Читать книгу Two-Thirds of a Ghost - Helen Inc. McCloy - Страница 4

When Christmas shopping brought Philippa Kane to town, she usually arranged to meet her husband at the Commodore Bar close by Grand Central, so they could go home on the train together. Tonight she found their favorite table empty and established herself with a champagne cocktail, where she could watch both the clock and the revolving door.

Philippa was an aristocrat in the antique sense of the word. She always obtained the best for herself in every phase of life, great or small. She was wrapped in a voluminous cloak of the rare, sea otter fur, so dense that the finger cannot be forced down through the pelt to the skin. An enormous black alligator bag matched tiny alligator shoes. An unbelted dress of black jersey sculptured her torso to the new, Grecian line, and a speckled pheasant’s breast gave her turban the new width. Her gloves were soft, natural doeskin; her jewels, jade set with diamonds. Even her little coin purse was a limp, elegant affair of gold mesh with a diamond clasp, and her cigarette case was polished olive wood with an ivory intaglio of Apollo and the Three Muses, cunningly carved in miniature after a design taken from an Attic vase.

A russet lipstick brought out the faint, reddish glints in her pale chestnut hair and the faintest touch of emerald eye shadow gave her gray eyes an olive cast. Her face echoed portraits of the Empress Eugenie—a pallid, perfect oval with fastidiously arched brows, long, narrow eyes, an arrogant nose and a disillusioned mouth. Her smile twisted sardonically when she saw Tony struggling through the revolving door with two typescript boxes under one arm and an evening newspaper stuck in his overcoat pocket. He didn’t look at all the way Philippa thought the President of Sutton, Kane and Company should look.

Philippa had come into the world of writers and publishers through marriage. She was born into a different world of gilt-edged bond portfolios and real estate holdings in the heart of Manhattan, apartments on upper Fifth Avenue and palatial cottages in the Hamptons. Like most third-generation heiresses, she took little interest in the unromantic industries that built her grandparents’ fortune. Her Europeanized education made her ideal of luxury the life of the Victorian leisure class. It was inevitable that she should shape her life around one of the three classic amusements of that class—politics, sport or the arts. But today all three are highly competitive professions where the amateur has small chance of success. Philippa wanted to write and couldn’t, but, through her attempts to write she met Tony Kane, then a young assistant editor with a publishing firm called Daniel Sutton and Company.

Her widowed mother tried everything short of corporal punishment to break off what she called a mésalliance. Time had its usual revenge. The 1929 crash swallowed the substantial residue of a once great fortune. Tony and Philippa were married in 1931 and, for several years before her death, Philippa’s mother was wholly dependent on Tony as Philippa herself was now.

Like many literary amateurs, she had soon discovered that professional writers are more attractive in books than in real life. Some of the most talented, and therefore the most profitable to Tony, had the most outrageous personalities and no manners at all. In fact it seemed almost as if the more successful a writer was the more eccentric he became—exactly the reverse of the situation in her father’s cosmos where the most successful were the most conventional.

Philippa today had just one word for writers—impossible. You never knew where they came from or what their parents had been. Some got drunk at parties, some tried to borrow money, some got involved in tortuous love affairs and all talked openly about things that were never mentioned in other circles. The fact that they sometimes talked brilliantly was no mitigation to Philippa now. Writers were economically unstable, broke one day and living like princes the next. Even a publisher as prosperous as Tony seemed like a tramp to Philippa. For one thing, he had no capital; he had to spend all he earned after taxes in order to maintain what she considered a normal standard of living. For another thing, he was constantly in touch with writers, and their influence corrupted his sense of decorum.

Of all her youthful ideals, Philippa had kept only one—her worship of the really great writer. She could forgive any eccentricity or even vulgarity in a man she believed to be a genius. What she found intolerable was the eccentricity without the genius that was so common in Tony’s world today.

Tony finally extricated himself from the revolving door and threaded his way between other tables to hers.

“Hi, Phil!” He dropped his bundles on a vacant chair, added his hat and overcoat to the pile and slumped into a seat opposite her. “Whew! What a day! Double Gibson for me.”

He lit a cigarette and eyed her warily through the smoke. His eyes had not faded with middle age. They were still a deliberate blue, without a hint of gray or hazel, and his rather full, round face was unlined. But his figure had lost its lean look and there was gray in the blond hair like a sprinkling of ashes.

