Aurora Dawn (17 page)

This frail jest broke the tension like a lightning spark. A deluge of laughter followed. Marquis howled and whooped, Grovill
reached across the astonished Laura’s lap to pump the banker’s hand, the ladies added loud silver tones to the merriment,
and Wilde himself reluctantly chuckled. The dinner was over. With one accord the guests rose, laughing and talking excitedly,
and moved back into the living room.

Father Stanfield was the last to leave the table. He rose slowly, and walked out slowly. Of all the guests, he alone had displayed
no symptom of mirth amid the general laughter that had cleared the air.

The Dinner Party: III—Containing a variety of

opinions on an important subject.

Y
OU CAN DEPEND ON IT
, anyone who says, “I have no opinion on the matter,” is dissimulating, because every man forms an opinion on everything that
comes within his ken. Some enterprising thinker, in quest of a succinct description of Man, more exact than the traditional
plucked-chicken picture of a “featherless biped,” laid down that “Man is an animal capable of forming opinions.” In the interest
of precision he might better have said that Man is an animal incapable of
not
forming opinions. Your human being is the phrase “Now,
I
think,” surrounded with arms, legs and obduracy. The guests at the Marquis dinner party, all common clay webbed into human
shapes, were no exceptions to this rule, and each one had something to say about Michael Wilde’s Oration Against Advertising.

Honey Beaton and Stephen English were sitting on the tan parallelepiped in the living room, sipping cherry brandy. Andrew
had disappeared during the exodus from the dining room, and English had quietly appeared at the girl’s elbow and assumed the
burden of her company. “I never know whether Wilde’s serious or not,” said the entrancing Honey. “It seemed to me he was getting
pleasure out of being spectacularly rude.”

“That was part of it,” said the banker, “but Mike was also airing a venomous prejudice, which stems from the year in which
he slaved under some stupid bully for twenty-five dollars a week. What he said was true enough about certain unsavory details
of the business, but he missed the real point. Advertising exists because it creates demand, and demand is the solar energy
of the American system. He also missed the obvious fact that our people like advertisements. They like to look at pretty girls’
pictures, they like to be promised the moon in a bottle of mouth wash, and they enjoy the pleading for patronage implicit
in all advertising copy. However, I thought Mike was in excellent form, and I confess I was ungraciously amused at the modulations
of Tal Marquis’s complexion.”

Mr. and Mrs. Van Wirt, Mr. and Mrs. Grovill, Mrs. Towne and Talmadge Marquis were taking their liqueurs in a semicircle before
the fireplace, where a fire smouldered halfheartedly in the steamheated air looking as though it felt sufficiently silly being
lit and could never be persuaded to blaze under such ridiculous conditions.

“It was just a lot of radical communism,” said Grovill. “These artists are all radical communists. Mind you, Mr. Marquis,
I think Wilde is a genius–that painting of you in the dining room is a real masterpiece, and plenty lifelike, too–but that’s
just it. All these geniuses have crackpot ideas because they’re not down to earth. I know some advertising fellows who are
every bit as brilliant as Michael Wilde, and honest men, too, and I sure wish one of them had been here to talk up to him.

”

Said Mrs. Van Wirt, “Van, I just sat there and kept praying you wouldn’t explode. Thank Heaven you behaved yourself. You know,”
she confided to everybody, “Van is a holy terror with all these radicals and communists. I wish I’d brought a clipping of
the speech he made at the Nutley Municipal Outing on the Fourth. It was just fireworks! Really, Van, I don’t know how you
held yourself in.” The good lady rested her large hand in a gesture of relief on the orange silk of her bodice.

The holy terror cleared his throat and explained that he supposed any man who was a guest of Mr. Marquis had a right to his
own opinion, however strange it might be, and that he always had as little as possible to do with artists, singers, and such
people, and didn’t take any of them seriously.

Mr. Marquis said that his good friend Steve English had warned him long ago about Wilde’s funny ideas, and that if the man
who ran the English Trust, Incorporated, made a friend of a radical there couldn’t be anything very dangerous about him, and
anyway, he believed Wilde’s bark was worse than his bite, because he never saw him any place but at the best restaurants and
clubs with the best people, who all accepted him.

“Dear,” said Mrs. Towne, putting her hand affectionately on Marquis’s, “why don’t you tell them about Aurora Dawn? You know,
how the name started, the way you were telling me the other night. I think it answers that painter perfectly.”

