Lanny thought: I have never seen my own country. His fortieth birthday was at hand, and he had never been farther west than Chicago. He thought: If we get into this war, it may not be so easy to travel. He found himself thinking of the great plains, the Rocky Mountains, and above all California, which has an advantage over the rest of the world in having the movie industry for its publicity department. Lanny could have flown there in a day and night, but what lured him was the thought of stepping into a car and driving for a solid week. Long-distance motoring had been one of his recreations since early manhood, and now Hitler and his war had ruined it in Europe.
Then another thought, a mousy little thought, stealing silently into his mind: How pleasant it might be to have Laurel Creston along on such a trip! How many things they would find to talk about, and how greatly his appreciation of the scenery would be enhanced by her comments! They had taken such a tour in Germany, keeping out of touch with the Gestapo; a semicircular tour of Central and Western Germany, starting in Berlin and stopping at Berchtesgaden, and then out by way of Austria and Switzerland. A tour that had surely not been forgotten by either of them!
He imagined himself calling her up and saying: “Have you ever seen your own country, and would you like to see it?” It would be a strictly proper, brother-and-sister tour, like the previous one, and he would make that plain in delicate, well-chosen words. They would stay in different hotel rooms, even in different hotels if she preferred. To be sure, none of her friends would believe it; but there was no reason why her friends should know about it. The project concerned themselves alone.
Lanny’s imagination had always been active, and now, for some reason, it became even more so; it was interested in playing with this theme and in composing variations, a diversion familiar to all musicians. The same theme can be grave or gay, minor or major; it can be played with various instruments and in various tempos. Lanny’s imagination decided to dispense with the separate rooms, or to make them part of one suite; he pictured himself calling up Laurel Creston and saying abruptly: “How would you like to marry me and have a honeymoon in California?” The women have a stock answer to such inquiries: “This is so sudden!” Now and then one of them may aspire to be original and say: “Well, it’s about time!”
Lanny had no idea what the real Laurel Creston would respond, but his musical fancy was delighted with this theme. She said “Yes” in various modes, and they had a most enjoyable holiday. New Jersey lies just across the river, and on the route to California; Lanny had heard that you could get married there without any preliminaries, and so they did, in his imagination, and it was a heart-warming experience. But then began the old round of problems. The journey came to an end, and they were back in New York, and what was he going to do with her then? Where would he hide her, and how would she manage to publish her satirical stories without getting the Nazi agents on her trail? As ex-husband of Irma Barnes, Lanny could still get into Hitlerland, but as husband of “Mary Morrow” he would stand an excellent chance of disappearing by way of a torture chamber and an incinerator.
There were other variations on this theme; one in Vienna waltz time, and one in Harlem swing, or the new night-club style called boogie-woogie. You didn’t have to stop and hunt for a preacher or a justice of the peace in Hoboken or Weehawken. You just sped on, the world forgetting, by the world forgot. You gathered your rosebuds while you might and you took no thought for the morrow, saying what should you eat and what should you drink and wherewithal should you be clothed. You knew that you would find cocktails and sizzling hot steaks in roadhouses along the way, and as for clothes, you had them in the trunk of the car, including pink silk pajamas, or maybe black with Chinese dragons in silver or gold. And did they cost money!
Such was the mood of the time, and you asked for what you wanted. The smart New Yorkers had a word for it, “propositioning,” and the woman was not supposed to take offense; quite the contrary, she might be the one to speak, for wasn’t it supposed to be a woman’s world? Long ago, in France, Lanny had been “propositioned” by Isadora Duncan, and he might have accepted, only he happened to be in love with Madame de Bruyne at the time. Was he being puritanical now, and was Laurel pretending to be the same because she thought that was the way he wanted her to be?
