The Sound of Thunder

  “I said that he is working,” said Maria. “That is all I can say. He lives in a trance of despair, trying to salvage what he can. He will not mortgage the house, he says. That will be the last thing he will do. We can pray for him. Beyond that, we can do nothing.”

  “Nor can America,” said David. “Ma, why doesn’t Ed put the family on its own? Cut off all the allowances and the free ride it is getting here at his expense?”

  Maria gave him a cryptic smile. “Does one take power from a man who lives for power, even if it will save his life? No. That is why he is fighting.”

  CHAPTER VIII

  Gregory could feel the big living room of the penthouse filling up behind him with cocktail-hour guests. But he stood before the huge dark window gloomily, his hands in his pockets. Then he saw his reflection in the black glass, lighted by the lamps in the large warm room, and the firelight that twinkled far behind him. He was abominably startled. It was as if Edward were looking at him grimly from the other side of the glass. He knew that he resembled his brother in an extraordinary way, but, as he believed, in a more refined and delicately clear-cut way. Something had betrayed him momentarily, some deep and secret thing in himself which he had never suspected, to give his reflection the very embodiment of Edward’s strength, his crude outlines, his look of still violence and power. Gregory was revolted and outraged—he told himself. Yet when he turned his head quickly, in half-profile, and saw himself as he was, he was strangely bereft, as if part of him had become cloudy and unstable and pallid, no longer puissant, no longer certain.

  His agent, who called himself LeCroix—no Christian name, just LeCroix—came scuttling up to him where he stood before the great window looking out at the mountain-blue façade of New York in the growing twilight. “Still brooding, Greg?” he asked in his intolerably amused voice, so thin and light. “How many times do I have to tell you that the reviews are raving? Why can’t you be happy about them? Look here, I have more of them—just came in this morning.”

  “The book’s been out a month—no, six weeks,” said Gregory, sullenly. “How many copies have been sold? One thousand, and just dribbles of reorders. Reviews? It looks as if the people never read reviews. The critics tore Always Adorable apart—that little blonde housewife up in the Bronx—and it’s selling thousands a week, after six months. And Hollywood paid half a million for it, and it’s going to be a play.”

  LeCroix shrugged. He was a tiny, black little man of undetermined racial origin, and Gregory had always thought he resembled a lizard, so quick and sharp and sinuous he was, so knowing and brilliantly black of eye. He hardly reached to Gregory’s tall shoulder. “It’s like I told you, Greg. It’s sex the people want—”

  “It’s social significance you said they want,” Gregory interrupted rudely.

  LeCroix scratched his waxy ear and shook his head humorously. “Greg, they want their social significance in the hay, too. The noble factory girl and the muscular machinist—all the details after the hanging electric light is off in the drab bedroom. The public doesn’t want the sex door slammed in its face; it wants to participate.”

  The hubbub was increasing behind them. They stood in the shelter of massive draperies of white satin scrawled over with a livid green pattern. “I’m not going to give the bastards clinical details,” said Gregory. His whole Lutheran soul, against which he had long ago revolted but which still persisted like a stern and huge shadow in the background of his mind, seemed to nod its austere head.

  “Anatomical details,” said LeCroix. “Sensations, so they can have a private orgasm by themselves. Even social significance, and—our line—has to have its trappings of hot breaths and sweatings and wrigglings. This book—even the burly workers behave as if they had morals and consciences, and God knows they don’t. They’re just animals.”

  Gregory stared at him, his gray eyes diminishing to points under his thick black brows. He was not naïve; he knew the contempt in which the “workers” were held by their self-appointed saviors. He knew the power they wanted. But still there was some uneasy integrity in him, some atavistic principle, which kept him apart from the general hypocrisy. He thought, It used to be that people were religious hypocrites. Now they are “social” hypocrites. They must always believe, in spite of their own knowledge of themselves, that they were better than they were. It isn’t fashionable any longer to conceal your greed, your hatred, your lack of decency and compassion, your cruelty, under what used to be called “a religious cloak.” No. Now it must be a “social” one. If you shouted loudly enough, and long enough, that you were concerned with “social” problems, and that your heart bled for the “workers,” you could come to believe it yourself, and you could forget, could hide from, the awareness of your true motivations.

