Aurora Dawn (9 page)

“Hello, Honey,” said a new voice. The three diners glanced up. Andrew Reale was standing beside their table.

If the reader has been enduring Michael Wilde’s nonsensical farragoes with half the impatience with which the author has been
forced to set them down, he may wish to abandon the book now. I think it only fair to warn the audience that this harlequin
is one of the key figures in the pantomime. It is regrettable, because he is capable of taking up an entire chapter with a
speech (he does so, in fact, in Chapter 13); and were this anything but a true tale, I would surely remove him with surgical
dispatch. As it happened, however, it was unquestionably Michael Wilde who started the great Aurora Dawn scand … but it is
poor storytelling to anticipate.

Andrew, then, fresh from sleep in a luxurious Pullman compartment, glowing with the secret of his triumph at the Old House,
had just arrived at Le Boeuf Gras to take a fortifying lunch before his appointed interview with Talmadge Marquis, a prospect
at which men usually quaked. The fact that he was the bearer of good news reassured him only slightly, for it was known that
the most pleasant conversation with Marquis could take a turn that would suddenly break a man’s career and leave his children
without bread. It was no great coincidence that brought Andy to the very eating place in which his sweetheart was dining with
a millionaire and a well-known painter, for despite the number of restaurants in New York, there are only a half dozen at
which a certain segment of the population will ever manifest itself, and, in the neighborhood of East Fifty-second Street,
Le Boeuf Gras is as much the place to go to as, say, Mahomet’s tomb is in Mecca.

Honey introduced her fiancé to her companions, and he cheerfully accepted their prompt invitation that he join them at table.
It was no new thing for him to find his sweetheart dining with strange and attractive gentlemen, for he was aware of the obligations
of her profession. He trusted her utterly, with the careless confidence of a young man who has been permitted by a young lady
to find out that she adores him. This reaction, predictable as the tendency of a man to stand with his back to a fire, is
discerned by some young ladies early in life, and cynics say that occasionally they even use it to advantage, but this pen
explores no such dark corners of experience.

It was not long before the conversation disclosed that both the painter and Andrew were to meet with Talmadge Marquis shortly
after lunch–Wilde to observe his subject at work, and obtain what he called “the nasty dimension of truth” for his portrait;
our hero, of course, to report on his foray to the valley of the Faithful Shepherd. They agreed to share a taxi to the Empire
State Building, where, cutting a cross-section two stories thick across the upper part of the tower, the great enterprise
of Aurora Dawn hummed.

While Andrew ate, the others were entertained by a harangue on the beauty of young love and the desirability of the immediate
retirement of Honey and her betrothed from New York, of which Michael Wilde delivered himself without interruption, except
as he paused to greet by name several wealthy, celebrated, or notorious people as they moved past his table. Since the reader
is acquainted with his views on this subject, neither conscientiousness nor truth require the reproduction of his words, for
which the laboring author is grateful.

The sermon was choked off by the arrival at the table of an anecdotal newspaper columnist, one Milton Jaeckel, who lived at
the time by amassing and reprinting the witty remarks of well-known people. The value of a quotation being, for his purpose,
always in direct proportion to the notoriety of the originator, it was often in inverse ratio to the content of wit, an excellent
thing, since it saved the columnist’s readers from puzzlement. This man of letters frequented the half-dozen dining places
mentioned above, scurrying around the whole circle thrice during twenty-four hours: at dinner, after the theater, and in the
early morning hours. He was rarely seen by day, but the feast of St. Patrick had altered his habits and activated him this
noon. At night, the casual stroller along Broadway, taking pleasure in the agreeable contrast of the constellation of Orion
and the electric cinema displays, would probably be startled and possibly knocked over by this pale, bird-visaged, stooping
creature, scuttling through the gloom from one restaurant to another as though pursued by a fiend.

It was this same littérateur who, espying Michael Wilde, hurried to the table, drew up a chair, sat down without an invitation,
and, pulling out a worn paper notebook, said, “Got something for me, Mike? Hello, Honey. Hello, Mr. English.”–Nobody at the
table seemed in the least surprised by this proceeding. Everything in the world is strange; singularity is only a matter of
insufficient repetition.–Michael Wilde, hardly pausing for breath, switched from his exhortation of the lovers to a series
of anecdotes about himself, one of which candor requires that we set down. A publisher, it appears, had asked the painter
to write a history of American art. “You’re too late,” Wilde quoted himself as answering. “I have already sold the rights
to my autobiography.” The columnist’s pencil swooped at this one; then he stood up, muttered an excuse, and vanished.

Luncheon over, the party rose from the table. Laura, with the utmost decorum, managed to find her way to Andrew’s side and
slip her fingers lightly through his, and out again. There were at least three men in the room who could have, and gladly
would have, given a sum in excess of Andy’s boldest aims for that touch and what it implied. Andrew was very pleased by it,
to be sure, and whispered in return the one word, “Success!”–“Wonderful, come home to dinner,” said Laura quietly. Andrew
nodded. They walked out into the sunny canyon of windows and stone along which March was doggedly fighting its cold and windy
way from the river. March came into Fifty-second Street like a lion at the bank of the Hudson, but, impeded by the buildings,
usually was a very tired lamb at Fifth Avenue. This, however, was a vigorous March day, and there was a pleasant sting in
the wind. Andrew Reale and the painter stepped into a taxicab while Laura took the arm of Stephen English and walked briskly
by his side toward Radio City.

