The Celebrity (3 page)

To describe Thornton Johns merely as a tall, handsome, fair-haired man is to ignore those particularities of contour and coloring which would set him apart from other tall, handsome, and fair-haired men. He would have stood three inches over six feet if he were bald, or if his hair lay spraddled or pasted flat to his scalp. But slightly over an inch was added to his six-three by the vigorously upstanding cropped hair on top of his—elsewhere—closely cut skull. This haircut gave considerable distress to his barber, who would murmur, without a halt in the rhythm of his rapid snipping, “Crew cut—she ain’t such the rage now, Mr. Johns.”

“Yeah, I know, but I like her.”

He did
not
like the tow color of his hair, fearing that someone might take it for white or gray. No one ever did. So lean a face, so bright an eye, so vigorous a body gave no associative hints of middle age. He still looked the ex-college athlete, which he was, and if occasionally he had to frown at the bathroom scale in the morning, he had the requisite will power to cut out carbohydrates and butterfats for enough days to make frowning unnecessary.

Now, however, Thornton Johns was frowning. His lower lip was caught at the left of his mouth by vexed teeth and there was a scowl in his eyes, which were blue, and noticeable in that they gave the hasty observer an impression of being triangular. This was because their upper lids had a down-slanting fold at the outer corners, a characteristic no other Johns child could boast.

It may have been the continuing pressure of incisor and canine on his lower lip that suddenly told him he was working himself up to a state, and he at once relaxed, told himself not to be a sorehead, and immediately felt better. Just the same, the evening ahead would be dull. He liked parties and he liked his parents and he liked his family but when it came to combining all of them something terrible happened. Were all parents so sentimental about their wedding anniversary? For a full week leading up to every January 17th for as far back as he could remember, he had wondered precisely the same thing. But year succeeded year, his parents’ sentiment grew, and more and more small fry in the Johns family grew with it, becoming big enough fry to be expected to attend. Eighteen for dinner is what it would be this time. And, as usual, at
his
house.

“The gathering of the clans—or rather, the blathering,” he had called it at the luncheon today and it had got a laugh. It was easy to get a laugh at the Premium Club, easy for him anyway. Everything seemed to come out with a funny twist the moment he stepped on the small dais; his vocabulary changed; odd turns of expression came to him without effort. Long ago he, and others, thank Heaven, had discovered his unexpected ability to ad-lib, and at most of their meetings he was Chairman, Master of Ceremonies, Proposer of Toasts, and Unofficial Host to visitors or newcomers.

It made him feel good when he saw appreciative faces turned up to him and heard the low contagious sound start in their throats. It made him stand straighter and feel like somebody. Since he had turned forty, three years ago, his morale seemed to need such boosts more frequently. Sometimes he felt as if sarcastic movies were forever being made about hucksters, and a play called
Death of a Salesman
was getting rave reviews in its out-of-town tryouts. It was opening on Broadway soon, but he might not even see it. Sometimes it was frightening to
be
a salesman.

But when that ripple of laughter came up at him, he forgot his jitters about the future. Today he had been at his best. “Fellow Insurance Vendors,” he had started dourly, “I’m in a grouchy frame of mind.” Even that had made them smile expectantly. “Tonight I’ll be feeding and entertaining seventeen people at my own expense and not one hot prospect in the bunch!” They had roared and for the rest of his talk they had lapped up every word.

That was thin comfort now, with the inundation less than two hours off. Cindy dreaded the evening too and had talked darkly this morning, as she did every Thanksgiving and Christmas, of giving up their nine-room apartment and moving into a tiny one, “like everybody else in your family.”

He
was
the only one who could play host to the whole gang at once; a momentary warmth coursed through him. His attention was caught by a long narrow envelope beside his memo pad and he reached for it. It was of heavy paper, almost cardboard, terra cotta in color, and tied around with a flat half-inch tape of the same tint. He yanked at one end of the band; the pleated packet opened fanwise and he drew out some two dozen folded documents, green-bordered and crisp as new dollar bills at a teller’s cage. Roy Tribble
ought
to have more coverage, he thought, my letter about it is perfectly sound. Even second-string radio stars are managing to get into television on the side and that means added income. Was it not a cardinal principle of life that added income should mean added coverage?

