a year at a time.

Thorn wished Abby would leave the room, go out of the house. He had to think; with her eyes boring holes in his back, he would never collect himself. She was like another Gregory. She would wangle it all into something larger than stubbornness and better than ingratitude!

He forced himself to look at her. Abby said, “Thorn,” in a shaken voice, and fell silent once again. Minutes went by. “Thorn,” she said more firmly, “you’re thinking he’s forgotten everything you’ve done for him. But there’s one thing
you’ve
forgotten.”

Abby did not know just how to start. At the center, she thought, of the great widening circle of the agents who sell a book and the printers who print it and the publishers who publish it and the critics who review it and the bookstores who sell it and the readers who read it and the movie studios who buy it—at the center of all this world was an author who wrote it. Haltingly she tried to put this into words for Thorn. “Without that author,” she ended, “where would any of that world be? If he hadn’t leaned over a pad of blank paper, or faced the dead motionless keys on a typewriter, where would any of it be?”

Thorn looked at her, and she thought, Now he knows. Somehow they all know. Sooner or later, they all know. She did not ask herself who they were or what they all knew; but again she thought, Now he knows.

“You mean,” Thorn said, “without Gregory, where would I be.”

“It’s not only you and Gregory.”

“You do mean,” Thorn went on slowly, “without Gregory’s brains and talent, where would I be. Downtown selling insurance, you mean.”

He sat down and shielded his face with his hand. Looking at him, Abby suddenly remembered the rainy night when Ed had driven them out to Roslyn.
Thornton Johns Speaks Tonight
on “MY BROTHER, GREGORY JOHNS.”

In her mind, voices seemed all at once to be calling out to her: My father Gregory Johns, my son Gregory Johns, my uncle Gregory Johns, my brother-in-law Gregory Johns, my client Gregory Johns, our author Gregory Johns, our new property Gregory Johns—

Behind his shielding hand, Thorn was thinking, I shouldn’t have put that into her head, about where would I be. It was true once; it’s not true any more. Nothing could put me back downtown, an insurance salesman and nothing more. Just the same, one more fight like this
could
stop everything else cold.

He saw the piled-up stenotype record in his office; he tried to imagine the moment when Gregory would have to be told about it. Suddenly Thorn could feel himself tearing the three hundred pages to shreds. Prudence paid off better than punches, prudence and patience. A book about aborigines and native blacks was useless but the next one after it might be another
Horn of Plenty
or even another
Good World.

“I know what you meant, Abby,” he said at last. “I won’t ever forget it.”

Abby nodded without looking at him and, after a bit, he crossed the room and knocked on Gregory’s door. “May I come in a minute?”

“Come ahead.”

“I just wanted to say—” He hesitated; there had been no welcome in Gregory’s voice, but no truculence either. Thorn opened the door. Gregory was standing at the window, facing the garden court, but he had taken off his glasses and Thorn knew he wasn’t looking directly at anything. Thorn waited for him to put them on again and turn toward him, but Gregory just stood there, holding the curved horn shaft and gently swinging the glasses to and fro.

“I thought,” Thorn began, “that we ought to talk this out a bit more.”

Gregory turned. “We really oughtn’t. We talked out all there is to talk out.” He left the window and sat down at his desk. As if his glasses; were a new kind of paperweight, he set them down squarely in the center of his yellow pages of manuscript.

“Any agent worth his salt,” Thorn said, and stopped. He never was aware of Gregory’s glasses but now they held him; as if they were eyes looking up at him, from Gregory’s work. “
Any
agent would try to brief you on markets and possible sales for anything you showed him.”

“If I asked him about markets and sales.”

“I’d do that if I
weren’t
your agent,” Thorn said. “You’d try to give
me
a steer if you thought I was getting off the track, wouldn’t you? Sure you would.”

The last words were spoken with such, warm confidence that Gregory found himself thinking, Please! No brotherly love, not just now. Even unspoken, this sounded so churlish; that he said aloud, “Probably I would, but—”

“That’s really all I was doing, Gregory. But the minute you tell me you’re not on the wrong track, that it’s the one track you want to be on, regardless, then what I say is ‘Fine, just fine.’”