“What’s wrong, Tony?”

“Wrong? Nothing’s wrong. It’s just that I’ve had a hard day and…”

“Tony, dear, you really can’t fool me after all these years. That wary look means you want me to do something for you that I won’t want to do. What is it this time? Not one of those dreadful creatures from behind the Iron Curtain who has written another Twenty Years in a Slave State? The last one broke Grandmother’s Dresden teapot and I’m sure he has those missing salt spoons unless he’s pawned them by now.”

“Nothing like that.” Tony reached eagerly for his Gibson. “Amos is in trouble.”

“Amos? Oh, dear, what are we supposed to do for him now?” Petulance poisoned her voice. “He even has to live near us in the country so you can spend all your spare time holding his hand. And he’s such a dull, common little man.”

“But you do like his books,” protested Tony.

“The last one wasn’t as good as the others. I think he’s slipping.”

“Don’t say that.” Tony frowned and took another swallow of his cocktail. “Don’t even think it. Amos means a lot to us. More than you realize. Not many men can turn out four books in four years and win the approval of both critics and public. Amos is quite a phenomenon. He made Sutton, Kane what it is today.”

“Couldn’t we do without him now?”

“Frankly we couldn’t.” Tony’s voice was unusually hard. “What’s more, we’re not going to. Amos is loyal. He’ll stick with us through thick and thin.”

“No matter what Doubleday offers?”

“Don’t be silly. Amos knows he can’t go to another publisher.”

“Why not?”

Tony sighed. “I just told you—Amos is loyal. We can trust Amos. He’s perfectly well aware of all the things I’ve done for him. What’s worrying me is that wife of his.”

“Vera?” Philippa dropped her eyes as she lit a cigarette. “I thought they were divorced.”

“Only separated. And now she’s flopped in Hollywood, she wants to come back to him. It’s in the evening paper.”

“What am I supposed to do? Reason with her?”

“Worse than that.” Tony’s sudden grin was as engaging as he could make it before he took the plunge. “I phoned her in Hollywood this afternoon and invited her to stay with us until she’s settled in New York. You see, I’ve got to have her where I can watch her and keep her from bothering Amos. She accepted and I want you to be nice to her.”

Philippa stubbed out her newly lighted cigarette so vehemently that it broke in half. “Really, Tony! There are limits. In the first place, the invitation should have come from me. In the second place, do you think I can live in the same house with that smarmy little adventuress for any length of time? I shall go mad—stark, staring mad.”

“Oh, Vera’s no picnic, but she’s not as bad as all that. For one thing, she’s not loud. You ought to like her nice, low voice. You’re always complaining about women who squeal and shriek. What is it you call it? Unmodulated?”

“I detest her soft, sly, insinuating voice. I detest everything about her.”

“So does Amos. So you ought to be on his side. If she stays with us, he’ll only have to see her once—Sunday when he meets her at the airport. He feels he has to do that much. But he’s going to drive her straight to our house and we’ll have a supper party so he won’t be stuck with her for the rest of the evening.”

“A party at two days’ notice? You’re insane, Tony. Why can’t Vera stay with Gus and Meg in New York?”

“Gus is too soft-hearted to handle a wildcat like Vera. He couldn’t keep her from bothering Amos. And it’s particularly important that Amos isn’t bothered on the eve of the Bookbinders’ Dinner.”

“Does Amos have to go?”

“Didn’t I tell you? Amos is getting the Award. The Most American Author of the Decade. Ten thousand bucks and fifty thousand worth of prestige and publicity. We’ve got the layouts of the ads all ready to be released the day after the dinner. He’ll have to make a speech and it better be good.”

“There are a lot of things you don’t tell me, Tony,” said Philippa thoughtfully. “Just what do you really mean when you speak of Vera ‘bothering’ Amos? She can’t keep him from writing. Lots of writers do their best work when they’re unhappy.”

Tony sighed. “I suppose I’ll have to tell you now. But keep it under your hat. No one has ever known except me and Gus.”

“Known what?”

“When Amos wrote his first book he was a recently reformed alcoholic. Didn’t you ever suspect?”

“No. I thought he just didn’t like to drink.”

“He likes it too well,” said Tony grimly. “When I first met Amos he still had to take Antabuse. He’s shown a lot of character holding himself in line without the help of a drug for the last four years, but he had one bad relapse. That was during the three months he lived with Vera.”