He riffled quickly through the documents and then threw them on the desk. He didn’t feel constructive about Roy Tribble or anything else; morning would have to do. He rose, went to the window, and looked out at the dying afternoon. Below and beyond him he could see the Battery and the confluence of New York’s two great rivers. Movement, flow, direction—a man wanted to be going somewhere instead of feeling impaled on the sharp stake of routine. He watched the fat twin funnels of a huge steamship moving slowly down the Hudson; England, he thought, Paris, skiing in Switzerland, sun-bathing on the Riviera. He turned slightly to the left and saw a rusty dirty old freighter nosing out of the East River. South America? The Azores? The West Coast of Africa?

He needed a vacation; it wasn’t like him to be beefing about he knew not what. A week’s fishing would fix him right up. Even when he was a boy he had learned there was no better way to get over things—scoldings, bad marks, or any other misery—no quicker way than to drop everything and go fishing. “Let’s go to the dock, Gregory,” he’d say and the kid would rush to the cellar for their tackle. As long ago as that, Gregory never let anyone say “Greg” or use any other nickname; in a shy, unspectacular fashion, he was independent even then, never bothering about what anybody thought of him, never trying to be popular at school by going out for the teams. Fishing was the only sport Gregory was good at; when he was no more than eight or nine he’d learned everything he could teach him about bait and hooks and spinners and reels. On a thousand summer days they’d fished for perch or lafayette off the dock at Freeton or, when they could sneak a rowboat and get out into the channel, for flounder or fluke or small bass.

The smell of summer was suddenly in the room with him; melting tar between the wide dry planks of the dock, the faint saltiness in the wind blowing off the bay, the marshy odor of low tide and flats. It was funny, he thought, how often his mind turned back to boyhood as he grew older. Everything had been simple then; he was the older brother and Gregory his special charge in a family of girls, and the feeling of being the kid’s hero was wonderful. A shadowy imitation of that welled up even now, whenever Gregory turned to him for advice and help on some business matter—it was still pleasant.

Five years ago, with Gregory in uniform at a Washington desk, it had seemed natural enough that he, the businessman of the family, should fill in for a while on business matters at home. Gregory had quit his literary agent, and his small affairs were in a mess. Nobody as careless as Marilyn Laird should have been anybody’s agent, it turned out, but once the bolloxed-up accounts were straightened out, once the incomplete records and inaccurate files were put to rights, the rest had been easy. There was nothing particularly hard about familiarizing himself with Gregory’s book contracts and asking around until he knew about publishing practice in general, on royalties, rights, options, and the rest of it. It was a welcome relief from insurance anyway, and a hobby had been born.

A man needed hobbies just as he needed vacations. It would be even better if that week’s fishing weren’t a solitary affair. Cindy had been talking about Florida a good deal lately but that wasn’t what he meant either. He looked again at the freighter below him; she wasn’t nosing along any more; she was out in open water, full steam up. It was years since he had taken a winter vacation—

A harrowing memory of day before yesterday’s check to the Collector of Internal Revenue ripped through him. He abandoned his post at the window, went back to his desk, and put a despondent finger on the buzzer. Beyond the frosted glass of the closed door, an open drawer was thumped home and a chair on creaky casters was pushed across linoleum. The door swung in and a caressing voice said, “Yes, Mr. Johns?”

He didn’t look up at her. There were times when it was better not to meet that cool glance. For two years he had known she would look at him so and in no other way, turning to him the face of an indifferent angel while she spoke in a low voice that assured him he was her one concern, and often that knowledge did not disturb him. But this was not one of the times. This was one of the quite-opposite times, when she became a symbol of all the unreachables in the world. Her name was Diana.

He looked at his desk sternly. “I won’t wait for the draft of the Tribble letter after all,” he told his memo pad. “I won’t have time to revise it.”

“You won’t?” Surprise, regret, understanding—all were in the two syllables.

“I forgot this was the seventeenth. I promised to be home early.”

“Oh yes—‘the gathering of the clans, or rather, the blathering.’”