“Oh, well, there you are; just goes to show how a fellow can shoot off his face without knowing what it’s all about,” said
Marquis. “We of the Marquis Company are perfectly well aware that Aurora means ‘dawn’ and that the name is repetitious. What
Mike Wilde doesn’t know is that the name of the soap was just plain ‘Aurora’ at first, when Dad started to make it, but he
was afraid too many hicks didn’t know what it meant or even how to pronounce it, so he decided to take no chances. The original
trademark on the package had ‘Aurora’ in a gold arch over a rising sun, and Dad just put the word ‘Dawn’ in big black letters
in parentheses under ‘Aurora.’ Well, wouldn’t you know, every dumb housewife who bought it began asking for Aurora Dawn soap.
This went on for ten years, and then they held a board of directors’ meeting and decided to cut out the parentheses and use
the double name. It was my idea, by the way, to have the girl put into the trademark. I got it in college when I read about
the dawn being a Greek goddess. Everyone knows that those goddesses ran around naked, so it was a perfect opportunity for
some glamour, but classical, you know, not offensive. Dad was conservative, but I talked him into it. I’ve heard it said that
we have the most tasteful yet eye-catching trademark in America.”

“It is pretty,” said Mrs. Van Wirt.

“And I’ll bet the girl who posed for it did all right,” said Grovill in an aggrieved tone. “What has that fellow got against
models? Edith here was a fairly well-known model in her day, and she’s none the worse for it.”

“Not judging by her looks,” said Marquis gallantly, and was rewarded with a glowing smile, which encouraged him to proceed.
“What did you think of Wilde’s little speech, Mrs. Grovill?”

Said the former Flame Anders pleasantly–and it was the only time she spoke during the evening–“I have no opinion on the matter.”
With this, her smile died away as gently as a winter sunset.

To the left of the blue foyer where the bronze horse contemplated his geometrical rear with distaste, there was a miniature
wood-paneled barroom decorated with old-fashioned sporting prints, drinking, slogans, and tolerably ribald designs, wherein
Michael Wilde and Father Stanfield had established themselves with a bottle of brandy and a large glass bowl of salted peanuts
between them.

“Shepherd, I like you,” said Wilde, burying his hand to the wrist in peanuts and withdrawing a fistful. “You are a clown and
a fraud, but you lie in Abraham’s bosom all the year, despite yourself. I envy you your relationship with the Almighty, which
is what redeems your nonsense and even gives it the white effulgence of sanctity. I suppose in a land where radio comedians
are the ultimate custodians of utterance, God, too, must speak through an instrument of brass. Perhaps we’re close to the
Last Judgment, Shepherd, for in you the scripture is fulfilled, ‘The Lord ascendeth in the noise of a cornet.’”

The massive cleric refilled Wilde’s glass from the half-empty bottle of brandy.

“Son, you gi’ me plenty to think about tonight,” he said. “I reckon I kin tell when a feller is really mean and when he’s
jest actin’ up outta pure love of fun or springtime, and yer rough talk don’t bother me none. You was worryin’ them folks
fer the hell of it, but you was worryin’ them with the truth, which is the best worrier they is. I want you to know, son,
that afore I signed that there contract I prayed fer a solid quarter hour to the Lord to open my eyes, if I was a-reachin’
fer devil’s money. Every one of these here soap dollars is goin’ into new buildings fer the Fold. Gain is trash to me, but
I am ambitious fer the growin’ of the Fold. Maybe my ambition carried me away.”

The painter drank off his glass. “Look, Shepherd,” he said, “your hands are clean. It’s old Dubl-Bubl and his auxiliaries
who must burn for buying and selling the Word. Whatever you’re doing on the air is good. Your merry-andrew preaching gets
to thousands of deafened ears and reawakens them to the sound of the still, small voice. You’re a cheap and tawdry horn, Heaven
knows, but Gabriel is blowing you.”

“I got one thing to thank you fer, son,” said Stanfield, leaning his chin on a heavy hand and gazing far off, his lips compressed.
“Until tonight I had nothin’ to say in next week’s broadcast fer a sermon. Now I dunno–”

Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Leach were holding a colloquy in a guest room upstairs while Mrs. Leach renewed the perishable charms
of her complexion.

