Saratoga Trunk (38 page)
Authors: Edna Ferber
“Sh-sh-sh! Al right. Al right. Later.”
“Now! Now!” Her voice was rising.
Mrs. Bellop spoke soothingly while Bart’s mouth opened and closed like that of a gasping fish. “The railroad—they—Bart got word that everything was—was—successful—isn’t that lovely!”
Clio spat the word through her teeth. “Successful! Successful! Clint! Where is he?” She actually shook Van Steed’s arm as one would try to shake an answer out of a stubborn little boy.
He had not the gift of dissembling. Her fingers were biting into his arm. Ruthless in business, he was water-weak against the browbeating of a determined woman. “It’s nothing. We heard that little— uh—the dwarf was hurt somewhat. Somewhat. Quite a fight,” he went on, with a rickety attempt at jocularity. “Quite a little fracas the boys had. But you’ll be glad to know that they won.”
“Do you want me to strike you here before all these people! Maroon! Tell me what has happened to him! Maroon!”
“Well, I understand he was hurt a little—nothing serious—no direct word from him, but you know how he is—he can take care of himself—”
Her face was livid, her eyes narrowed to black slits, her lips drew back from her teeth. It was a face venomous, murderous, terrible.
“He’s dead. He’s dead. I can see it in your face. Your cowardly face. He fought for you and your miserable crawling railroad that brings you your dirty coal. I tell you I despise you. I would sooner marry a snake that crawls on its belly. I would—”
But they were not looking at her, they were looking at something beyond her, down the long hallway. She turned, then, to see Clint Maroon almost in the doorway. A stained and soiled bandage wrapped his head, his right arm rested in a sling, he leaned a litde sideways as though to ease some inward strain. And behind him strutted a grotesque little figure on whose head rose a bump the size of an egg—a figure in a stained and ragged uniform of wine red and muddied boots whose left member lacked a heel, so that he limped and hopped as he came.
“Howdy, folks,” drawled Maroon. “My, my, Mrs. De Chanfret, you look right pretty. I reckon I’m a sight—”
She seemed not to run to him merely but to spring like an arrow shot from the bow. “Clint! Clint
chéri!”
But at the impact of her body flung against his Clint Maroon said, “Ouch!” like a little boy. And then his long body crumpled to the floor, dragging Clio to her knees as he went.
Propped up among the pillows of his bed, Clint Maroon looked out almost
sheepishly from beneath his head bandage at the faces turned so solicitously toward him. The bandage was a proper one now; the arm in its splint rested comfortably against his side; the room smelled of drugs and eau de cologne and coffee. He looked very clean and boyish. The doctor had come and gone.
“Shucks! I feel fine. That’s the first time a Maroon ever did a sissy thing like that. I sure hope you-all will excuse me being so womanish. Fainting away. I’m plumb ashamed.”
“Don’t talk now,
chéri.
Rest. Here. Another sip of this.”
“Why, say, many a time back in Texas I’ve been hurt worse than this throwed by a bucking horse. Never made such a to-do about it. Nothing to eat all day—that was it, only a swallow of whisky one of the boys—say, that cup of Kaka’s good coffee, the way she makes it, is better than any medicine. Where’s Cupide?”
Two hands grasped the bed’s footboard, the dwarf’s powerful arms pulled him up so that the great head, decorated now with a plaster where the lump had risen, rose like a nightmarish sun over the horizon.
“You would have been killed—but smashed dead—if it had not been for me, Monsieur Clint.”
“I know, I know. I reckon it might have been better, at that, than having you around my neck the rest of my life.”
“Then why you take him along?” Kaka demanded.
“Take him!” Maroon yelled. “I tried the worst way to get shut of him.” He glared wrathfully at the gnomelike figure perched now on the footboard. “How come you got on that train, anyway, after I turned you off at the Albany station?”
“Oh, that was easy,” Cupide explained. His tiny hands made an airy nothing of it. “I butted him in the stomach, he grunted like a stuck pig, then I took the five dollars you had given him and I ran just as the train was moving—it was dangerous, I can tell you it was—and I hid in the water closet or under the seats when you came near. The boys were very nice to me—
mais gentil
—very.”
“Insecte!”
said Kaka, fondly.
“Fou furieux!”
Clio pushed the hair back from her forehead with a frantic gesture. “I tell you, I don’t understand, I don’t understand such people. You are hurt and broken and this monkey here might be dead—you, too—and all that a fool who has already millions may have another million. What nonsense is this!”