The quotation marks in her voice were like tiny fishhooks. What the Premium Club appreciated might not rate as high with other people—he must remember that. She probably thought it corny or, even worse, Babbitty. The tiny hooks were now imbedded in his flesh and he squirmed.

He would not continue, he thought angrily, to sit with downcast eyes this way, like a schoolboy. At once his mind sent out executive directives through all the proper ganglia and synapses of his nervous system, and the muscles of his eyeballs and eyelids obediently retracted. He looked up. She was smiling, but the meaning of the smile was not clear enough to be soothing. He spoke icily. “So if you’d rather leave early too, you can finish it in the morning.”

She slapped her notebook shut and said, “Thanks,” with alacrity. She began to tidy up his desk and he leaned back in his swivel chair, his eyes closed. It was nice to hear her bustling about so near to him. Diana indeed. There was nothing of the Amazon—or of the huntress either, worse luck—about Diana Bates. She was small and slender and, for all her severely unadorned black dresses, as feminine as pale pink satin and high-heeled mules.

This notion, however, was not soothing either.

Thornton Johns crossed the room to the clothes tree in the corner, glanced briefly at the scrap of emerald velvet nestling close to his gray felt, and averted his eyes. He thought, If I were a bachelor, and at once saw Cindy’s and the boys’ faces reproaching him. It wasn’t
only
being married anyway; girls like Diana were looking for somebody more romantic than a salesman in a city crawling with salesmen. Once, just after she had begun to work there, she had said, her eyes shining, “Roy Tribble, the radio star? Does he ever come in here, Mr. Johns? I’ve never met anybody on the radio or in the movies.”

Well, he decided, what the hell. Let her set her cap for a man she considers A Somebody.

“Good night,” he said coldly.

Purposefully he strode down the hall. Glamour, a name, that’s what impressed girls like Diana, and that was all right by him. He wasn’t going to go around hanging his head because he was just a salesman and start brooding over all the jokes about people ducking insurance salesmen more than any other breed of salesman. Let her shine at Roy Tribble as much as she wanted to. Once this boring evening was behind him for another whole year, he’d feel better about everything.

He reached the bank of elevators and though the hall was empty, the imperfect bulb in the down signal was flickering busily. It seemed to be winking at him.

There are certain families, and the large Johns family was one such, that have a mania for nomenclature. Parents who name their sons after Presidents and Generals, parents who zealously thumb through the Bible when a new baby is due to join their little group of Zillahs, Absaloms, and Bathshebas—these parents surely reveal, if “mania” be too harsh a term, a strong attachment to nomenclature as well as to American history or the Book of God. And what of a certain large family with so passionate a love of horticulture that its girls were christened Ivy, Laurel, Rose, and Hyacinth, and its boys Oakley, Ferndon, Elmwood (since Elmer was too lower-class), and Larch?

The Johns family would never have gone as far as that.

But when, in the early days of the century, Gerald Johns met a pretty girl whom he politely called “Miss Thornton” for an entire evening in the shy tempo of that time—when Gerald then discovered that of all possible feminine names, hers was Geraldine, he immediately felt, in the neatness and sweetness of this phonetic pairing, an importance, a charm, and a destiny. And Geraldine felt them too.

Once they were married, they decided to bestow upon all their children names beginning with G. A year later, they found it grievous to wreck the auditory perfection of Gerald Johns, Junior, by inserting a middle name for the sake of the Thornton grandparents, never suspecting that their first-born would disown the Gerald anyway, once he reached the age of consent—in his case, five. Before this unhappy defeat, having had four years to discuss hard G’s versus soft G’s, they were ready with Gregory, and when the recessive characteristics finally won out over the dominant, and girls began to appear, they were equally prepared with Gracia, Gloria, Georgia, and Gwendolyn.

Hard G or soft, all the Johns offspring, save one, were present in Thornton’s apartment on the mild January evening of the seventeenth, together with husbands and wives and those of their own children who had qualified for admission by having entered their teens. The missing one was Gwendolyn, who lived in Wyoming, wife of a rancher and mother of five little would-be ranchers.