Get thee behind me, Satan! Lanny told himself that this lady from Baltimore was a person of fine sensibilities, and that if she wanted anything from him it would be true and enduring affection. That, alas, he was not in a position to offer, and he told himself that he ought to be ashamed to think of her in ways that would humiliate and degrade her. Suppose that in one of her trances Grandmother Marjorie Kennan were to tell her about it! And suppose Laurel were to start wondering whether this message was a product of Lanny’s subconscious mind or her own!
XII
Baldur Heinsch had said: “If you are going, you ought to see Hearst’s art works in the department stores and in his storerooms up in the Bronx.” Lanny decided that this was sound advice in any case, so he called up his friend and art mentor, Zoltan Kertezsi. Together they visited two great department stores which, for the first time in the history of the world, had set apart whole floors for the exhibiting and selling of old masters and museum objects.
For half of a long life a headstrong master of millions had amused himself accumulating such works from all over Europe. He had employed agents to scour the Continent, and had built a huge medieval palace on the Pacific Coast to contain them. When this and its various satellite buildings could hold no more, he had constructed first one and then another enormous storehouse in that northeastern part of Greater New York known as the Bronx. Many of these treasures the lord of San Simeon had never seen; he had bought them by cable and was content to know that they were his property, and safe from fire and thieves.
The great depression had come, affecting both circulation and advertising of newspaper chains; also the infamous New Deal had imposed huge income taxes. Hearst had had to kill some of his papers and sell others and let a trusteeship manage the rest. He had lost interest in his art treasures and decided to turn them into cash. Someone had had the bright idea of advertising and marketing them through department stores; so here you could look at rows of paintings, priced anywhere from fifty dollars to fifty thousand—and they were selling fast. Another store offered all sorts of objets d’art, statuary, vases, tapestries, armor, and weapons, from Venetian daggers which you could use as papercutters to huge halberds and battle-axes which only an athlete could wield. A price tag on every one, from ninety-eight cents up to ninety-eight hundred dollars!
The people of New York knew all about William Randolph Hearst, who had once run for mayor, and then for governor of the state, and had tried hard to run for President—but the people had got onto him by that time. They thought it would be fun to own something which they could say was from his collection; they were rolling in money, because ships and steel and copper and oil and food, paid for in cash, were being poured into Britain, or into the ocean on the way. And now here was Uncle Sam ordering twelve billion dollars’ worth of armaments! Why not have a little fun, and incidentally a little culture? You could save the price tag and prove what you had paid, and it was as good as money in the bank!
Heinsch had added: “If you want to see the storerooms, let me know. Several of our most active workers are employed there.” So Lanny called the official and was told: “I’ll telephone and arrange it. Present your card and ask for Mr. Hickenlooper.” So Lanny waited at the door of a warehouse which occupied a whole city block. Through a slot which might have belonged to a speakeasy he stuck in his visiting card, and a stoutish rosy German from Yorkville appeared and invited him in.
You couldn’t believe it without seeing it with your own eyes. In this place was an office with cabinets containing one hundred and fifty fat books composed of loose leaves, the catalog of this warehouse. Ten or eleven clerks were needed to keep them up-to-date. There were twelve thousand objects listed, Lanny was told, an
d that didn’t sound so formidable—until it was explained that an “object” included such things as a “complete medieval room,” and there were seventy of these. Another “object” was a whole monastery from Spain; you might think that was a joke, but no, here it was, in fourteen thousand cases which had cost seventy thousand dollars just to pack. The monastery had been built in the year 1141, and Hearst had bought it without seeing it, and had ordered it taken down, stone by stone, each labeled on the boxes, so that the structure could be set up in any part of America which felt the need of either a monastery or a tourist attraction.
Many items were equally fantastic, and the figures staggering. There were eight million dollars’ worth of tapestries—at least that was what had been paid for them. For a single set the dealer Duveen had received the sum of $575,000; perhaps that was the money with which this celebrated personality had been able to become First Baron of Milbank. Not much fun looking at rolled-up tapestries, and one packing box looks much like another, but Lanny let himself be escorted from floor to floor. If he was going to meet the master of San Simeon it would be something to report on.