Now the warmth was for Gregory’s judgment, for his rights as an author. If Gregory had thought, the tone said, that Thorn would ever dream of forgetting those rights, then Gregory had misjudged and even wronged him.

“Just fine,” Thorn repeated urgently. “You never gave me a chance to say that.”

“Let’s leave it at that.” Gregory’s hands began to move restlessly about the desk, shifting pencils, moving pads, finally coming to rest on his glasses. There was a pause.

“God, Gregory, put them on, will you? You look like a stranger.”

It was so unexpected that Gregory automatically complied. He glanced up; Thorn’s face was strained and flushed. Suddenly Gregory remembered the night when Cindy had humiliated Thorn in front of him and Abby, with her hints about affording a vacation, and, as it had then, an odd sensation came to him, of being the older brother, the taller, the heavier of the two. All at once the rest of his anger evaporated. “Take it easy, Thorn,” he said. “We’ve had it out; we had to have it out once. Now stop worrying about the rest of your applecart.”

He heard Thorn swallow and for one moment Gregory Johns longed for the old Thorn, the one who had never sold a movie, who had never made a deal with a studio. The old Thorn wouldn’t have let Cindy send out those Christmas cards, wouldn’t have sold Jill Goodwyn that policy, wouldn’t have told Hathaway at the last minute to go peddle his papers elsewhere. Long ago a process had started; in this age it was a process that could go on and on, faster and faster. In a year or two would
this
Thorn be the old Thorn? Were there to be newer and newer Thorns?

The ramifications, Gregory Johns thought, the collateral results. Sometimes you laugh at them, and sometimes you watch them and feel deprived and lonely.

“The hell with the applecart,” Thorn said then. “I wasn’t worrying about
that.
” He glanced at Gregory; it was the old Gregory again, no longer a stranger. “Or maybe I
was.
An applecart a day—” Gregory smiled, and Thorn thought of the relief he always felt when an audience of strangers laughed for the first time and became an audience of friends. Pretty soon the spring tour would be starting; Zoring had already signed on six or seven dates in Hollywood and Brentwood and Beverly Hills. This time he would be going out alone—no Cindy, no Gregory and Abby, just himself, unhampered and free.

He looked at his watch. “Well, Gregory, I’d better get back to the office. I’ll be seeing you one night next week. Remember?”

He waved genially and went back to Abby, slapping the door to behind him. Gregory could hear their voices and then the thump of the front door. He’s recuperating already, Gregory thought, and was unexpectedly glad. In a day or two the applecart would be rolling along as usual. It never would tip over all the way; it was a nice twentieth-century applecart, on stout wheels, complete with resilient springs, perfect lubrication, and white-wall tires. Plus jet propulsion and calliope sound effects. Here comes Thornton Johns; there goes my brother.

The door opened again and Abby looked in anxiously. He smiled and she came toward him, around the desk and behind him. She reached down and moved the top page of the manuscript so she could see it. This part hadn’t been typed yet, hadn’t been shown to Thorn. Gregory looked down at it too. Words were scratched out, rewritten and scratched out again; lines were struck through entire sentences; a great X bisected the whole center. The entire page was black, scribbled over; every margin was filled, every inch of space covered over.

She waited until he looked up at her. Then she said softly, “Page 153. Quite a lot of progress since a month ago when you were at 200, isn’t it?”

The holidays were over, the New Year came in, and on Monday, the sixteenth of January, 1950, the Cathedral chimes on Fifth Avenue began to ring out six o’clock.

In an office high above the street, the five judges of Best Selling Books, Inc., stared at each other hopelessly. With five votes now instead of six as it used to be, thought Ethel Flannegin, the renowned novelist, lecturer, and book-club judge, deadlock should have been impossible. But two monolithic immovable stand-pat die-hards could achieve deadlock too. Miss Flannegin heard the chimes, looked at her watch for corroboration, and then glanced around the table. Each weary face was stubbornly dedicated to duty; in each pair of eyes was a miserable but pure mulishness; each pair of jaws was set with the willingness to do battle for another two hours.

“Why,” Miss Flannegin whispered tentatively, “don’t we compromise?”

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