“So that was why you got Vera a job in Hollywood!”

“Precisely. She kept liquor in the house, she drank in front of him and she taunted him with his weakness. It was just too much for him. It mustn’t happen again. Think what it would do to his TV program. And, in the end, it would kill him.”

Philippa was moved. “Even Amos doesn’t deserve a woman like Vera…Or maybe he does.” Her smile twisted. “Maybe men get the women they deserve.”

A few years ago Tony would have answered: “How did I ever deserve anyone as wonderful as you?” Now he merely said: “Do women get the men they deserve?”

“I’m sure they do.” Her smile teased him as she, too, avoided the obvious gallantry. “All right, Tony.” She capitulated suddenly. “I’ll do what I can with Vera, but don’t expect me to like it. Are you sure Amos hates Vera now?”

Tony hesitated. “I hope so. He has to live alone to accomplish the immense amount of work he does. The monastic life—bad for the writer, but good for the writing.”

“And the publisher,” murmured Philippa. “I still think he may be slipping. Passionate Pilgrim bored me in galleys.”

“You’re nuts!” Tony’s protest was a little too loud. “We’ve sold out a first printing of forty thousand copies before publication and it’s the July choice of the Book-of-the-Week Club. Catamount Pictures is bidding against…”

“Oh, he’s still a commercial success. That’s momentum. But artistically…”

“That’s not what Maurice Lepton says.”

Tony dragged the newspaper from his overcoat pocket. It proved to be an advance copy of next Sunday’s New York Times Book Review section. “Look at that!”

The first page was headed a landmark in American letters. A photograph showed a thin, mild face with a short beard, gazing at some remote object outside the picture. The shirt collar was open, the shoulders were tweedy and the frail fingers held loosely onto the bowl of an old, charred pipe.

“Where’s the dog?” said Philippa. “Authors with tweed jackets and pipes always have a dog lying at their feet.”

“There was a dog,” admitted Tony. “The Times cut out the feet to get a better enlargement of the face.”

“Amos doesn’t own a dog.”

“I know, but Red Nicholas, our bright new publicity man, rented one for the picture.”

“Mr. Nicholas may be bright, but he is scarcely original. Amos doesn’t smoke either. You should have had a little box of Antabuse in his hand and Vera lying at his feet.”

“That isn’t very funny, Phil.”

She ignored him and began to read aloud: “PASSIONATE PILGRIM. By Amos Cottle. 450 pp. New York: Sutton, Kane and Co., $3.75. By Maurice Lepton.”

Her eye ran down the column to a passage Tony had marked with a red pencil. “Amos Cottle surveys our tawdry, TV society with the clinical eye of a social anthropologist annotating the mores of African pygmies…. His mystique is rooted in classical humanism, detached, witty, skeptical but always urbane and not incapable of compassion and even reverence. His ear for the cadences of contemporary idiom is accurate as a tape recorder, but he does what no machine can do—he selects the meaningful and allows it to stand as a symbol suggesting the rest. This is life itself in all its squalor and glory. Cottle spares us nothing—the dirt, the sweat, the blood, the ugliness and lust and cruelty of existence. It is all there under the velvet texture of his intricately organized prose, transmuted by Cottle’s art into a richly rewarding experience. What other writer today could have written this stark, lean sentence: ‘As I bent his arm behind his back with all my strength, I heard the dry crack of his tibia’?”

Tony explained the marking of his passage. “A fine quote for the jacket of Amos’s next book. Good old Leppy! What would we do without him?”

“I believe Lepton really does like Amos’s work,” said Philippa. She read the note at the bottom of the review. “Mr. Lepton is best known for his monumental work, The Green Corn, a definitive study of American belles-lettres from 1900 to 1950. He is a regular contributor to various critical journals.”

“Of course he does!” rejoined Tony. “Amos’s stuff isn’t bad at all. I rather enjoy reading some of it myself and you used to like it. There’s no question about it—the guy can write.”

“So Lepton remarked in his review of Amos’s first book.”

“Not quite in those words.” Tony’s eyes narrowed, remembering. “‘I put down this volume with a sense of exhilaration all too rare in a reviewer today. Here, I told myself, is a discovery. Make no mistake about it—the man can write. He may be young, he may make technical mistakes in his first few novels, but he has that indefinable quality that sets the born writer apart from the hacks and amateurs who clutter the literary scene today and stifle the flowering of true talent by their very multiplicity, like weeds in a garden.’“

“Lepton always seems to see himself now as a gardener slaying the misfits with weed killer so there’ll be room for Amos,” reflected Philippa. “Isn’t Amos the only writer he’s ever really praised?”