Later he called Heinsch to say Thanks. “I have to visit clients in the Middle West,” he announced, “and it may be that I’ll decide to continue on to California. On second thought I believe it would be better not to use introductions from your friends, because that might make it seem a political call and put the old man on his guard. I’ll get some of the movie people to take me and I’ll talk about art. It may even be that I can do some business for him—find him some rich clients. He’ll be much more disposed to trust me if I can be the means of paying him some millions of dollars.”
He called his father, saying: “Can you spare the car for three or four weeks?” The answer was: “If I need another car, I can buy one. Go ahead and enjoy yourself.” Lanny understood the thought behind these words: “Anything to keep you from under the bombs!”
6
Westward the Star
I
The first stage of the journey was through the rolling farm country of Pennsylvania; woodlands, then hills, then the Allegheny Mountains, their valleys black with coal, their slopes denuded of timber. He came to the great steel city of Pittsburgh; in its Sewickley district, which claimed to be the richest borough in the United States, dwelt Lanny’s old friends the Murchisons, just back from their summer camp in the Adirondacks. Lanny had sold them an especially fine Goya, “El Comendador.” This Spanish grandee had got twelve bullet holes through him in the recent war, but they had been repaired so skillfully that you couldn’t find them, and it was a favorite parlor game to try. Doubtless the old gentleman had been a stuffy and tiresome person in real life, but with all his gold lace, and the collar of the Spanish Order of the Golden Fleece, he made a grand figure for the head of a staircase, and all newcomers took up eagerly the challenge to say where he had been hit.
Lanny didn’t say a word about art works. He told about his adventure with the Wehrmacht in Dunkirk and Paris, about Laval’s ancient château, and so on. After Harry had plied him with questions about the war and how it was going to turn out, he could be sure that Adella would ask: “Have you found anything that would interest me?” Thus invited, he would open a brief case full of photographs and tell about one work after another, never overpraising them, but preserving his careful judicious manner. Adella would say: “I think that is lovely!” and he would counter: “It is a little old-fashioned, what the French call vieux jeu.” The wife, who had once been a secretary and was now an ample and dignified matron, would reply: “We are all somewhat old-fashioned in this neck of the woods.” He would tell her: “The price seems to me a trifle high. I might be able to get it reduced, but it would take time.” To this the answer would be: “Harry is making so much money that it is a shame.”
Harry had inherited the control of a plate-glass factory, and so much of his product was being smashed in London every night that, so he said, he was assured of a meal ticket for the rest of his days. Harry’s waistline had increased by a considerable percentage since the days when he had tried to run away with Lanny’s lovely mother at the outbreak of World War I. He had grown also in business importance, but he never tried to put on any “dog” with Lanny Budd. If his wife wanted a painting, or anything else in the world, she could have it; but Lanny would take the husband’s side and try to restrain an amateur collector’s ardor. This time he told about Hearst, holding him up as a terrible example of what this impulse could do when it was turned loose. But, even so, Adella ordered a painting; her choice was a Eugenio Lilcas, an imitator of Goya, very good, and she said it would be fun to see if her friends could tell the difference.
II
Next came Cincinnati, home of another American family grown far too rich, this time out of hardware. These were Sophie Timmons’s relatives, a lot of them, so that the government didn’t get the whole fortune in income taxes. A company assembled to meet Lanny Budd, and several wanted to talk about paintings, having visited the Riviera and seen the half-dozen French masters in Sophie’s villa. The older men took no stock in “foreign doodads” and guessed they were mostly “hooey”; but the ladies found Lanny Budd a delightful fresh breeze in their overgrown river town, and wished he would stay and marry their newest daughter just out of finishing school.
