Naturally I hadn’t ever had such an experience, but looking back on parties I’d been to, I realized that such things could happen. We don’t go for strangers in Hollywood unless they wear a sign saying that their axe has been thoroughly ground elsewhere, and that in any case it’s not going to fall on our necks—in other words unless they’re a celebrity. And they’d better look out even then.
“You should have risen above it,” I said smugly. “It’s not a slam at you when people are rude—it’s a slam at the people they’ve met before.”
“Such a pretty girl—to say such wise things.”
There was an eager to-do in the eastern sky, and Wylie could see me plain—thin with good features and lots of style, and the kicking fetus of a mind. I wonder what I looked like in that dawn, five years ago. A little rumpled and pale, I suppose, but at that age, when one has the young illusion that most adventures are good, I needed only a bath and a change to go on for hours.
Wylie stared at me with really flattering appreciation—and then suddenly we were not alone. Mr. Schwartze wandered apologetically into the pretty scene.
“I fell upon a large metal handle,” he said, touching the corner of his eye.
Wylie jumped up.
“Just in time, Mr. Schwartze,” he said. “The tour is just starting. Home of Old Hickory—America’s tenth president. The victor of New Orleans, opponent of the National Bank, and inventor of the Spoils System.”
Schwartze looked toward me as toward a jury.
“There’s a writer for you,” he said. “Knows everything and at the same time he knows nothing.”
“What’s that?” said Wylie, indignant.
It was my first inkling that he was a writer. And while I like writers—because if you ask a writer anything you usually get an answer—still it belittled him in my eyes. Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person. It’s like actors, who try so pathetically not to look in mirrors. Who lean backward trying—only to see their faces in the reflecting chandeliers.
“Ain’t writers like that, Celia?” demanded Schwartze. “I have no words for them. I only know it’s true.”
Wylie looked at him with slowly gathering indignation. “I’ve heard that before,” he said. “Look, Mannie, I’m a more practical man than you any day! I’ve sat in an office and listened to some mystic stalk up and down for hours spouting tripe that’d land him on a nut-farm anywhere outside of California—and then at the end tell me how practical he was, and I was a dreamer—and would I kindly go away and made sense out of what he’d said.”
Mr. Schwartze’s face fell into its more disintegrated alignments. One eye looked upward through the tall elms: He raised his hand and bit without interest at the cuticle on his second finger. There was a bird flying about the chimney of the house and his glance followed it. It perched on the chimney pot like a raven and Mr. Schwartze’s eyes remained fixed upon it as he said: “We can’t get in. And it’s time for you two to go back to the plane.”
It was still not quite dawn. The Hermitage looked like a nice big white box, but a little lonely, and vacated still, after a hundred years. We walked back to the car—only after we had gotten in, and Mr. Schwartze had surprisingly shut the taxi door on us, did we realize he didn’t intend to come along.
“I’m not going to the Coast—I decided that when I woke up. So I’ll stay here, and afterwards the driver could come back for me.” “Going back East?” said Wylie with surprise. “Just because—”
“I have decided,” said Schwartze, faintly smiling. “Once I used to be a regular man of decision—you’d be surprised.” He felt in his pocket, as the taxi driver warmed up the engine. “Will you give this note to Mr. Smith?”
“Shall I come in two hours?” the driver asked Schwartze. “Yes… sure. I shall be glad to entertain myself looking around.” I kept thinking of him all the way back to the airport—trying to fit him into that early hour and into that landscape. He had come a long way from some ghetto to present himself at that raw shrine. Mannie Schwartze and Andrew Jackson—it was hard to say them in the same sentence. It was doubtful if he knew who Andrew Jackson was as he wandered around, but perhaps he figured that if people had preserved his house Andrew Jackson must have been someone who was large and merciful, able to understand. At both ends of life man needed nourishment—a breast—a shrine. Something to lay himself beside when no one wanted him further, and shoot a bullet into his head.