“Every critic has his pet writer,” returned Tony. “Luckily for us, Amos is Leppy’s pet. They’re so identified in the public mind by this time that Leppy can’t let Amos down, no matter what Amos writes.”

Philippa glanced at the clock. “We’d better be going if we want a seat on that 4:39.”

Once they were settled in the train, her mind went back to the projected supper party. “Who on earth can we invite at such short notice?”

“The Veseys, of course. I have a feeling that Vera is really fond of Meg and Gus. If they have another date already, they’ll break it. After all, Gus is Amos’s agent.”

“But who else? All our friends are dated weeks ahead.”

Tony frowned. “Amos is a lion now. Must be somebody who’d like to meet him. How about that widow down the road who says she always wanted to write?”

“A woman alone?”

“She has a son at college. He must be home on Christmas vacation now. Ask him. Then we’ll get a couple of other novelists and…”

“Oh, no, we won’t!” cried Philippa fiercely. “They’re all madly jealous of Amos and he despises them. Haven’t you any non-fiction writers on your list who live in Connecticut?”

“Yes, but Amos is hardly their cup of tea. They’re all scientists and such.”

“We can still ask them. They can hardly refuse their publisher, can they? What about the Willings? Didn’t you publish a book of his years ago?”

“The Psychopathology of Politics,” muttered Tony. “That was way back in the forties when Dan Sutton was still alive. Not what you’d call a best seller, but it still brings in some royalties. Some of the medical schools use it as supplementary reading in their advanced psychology courses.”

“Good. Then I’ll ask the Willings and that will have to be it. Amos and Vera, the Veseys and the Willings and that little woman down the road and her son.” Tony took a typescript out of its box and began to read, but Philippa went on, thinking aloud: “We’ll have a simple buffet supper. Ham and turkey, potatoes au gratin and salad, fresh fruit and Stilton. Let’s have Scotch and soda first. I’m sick of sweet, messy cocktails. And it’ll make Amos less conspicuous drinking his iced tea in a tall glass, too. If only I had time to get that cushion recovered. The one the mystery writer burned a cigarette hole in and…”

“Why, Tony!”

The masculine voice brought Tony’s head up from his script with a jerk and cut off Philippa’s hostess chatter.

The man who stood in the aisle was small and slender with a sickly, pallid face and burning, black eyes. His straight, dark hair lay lank and glossy against his well-shaped skull. The mouth was thrusting, a little simian and mischievous, but there was intelligence in the eyes and the speaking voice was beautiful—a thing of light and shade and color expressed in terms of sound. He faced them, smiling with an easy self-possession that seemed to announce: here is an individual of unique importance.

“Why, Leppy!” Tony shouted. “It’s been a coon’s age. Where did you come from?”

“Got on at 125th. I’ve been lecturing at Columbia. I was prowling the train looking for a smoking car and…”

“Sit down.” Tony was on his feet. Luckily the seat in front of them was empty. Tony pushed the back over so that the two seats now faced each other. “You’ve met my wife, Philippa, haven’t you?”

“I don’t believe I’ve had that pleasure.” It said a great deal for Lepton’s grace that his bow did not seem grotesque in such a small, ugly man. He slid into the opposite seat that Tony had provided and Philippa smiled at him pleasantly. “I remember you at our wedding, but that was a long time ago. Do you live in Connecticut now?”

“No, I’m on my way to the Shadbolts for the week end. You know Shad, don’t you, Tony? He wrote that South Windish thing laid in Taos last year.”

“I’ve just been reading your review of Amos Cottle’s latest,” put in Philippa, determined not to be left out of the shop talk.

“Ah!” Lepton’s eyelids drooped but the slitted eyes were more brilliant than ever. “Now there’s a man who really can write. He doesn’t imitate anybody. He’s just himself. An original. That’s what American letters needs so desperately today.”

“I think he’s good myself,” said Philippa, loyally.

“Good? Dear lady, he’s magnificent. If the word hadn’t been so brutally abused, I’d say he was a genius. There’s nothing else in contemporary literature quite like the Cottle touch. You’re to be congratulated, Tony.”