“You didn’t think he was such a fool a week ago.”
“I did. I did. But when I heard you were hurt I hated him, I called him every name, I said terrible things.”
“Sorry?”
“Only if I have hurt the little man. Clint, let us go away from here. Take me with you. I have decided I do not care so much to marry a man with millions.”
“Looks like you’ll have to now, care or not.”
She stared, uncomprehending, startled. “What is this! Clint! What are you saying!”
“Well, sugar, it’s like this—”
But she knelt at the side of his bed, she put her head on the pillow beside him, she cradled his head in her arms. “I won’t leave you. I tell you I will follow you, I will make such a
bruit
that you will be ashamed.”
“Now, now, wait a minute. Hold your horses. I got a taste of this railroad and money thing, and say, it’s easier than riding fence. Even a dumb cowboy like me can get the hang of it. These fellows, they don’t only skin the country and the people—they’re out to skin each other. I’ve got a piece of that little Saratoga trunk railroad; Mr. Morgan gave it to me if I licked the Gould crowd, and I did. So now I’m figuring to get the whole of that railroad away from little Bart, and I will, too. I’m going to be hog rich. Just for the hell of it. And it’s all your doings, Clio. Only now things have got to be different between us.”
“Different?” she repeated with stiff lips.
“Sure thing. There’s no way out, honey. I aim to be worth millions and millions. That’s the way you wanted it. But our fun’s over. Folks as rich as we’re going to be, why, we just naturally have got to get married. Yes ma’am. Married and respectable, that’s us.”
There was a light knock—light but firm—on the sitting-room door of the
Maroon suite, and Mrs. Maroon entered, cool, smiling, lovely. The newspapermen scrambled to their feet.
“I’m sorry, but the time is up. I said fifteen minutes, and it has been nearly half an hour.” She looked up at him, anxiety in her eyes. “Tired,
chéri?”
Her hand on his arm.
“No. You’d think I was ten years old—instead of nearly ten times ten.”
She still smiled, her eyes were questioning them—what had he said, how much did they know? “You know, Mr. Maroon was hurt some years ago in a—in an accident. And sometimes now, when he overexerts himself, he feels it.”
“What accident was that?” the
Post
reporter asked.
“Uh—railroad accident, you might say,” Colonel Maroon replied.
“Recent?”
“Well, no, you couldn’t exactly call it recent. Matter of, say, sixty years ago.”
The reporters relaxed. “Now you’re kidding us again, Mrs. Maroon. Honestly, how a woman who looks the way you do can have a stony heart like that!”
She glanced up at her handsome ruddy husband; her eyes were searching to know more than the question implied. “Did you tell the young people what they wanted to know?”
There were lines of weariness in his face; he was polite, but it was plain that he longed now to be rid of them.
“Yes, honey. They wouldn’t listen to what I wanted to tell ‘em. So I told them what they wanted to know. It’s their job to get what they were sent for.” He raised a hand in farewell. “Good day to you, boys and girls. I wish some time before the last roundup you’d listen to the story I want to tell you. I could show you this country’s gone a long ways in the last fifty years. I don’t mean machinery and education and that. I mean folks’ rights. They’ve clamped down on fellows like me who damn near ruined this country.”
“Oh, now, Colonel! You’ve been reading books. You’re one of America’s famous citizens. No kidding.”
“Famous for what! Another quarter of century of grabbers like us and there wouldn’t have been a decent stretch of forest or soil or waterway that hadn’t been divided among us. Museums and paintings and libraries—that was our way of trying to make peace with our conscience. I’m the last of the crowd that had all four feet in the trough and nothing to stop ‘em. We’re getting along toward a real democracy now and don’t let anybody tell you different. These will be known as the good new days and those were the bad old days. The time’s coming when there’ll be no such thing as a multi-millionaire in America, and no such thing as a pauper. You’ll live to see it but I won’t. That’ll be a real democracy.”
“Sure, Colonel. That’ll make a great story.”
“That’ll be swell. Don’t forget to tell us all about it next time.”
“Thanks, Mrs. Maroon. Thanks, Colonel. Look, we’ve got to beat it.”
Standing there, handsome and straight, his wife’s delicate hand resting on his arm, he waved to them a Western salute with his free hand as though he were whirling a sombrero round his fine head. They were gone.
“They didn’t want to hear it, Clint?”
“No.” Gruff with disappointment.