“Hell of a lot in what he said, even if he is a crazy painter,” said Tom Leach, his face dark, his ring still rotating in
reverse in eccentric jerks. “I hate advertising. I’ve always hated it. Sometimes when I come to the office and see Grovill’s
pig face I get so sick of myself I want to die. I’d be happier if I went back to Detroit and got myself a thirty-dollar-a-week
job as a reporter.”

“It’s Grovill who poisons the business for you,” said his spouse, carefully painting a crimson mouth on the pale ribbons of
her lips and addressing Leach’s image in the dressing-table mirror. “How can you enjoy your life while you’re carrying a dead
elephant on your shoulders? You do all the work for both of you, and split the reward. He should be your office boy, not your
partner.”

“Walter took me into his office in the first place,” muttered Leach unhappily.

“Are you going to pay for that with your life? He took you in because he saw that you were a gold mine, and he’s been working
you ever since. You’ll never get any pleasure or peace in life until you push him out. But when you do, and when you’re Thomas
Leach, Incorporated, with the biggest name and the handsomest home of anyone in the business–a house as good as this show-place
of Marquis’s, or better–
then
you’ll like advertising, Tom, you’ll like it fine!”

There was in the rear of the Marquis domicile a thing as strange in that area of Manhattan as a camel or an igloo would have
been; namely, a garden. An unlikely series of real estate transactions had reared two huge apartment buildings on either side
of the little plot, and these grim sentinels had preserved the breathing earth from obliteration between them by rendering
construction in that narrow space forever unprofitable. The sun shone into the garden for only a little longer each day than
it might have illuminated the bottom of a well in those latitudes, but all the prisoned creativeness of earth, held down in
every direction by asphalt and brick, seemed to burst jubilantly up through this tiny oblong open to the sky, for the garden,
with no very expert tending, flourished luxuriantly. It was full of rose bushes, a memento of the sentimental taste of the
divorced mother of Carol, and during the summer months it was altogether the most exotic, the most entirely Keatsian bower
of sweet scents and amorous leafage that ever a taxicab roared by in a cloud of fumes. Urchins with destructive hearts and
itching fingers came and went with the years, eyeing the fragile, blooming wonderland impotently through knotholes in an exceedingly
stout and high fence and venting their bafflement by chalking improper adjurations as tall as themselves on its sturdy boards.

Curious readers can verify in the Nautical Almanac that on the night in question–July 9, 1937–the moon was three days away
from fullness, and at an extreme northerly declination. At about ten-thirty that evening, therefore, the satellite was almost
directly over the Marquis rose garden, pouring a flood of rare silver radiance down the bleak shaft between the apartment
buildings. Project yourself in imagination into the heart of this leafy, moonlit, odorous retreat, this perfumed fragment
of Eden hidden at the very core of the stony desert of Babel; and then, succumbing as you must to the spell of the blossoms
and the compassionate lunar radiance, forgive what you see.

Our hero (for he remains such, despite his grievous errors) sat on a marble bench beside Carol Marquis, breathing the rose-scented
air, gazing at the girl’s palely luminous charms, and expressing his opinion on advertising. The newest-burst rosebud on the
topmost spray in the garden was not more sweet and chaste than the maiden as she sat with her little hands folded neatly in
her lap, listening attentively to his discourse. Fixed on him was the largest pair of brown eyes ever misappropriated from
the species Deer and bestowed on a human being. Andrew Reale was speaking quickly and nervously. He had been disturbed by
the painter’s talk somewhat as a pious novice, raised from birth in a convent, might be by her first encounter with a sneering
atheist; a bottomless black hole had suddenly opened before him in what had always seemed the solid ground of Reality, and
he had felt himself tottering on its rim. What would happen to the world, he had wondered uneasily at table, if anybody but
painters held such ideas? The burden of his rapid lecture to the girl was that advertising was just his way of getting to
the top, and that it was no better or worse than any other way, so far as he could see. If he could get ahead faster in advertising
because he had the knack of pleasing people and making ideas convincing, what was wrong in that? As long as there was business
there would be advertising, and he was going to be the leading executive in the game (the moonlight glinted in his eyes as
he said this) before he was thirty-five years old. As for the painter’s philosophy, maybe it was too deep for him, but it
sounded like a lot of showy speech with no substance; and furthermore, as far as that went, there was nobody in America more
successful in advertising his own self than Michael Wilde.