The reader may not approve of this pairing-off. I recount the events as they occurred.

In which the reader has the privilege of meeting

Talmadge Marquis,

reigning satrap in the industrial realm of Soap,

and learns more of the truly fascinating history

of Aurora Dawn; but which he may skip if he

is only following the love story.

T
HERE IS A
school of philosophy which holds that there is no such thing in the world as evil, and that what strikes the common sense
of mankind as evil is only “the absence of Being where Being should be.” The argument, simple and ingenious, runs so: no being
is perfect in this universe, except the Supreme Being; all other beings are imperfect, and are constantly striving to become
more perfect; but, in so far as they are imperfect they lack true Being, and it is this imperfection which appears to us as
Evil. Adherents of this doctrine are quite obdurate. I once overheard a two-hour argument in which one disputant was at last
crowded to the wall with the instance of a drunken husband strangling his wife and two babies, and was asked whether he did
not consider this an instance of evil? “No,” he replied with great calm, “properly understood it is merely an absence of Being
where Being should be …” and, in the shocked silence which ensued, he conceded, “a considerable absence.”

–The absence of Being where Being should be–

Talmadge Marquis was known far and wide to suffer from a considerable absence of Being in this sense. To the unphilosophic
view of people engaged in making soap and producing radio programs, he seemed (such was their lack of insight) to be an entirely
evil bully, loud, capricious and mean, and as obstinately resistant to progress as a hundred square miles of mud. They saw
this large man, with his large, red face, large, bellowing voice, and large indifference to reason and good manners as an
epitome of badness, not having the scholastic training to recognize in him an imperfect Being struggling toward perfection.
This grievous error was so widespread that he was hated by those he employed, feared by those he benefited, and despised by
those who were beyond his power. The pity was that, for all his upward striving, he seemed to acquire no Being whatever, because
in the twenty years since he had inherited the Marquis company at the death of his father he had only become more perverse
and noisy in the opinion of all who knew him, whereas he had started with no small endowment of these qualities.

It is important to emphasize that although Marquis was a soap manufacturer according to his income tax return and his own
innermost belief, he knew less about the article than a first-year student of organic chemistry, and could no more have manufactured
a piece of passable soap, given the necessary materials and apparatus, than he could have written a sonnet cycle on the subject.
Aurora Dawn, the soap and the industrial plant alike, had been created by his father. A man of power, Talmadge Marquis, Senior,
would, in other centuries, have organized a crusade, or rifled the Indies, or won a throne, or founded a religious order,
or led a revolution; having erupted out of the well of eternity into nineteenth-century America, he made and sold soap. He
understood better than the chemical engineers in his employ what the essential problem was. They saw it as a matter of producing
a saleable cleansing substance. He saw it as a matter of creating a new popular habit. He smashed at the populace with all
manner of powerful sermonizing in journals and on billboards, playing on strings of fear, love, and hope in their souls, until
he had a good number of them broken like children to an obedient trotting to drug stores at regular intervals for the purchase
of his little pink bars. He won a domain for himself out of the national economy in this democratic way; and in his old age,
shrewdly estimating his son as a man of very mediocre parts, he buttressed his conquest with talented managers and careful
lawyers, and died in the comforting faith that the principality would endure, despite the new prince.

Talmadge Marquis, who had smarted for years under his father’s low opinion of him, took up the scepter with a flourish. He
had been in power for less than a year when, by fiat, against the advice of all his father’s counselors, he changed the color
of the soap to white and ordered the spending of two million dollars to popularize the slogan, “Snow White, Snow Pure.” This
caused the resignation of the general manager of production, a genius of chemical engineering named Abraham Serf, who had
adored “Old T.M.,” and who had quietly effected the smooth running of the plant and the excellence of the product for several
decades. The sales of Aurora Dawn soap dropped forty percent in a single year, and the value of the Marquis Company stock
sagged. On the verge of a breakup, Marquis was rescued by a banker, none other than our acquaintance Stephen English, who
purchased a controlling interest in the corporation, rehired Serf and politely ordered Marquis never again to overrule the
general manager in matters of technical policy. The presidency of the company and the entire outward picture of control were
left as before with Marquis at the head. The original roseate hue of the product was restored, and two million dollars were
allotted to popularize the slogan, “There Is Nothing Purer Than the Dawn–and the Dawn Is PINK.”

Thus balked in his first effort to assert his rule, Marquis became so irascible that within six months he lost his wife and
half of his office staff. He made up the defection of his spouse with a procession of young women strikingly similar in dimensions,
coloring, and morality, changes occurring, as a rule, when intimacy with Marquis strained the large tolerance of these companionable
damsels. In time an office force evolved around him made up of people with a limitless capacity for bearing contumely so long
as they were well paid. The arrival of Marquis in his office was the occasion of a series of white-toothed smiles as he passed
along the desks, implying as much friendliness as the snarls of cougars. He was aware of this, and usually found a curious
pleasure in moving through the atmosphere of impotent hate.