“Thanks.” Tony composed his features to a suitably reverential gravity, but Philippa had always suspected that Tony was far more interested in Amos’s sales figures than his literary qualities.

“Cottle must be a very lonely man,” went on Lepton, in a musing tone; “A talent like that is like great wealth—it cuts you off from the rest of humanity. I think of Kim as a monkish figure, withdrawn and abstracted, submerged in his own—er—ah…”

“Mystique,” suggested Philippa, like a bright child trying to join a grown-up conversation.

The brilliant gaze shifted to her. “I see you really have been reading my review.”

“It’s a nice word. I like it spelled that French way,” she prattled on, while Tony winced. “I like all the words you use—words like meaningful. If I were writing a review, I’d just say significant, but I suppose there must be an opposite of meaningless in the dictionary and it sounds a lot more Thursday Review…. You know Amos really isn’t monkish at all. He’s quite a lot of fun sometimes.”

Lepton looked thoughtfully at Tony. “I’d really like to meet him sometime. He must be as fascinating as one of his own characters.”

“Why, haven’t you ever met him at all?” Philippa was astonished.

“Leppy is not the kind of critic who frequents publication-day cocktail parties at Toots Shor’s,” said Tony.

“Haven’t you ever seen Amos on TV?” demanded Philippa.

“I do not own a TV set,” answered Lepton firmly. “I avoid TV whenever I can.”

“Amos has had his own weekly program for the last six months,” explained Tony. “He interviews other authors about their books. He doesn’t criticize. Just draws the other guy out and gets him to talk about what he was trying to do when he wrote the book in question.”

“I’m sure he doesn’t criticize,” said Lepton a little bitterly. “I’ve been told many times that there is no place for real criticism on TV.”

Philippa had an inspiration. “If you really want to meet Amos, we could arrange it for this week end. We were just planning a small supper party for Amos when you came by. Sunday at our house at six o’clock. We’d love to have you come and bring the Shadbolts.”

“That’s very kind of you indeed.” Lepton made another graceful little bow and Philippa wondered: why did critics always have much more charming manners than the wild, rough lot who called themselves creative writers?

“I’m sure the Shadbolts would appreciate it, too,” went on Lepton. “But I’ve already told them I would have to leave Sunday afternoon, and they may have made other arrangements for the evening. Why don’t I just get a taxi to run me over to your place around six?”

“I can run over to the Shadbolts in the Austin and pick you up,” said Philippa. “If you’re really coming.”

“Of course I’m coming.” He smiled. “I’ve never been able to live up to the standard of that English critic who made a point of never meeting a writer in the flesh throughout his long and acidulous career.”

The smile transmuted his monkey face into something Philippa found fascinating. She was reminded of an old story—an Edwardian rake who boasted: “I am considered the ugliest man in Europe, but give me half an hour alone with any woman and I can win her away from the handsomest man in the world.” What would half an hour alone with Maurice Lepton be like?

The thought was pleasantly disturbing. She began to plan what she would wear tomorrow when she went over to the Shadbolts. Of course Maurice Lepton wasn’t really her type. Indeed she wasn’t sure she even liked him, but…

Something feline in her nature enjoyed hunting for the sake of the hunt itself, without feeling either desire or hostility toward the quarry. Like a domestic cat, she managed her life so that she could enjoy both the civilized satisfactions of peaceful luxury at home and the savage excitements of the chase abroad. It was an ideal life, she thought—a life where all the prizes of a policed society were enjoyed without the repression of a single feral impulse. Philippa might have her faults, but she was entirely free of repressions. Sometimes she wondered if Tony had ever suspected the fact.

When Lepton left the train at Norwalk, Philippa allowed her ungloved hand to linger a moment in his. Their eyes met and for an instant that feeling of sweet disturbance swept over her again more strongly than before. She was a little frightened. Pleasure she understood, but she had always avoided passion. She had always been mistress of herself.

“Well, what do you think of Leppy?” asked Tony as the train rumbled on toward Westport.

“I don’t know.” Philippa was as puzzled as she was fascinated by the unplumbed depths in those eyes. Out of sheer intuition she plucked a curious phrase. “I think he’s unscrupulous and dangerous.”

“Dangerous? That poor little bookworm who hasn’t seen the sun for twenty years?” Tony laughed.