  “What’s the matter, Greg?” asked LeCroix.

  “At least,” said Gregory, following his own thoughts, “I’m not a hypocrite.”

  LeCroix, who knew humanity very well indeed, smiled cunningly.

  Gregory said, “I’ve read Always Adorable. I don’t care what the dainty literati say about it, and the obscene jokes they make about it. It’s a good book. It’s crude, in a way, but it’s a crude power. And it’s vivid and interesting. Its descriptions are excellent about the period—”

  “Murky, turgid,” said LeCroix. “Ebullient. Violent. Rococco.”

  “I know, I know! I read reviews, too!” Gregory’s face flushed with an anger he could not understand. “‘Sprawling. Undisciplined. Indiscriminate.’ So, as you’d say, the public gobbles it up, even in these times. Why? Because it’s alive. Because it has human emotions. Because it isn’t a ‘taut’ story; it isn’t ‘sensitive.’ My books are. That’s why the public leaves them alone, in spite of the logrolling.”

  “It’s got sex,” LeCroix pleaded, still watching Gregory with those tight and cunning eyes, full of mistrust.

  “I can’t write ‘sex,’” said Gregory. He was deeply startled. Why not? The austere shadow in the back of his mind nodded its head approvingly. He added lamely, “What I write about is too serious for these days.”

  “But sex is life, too,” said LeCroix, his restless eyes roving constantly, a habit which irritated Gregory, who was a product of a disciplined family.

  “So it is. So are the functions of the kidneys and the bowels,” said Gregory. All at once he could not stand his agent. “But no one but doctors write about those.” He paused, and flushed again. “Love is a different thing. I have love in my books, real love. Do I have to go into anatomical details and dissections?”

  “That’s what the idiot public wants,” said LeCroix, indulgently. “Oh, cheer up. I think a book club is going to take your book as a free gift to get new subscribers, and there’ll be reprints.”

  Gregory shifted on his big feet. “Don’t try to soothe me. You know damn well that no book club would take my book, and no reprint house, either. And not because there’s little or no ‘sex’ in it.”

  LeCroix said smoothly, “Well, that’s because they’re too conservative. They’re doubtful about—our line. But there’ll come a day—” He coughed. “A day we’re all waiting for, Greg. Even in your old stories about Mr. Thor there isn’t any sex. Now, you could write a whole new novel about him, just as he is—and he does exist, I know—and let him have a few hot tussles in the hay, and a few thrilling lays, while he goes about his business of destroying the widows and orphans, and swallowing up small business, and beating down his rivals, and consolidating and expanding his financial empire.”

  Gregory thought involuntarily, But that would be a lie about Ed! Ed’s as virtuous as a deacon … Oh, God damn him, anyway! He said hurriedly, “I’ve just been rereading War and Peace. It’s full of—of love and passionate scenes. Yet you and the rest of your boys wouldn’t call it ‘sex.’”

  “Who reads War and Peace?” asked LeCroix, reasonably. “Do the movies buy it? Do the housewives thrill over it? Does the truckdriver slaver over it? Who reads Tolstoy?”
br />   Gregory looked at him. But he did not see him. I’m a failure, he thought. I was never really a writer, in spite of the money I’ve made on the Thor series and other shorts for The City and other magazines, and inclusion in the anthologies. No, I’m wrong. I am a writer. But what’s wrong with me? Why don’t I make a success, the sort of solid success I want? I do my best; I’m up to my neck in this thing, this social significance and Communism, and nothing happens. God damn the stupid masses! I write for them, try to awaken them, stir them, get them to move—and they read Always Adorable!

  The austere shadow whispered, But you have no courage. You really have no integrity. And you lie.