“Ah, well, it doesn’t matter now.”
“But honey, I sure would have liked to have them hear it. We were a couple of bad characters, I suppose, the way you’d look at it now.”
She looked down at the simple flowing folds of her white gown. She smiled her lovely smile. “Streamlined. Saratoga trunks are streamlined now, and so are railroads and houses and people. Everything except this hotel. It’s kind of wonderful to come back and find it the same.”
He wiped his forehead with his fine linen handkerchief. “The storybooks made the old days seem right pretty. But it’s better this way. I’ll be glad to get rid of the money. . . . Want to go to the races, honey? Like we did in the old days!”
“But do you think you could stand it,
chéri?
The noise, the heat, the cameras, the crowds staring.”
“Shucks, I’ve stood it for sixty years. I guess I can stand it a while longer. Anyway, if it’s going to kill me I don’t know anywhere I’d rather die than sitting out there at the Saratoga track watching the horses coming round the curve. Remember the time that little devil Cupide—?”
Edna Ferber first intended to write
Saratoga Trunk
as a play, and she
went so far as to involve the great acting couple Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne in its development. But, when she brought the idea to George S. Kaufman, with whom she generally collaborated on plays, he proved lukewarm to the idea. A disastrous scouting trip to Saratoga in December—where the glamorous resort hotels that played host to the wealthy in the summer were not heated for the winter— completely soured Kaufman. Ferber temporarily shelved the idea, later resurrecting the material for a novel, which was published by Double-day in 1941.
Given its theatrical origins, it is not surprising to learn that the few negative reviews Ferber received for the book faulted its staginess. By far the worst was Edward Weeks’s assessment in the
Atlantic.
“The novel wears too much make-up,” he wrote. “Clio is play-acting too often, Clint is too stagey a Texan, and the millionaires at Saratoga are comedians—not people of power. Despite Mrs. Bellop’s breezy candor, despite the delectable food and the charming clothes, despite Clio’s Parisian turn of phrase, there is throughout an unmistakable trace of musical comedy in this prose.” And
Time
complained that “Miss Ferber’s noisy, flashing manner never really gives you a period, but always makes you enjoy the fraud.
Saratoga-Trunk
is so neady made that the scenarists need only bracket the non-dialogue as stage direction, and call it a half-day’s work.”
But other critics applauded Ferber for these same qualities. Fairfax Downey, in the
Saturday Review of Literature
, wrote, “Unpacking it is absorbing entertainment. There’s everything in it but the kitchen stove—no, that’s in it too. . . . Successful playwright that she is, she knows good theater.
Saratoga Trunk
, of course, is just that. Good theater.” The
Christian Science Monitor
felt that “in Miss Ferber’s skillful hands, the story, for all it worldliness, acquires so much vigor and color that it has indubitable entertainment value. It may be garish, theatrical, and no more subtle than a circus, yet the sparkle is genuine. Nothing of Miss Ferber’s could ever be tawdry.”
Indeed, the majority of critics embraced the book, noting that Ferber’s achievement lay in her masterful, atmospheric recreation of time and place. Reviewing it for
Library Journal
, S. E. Sherman called
Saratoga Trunk
“an utterly delicious concoction. This expertly written, absorbingly entertaining satire likewise adroitly contrasts the ideals of a plutocratic America gradually emerging into a true democracy.” “One closes
Saratoga Trunk
with the feeling of having lived in a rich and exciting world, peopled by fascination and exciting characters no less real because they are eccentric and romantic,” wrote Rose Feld in
Books.
“The secret of Miss Ferber’s achievement is rooted in many things—her vitality and belief in the people she creates; her meticulous care with all the details of background and characterization; her unfailing sense of drama. Possibly this adds up to genius.”
In the
New Yorker,
Clifton Fadiman said, “The author draws a sound, truly patriotic moral from her story, but it won’t disturb anyone excessively. As flashing and agreeable a yarn as Miss Ferber has fashioned for some time, it should be a walkaway for La Dietrich and Mr. Gary Cooper.” Indeed, when the movie version of
Saratoga Trunk
appeared in 1943, Gary Cooper had been cast as Clint Maroon, but it was Ingrid Bergman who played Clio Dulaine. Coming full circle, the book also was adapted as a Broadway musical in 1959, with Howard Keel and Carol Lawrence in the leads. It closed after 10 weeks. Ferber herself played no active part in either of these incarnations of the story.