On to Detroit, where Mrs. Henry Ford and her son Edsel were making a modest collection, and where Henry was standing out stubbornly against the efforts of his government to persuade him to make war goods. Then to the small town of Reubens, Indiana, home of Ezra Hackabury, proprietor and retired manufacturer of Bluebird Soap; Ezra was eighty and his soap was over sixty, and both were still going strong. He had come to the Detaze show in Cleveland and bought several paintings which Marcel had done on Ezra’s yacht, the Bluebird, and now he wanted to look at photographs of others. He was still meaning to donate them to his town library—just to spite his in-laws, he said with a grin.
And then Chicago, which to Lanny meant old Mrs. Fotheringay, who lived in a palace on the North Shore and collected babies; painted ones, of course. Every time Lanny went to Europe he would find her a new one; sometimes he would bring it along, but this time he had had his hands full and brought only photographs. Her “darlings,” she called them, and fell in love with a very delightful Hoppner, and only wanted to be sure the child had rosy cheeks. When Lanny was able to assure her of this fact, she wrote him a check for twenty-seven thousand dollars, and didn’t mind trusting him to buy the painting when he could and have it shipped to her by airmail so as to be safe from the submarines.
III
That was the end of business, and the rest was play. Westward on the Lincoln Highway; now and then it made a sharp turn to avoid somebody’s barn, but most of the time it went straight ahead, and sixty miles an hour was all right outside of towns. Lanny would start early and drive until after dark, with no stops except for lunch and dinner; six hundred miles a day was a comfortable stint. Illinois, and then Iowa, where once the rolling prairie had been and the buffalo and Indians had roamed. Now it was all fenced, and there were farmhouses with immense red barns—that being the cheapest kind of paint. The corn had been shucked and the stalks dumped into the great tall silos, and droves of big hogs were rooting in the fields.
Then it was Nebraska, and the road began to climb, slowly and steadily, and with every rise the land became drier and the farms poorer. This had been grazing land, but it had been plowed for grain during the boom of the last war, and so it had become a country of dust storms, and the problem was to keep it from turning into desert. The effort was a part of the New Deal’s “boondoggling,” endlessly carped at by the enemies of F.D.R.
You had to see this land in order to realize the immensity of it; you had to watch it rolling by, mile after mile, with its monotony of scenery, and realize that it extended north and south many hundreds of miles. He would turn the dials of the radio in his car and get news about the air war still going on overseas; and when he sto
pped at filling stations, or to eat or spend the night, he would get into conversation with the people and ask what they thought about this world-shaking crisis. He discovered that to the last man and woman they had one idea, which was to keep their own country, their own sons, out of the mess. Mostly they were against Roosevelt because they suspected him of trying to get them in. Oddly enough, many were against Willkie, also, because he was beginning to talk more and more like his rival.
So came the Rockies, far ahead and high up, covered with snow; you climbed, and it was Wyoming, the great open spaces, the cattle country; the road was a tiny gray thread, and alongside it were sloping structures like well-braced fences to keep the snow from drifting over the roads. Eight thousand feet was the altitude, and the air was crisp and bracing, but there wasn’t so much of it, and if you walked it had better be slowly. Then you were in the mountains, climbing, with high peaks and canyon walls on both sides, and a clear green stream below. Snow everywhere—and you had better keep going, for you wouldn’t want to be caught here by a storm.
Then down into the broad fertile plateau where old Brigham Young had looked about him and struck his staff into the ground, saying: “Build here!” It was the country of the Latter-Day Saints, whose founders had followed the Old Testament and taken many wives and replenished the earth. It hadn’t pleased the other Bible-reading Americans, but it had seemed to work—if the purpose of mankind was to labor from dawn to dark and produce enormous quantities of fruit and grain and sugar beets, copper and silver, lead and zinc. It looked as if the old Mormon prophet had foreseen the automobile, for every street of his city was wide enough for diagonal parking. His Temple, begun nearly a hundred years ago, had walls of granite six feet thick and had been one of the wonders of this high mountain world.