  No, said Gregory in desperate answer, I do believe in what I write. Who could be worse than Ed?

  He looked at his reflection in the window again, and once more he was bereft. Only Gregory Enger was reflected there, the pseudo-élégant, the shadow of a stronger man, and Gregory thought sharply of his brother and hated him with increasing hatred. He took my strength from me, he told himself. He chewed me until all my juices were gone.

  Gregory turned, with a feeling of profound exhaustion, to the masses of people in the room. The host, a rotund and beaming little man of great wealth, was greeting everybody with much joviality. The butler was circulating with trays of cocktails. A maid followed with trays of hors d’oeuvres. The vast Oriental rug gleamed like flattened jewels in the lamplight and the firelight. Cabinets of priceless objets d’art stood along the gold and ivory walls. The French furniture, the pictures, the marble fireplace, the exquisite mirrors—all of it—had cost an enormous fortune. The host owned this penthouse. He had inherited such tremendous wealth that he could not spend his income, in spite of a palatial yacht, an island surmounted by a mansion off the coast of Florida, another mansion near Cape Cod, and in spite of the harem he kept unofficially. He was a Communist; he supported at least four Communist newspapers and other periodicals. He suborned Senators and other government officials. He had never worked a day in his life. He was a Communist. Gregory knew why. Money was not enough for men like himself—and there were many in this very room tonight. They wanted personal power over the masses they loathed, and whose freedom they loathed even more. They, simply, wanted the knout, the power of life and death. Power, reflected Gregory. Is that what I want, too? The power to destroy?

  There was Thornton Greene over there, another such a one as the host. A tall and distinguished man, as elegant as David was elegant. A wealthy man. He boasted lightly of his tax-exempt securities, which he had bought when he had inherited his father’s money. And who had been his father? A sturdy bricklayer who had become a building contractor. The bricklayer may have been physically gritty from his honest mortar. But his son, in spite of the Saville Row clothing, in spite of the jewelry, in spite of the air of sophistication and quiet assurance, had a dusty look. His features appeared overlaid with a patina of drifting powder, such as the dead wear in their coffins. It usually surprised Gregory, and absurdly, when Greene spoke with vehemence, though still with that cultured lightness, and when his eyes actually gleamed. The dust was thick—thick …

  There were no labor leaders present. They were too gross for this delicate company, who plotted their subjugation as well as the subjugation of their unions to the Universal State, as the cognicenti liked to call it euphemistically. Gregory thought, Why, any labor leader would gag at them! He hurriedly quelled the heretical thought. What was the matter with him tonight, for God’s sake?

  You could really write—if you were an honest man, the rebuking shadow whispered to him. What are you doing here?

  The bejeweled women, with their fierce, fanatical, and cruel eyes, moving about the room in their individual halos of perfume. The alert men, always watching, watching, and whispering and whispering. The discreet jokes; no robust and human laughter here! “I talked with Senator So-and-So this morning … in the palm of my hand—there’s this bill coming up … Serge Ovlov … wonderful, eloquent! Higher taxes, that’s the thing.… Lenin—he told me about Stalin—masses—re-education of the people—will not be easy, but it can be done.… Did you read what Molotov said yesterday?… the professor was thrown out; reactionary … a matter of indoctrination of the teachers; resistive … government ownership of the means of production … now Lenin said … it was in 1895 … the workers, the workers … Machiavelli of course, was the first.… Did you read—?”

  The conversation was always the same. It was not, thought Gregory, that a man tired of it or thought it futile. It wasn’t futile; it was having results all over the world. But sometimes one would like a little lightness, a little humanness, a little warmth, a little gaiety, some boisterous jokes. The guests drank little. This was something which Gregory, who sometimes had a tendency to overdrink, could not understand. They also seemed to get very small joy out of life, in spite of their luxury and their money. “War,” somebody said. “Of course, war.” Gregory stood very still. Yes, he knew about the program for wars, but it had seemed not to be in the realm of reality; it was simply a theory. “I think about 1940,” said another voice. “Hitler should be ready then.” Expression of smug satisfaction. War. But war was murder. The Party hated war.…

  Hitler? But he was a “reactionary.” Fascism was reactionary. Gregory’s head began to hum and ache. He looked about him desperately, from his sanctuary in the draperies.

