Tuesday to Bed. Francis Sill Wickware
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glancing at Stanton’s paper.
“I haven’t looked at it yet.” Stanton unfolded his Times. The significant headline—the one over the two right-hand columns—read: GROMYKO AGAIN REJECTS U. S. ATOM PROPOSAL. SAYS BOMB MUST BE SHARED WITH ALL.
“Same thing,” he said. “The Russians are still saying ‘no.’ ” He paused and scanned the first paragraph of the story. “I wish that once in a while the peace news could be as good as the war news used to be. Remember the war headlines toward the end? Advance, enemy routed, successful invasion, new landings—victory? Now what have we got?”
“Hmph, see what you mean,” Hazen agreed. “Still, I had the idea you were more or less pro-Russian, Stanton? You don’t sound it.”
Stanton laughed. “A good many people seemed to get that idea. It started with a letter of mine that was published in the Westport Herald. I simply pointed out that thirty years after the American Revolution we were a pretty cantankerous and self-conscious nation ourselves, and that maybe the newness of the regime over there had a good deal to do with the way the Russians are behaving. I wrote the letter because I thought it might cut down some of the violent talk I’d been listening to around here, but of course it didn’t. People began talking about me as though I were in the pay of the Kremlin.
“No, I’m not pro-Russian,” he continued. “I’m not especially anti-Russian, either. I just have no patience with self-righteous dogmatists, whether they’re Russians, Republicans, Baptists or anything else. Here’s our train,” he added, as the blunt green nose of an electric locomotive came into sight down the track and rumbled across the drawbridge over the Saugatuck. Stanton had seen occasions when all traffic on the New Haven was blocked at this point so that a couple of kids in a sailboat could go through the bridge.
He was positive that Hazen would bid him adieu as they boarded the train, but instead the old lawyer said, “Mind if I sit with you?”
“Of course not,” Stanton said. “I’d be delighted.”
“I’m glad I ran into you,” Hazen said, after they were settled. “I nearly called you at your office yesterday.”
“So?” Stanton smiled. “I can guess what about—those plans for the youth center, isn’t that it? Actually, I drew them up in rough last week, but I haven’t submitted them yet because I’m waiting to hear what we can get in the way of materials. You know, we talked about glass brick for the façade? I’m afraid we’ll have a tough time getting any before late spring, and we want to have the center finished by then. Of course we could put up a temporary wall and replace it later on when the glass brick is available. How does that strike you?”
“Eh? Yes, yes, I’ll recommend it.” Hazen coughed in an embarrassed way and looked out the window. “I’d never worry about you doing the plans, Stanton, or anything else you said you’d do. Always know I can depend on you. Not like some of these other fellows we have on the committees, all promises and no performance.” He paused. “No, there was something else I thought I might want to discuss with you.”
“Well,” said Stanton. “Here I am. Shoot.”
Hazen shook his head. “This wouldn’t be quite the place, I’m afraid. Anyway, it may turn out to be nothing at all.”
“You’re being very mysterious.”
“Am I? Well, that’s a lawyer for you. However,” he said carefully, “I may want to get in touch with you later today. You going to be in your office?”
“Yes, until traintime. I’m taking the Century.”
“Mm. Ah . . . got a pretty busy day ahead?”
“No,” said Stanton. “I’m going to answer my mail, if there is any, and then polish my speech a bit—oh, and practice looking at audiences, slowly, left to right,” he added with a smile. Hazen did not smile in return. “I don’t think I could keep my mind on any work today.”
“Well, as I say, I may call you toward the end of the morning. In fact, I might want to drop around to see you. Be all right?”
“Why, certainly.” Stanton’s expression was bewildered. “But . . . I wish you’d give me some idea of what this is all about?”
Hazen again shook his head. “No, not now. It’s just—something. Perhaps nothing. I’ll know later. Mind if I look at part of your paper?”
They read in silence until the train paused briefly at 125th Street, then rolled through the jungle of Harlem tenements. From the elevated tracks it was possible to peer down into the bleak, uncurtained windows and glimpse the most intimate and sordid vignettes. Stanton never saw these mean, barren little rooms and the stark, crumbling ugliness of the tenements without a sense of inner protest. What conceivable reason or excuse was there for people living that way, in Manhattan, in 1947? Yet he knew that these buildings along upper Park Avenue were veritable palaces compared with the tenements he had seen in some other slum sections.
“Ah . . . by the way, Stanton—” Hazen’s voice startled him—“seen that actor fellow lately?”
“You mean Billy Paige?”
“That’s the one.”
The train rocketed into the long tunnel leading to Grand Central. Some of the more impetuous commuters stood up and started putting on their coats and hats, moving toward the vestibules.
“Why—” Stanton considered—“I saw him a little while last Sunday. He came out for tennis and stayed for the cocktail party afterward at the club. What makes you ask about him?”
“Just happened to think of him,” Hazen replied. “What do you think of that chap, anyway?”
“Well, I don’t know. I never thought much about him, one way or the other.” Paige was a little too deft, a little too facile, a little too well-dressed, a little too aggressively handsome for Stanton’s taste, but he was pleasant enough and seemed to know a lot of funny stories. He was about thirty and had rather suddenly become a prominent Broadway figure on the strength of the leading part in the first big hit of the season.
“These theatrical people—I don’t seem to have much in common with them,” Stanton said. “They live in a world of their own and they don’t have much interest in anything else. At least, I find it hard to talk to them. But Betsy—Mrs. Wylie—gets along with them pretty well. She’s interested in the theater.”
He reflected that her interest of late had become almost irritating. Betsy pretended a superior knowledge of all phases of stagecraft from playwriting to baby spots, had dragged Stanton to any number of bad plays he didn’t want to see, and at times referred to people like the Lunts as “Lynn and Alfred” although she never had met them.
“Paige is sort of a lightweight, if you know what I mean,” Stanton went on. “But he’s all right; I like him well enough. He’s a very good dancer, too—at least, that’s what Betsy says. You know, she’s very keen on dancing, and I’m much too tall for her. She likes dancing with him.”
Hazen’s eyes were half closed, and his expression was inscrutable.
“Grand Central!” a conductor bawled from the end of the car. The train slid to a stop alongside the gray concrete platform. Stanton and the lawyer edged into the line of passengers and were propelled through the vestibule.
As they were climbing the ramp to the marble floor of the terminal, Hazen said: “Where’d you meet this Paige fellow, Stanton?”
Stanton had almost forgotten about Billy Paige. He glanced quickly at the lawyer, but Hazen was looking at the floor of the ramp. Stanton said, “Mr. Hazen, why are you so interested in Paige?”
“Oh, just wondered about him—seen him around,” Hazen said. “Where’d you meet him?”
“Well—” Stanton had to think about just when he had met Billy Paige—“in Westport, early in the summer.