Of course we did not know this for twenty hours. When we got to the airport we told the purser that Mr. Schwartze was not continuing, and then forgot about him. The storm had wandered away into eastern Tennessee and broken against the mountains, and we were taking off in less than an hour. Sleepy-eyed travellers appeared from the hotel and I dozed a few minutes on one of those iron maidens they use for couches. Slowly the idea of a perilous journey was recreated out of the debris of our failure: a new stewardess, tall, handsome, flashing dark, exactly like the other except she wore seersucker instead of Frenchy red-and-blue, went briskly past us with a suitcase. Wylie sat beside me as we waited.
“Did you give the note to Mr. Smith?” I asked, half asleep.
“Yeah.”
“Who is Mr. Smith? I suspect he spoiled Mr. Schwartze’s trip.”
“It was Schwartze’s fault.”
“I’m prejudiced against steam-rollers,” I said. “My father tries to be a steam-roller around the house, and I tell him to save it for the studio.”
I wondered if I was being fair; words are the palest counters at that time in the morning. “Still, he steam-rollered me into Bennington and I’ve always been grateful for that.”
“There would be quite a crash—” Wylie said, “—if steam-roller Brady met steam-roller Smith.”
“Is Mr. Smith a competitor of Father’s?”
“Not exactly. I should say no. But if he was a competitor I know where my money would be.”
“On Father?”
“I’m afraid not.”
It was too early in the morning for family patriotism. The pilot was at the desk with the purser and he shook his head as they regarded a prospective passenger who had put two nickels in the electric phonograph and lay alcoholically on a bench fighting off sleep. The first song he had chosen, “Lost,” thundered through the room, followed, after a slight interval, by his other choice, “Gone,” which was equally dogmatic and final. The pilot shook his head emphatically and walked over to the passenger.
“Afraid we’re not going to be able to carry you this time, old man.”
“Wha?”
The drunk sat up, awful looking, yet discernibly attractive, and I was sorry for him in spite of his passionately ill-chosen music.
“Go back to the hotel and get some sleep. There’ll be another plane tonight.”
“Only going up in ee air.”
“Not this time, old man.”
In his disappointment the drunk fell off the bench—and above the phonograph, a loudspeaker summoned us respectable people outside. In the corridor of the plane I ran into Monroe Stahr and fell all over him, or wanted to. There was a man any girl would go for, with or without encouragement. I was emphatically without it, but he liked me and sat down opposite till the plane took off.
“Let’s all ask for our money back,” he suggested. His dark eyes took me in, and I wondered what they would look like if he fell in love. They were kind, aloof and, though they often reasoned with you gently, somewhat superior. It was no fault of theirs if they saw so much. He darted in and out of the role of “one of the boys” with dexterity—but on the whole I should say he wasn’t one of them. But he knew how to shut up, how to draw into the background, how to listen. From where he stood (and though he was not a tall man it always seemed high up) he watched the multitudinous practicalities of his world like a proud young shepherd, to whom night and day had never mattered. He was born sleepless without a talent for rest or the desire for it.
We sat in unembarrassed silence—I had known him since he became Father’s partner a dozen years ago, when I was seven and Stahr was twenty—two. Wylie was across the aisle and I didn’t know whether or not to introduce them, but Stahr kept turning his ring so abstractedly that he made me feel young and invisible, and I didn’t dare. I never dared look quite away from him or quite at him, unless I had something important to say—and I knew he affected many other people in the same manner.
“I’ll give you this ring, Cecelia.”
“I beg your pardon. I didn’t realize that I was—”
“I’ve got half a dozen like it.”
He handed it to me, a gold nugget with the letter S in bold relief. I had been thinking how oddly its bulk contrasted with his fingers, which were delicate and slender like the rest of his body, and like his slender face with the arched eyebrows and the dark curly hair. He looked spiritual at times but he was a fighter—somebody out of his past knew him when he was one of a gang of kids in the Bronx, and gave me a description of how he walked always at the head