  His eye lighted on a young woman who was standing uneasily on the periphery of the massed guests—who drank so little and so cautiously and endlessly watched one another. A young woman, perhaps in the late twenties or early thirties. She stood out in this exotic and glittering company like an honest sunflower set among rich and poisonous blooms. She had a bold, full face, with bold blue eyes, and a very large red mouth, which she licked uncertainly as she grinned. Her very blonde hair was pulled back from her broad temples and wide cheekbones into a severe chignon, which looked like a gleaming ball of yellow light. She was very tall; there was an open sensuality about her, in spite of the discreet tailored suit of dark blue. But it was the sensuality of a female animal in heat, innocent and avid and unashamed. Her full figure appeared to be about to burst out of the rigid suit; her white silk blouse could hardly restrain the unaffected press of her breasts. Gregory saw her hands, big and rather coarse, and her big feet in the high-heeled slippers. She exuded vitality, earthy and demanding, in spite of her apparent attempts to be inconspicuous. It was evident that she was not one of this company; she was listening, and her impudent eyes had a bewildered cast over them. She was trying to understand, and sometimes her smooth white forehead, a little cowlike, wrinkled conscientiously. She was sipping at her glass with obvious enjoyment. Now it was empty. She glanced about her for another. The butler passed, and she eagerly seized on another glass and drank it down in one gulp.

  LeCroix, bustling nearby with a lizard’s rapid movements, saw Gregory’s signal. He came at once. “Not drinking?” he asked. “What’s the matter, Greg? You usually—”

  “Who’s that girl over there, the big, bad-eyed blonde?” asked Gregory. “One of us?”

  “Who? Margo? That’s Margo Montgomery.” LeCroix grinned. “Née Mamie Elkins. From Ohio. A farm girl, now a model and a good one, too. Earns her keep.”

  “Her keep?”

  “Oh, not that way. A frigid piece of meat. You wouldn’t think it, would you? I know—personally, brother! All that—” and he continued his description, obscenely. For some reason Gregory winced and felt outraged. “She came with Greene,” the agent concluded. “Not that he’ll get anywhere with her. And she’s not a Lesbian, either. Likes the boys, in a hands-off way. I don’t know why Greene brought her; she’s as dull as milk. Not a Party member. He’s wasting his time, both ways.”

  “I’d like to meet her,” said Gregory.

  LeCroix shook his head with coy rebuke. “Not in your present funk. She’s the gay type. Likes to laugh a lot. You know, the typical stupid female. Tell her you’ll buy her a dinner, and dance with
her in some hot night club, and that there’ll be no fumbling in a taxi, and you’ll kiss her chastely on the brow at her door, and that’s all, and she’ll roar off with you. Heard her voice? Big and husky, like herself; it grates on a chap’s ears. You wouldn’t like it. She wouldn’t appreciate your wit—when you’re witty, and you’re not witty tonight. Look for something more your type.”

  Gregory studied the girl, and he became aware of a tremendous animal strength in her. He was always mysteriously drawn to strength; it had a fascination for him beyond his understanding. He was aware of this; he thought that it was because he was strong himself. He was drawn to these people in this room because they were strong, and so he was attracted to them. But LeCroix was thinking, candidly, You want her because you’re weak, and you’re here, not even knowing what it’s all about, because it gives you a feeling of power and fortitude that isn’t in you. But what would we do without the weak, anyway, even if you aren’t reliable? Darling boy, you’ll be the first to be liquidated! After we let you have your personal revenge, of course.

  “I like her,” said Gregory; stubbornly. “Trot her over.”

  LeCroix shrugged. “It’s your party,” he said. “First thing, she’ll tell you your tie is all wrong. The model-complex, you know.”