can’t go to another publisher.”
“Why not?”
Tony sighed. “I just told you—Amos is loyal. We can trust Amos. He’s perfectly well aware of all the things I’ve done for him. What’s worrying me is that wife of his.”
“Vera?” Philippa dropped her eyes as she lit a cigarette. “I thought they were divorced.”
“Only separated. And now she’s flopped in Hollywood, she wants to come back to him. It’s in the evening paper.”
“What am I supposed to do? Reason with her?”
“Worse than that.” Tony’s sudden grin was as engaging as he could make it before he took the plunge. “I phoned her in Hollywood this afternoon and invited her to stay with us until she’s settled in New York. You see, I’ve got to have her where I can watch her and keep her from bothering Amos. She accepted and I want you to be nice to her.”
Philippa stubbed out her newly lighted cigarette so vehemently that it broke in half. “Really, Tony! There are limits. In the first place, the invitation should have come from me. In the second place, do you think I can live in the same house with that smarmy little adventuress for any length of time? I shall go mad—stark, staring mad.”
“Oh, Vera’s no picnic, but she’s not as bad as all that. For one thing, she’s not loud. You ought to like her nice, low voice. You’re always complaining about women who squeal and shriek. What is it you call it? Unmodulated?”
“I detest her soft, sly, insinuating voice. I detest everything about her.”
“So does Amos. So you ought to be on his side. If she stays with us, he’ll only have to see her once—Sunday when he meets her at the airport. He feels he has to do that much. But he’s going to drive her straight to our house and we’ll have a supper party so he won’t be stuck with her for the rest of the evening.”
“A party at two days’ notice? You’re insane, Tony. Why can’t Vera stay with Gus and Meg in New York?”
“Gus is too soft-hearted to handle a wildcat like Vera. He couldn’t keep her from bothering Amos. And it’s particularly important that Amos isn’t bothered on the eve of the Bookbinders’ Dinner.”
“Does Amos have to go?”
“Didn’t I tell you? Amos is getting the Award. The Most American Author of the Decade. Ten thousand bucks and fifty thousand worth of prestige and publicity. We’ve got the layouts of the ads all ready to be released the day after the dinner. He’ll have to make a speech and it better be good.”
“There are a lot of things you don’t tell me, Tony,” said Philippa thoughtfully. “Just what do you really mean when you speak of Vera ‘bothering’ Amos? She can’t keep him from writing. Lots of writers do their best work when they’re unhappy.”
Tony sighed. “I suppose I’ll have to tell you now. But keep it under your hat. No one has ever known except me and Gus.”
“Known what?”
“When Amos wrote his first book he was a recently reformed alcoholic. Didn’t you ever suspect?”
“No. I thought he just didn’t like to drink.”
“He likes it too well,” said Tony grimly. “When I first met Amos he still had to take Antabuse. He’s shown a lot of character holding himself in line without the help of a drug for the last four years, but he had one bad relapse. That was during the three months he lived with Vera.”
“So that was why you got Vera a job in Hollywood!”
“Precisely. She kept liquor in the house, she drank in front of him and she taunted him with his weakness. It was just too much for him. It mustn’t happen again. Think what it would do to his TV program. And, in the end, it would kill him.”
Philippa was moved. “Even Amos doesn’t deserve a woman like Vera…Or maybe he does.” Her smile twisted. “Maybe men get the women they deserve.”
A few years ago Tony would have answered: “How did I ever deserve anyone as wonderful as you?” Now he merely said: “Do women get the men they deserve?”
“I’m sure they do.” Her smile teased him as she, too, avoided the obvious gallantry. “All right, Tony.” She capitulated suddenly. “I’ll do what I can with Vera, but don’t expect me to like it. Are you sure Amos hates Vera now?”
Tony hesitated. “I hope so. He has to live alone to accomplish the immense amount of work he does. The monastic life—bad for the writer, but good for the writing.”
“And the publisher,” murmured Philippa. “I still think he may be slipping. Passionate Pilgrim bored me in galleys.”
“You’re nuts!” Tony’s protest was a little too loud. “We’ve sold out a first printing of forty thousand copies before publication and it’s the July choice of the Book-of-the-Week Club. Catamount Pictures is bidding against…”
“Oh, he’s still a commercial success. That’s momentum. But artistically…”
“That’s not what Maurice Lepton says.”
Tony dragged the newspaper from his overcoat pocket. It proved to be an advance copy of next Sunday’s New York Times Book Review section. “Look at that!”
The first page was headed a landmark in American letters. A photograph showed a thin, mild face with a short beard, gazing at some remote object outside the picture. The shirt collar was open, the shoulders were tweedy and the frail fingers held loosely onto the bowl of an old, charred pipe.
“Where’s the dog?” said Philippa. “Authors with tweed jackets and pipes always have a dog lying at their feet.”
“There was a dog,” admitted Tony. “The Times cut out the feet to get a better enlargement of the face.”
“Amos doesn’t own a dog.”
“I know, but Red Nicholas, our bright new publicity man, rented one for the picture.”
“Mr. Nicholas may be bright, but he is scarcely original. Amos doesn’t smoke either. You should have had a little box of Antabuse in his hand and Vera lying at his feet.”
“That isn’t very funny, Phil.”
She ignored him and began to read aloud: “PASSIONATE PILGRIM. By Amos Cottle. 450 pp. New York: Sutton, Kane and Co., $3.75. By Maurice Lepton.”
Her eye ran down the column to a passage Tony had marked with a red pencil. “Amos Cottle surveys our tawdry, TV society with the clinical eye of a social anthropologist annotating the mores of African pygmies…. His mystique is rooted in classical humanism, detached, witty, skeptical but always urbane and not incapable of compassion and even reverence. His ear for the cadences of contemporary idiom is accurate as a tape recorder, but he does what no machine can do—he selects the meaningful and allows it to stand as a symbol suggesting the rest. This is life itself in all its squalor and glory. Cottle spares us nothing—the dirt, the sweat, the blood, the ugliness and lust and cruelty of existence. It is all there under the velvet texture of his
